Environmental Talk

“Il entre chaud ici . . .”

One of the fascinating things about the global warming debate is how everything is evidence for global warming and all the effects of global warming are disastrous.

Of course, most of this is hype but it is passed off as if it were mainstream science.

A short reality check would take care of at least some of the negativity surrounding global warming. The Sunbelt and the I-85 corridor from Raleigh, NC to Atlanta, GA are among the fastest growing areas of the country at the expense of the Northeast and Midwest. If increasing global temperatures are so bad, why do people continue to migrate to warmer places to live? Is it that all these people just couldn’t wait to experience global warming in 50 years, they had to experience it right now?

Earlier this month, I compiled a list of “record” cold articles with the warning that it would be a good idea to keep them in mind when we started hearing all the hot temperatures = global warming headlines this summer. Funny thing, we didn’t even have to wait that long.

The following article from Breitbart.com is a typical example of how much nonsense is presented as if it was common knowledge:

Hottest April in France since 1950
France this year had its hottest April since 1950, with the average temperature four degrees Celsius higher than the usual 10 degrees (50 Fahrenheit), the national weather office said Monday.

In the northern half of France, averages recorded between the first and the 24 of April were between 8 and 12 degrees higher than the seasonal norm, said Meteo France.

1950 was the year reliable temperature measurements from 22 stations across France were begun.

Record April temperatures across Europe have led to fears of drought.

Amid growing fears over global warming, experts say average temperatures have already risen 0.74 degrees Celsius over the past century and predict that they will rise another four degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

Smuggled into the article here is the not-so-implied connection between France’s hot temperatures and global warming. If record hot temperatures in France signal global warming, shouldn’t record cold temperatures in New York be given equal weight as evidence of global cooling?

If the planet was cooling in March and warming in April, there’s only one conclusion we can draw . . . Mother Earth has malaria.

Okay, both the “cold” evidence and the “hot” evidence are equally as preposterous as jumping off points as proof of any kind of direction of climate change.

To make matters worse the author of the article engages in one last bit of sleight-of-hand before signing off. He/she notes that temperatures have warmed about three-quarters of a degree in the last century and somehow manages to say experts “predict” that the temperature is going to warm four degrees in the next century.

The global warming debate is far reaching enough that you could probably find an “expert” to say temperatures were going to warm 50 degrees over the next century.

But the reality of the situation is that it is simply ludicrous to assume, as a matter of course, that the warming rate of the last century is suddenly going to become five times as great over the next century.

For even more perspective, let’s take a look at the projected global temperature changes from a suite of models cited in the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Note that the blue line near the bottom of the ranges is simply the straight line extrapolation of observed temperature changes.

No one has accused the IPCC of having anything approaching a skeptical bias toward the question of global warming and yet not a single one of the models chosen for inclusion in the report breaks the four degree barrier.

Certainly it would seem that the burden of proof should fall on anyone arguing that the observed rate of temperature increase of the past 25 years (which is an already accelerated rate when compared to the past century’s increase) is going to do anything more than continue at the current pace.

At the current rate, the global temperature will increase over the next 100 years by a little over one degree Celsius or roughly the increase seen over the last 150 years.

Remember how New York sank under the ocean in the last century, how millions of species died out and how many wars were started over dwindling food supplies? Yeah, me neither.

Doom sayers have been around since the time of the Pharaohs. The French even have a saying for it: “La plus ca change, la plus c’est la meme chose.”

global warming, climate change, France, bikini, IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Third Assessment Report, prophets of doom, doom sayers, malaria, Mother Earth,