Federal Judiciary

Global Warming? LOL! -- By: Deroy Murdock

Florida?s unusually cold coastal waters (in the 40s, in some places) have killed a record 280 manatees through February 12. As CNN reports, manatees like it above 68 degrees. Some now warm themselves in the 78-degree discharge of a Tampa Electric Company power plant.

February 12?s storm followed a Nor?easter that shuttered Washington, D.C.?s federal offices for four days. Through February 14, this winter?s 55.9 inches of snow smothered Washington?s previous record, 54.4 inches, from winter 1898-1899.

How about last month?

?In Europe, snowstorms and sub-zero temperatures severely disrupted air, rail, and road transport,? the U.S. National Ice Center?s Sean R. Helfrich concluded January 12. ?The snow events impacted hundreds of millions of people world-wide, with a number of weather-related deaths reported.?

Meanwhile, December?s snow cover was North America?s greatest, and the Northern Hemisphere?s second greatest, in the 44 years measured.

Warmists correctly retort that three frigid months establish no pattern. Instead, listen to East Anglia University (EAU) climatologist Dr. Phil Jones. This world-famous advocate of ?global warming? conceded to the BBC that Earth?s positive temperature trend between 1995 and 2009 is ?not significant.?

Jones, the chief figure in the ?Climategate? e-mails controversy, rejected the oft-stated claim that ?warming?-related science is settled. ?This is not my view,? Jones added. ?There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the paleoclimatic) past as well.?

Thus, it has become nearly impossible to hear about ?global warming? without giggling. The boiling planet that Albert Gore promised has yielded to global cooling. Meanwhile, Gore?s vaunted scientific ?consensus? has collapsed, like a roof buckled beneath too much snow.

NASA is fending off charges that its National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia University ?dramatically trimmed the number and cherry-picked the locations of weather observation stations they use to produce the data set on which temperature record reports are based,? according to Weather Channel founder John Coleman. Average global temperatures are calculated based on observations from some 1,500 weather stations today, versus about 6,000 in the 1970s. Canadian stations have fallen to 35 from 600.

Icecap.us meteorologist Joseph D?Aleo, another Weather Channel veteran, says NASA exhibits ?a clear bias toward removing higher-latitude, high-altitude, and rural locations? from its sample. Andean weather gauges, for instance, are overlooked, while regional temperatures now are ?determined by interpolation from stations hundreds of miles away on the coast or in the Amazon,? D?Aleo says. He compares this to calculating Minneapolis?s average temperature by reading thermometers in St. Louis and Kansas City.

The United Nations?s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) purports to be for ?warming? science what the Congressional Budget Office is for U.S. fiscal policy. All sides expect both to furnish accurate and reliable data. If CBO were caught with a broken abacus making multiple errors, however, some politically motivated, it might face IPCC?s current level of embarrassment.

IPCC?s Nobel Prize-winning 2007 report, its latest, claimed that Earth ?suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s.? According to January 24?s Times of London, this assertion was based on an unpublished, non-peer-reviewed manuscript by Robert Muir-Wood of London?s Risk Management Solutions. When his 2006 paper finally was published in 2008, after the IPCC invoked it, Muir-Wood?s study concluded: ?We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.?

IPCC?s Dr. Murari Lal asserted that so-called ?global warming? would melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035, first drowning Asians in flash floods, and then dehydrating them beside desiccated rivers. Dr. Lal?s source for this apocalyptic vision was a non-scientific, 2005 World Wildlife Fund report, one of 16 non-peer-reviewed WWF papers that IPCC considered ?evidence.? WWF, in turn, recycled two 1999 magazine interviews with glaciologist Syed Hasnain. WWF?s study also featured a massive mathematical mistake. It stated that a glacier receded at 134 meters (439 feet) annually. The correct distance was 23 meters (75 feet). WWF calculated annual shrinkage by dividing 121 years of glacier loss by 21, not 121. Oops!

?We knew the WWF report with the 2035 date was ?grey literature,?? lacking peer review, though no one at IPCC saw anything amiss, Dr. Lal told London?s the Mail on Sunday. He added: ?We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.?

This is excellent lobbying and dismal science.

IPCC claimed that African, Alpine, and Andean mountain tops had lost ice between 1900 and 2000 ?due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming.? One source for this conclusion was an unpublished geography thesis by University of Berne master?s degree student Dario-Andri Schwörer. He quoted observations from Swiss mountain guides. IPCC also cited a 2002 Climbing magazine article, in which author Mark Bowen interviewed mountaineers who had scaled glaciers since the 1970s.

?There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense,? Prof. Richard Tol of Dublin?s Economic and Social Research Institute, said in January 30?s London Daily Telegraph.

On February 13, IPCC retracted its statement that 55 percent of the Netherlands lies below sea level. In fact, only 26 percent is that low.

Last November, hundreds of hacked e-mails from Great Britain?s Climate Research Unit (CRU) at EAU showed key warmists concealing inconvenient truths that undermined their pet theory.

?If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the U.K., I think I?ll delete the file rather than send to anyone,? CRU?s now-suspended director, the aforementioned Dr. Phil Jones, e-mailed Prof. Michael Mann, director of Penn State University?s Earth System Science Center. ?We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.?

Britain?s Information Commissioner ruled earlier this month that CRU scientists broke the law when they rejected freedom-of-information requests for raw data underlying their global-temperature calculations.

These underlying weather observations were discarded, so CRU?s results cannot be duplicated. This renders them -- by definition -- non-scientific.

Sir Muir Russell?s inquiry into this scandal has become scandalous in its own right. Russell?s panel will meet secretly and issue no transcripts of its probe into CRU?s non-transparency. Nature magazine editor Phil Campbell resigned from Russell?s supposedly neutral investigation after his previous statements showed pro-warmist bias.

Such monkeyshines have propelled the hoax of so-called ?global warming? since its inception. Former U.S. senator Timothy Wirth (D., Colo.) confessed to rigging a June 1988 Capitol Hill hearing to make it appear warmer than usual.

?We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer,? Wirth said on an April 2007 edition of PBS?s Frontline. ?So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.?

Wirth then committed outright deception.

?We went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn?t working inside the room,? Wirth told correspondent Deborah Amos. At the next day?s hearing, ?it was really hot,? Wirth explained. TV coverage showed a top NASA scientist and ?warming? proponent sweating through his statement. As Wirth bragged: ?The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.?

Fakery should be left to Hollywood sci-fi directors, not senators. And yet such fabrication has dominated this issue for four decades. As IPCC author Stephen Schneider told Discover magazine in 1989: ?To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.?

U.S. senator Scott Brown (R., Mass.) suddenly emerged from nowhere and knocked Obamacare into a coma, seemingly days before enactment. These revelations of slipshod and sinister ?global-warming science? similarly have crippled cap-and-trade energy taxes, job-killing international ?climate change? treaties, and other self-destructive policies. The fact that America is buried in snow is the icing on the cake.

-- Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University. 

Full post as published by Bench Memos - National Review Online on February 18, 2010 (boomark / email).