Al Gore blathers on and on in today’s New York Times. About what? Well Global Warming, of course. This is the same Al Gore who thinks you need to cut greenhouse gas emissions as he jets around the country for speaking arrangements telling you how much you need to sacrifice to save the planet. Bear that in mind as you read this sanctimonious piece of crap he hurled at the wall of the Times today.
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.
Is it supposed to reassure me that scientists, in the face of a major scandal involving data collection, are so stubborn and unwilling to listen that they still believe what the lying data told them? The data wasn’t found to be partly inaccurate.
1. The hockey-stick graph that we’ve all been shown a thousand times simply isn’t based on the data collected. At all. Period.
2. The scientist that ran the facility has said that the data that was in fact collected demonstrated no measurable climate change over the past 15 years. None. While the Goracle would like you to believe that this is merely a slip-up in paper management, the continuing evidence demonstrates that any data disproving global warming was happening and an immediate threat was discarded, destroyed, lost, or “modified” so as to suit the purposes of those whose employ depended on global warming being real.
3. Gore mentions that the e-mails were stolen; as if that makes them not true. The contents of those e-mails are not disputed, and since their release, two people have resigned over them. They’re true, regardless of the method by which they were obtained.
4. The consensus that was built by scientists was built mainly based on the data that we’ve discussed in the prior 2 points.
It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Note the word “probably.”
Everything else in this piece is spoken with authority, but for some reason, he felt the need to say “probably” here even though he builds on it. Guess he couldn’t set up his point too stridently in case the data was proven wrong again.
Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
Difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location.
Unless that location is a place that has ice, in which case it’s a breeze. If that ice recedes, we’re doomed. As for the second hottest January… That sounds really bad, right? Except for the fact that half the world is going through the last month of summer in January. I’ve noticed we can’t find that number (I wonder how many 10ths of a degree it was warmer?) anywhere today. Just references to the statement.
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
Actually I don’t know anyone who would call themselves a climate denier. For the most part, everyone agrees that there is, indeed, climate.
That notwithstanding, most people arguing the validity of anthropogenic global warming (often abbreviated AGW) have said for years that the climate is cyclical and not linear. The odd thing, however, is that the only person who came forward and said that there has been no appreciable global warming in the past 15 years was Phil Jones, one of the folks at the center of the IPCC scandal.
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
When it snows excessively, it’s because of global warming. If, however, it’s the warmest January in decades, it’s also because of global warming. If you have a mild summer, it’s because of global warming, but if you have a hell of a hot brutal summer, that’s because of global warming.
It seems that no matter what the weather conditions (or climate, when taken as an aggregate) are, Al Gore and his ilk have managed to turn it into evidence to prove their point. The problem is that the evidence doesn’t really prove his point any more. Is something happening in our atmosphere? Sure, but the reality is that we don’t know what it is, let alone if human beings are causing it, so maybe the hysteria should be toned down a bit and instead of falsifying data to demonstrate a desired conclusion, we actually try to figure it out.
And it wouldn’t hurt to stop listening to blowhards like Al Gore in the meantime.