Have you noticed the silence about this year’s hurricanes from
Al Gore, Pontiff of The Holy Order of the Sky Is Falling? As last
year’s hurricane season began, the pontiff and his acolytes
cheerfully predicted a series of devastating hurricanes. None came.
So far this year it’s been Dean, which put the east coast of Mexico
awash, but without huge losses. Silence from THOOTSIF. No
wonder.
Global warming measured over the last century ranges from one to
two degrees Fahrenheit. Mr. Gore routinely preaches that it will
get ever warmer and calamity will ensue. Since he contends that
human beings are the cause of this, his remedy is to crank down
industrial society. Alas, the weather is not cooperating with his
theory.
On July 9, two days after THOOTSIF’s much ballyhooed worldwide
series of rock concerts, it snowed in Buenos Aires for the first
time since 1918. July, remember, is winter in Argentina, but the
season’s temperatures are usually akin to those of California or
Florida.
In Sacramento, California, where 100-plus temperature in the
summer are common, on August 4 it went down from 104 to 74 the next
day. It happened again on August 6, setting the lowest high
temperature for that day in 101 years.
We have Lloyd Billingsley of the Pacific Research Institute to
thank for both pieces of news, inasmuch as the news media (other
than the hometown ones in B.A. and Sacramento) seem not to have
noticed it. That’s not surprising since most of them have long
since bought into THOOTSIF’s mantra, to wit, that catastrophic
future global warming is “settled science.” It’s not.
The predictions of calamity rest on computer models that are no
better than their design. An article by British researchers in the
journal Science this month makes the point that “A common
criticism of global climate models, particularly for predicting the
coming decade, has been that they only include facts such as solar
radiation, atmospheric aerosol and greenhouses, which are affected
by changes from outside the climate system, [but ignore] climate
variability that arises from natural changes within the system,
such as El Nino, fluctuations in ocean circulation and anomalies in
ocean heat content.”
Theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson casts more doubt on the use
of land temperatures to build predictive computer models. About
average land temperature, he says, “there’s no way you can measure
it.”
If climate modeling is as inexact as these scientists say,
shouldn’t Congress take their views into account before trying to
pass draconian laws that would increase the cost of energy and hurt
our economy?
The global warming alarmists had been pointing to 1998 as
evidence that the warming trend is current. It was, they claimed,
the hottest year on record, buttressing their contention that the
warming trend is a result of the large increase in worldwide
industrial production since World War II. Alas, NASA has just
rained on their parade. It says 1934 — in the midst of the Great
Depression — was the hottest year and that 1921, 1931 and 1938
were also among the Top Ten.
Despite all this bad news for the alarmists they manage to keep
the “mainstream” media in a state of agitation. Typical of their
stories, these August 8 headlines: Washington Post,
“Across the Globe, Extremes of Heat and Rain”; the New York
Times, “Warming Threatens Farms in India, U.N. Official
Says.”
It turns out these are nothing new. A researcher at the Library
of Congress recently came across this Page 2 story in the
Washington Post of November 2, 1922: “Arctic Ocean Getting
Warm; Seals Vanish and Icebergs Melt.” Sound familiar? The Business
& Media Institute recently completed a study in which it said
that the media “have warned about impending climate doom four
different times in the past 100 years.”
Bad news all around for The Holy Order of the Sky is Falling. I
tried to call Pontiff Al for an opinion, but was told he was
traveling. So, I spoke to THOOTSIF’s recording secretary, Ms. Henny
Penny. She was in a sour mood. Her one-word comment was,
“Cluck.”
