Government Types are the Last to Know

Is The Media Turning?

It's frustrating when reality does not accord with one's deepest beliefs. Most politicians in the West (and a few in the East) have become converted to the religion of global warming--a specific denomination within the broad church of environmentalism.

It seems, however, that the congregations are shrinking by the day. The general populace stopped being concerned about global warming months and months ago. Real problems have pushed out the phony ones. But still the politicians struggle manfully on. But it's frustrating when reality does not match up with theory.

Here are some snippets. Firstly, Colorado ski fields are opening up today--the earliest opening season in forty years! Or so the Denver Post reports. In New Zealand we have just been through the worst snow storms in the North Island for this time of the year in decades. Clearly the climate is taking fright at even the prospect of our Emissions Rorting Scheme.

The Antarctica ice melt this year has been the lowest since satellite records first began (1980). Clearly Antarctica is not playing its part according to the warmist script. Hasn't it heard yet that the debate is over and the science is settled and that the earth is on a warming path to extinction. How dare Antarctica not melt properly!

One of the looniest stances on the issue has been taken by the UK Met Office. Its recent record of forecasting season weather has been dismal to say the least. Christopher Booker summarises how pathetic recent forecasts have been:

Most people are aware that the UK Met Office has in recent years become something of a laughing stock. Its much-derided forecast that Britain would enjoy a "barbecue summer" this year was only the latest of a string of predictions that proved wildly off-target. Three years ago it announced that 2007 would be "the warmest year ever", just before global temperatures plunged by 0.7 degrees Celsius, more than the world's entire net warming in the 20th century. Last winter, it forecast, would be "milder and drier than average", just before we enjoyed one of our coldest and snowiest winters for years. And in 2009 it promised us one of the "five warmest years ever", complete with that "barbecue summer", when temperatures have been struggling to reach their average of the past three decades.

He goes on to explain why that office routinely forecasts "much warmer than average" seasons.

The Met Office's computer is programmed to believe that the chief driver of climate change is the rising level of CO2 – hence its predilection for forecasting barbecue summers and warmest-ever years.

One supposes the Met Office had to put its mouth where its money was. Since global warming as a result of rising CO2 emissions was a "fact" it had to be programmed into the computer prediction model. We suspect the same bias has been programmed into our own government NIWA models, since that office has regularly over estimated temperatures for the last few years. There is something terribly Canutesque in all this.

Finally, Lawrence Solomon captures our attention with his startling headline, "The end is near". He writes:

The great global warming scare is over — it is well past its peak, very much a spent force, sputtering in fits and starts to a whimpering end. You may not know this yet. Or rather, you may know it but don’t want to acknowledge it until every one else does, and that won’t happen until the press, much of which also knows it, formally acknowledges it.

How do we know that it is over? Lawrence explains:

I know that the global warming scare is over but for the shouting because that’s what the polls show, at least those in the U.S., where unlike Canada the public is polled extensively on global warming. Most Americans don’t blame humans for climate change — they consider global warming to be a natural phenomenon. Even when the polls showed the public believed man was responsible for global warming, the public didn’t take the scare seriously. When asked to rank global warming’s importance compared to numerous other concerns — unemployment, trade, health care, poverty, crime, and education among them — global warming came in dead last. Fewer than 1% chose global warming as scare-worthy.

The informed members of the media read those polls and know the global warming scare is over, too. Andrew Revkin, The New York Times reporter entrusted with the global warming scare beat, has for months lamented “the public’s waning interest in global warming.” His colleague at The Washington Post, Andrew Freedman, does his best to revive public fear, and to get politicians to act, by urging experts to up their hype so that the press will have scarier material to run with.

He sees, however, that the media and the press are turning.

But the press has also begun to tire of Armageddon All-The-Time, and (I believe) to position itself for its inevitable attack on the doomsters. In an online article in June entitled “Massive Estimates of Death are in Vogue for Copenhagen,” Richard Cable of the BBC, until then the most stalwart of scare-mongers, rattled off the global warnings du jour – they included a comparison of global warming to nuclear war and a report from the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, to the effect that “every year climate change leaves over 300,000 people dead, 325-million people seriously affected, and economic losses of US $125-billion.” Cable’s conclusion: “The problem is that once you’ve sat up and paid attention enough to examine them a bit more closely, you find that the means by which the figures were arrived at isn’t very compelling… The report contains so many extrapolations derived from guesswork based on estimates inferred from unsuitable data.”

Maybe those delicate reporters and columnists have had their fill of chilblains and shivering. The earth's climate is just not co-operating any more. As our parents used to say, "You can't beat Mother Nature", or as the older smart farmers say, "Nature is always your first mortgage".

And why should they believe anything that comes from the global warming camp? Not only has the globe not warmed over the last decade but the Arctic ice is returning, the Antarctic isn’t shrinking, polar bear populations aren’t diminishing, hurricanes aren’t becoming more extreme. The only thing that’s scary about the science is the frequency with which doomsayer data is hidden from public scrutiny, manipulated to mislead, or simply made up.

Making up data. Yes, when all the dust has settled one hopes that the charlatans who have made up data are properly exposed and publicly stripped of membership in the scientific academies and societies.