“The whole aim of practical politics,” Mencken said, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
Richard Lindzen, one of the world’s foremost climate scientists, reminded me of Mencken’s saying when I sent him a transcript of Clinton’s panicky speech about climate change at a rally at Miami-Dade College in Miami, FL, October 11.
“Climate change is real, it’s urgent, and America can take the lead in the world in addressing it,” she told her mostly young audience.
Well, now, yes, climate change is real. It’s been real throughout geologic history. But for it to be urgent, it must now be something quite different from what it’s been before.
Clinton thinks it is. That’s why she said that over the last thirty years “the climate challenge has only grown more stark.” Has it?
Clinton called Al Gore, who spoke at her rally and in 2008 and again in 2009 falsely predicted that in five yearsthe North Pole would be ice free, “one of the world’s foremost leaders on climate change.” She recommended his movie An Inconvenient Truth despite its many scientific errors. Yet she ridiculed her opponent as “a guy who denies science” because he denies not climate change per se but manmade climate change dangerous enough to warrant spending $Trillions to fight it.
She might want to learn just a little bit of climate science herself—the bit about temperature trends.
Has the world warmed in the last 150 years? Yes, by perhaps 0.8–1.0°C.
Does that prove that human activity—CO2 and other “greenhouse gas” emissions—caused the warming? No. Why not?
First, because the first hundred years of that warming occurred before CO2 levels rose enough to blame.
Second, because even by the data preferred by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) the warming was intermittent, and two periods (1860–1880 and 1910–1940) during the first hundred years were every bit as rapid as the one period (1980–2005) in the last fifty years, as shown in this graph exposing the statistical deceptions of the IPCC. (The IPCC provided the red, purple, and orange trend lines to depict accelerating warming periods; the yellow lines show that the warming occurred at the same rate in three periods.)
Third, because once you’ve applied the proper statistical tools to control for the normal fluctuations of a coupled non-linear chaotic fluid-dynamic system (which is what Earth’s climate is) to global temperature data since 1958 (about the beginning of the period during which climate alarmists claim manmade CO2 emissions began forcing global warming), you find that there was no upward trend from 1958 to 1977 and none again from 1977 to 2012. The entire global temperature change in that period occurred in a single step, in late 1977, driven not by CO2 but by the reversal of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from negative (cooling Earth’s atmosphere) to positive (warming it).
