I applaud President Obama for visiting Alaska. I have family there, and it is a state often forgotten when the White House schedules presidential trips. But Obama’s reason for going — to highlight the results of man-caused climate change — is fraudulent. Humans are not causing global warming in Alaska or anywhere else on the globe.
Here follow three facts to counter the nonsense you will hear this week. And by “facts” I mean data collected by incorruptible sources, not predictions based on dodgy computer climate models or readings from land-based stations that skew recorded temperatures upward, keeping alive the ever-failing hypothesis of man-caused global warming.
Fact #1: Global temperatures have been flat for nearly 19 years.
Measured by satellite — the most-accurate way to measure global temperatures — there has been no global warming since kids who are entering college this year were born. The Class of 2015 has been told all their lives in school that human activity has been dangerously warming the planet. The facts — the data collected by the satellites NASA sent up into orbit — tell a different story:
The stories about “the warmest year on record” you read in the media mostly concern a fraction of a degree — and even those fractions mean little because the old, unreliable, land-based temperature stations were adjusted in a way that makes today’s temperatures seem warmer than the past. Take the Medieval Warm Period — called the “climate optimum” before warming was deemed bad — which was a lot warmer than today. Greenland, for example, was for centuries able to support modest crops and livestock. (They abandoned the colonies for good reason: It once was warm but got too cold!)
Fact #2: Polar ice is not dangerously melting.
Whenever you see a news report claiming some climate landmark represents the “greatest in recorded history,” your skeptical antennae should deploy. The world only got around to sending satellites into space to observe and measure the climate in the 1970s, including satellites that took pictures of the North Pole and South Pole to measure ice extent. So when you hear that polar ice levels are “dangerously low,” remember that the only real measurements we have for contrast were taken when the Bee Gees were hot.
It does not take much Google skill to come up with a photo from the 1950s of an American submarine surfacing at the North Pole without much pack ice around the vessel. If that happened today? Good Lord, the media would go crazy. But it (gasp!) happened again to two subs in the 1960s.
The fact is, current ice extent on the North Pole is within the normal range of what satellites have accurately measured — again, only since the 1970s.
What about the South Pole? It continues to set records for ice cover and last year entrapped a global warming cruise in ice.
Fact #3: Extreme Weather is Declining.
President Obama was praying for Tropical Storm Erika, currently petering out, to be an actual hurricane by the time it struck the US. It would have given him a tiny, wind-blown branch upon which to rest his case that storms are getting stronger and more dangerous because of man-caused global warming. But even if Erika hit Florida as a Category 2 hurricane, it still wouldn’t have broken the longest-ever streak of a major hurricane (Cat 3 or higher) not landing on US soil.
That’s right. Every passing day adds to the ten-year record, set on September 12, 2015. We are experiencing the longest stretch of time in recorded history in which no major hurricane has struck the United States. Records on this have been kept, unmolested by data fudging, for more than 100 years.
As for cold weather, the “big snow” then “very cold” cycles for the past two winters in the Lower 48 were entirely normal. Human emissions of CO2 had nothing to do with it.
If you’re interested in what’s really happening to our climate — and want more than three facts to counter Obama — visit the archive of Heartland’s 10 International Conferences on Climate Change. You can also read more about the non-alarmist, non-politicized data at Climate Change Reconsidered.
