IT’S THE WARMISTS WHO DISRESPECT SCIENCE

You may have heard of Bill McKibben.  When I googled "McKibben," I got more than 7 million hits.

You may not have heard of Henrik Svensmark.  When I googled his name, I got just 233,000 hits.

Mr. McKibben is "probably the nation’s leading environmentalist," Boston Globe reporter Anis Shivani wrote last year.  So when Bill McKibben wrote that Hurricane Irene "has a middle name, and it’s Global Warming," his article drew a lot of attention from journalists. 

Warming increases the number and violence of hurricanes and tornadoes, Mr. McKibben wrote in the Daily Beast (owner of Newsweek)  the day before the storm struck the Eastern seaboard.

This is hooey.  Worldwide, accumulated cyclone activity (what we call hurricanes scientists call tropical cyclones) is near historic lows, Florida State University climatologist Ryan Maue said in August.

Three hurricanes strike the U.S. every two years, on average.  But the last hurricane before Irene to make landfall was Ike, on Sept. 13, 2008.  There are five categories of hurricanes, with categories 3, 4 and 5 defined as "major" hurricanes (the higher the number, the worse the storm).  Ike was a Cat 2 when it struck Galveston.

"The period 2006-2010 is one of only three five year consecutive periods without a major U.S. hurricane landfall," British climatologist Adam Lea wrote last October.  "There has never been a six year period without a U.S. major hurricane landfall."

Now there has.  Irene was just a Cat 1 when it struck the Outer Banks of North Carolina.

Warmer oceans should result in fewer hurricanes, said a paper published in May by scientists affiliated with NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).

AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein echoed Mr. McKibben.  "Nature is pummeling the United States this year with extremes," he wrote Sept. 3.  "Unprecedented triple digit heat and devastating drought.  Deadly tornadoes leveling towns.  Massive rivers overflowing.  A billion dollar blizzard.  And now, unusual hurricane-caused flooding in Vermont."

Unprecedented?  Not hardly, said Steven Goddard at the RealScience blog, who accused the AP science reporter of displaying "spectacular ignorance."  The summer of 1934 was much hotter, and drought that year covered 80 percent of the country, compared to 25 percent this year.  Flooding was worse in 1927, he noted. 

This was the deadliest year for tornadoes since 1953.  But the 482 deaths are less than the 519 in 1953, and nowhere near the record, set in 1925, of 794.

"Borenstein has no idea what he’s talking about," Mr. Goddard said.  "Are these reporters too lazy or too dumb to do any research?"

Though both are unburdened by much knowledge of the subject (Mr. McKibben’s degree is in journalism), neither he nor Mr. Borenstein are idiots.  But they aren’t eager to report facts which conflict with the theory of Anthropogenic (man made) Global Warming or AGW.

Nor are many of Mr. Borenstein’s colleagues, which may explain why – unless you’re a TTPer –  you’ve heard so little about Henrik Svensmark, director of the Center for Sun-Climate Research at the Danish National Space Center.

Most of what little has been written about Dr. Svensmark was written when warmists savaged him for saying cosmic rays have a far greater effect on climate than do the activities of man, and for his prediction that global temperatures soon would cool.   (TTPers learned about this back in 2005 in Solar Warming.)

Experiments by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, have confirmed Dr. Svensmark’s theory that cosmic rays accelerate cloud formation.

This is a big deal.  "CERN, and the Danes, have in all likelihood found the path to the Holy Grail of climate science," wrote energy expert Lawrence Solomon in Canada’s Financial Post.

But when CERN’s research was published in August in the prestigious journal Nature, journalists paid little attention to it.

Facts delivered other blows to AGW this year. 

"The sea level is now rising faster along the U.S. Atlantic coast than at any time in the past 2,100 years," former Vice President Al Gore wrote in June.

Sea levels actually declined in 2010, NASA said in April.  This was surprising, because sea levels have been rising since the last ice age.

Less heat is being trapped in the atmosphere than computer models predict, data from NASA’s Terra satellite indicate, according to a study in July.  The discrepancy between the computer model and reality is "huge," said study co-author Roy Spencer, who won NASA’s Exceptional Scientific Achievement medal for his global temperature monitoring work.

Though underreported, these facts have warmists panicking.  Their efforts to keep an increasingly skeptical public frightened have passed from the sublime to the ridiculous.

* Rising temperatures will cause more wars, warmists claim.  History shows there’ve been more wars in colder periods, says the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

* A warmist think tank in Australia said last month rising temperatures will increase mental illness.  The rise in global temperatures in the last 100 years is 1.44 degrees F, according to the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  A person would experience "climate change" nearly three times as great by moving from Pittsburgh (average annual temperature, 50.3 F) to Philadelphia (54.3F).  It may be nuts to move to Philly from Pittsburgh, but mental illness isn’t more prevalent there.

* The most preposterous assertion came in a paper in August by three young scientists, two affiliated with Penn State, one with NASA.  If we don’t stop global warming, space aliens may kill us, they warned.

"ETI (space aliens with Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) could attack and kill us, enslave us, or potentially even eat us," they wrote.  "ETI could attack us out of selfishness or out of a more altruistic desire to protect the galaxy from us.  We might be a threat to the galaxy just as we are a threat to our home planet."

And these clowns say it’s the skeptics who disrespect science.