Quick Update: Baby, It’s REALLY Cold Outside
Posted by Tom Naughton in Media Nonsense, PoliticsEven as the left’s useful idiots in the press continue sounding alarms about a warming planet and trying to explain away the Climategate emails (”Hey, no big deal; happens in science all the time”), that darn old weather just won’t play along. Record low temperatures were set this week in Alabama, Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming. Many of those records were set more than 100 years ago.
Meanwhile, much of the country was hammered by blizzards, 20 inches of snow fell in northern Arizona — four times the previous record — and areas of Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas experienced their earliest snowfalls ever.
The honest climate scientists (known as “deniers” and “skeptics” in the press) have been saying for years that climate is cyclical and we’re most likely heading into a cooling span of 30 years or so … and perhaps even a longer span that will become another “mini-ice age.” (See this post for an excellent lecture by an actual scientist.)
We’ve been setting record low temperatures for three years in a row now. If this continues as predicted, it’s going to be rather difficult for the alarmists to insist that a 21-year warming period is a long-term trend, while a 30-year cooling period is an anomaly. But I’m pretty sure they’ll try anyway. Their funding depends on it.
Fortunately, the politicians still have to worry about what the voters think. Cap-and-trade has never been about saving the planet; it’s an excuse to raise taxes without saying “taxes.” But it’s going to be a tough sell when the voters are freezing their butts off and shoveling snow.
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And thus we shake our heads.
I wonder if their cherry picker runs on biofuel…
Yeah, I saw that one. They’re getting desperate. The good thing is, people tend to notice when they’re freezing their butts off. These warming claims are becoming progressively more ridiculous. I predict someday “An Inconvenient Truth” will be shown alongside “Reefer Madness” in the category of “movies that were supposed to scare you and now just make you laugh” category.
Back in college in the 1970’s, the big scare was the coming ice age. What ever happened to that? What probably didn’t happen was funding, so the idea disappeared.
That’s what I was told in high school as well. We were in a 30-year cooling trend at the time. Newseek even suggested — I’m not kidding — we might have to blow up the polar ice caps to prevent a worldwide disaster. Now, of course, any natural shifting in the ice caps is portrayed as a crisis. Amazing how people can’t seem to look beyond the relatively recent decades to get the whole picture.
This summer sure was one of the coolest I remember ever. I *loved* it! I hate heat with a passion, and summers in NJ tend to get beastly hot and humid in July and into August. But this summer was quite acceptable. Heck, when I went to maritime Canada in July we had to use the furnace every day - and when we went to have lunch with the neighbors one day they had their wood-burning stove roaring away.
For the second year in a row now we’ve also had snow storms in October. I’ve lived in NJ most of my life and I don’t recall ever seeing snow in October! It was always considered a rate thing to see snow before Christmas. I remember how shocked everyone was when we had a big snowstorm on Thanksgiving week in 1995. Now we are getting snowstorms before Halloween.
As one friend said, after having to get out his snow blower in October, “Thank you Al Gore.”
I believe it’s a good thing to try to prevent pollution for its own sake. But heck, the climate of the earth has always been changing. I mean didn’t we all learn that in school as kids? Who didn’t learn about dinosaurs living in steamy swamps, and valiant cavemen contending with the elements of the Ice Age. Over the grand sweep of time what is a minor shift one way or the other over a 30 or 50 or 100 year span?
What’s laughable is that every time we end up with unseasonably warm weather, the media pounce on it and tie in stories about global warming. But when it’s way colder than usual? Uh … no big deal. No stories about how maybe the planet isn’t warming after all.
When its warm its global warming.
When its cold its an “extreme weather event”… caused by global warming.
We in New Zealand are experiencing a colder than usual summer also.
And back to the banking issue… “Oh noes, the greedy capitalists has wrecked it!”
Not being into American politics I thought before the election that Obama would be a relatively benign figure that would make everybody feel good because they have a black president (don’t get me started on that elephant in the room). The more I see the more I see I was wrong. He is really screwing #@#$ up bad…
I even have a few relatively conservative friends who fell for the “It’s about time we have a black president” line. They regret that decision. As I told them at the time, I don’t care if the guy is white, black, brown or purple; I don’t vote for big-tax, big-spend, big-government politicians. If Michael Steele (black conservative) was the nominee, I’d happily vote for him.
Yessss nothing confirms a theory like a few data points.
Its cold outside, they must be lying for dineros!
Please go spend a few hours reading what scientists actually discuss, as opposed to cherry picking science that fits your political viewpoint. You could try the real climate website, but a word of warning, you have a lot of reading ahead of you.
Science is science, policy is politics. Don’t confuse the 2.
I didn’t confuse the two. The UN did. And speaking of cherry-picking a few data points, that’s exactly what led to all this global-warming b.s. Mann and the other shysters used tree-ring data to calculate cooler temperatures in times past. But those same tree-rings also showed a decline in the 20th century, so they conveniently used thermometer data for the 20th century, which allowed them to show a sudden upswing. If they’d used one data set for the entire graph, there’d be no upswing. They also suppressed the warming period that began over a thousand years ago, when temperatures were warmer than they are now for several hundred years. The Vikings had colonies in Greenland and grew crops that don’t grow there now … it’s too cold.
And what does the sentence “The fact is that we cannot explain the lack of warming in recent years, and it’s a travesty that we can’t” mean to you? That was in those emails. This is utter b.s., being passed off as science.
You could also try reading some real climate research yourself. Start with Ian Plimer’s “Heaven and Earth.”
“Please go spend a few hours reading what scientists actually discuss . . . ”
I’d rather spend some time reading what scientists publish along with the data and programs they use to form their conclusions. But since I’m not part of the CRU and can’t see the data and the many programs used to make their “corrections” and “adjustments” and novel “statistical” methods, I have to depend on internet blogs and outsiders to supply my hours of science reading. Thanks Tom for writing about this stuff.
And considering the climate scientists seem more than a little determined to avoid having their data reviewed by others, I don’t trust much of what they say. While researching FAT HEAD, I learned that the conclusions of a study — the only part most journalists read — are sometimes at complete odds with the hard data.
Hmmm…here in Virginia we’re having a blizzard at the moment, with expectations of about 2 feet of snow. Damn you, global warming!
Where is it when we need it?