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Three Facts to Counter Obama’s Alaska Global Warming Hype
I applaud President Obama for visiting Alaska. I have family there, and it is a state often forgotten when the White House schedules presidential trips. But Obama’s reason for going — to highlight the results of man-caused climate change — is fraudulent. Humans are not causing global warming in Alaska or anywhere else on the globe.
Here follow three facts to counter the nonsense you will hear this week. And by “facts” I mean data collected by incorruptible sources, not predictions based on dodgy computer climate models or readings from land-based stations that skew recorded temperatures upward, keeping alive the ever-failing hypothesis of man-caused global warming.
Fact #1: Global temperatures have been flat for nearly 19 years.
Measured by satellite — the most-accurate way to measure global temperatures — there has been no global warming since kids who are entering college this year were born. The Class of 2015 has been told all their lives in school that human activity has been dangerously warming the planet. The facts — the data collected by the satellites NASA sent up into orbit — tell a different story:
The stories about “the warmest year on record” you read in the media mostly concern a fraction of a degree — and even those fractions mean little because the old, unreliable, land-based temperature stations were adjusted in a way that makes today’s temperatures seem warmer than the past. Take the Medieval Warm Period — called the “climate optimum” before warming was deemed bad — which was a lot warmer than today. Greenland, for example, was for centuries able to support modest crops and livestock. (They abandoned the colonies for good reason: It once was warm but got too cold!)
Fact #2: Polar ice is not dangerously melting.
Whenever you see a news report claiming some climate landmark represents the “greatest in recorded history,” your skeptical antennae should deploy. The world only got around to sending satellites into space to observe and measure the climate in the 1970s, including satellites that took pictures of the North Pole and South Pole to measure ice extent. So when you hear that polar ice levels are “dangerously low,” remember that the only real measurements we have for contrast were taken when the Bee Gees were hot.
It does not take much Goog
le skill to come up with a photo from the 1950s of an American submarine surfacing at the North Pole without much pack ice around the vessel. If that happened today? Good Lord, the media would go crazy. But it (gasp!) happened again to two subs in the 1960s.
The fact is, current ice extent on the North Pole is within the normal range of what satellites have accurately measured — again, only since the 1970s.
What about the South Pole? It continues to set records for ice cover and last year entrapped a global warming cruise in ice.
Fact #3: Extreme Weather is Declining.
President Obama was praying for Tropical Storm Erika, currently petering out, to be an actual hurricane by the time it struck the US. It would have given him a tiny, wind-blown branch upon which to rest his case that storms are getting stronger and more dangerous because of man-caused global warming. But even if Erika hit Florida as a Category 2 hurricane, it still wouldn’t have broken the longest-ever streak of a major hurricane (Cat 3 or higher) not landing on US soil.
That’s right. Every passing day adds to the ten-year record, set on September 12, 2015. We are experiencing the longest stretch of time in recorded history in which no major hurricane has struck the United States. Records on this have been kept, unmolested by data fudging, for more than 100 years.
As for cold weather, the “big snow” then “very cold” cycles for the past two winters in the Lower 48 were entirely normal. Human emissions of CO2 had nothing to do with it.
If you’re interested in what’s really happening to our climate — and want more than three facts to counter Obama — visit the archive of Heartland’s 10 International Conferences on Climate Change. You can also read more about the non-alarmist, non-politicized data at Climate Change Reconsidered.
Published in General
If those band members are all homicidal socialist revolutionaries, I think we would be concerned about the number of them even in that proportion. Or homicidal Islamic terrorists.
Which would you prefer to see as a tourist, barren ice or teeming wildlife?
I’m partial to ice, but there is no reason it has to be barren.
I remember the time we took kids sampling for planktonic pond invertebrates through the ice, then let them examine what they had found. One of the parents, an A-personality surgeon, said afterwards, “I had no idea. I had thought the water under the ice was sort of sterile.” Teeming with wildlife would have been a good description for it.
BTW, my wife would vouch for my love of ice. When we were first married she enjoyed ice fishing with me – from the comfort of a heated darkhouse. She tried joining me in a backyard tent in northern Minnesota winter – for about half a night – and has never tried it again. She was telling some folks the other day about how she was from Iowa and had never seen the ocean, so some years after we were married the first ocean I took her to see was the Arctic. This was in late June 1987, just after ice-out.
Obama in Anchorage:
“Those who want to ignore the science – they are increasingly alone. They’re on their own shrinking island…. If we do nothing to keep glaciers from melting faster and oceans from rising faster and forests from burning faster and storms from growing stronger, we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair. Submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields no longer growing, indigenous people who can’t carry out traditions that stretch back millennia.”
There’s so much wrongheadedness in those words I don’t even know where to begin. Liberals fear living in a theocracy, but we already are living in one. We are a warmocracy.
This is a kind of hysteria that reminds me quite a bit of the daycare center child molestation hysteria of the 1980s, especially the McMartin and Amirault cases. There was a received wisdom that was dangerous to challenge.
These hysterias seem to have a life of their own, but when we look a little deeper we usually find that there are hidden agendas and careers to be made from them, in the one case prosecutors like Janet Reno and Martha Coakley, and in the other scientists like Michael Mann and James Hansen.
And she stayed married to you? Amazing.
Man with the Axe, reminds me of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. If Obama has his way we will be running around half naked in the cold and the dark. If you have ever read anything about that movement it is unbelievable that it actually happened but it did.
That just makes me want to pound my head against a wall until the pain stops.
This is ignorance on a rocket sled.
The science is out there. Anyone who promotes the climate change agenda is a lying scam artist.
So let’s drive them into poverty instead. One degree warmer instead of two, but no one can afford to turn the electricity on.
Clearly, the Heartland Institute follows Ricochet. I feel so proud.