Pirate's Cove

Unsurprisingly, the two op-ed authors, Michael Oppenheimer and Kevin Trenberth…you remember, Kevin, right? He’s the one who wrote the email which said “we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t”, among others…start out by forgetting to actually mention science. But, you know, alarm bells

In a recent op-edfor The Post, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.) offered up a reheated stew of isolated factoids and sweeping generalizations about climate science to defend the destructive status quo. We agree with the chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology that policy should be based on sound science. But Smith presented political talking points, and none of his implied conclusions is accurate.

So the two are going to rebut what they call Smith’s talking points with….talking points!

The two of us have spent, in total, more than seven decades studying Earth’s climate, and we have joined hundreds of top climate scientists to summarize the state of knowledge for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Climate Research Program and other science-based bodies. We believe that our views are representative of the 97 percent of climate scientists who agree that global warming is caused by humans. Legions of studies support the view that, left unabated, this warming will produce dangerous effects. (This commentary, like so much of our work, was a collaborative process, with input from leading climate scientists Julia Cole, Robert W. Corell, Jennifer Francis, Michael E. Mann, Jonathan Overpeck, Alan Robock, Richard C.J. Somerville and Ben Santer.)

How many times will Warmists push that discredited 97% study? Remember, 32% of the papers included take a stance on man-induced global hotcoldwetdry. 97% of the 32% say Mankind has an effect, yet over 50% say that Man bears responsibility of more than 50% of the perceived warming. Heck, I take a position that Mankind bears a small burden for any global and local (UHI/land use) warming.

Man-made heat-trapping gases are warming our planet and leading to increases in extreme weather events. Droughts are becoming longer and deeper in many areas. The risk of wildfires is increasing. The year 2012, the hottest on record for the United States, illustrated this risk with severe, widespread drought accompanied by extensive wildfires.

Extreme weather has been debunked, too. And it was the lower 48, not the United States. Alaska has been cooling, to the tune of 2.4F over the last 10 years. Much of Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and Antarctica have been cooling. Most of the Southern Hemisphere hasn’t noticed any warming. And, as I’ve written ad nauseum, the global temp has gone up only 0.28F since 1990 and 0.14F since 1997. Not numbers to get excited over.

Last month, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 400 parts per million, approaching the halfway mark between preindustrial amounts and a doubling of those levels. This doubling is expected to cause a warming this century of four to seven degrees Fahrenheit. The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide reached this level was more than 3 million years ago, when Arctic lands were covered with forests. The unprecedented rate of increase has been driven entirely by human-produced emissions.

No, it didn’t actually break the 400ppm level, so they’re lying. 2nd, Arctic lands had trees? So, this happened before? It’s not unusual? Whoops!

Computer model projections from at least 27 groups at universities and other research institutes in nine countries have proved solid. In many cases, they have been too conservative, underestimating over the past 20 years the amounts of recent sea-level rise and Arctic sea ice melt.

No, they haven’t. And sea rise has been well within the historical norm for the last 7000-8000 years as a mild warm period. Consider, the average sea rise over that time is 6-8 inches. This is between cool and warm periods. How do you get an average? Well, if we refer to math, it means that there are going to be observations above and below that average, say, 16 and 0. That gives us the average. The mean 20th century average was 8 inches. If this was a big warm period, we should expect much more.

I could go on and fisk pretty much ever paragraph they write, exposing the science talking points. They even blame Superstorm Sandy on “climate change”. And if they’re using that term, they’re interested in politics, not science.