Change is what the climate does: 2012

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Darkness and Doom

Apocalypse and Gloom.

It is amazing how political and religious beliefs can lead us into dark alleys.

Alarmists are depressing.

It reminds me of the old joke about the Jewish man who reads the Arab newspapers all the time. “Why do you do that”, asks his friend. “Because”, said the Jewish man, “in the Israeli press all you read about are scud missile attacks and suicide bombings in the marketplace. In the Arab papers you read about how Jews own all the banks and control the world. The news is so much better.”

It is so much better to be a CAGW skeptic. The climate realists tell us how CO2 helps increase crop yields, severe weather isn’t getting worse, deaths due to extreme weather are way down, sea levels are not accelerating, there is no hot spot (pdf) and temperatures have leveled off. This is great news. It is hard to understand why alarmists are still so alarmed.

Perhaps they are alarmed at the realization that Mother Nature is not behaving in a depressing fashion and they find that depressing because they will have to admit that they were wrong and that untold resources have been wasted pursuing policies to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Now that is depressing. Mother Nature is doing what she has always done. We can sympathize and can thank them for helping to advance the understanding of how our climate really works. Bad theories show us where the dark alleys reside. Can they take solace in that contribution?

Wednesday, December 26, 2012

Mann is taking Nominations

Michael Mann of Hockey Stick infamy is accepting nominations for the climate change denial #farceoftheyear award.

Fun game Michael. So here are my 5 nominations for the CAGW denial of the year award:

nominating Mother Nature for denial of CAGW who, in the warmest year evah, decided to send all that overheated Arctic air across Siberia and Eastern Europe killing hundreds due to the cold. And winter has barely begun. Guess she didn’t get the winter is warming memo.
nominating the Maldives for CAGW denial by building hotels, resorts and airports which are soon to be submerged beneath the waves due to the rising seas. Stupid capitalists investing millions into infrastructure that will flood in decades.
nominating the GCMs used by the IPCC for denial of CAGW by overestimating the warming which means they invoke the wrong cause. After all the fruits and veggies that carbon dioxide has helped to grow we owe CO2 an apology.
nominating Antarctica for CAGW denial by witnessing more sea ice than normal around her for 12 straight months and for setting a record low of -100.8F at the South Pole in honor of the hottest year evah. Kinda takes the GLOBAL outta GLOBAL warming don’t it??
nominating the summer 2012 heatwave/drought in the US for CAGW denial by failing to break the world record high or even set a State record high temperature during the hottest year evah! And for not sharing the heat with Alaska which enjoyed a cooler than normal summer. Kinda takes the GLOBAL outta GLOBAL warming don’t it??

Hot here; cool there. Heat distribution not so rare.

Thanks for the game Michael, See you next year for an encore?

Friday, December 21, 2012

How is your Doomsday Going?

Pogo politics from the Club of Rome:

"In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention....and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself....believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or….one invented for the purpose."

"The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man."

And yet, things just keep getting better as this article from the Spectator points out. Here are some positive changes that we can all embrace.

Life span is up.
Incidence of HIV and malaria is down.
Peak oil postponed again.
Death tolls from natural disasters are down.
There were fewer war deaths in the last decade than at any time in 100 years.
There is less poverty.
Global inequality is less.

Check out the article. It is a time to rejoice and take pride in our human progress.

The Club of Rome is still out of touch with reality. Some things never change.

May this holiday season find you in good health and good spirits. Much happiness for a peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Claiming Science as Their Own

When catastrophic anthropogenic global warming(CAGW) alarmists and messianic messengers of climate change claim science as their territory it is a little like the inmates taking over the asylum. Hah!¹

Just as that picture turns the world topsy-turvy like a trip down the rabbit hole reality bears witness to the fact that CAGW advocates have most things back to front. Hah!

In darkness they dwell turning our world into a living hell. Hah!

And while alarmists try to claim science as their own they engage in anti-scientific behaviour such as declarations that the debate is over, there is a consensus and the science is settled. These announcements from the high priests of CAGW should be enough to automatically turn on the skeptical radar of any thinking person and send it into an earnest vibrational bout of wild blinking and bleeping. Not only do they want the field of science to themselves they do not want any opposition on the pitch. They want to be champion without having to play the game. That sounds more like the modus operandi of a religion not the chessboard where hypotheses are formed and tested with reality as the final arbiter of truth. While skeptics may have been late to the contest the game is now on.

Alarmists say human induced CO2 is driving temperatures to the far side of uncomfortable and if we do not curtail our emissions of CO2 soon we will see human fricassee. Hah!

But there are those who say it is not so. Since we are engaged in a family feud let us use a slightly modified version of the famous phrase from that TV game.

Science says: temperature drives CO2. Monthly CO2 changes do not affect temperature. Hah!

Alarmists say that severe weather is on the increase in both frequency and severity due to CO2 increases.

Science says: not so. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, drought and forest fires are all trending down even as CO2 continues to accumulate in the atmosphere. Hah!

How can CAGW driven by human induced CO2 be causing current examples of severe weather when there has been no warming for the last 16 years? Disconnect!

While alarmists try to demonize the burning of fossil fuels, CO2, a trace gas essential to life on Earth continues to provide us with untold bounty. CO2 is plant food and they love it.

Alarmists have gotten the world backwards and are so ensconced in their misanthropic delusion of global doom that they cannot see reality. Every instance of bad weather is blamed on CO2 and strengthens their global warming angst. They are projecting their own fears and guilt upon the world rather than dispassionately examining reality. Ideology floods their thinking and they are drowning in their own anxiety. CAGW is such a mixed up jumble of nonsense that it should be sent to Alice in Wonderland where the scientists treat common weather phenomena as unusual. CAGW will fit right in.

Trouble is they are trying to drown the rest of us as well. And they may succeed long before their scary sea level rise submerges the Maldives. When you put dirt in a bucket of water does the water level rise? Has anyone calculated the amount of ‘dirt’ that land erosion, silt deposition and underwater volcanic activity in the ocean might contribute to sea level rise?

Those of us who are anchored in reality are bombarded with political action that seeks to mitigate a non-existent problem by ‘getting us off fossil fuels ASAP’. Hence we have government programs to ban incandescent light bulbs, plastic bags, coal power plants as well as subsidize the manufacture of electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels and biofuels. All these actions are totally unnecessary and sets the government up for massive waste of taxpayer money when the subsidies are withdrawn, the companies fail and take the ‘green’ jobs with them.

Historians and scientists will look back upon this era as awash in erroneous apocalyptic beliefs driving a fearful political elite. Phd theses will be written by social psychologists seeking answers as to how seemingly intelligent people could be betrayed by their emotional reactions to bad weather. And they will stumble upon certain beliefs expressed in various writings and speeches that will turn on the light bulb of understanding.

Quote by Club of Rome: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention....and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself....believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or….one invented for the purpose."

Quote by Christine Stewart, former Canadian Environment Minister: “No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits.... climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

These two quotes sum up the chimera that is CAGW. Alarmaholics don’t care about scientific truth. They are all about the pogo political science.

The future will look back and bestow CAGW with a more accurate acronym - Conning A Gullible
World. CAGW will be lumped in with other scientific misadventures like the Flat Earth, Earth is the center of the solar system, the fake Moon Landing, phlogiston, et al.

H.L. Mencken was aware of the political problem many years ago when he remarked:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

CO2 has been exhaled during the creation of this post. No living thing was harmed. Some even liked it.

¹Hah! - emphatic CO2 exhalation in defiance of imagined human induced global warming