Panic
By Mitch Berg
The AP says we’re all already dead:
When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, global warming was a slow-moving environmental problem that was easy to ignore. Now it is a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid.
Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating. Time is close to running out, and Obama knows it.
Hinderaker:
This displays a remarkable level of ignorance on the part of the Associated Press. Global temperature records are nowhere near accurate enough to rank years, over a period of centuries, with any confidence. For the recent past, though, we have the world’s best data set here in the U.S. And it’s true that at one time, it was widely believed that the 1990s were the warmest recent decade. But that was before it was discovered that NASA’s James Hansen, Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, had been fudging the data, either accidentally or on purpose. NASA was forced to correct its data, with the result that the ten warmest years on record here in the US are as follows: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939.
The AP apparently hasn’t gotten the word, perhaps because it is relying on the report of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But the IPCC report was a political document, not a scientific one, which deliberately ignored the most current research in the field.
Global Warming: the first utterly un-falseable, un-testable theory in the history of science.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:47 am
I was shivering this morning, but it was not from fear of global warming.
December 15th, 2008 at 11:49 am
“Global Warming: the first utterly un-falseable, un-testable theory in the history of science.”
JUNK SCIENCE!
December 15th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Kermit,
Don’t forget, global warming also causes extreme cold. These demagogues have their bases covered!
December 15th, 2008 at 2:32 pm
It was Hansen who also publicized the erroneous idea that last October was the warmest on record by using Siberian temperatures from August and September.
Is it science when you don’t bother to check your data and put your thumb on the scales when evaluating it?
Want something fun to read on Hansen and his data fudging? Try this article in that irreverent publication on tech the Register, subtitled “What’s the Temperature, Kenneth?” http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/print.html
December 15th, 2008 at 9:05 pm
“What’s the Temperature, Kenneth?”
That’s priceless! maybe Hansen can start signing all of his agitprop… I mean Scholarly work, with the epilogue “Courage”.
December 15th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
And the sea ice and glaciers are still actually there, right guys? Right? No, seriously, nothing’s melted….
December 15th, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Right? No, seriously, nothing’s melted….
Well, it’s still pretty debateable, actually.
December 15th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
Ice melts… New ice forms, kind of a cycle sort of thing.
And new ice is indeed forming, but even if, for the sake of the argument, we were to accept that it wasn’t… Why is it inherently 1) humanity’s fault or 2) assumed to be a definite bad thing?
The earth has been far warmer for much longer within recorded history. Greenland was named such, because when the Vikings found it, it was green. They recorded sailing on rivers now buried by hundreds of feet of glacier.
This period of time was associated with a high level of solar activity. The sun was essentially burning hotter. It then rapidly cooled off around 1350 AD, beginning a period that lasted until the 1850’s called the Little Ice Age.
Funny enough, the past 25 years that they’ve been yakking about Global Warming, has also been marked by an extremely active solar cycle, which coincidentally ended a bit over a year ago, & while we’ve been living through the coolest year in the past decade, the sun has been dead quiet.
It’s almost as if that big shiny yellow thing up there has some sort of ability to affect the climate & weather here on Earth… Hmmm, go figure!
December 15th, 2008 at 11:05 pm
Shirt, The Little Optimum, circa 1000 AD to around 1300 AD. An Inconvenient Truth to to MMGW acolytes. If you are paying attention, sunspot activity has gone to virtually zero over the last couple of years, and this generally indicates it is going to get mighty frigging cold.
But the U.N. has it’s precious IPCC, and we’d better not question so august an organization as the U.N.
December 16th, 2008 at 12:26 am
I mentioned that! 😉
here’s a photo of the first sunspot in weeks:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/soho/sunspot_20080923.html
December 16th, 2008 at 12:27 am
I guess that photo is from September 2008…I need to go to bed.
December 17th, 2008 at 8:45 am
Are you guys oppressing charlieq? We still guarantee freedom of religion here in the good old USA, don’t we?
Then again, some of the same people who have been reasonably extreme views on Jeffersons “wall of separation” between church and state, seem to want to enact their religious beliefs in state policy.
December 17th, 2008 at 12:30 pm
Funny post on the topic from Ed Morrissey:
http://hotair.com/archives/2008/12/17/scientists-scoff-at-ap-global-warming-story/