Do you happen to remember hearing about how a man-made climate crisis is causing extreme weather events? Like when in highlighting Superstorm Sandy’s destruction during his 2013 State of the Union address President Obama proclaimed: "Now, it's true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15. Heat waves, droughts, wildfires and floods, all are now more frequent and more intense."
Obama continued: “Climate scientists have said that as the planet warms, extreme weather events will become more frequent.” And after all, being president with all that EPA-endorsed science at his disposal we should expect him to know . . . right?
Well, perhaps not after all. Satellite records show that despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels, global temperatures during those 12 recent “hottest years” have been statistically flat for the past 18 and counting. We are also witnessing a historically long stretch without a major U.S. landfall hurricane strike.
Most other extreme weather events have become less severe as well. As University of Colorado-Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr. told the Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee in July 2013, droughts have “for the most part become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century.” Globally, “there has been little change in drought over the last 60 years.”
Such inconvenient facts haven’t deterred the Obama administration’s EPA from launching draconian new regulations aimed at shuttering coal-fired power plants in the interest of ending global warming, aka, climate change.
Apparently no one has bothered to inform Administrator Gina McCarthy that such actions lack any scientific basis.
Senate Environment and Public Works Subcommittee member Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., drew a complete blank when he grilled McCarthy about EPA’s extraordinary regulatory overreach.
Asking on March 4 if she disputed Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Institute along with Dr. Pielke regarding fewer droughts having occurred in recent years, she replied: “I don’t know in what context he’s making statements like that.”
Sessions then asked, “What about hurricanes. Have we had more or less hurricanes in the last decade?” McCarthy responded: “In terms of landing those hurricanes on land, I cannot answer that question. It’s a very complicated issue.”
Sessions observed: “It’s not complicated on how many have landed. We’ve had a dramatic reduction in the number. We’ve gone a decade without a hurricane [Category] 3 or above . . . Would you acknowledge that over the last 18 years, that the increase in temperature has been very little, and that it is well below, matter of fact 90 percent below most of the environmental models that showed how fast temperature would increase?”
Bewildered again, McCarthy said, “I do not know what the models actually are predicting that you are referring to.”
Amazed, Sen. Sessions concluded: “This is a stunning development, that the head of the Environmental Protection Agency — who should know more than anybody else in the world, who is imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in cost to prevent this climate temperature increase — doesn’t know whether their projections have been right or wrong.”
Nevertheless, a Democrat-led witch hunt for “climate-change deniers” commenced shortly after The New York Times posted a recent front-page attack piece on Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon who believes solar changes — not human influences — account for periodically observed climate shifts.
Days later, Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., wrote to employers of Roger Pielke and six other targeted climate crisis skeptics demanding information about any funding they may have received from “outside sources” (e.g., fossil energy companies).
Not only has Dr. Pielke never received any fossil funding, he even authored a book calling for a carbon tax. Instead it seems that his real offense was to contradict top White House science adviser John Holdren in stating that it is “incorrect to associate the increasing costs of disasters with the emission of greenhouse gases.”
In Pielke’s case, the intimidating smear tactics are working. He states: “I have already shifted all of my academic work away from climate issues. I am simply not initiating any new research or papers on the topic and I have ring-fenced my slowly diminishing blogging on the subject.”
Pielke urgently warns us all: “When ‘witch hunts’ are deemed legitimate in the context of popular causes, we will have fully turned science into just another arena for the exercise of power politics. The result is a big loss for both science and politics.”
Such loss includes huge economic cost burdens that weigh heavily upon businesses and citizens, those who are poorest and most energy-dependent in particular. Whether attributed to extreme agendas, extreme ignorance, or lots of both, this disastrous political climate is long overdue for a man-made change.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of “Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom”(2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2012). Read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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