Disarming the Alarmists: Climate-change Myth Takes Three More Hits

• Disarming the Alarmists: Climate-change Myth Takes Three More Hits
  by Selwyn Duke, http://www.thenewamerican.com/  
  It’s no wonder climate alarmists are getting hot under the collar, proposing measures such as imprisoning climate realists. Because, increasingly, the facts are not intersecting with their agenda. And 2016 is providing no respite, with,reports Investor’s Business Daily (IBD), three more global-warming stories that no doubt put a chill on alarmists’ New Year’s revelry.
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  First up: Would you take a “hot stock tip” from a broker who’d been consistently wrong for more than a generation? That’s analogous to what alarmists are asking us to do, with scholars at the Cato Institute confirming “that climate models that warn of warming have been wrong for decades,” writes IBD. In fact and contrary to those models, temperatures have reportedly been stable now for approximately 18 years. And as Cato puts it stating the obvious, “If the known climate behavior cannot be well-captured by the models, no case can be made for the veracity of projections, from the same models, of the future evolution of our climate — the projections which underlie current climate/energy policy.” In other words, the best predictor of future predictions’ accuracy is past predictions’ accuracy.
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  And doomsayers have a particularly bad — and comical — record. As Dr. Walter Williams wrote in “Environmentalists’ Wild Predictions”:
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  At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.” In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore’s hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and “in the 1970s … hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich’s predictions about England were gloomier: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
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  England may be sorry it still exists in 2016, though, if Al Gore is to be believed. According to him, we have just 18 days left “to save the planet from turning into a total frying pan,” as the Washington Post put it. Gore may not now want to bet the house on that prediction, but he doesn’t have to. Since he announced on January 26^, 2006 that we had a mere 10 years to save ourselves, he has made countless millions as a climate-alarmist investor.
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  Next up: Presentation is everything. Saying “Big Oil” made more than “$100 billion in profits” in 2012 can stoke the fires of envy and redistributionism. Pointing out that its profit margin is only about 10 percent — far less than Apple’s 27 percent — is less compelling. Likewise, hearing that Greenland lost nine trillion tons of ice in the 20^th century can evoke images of the Wicked Witch of the West shrieking “I’m melting!” But then there’s what that fact means:
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  Greenland retained 99.7 percent of its ice cover during the 20^th century.
  Yeah, the island is that big.
  As the blog “Watts Up With That?” put it, “One would think that the fact that 99.7% of Greenland’s ice sheet survived the 20th Century might just be more scientifically relevant than a 0.3% loss… But I guess that doesn’t make for a very dramatic headline.”
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  It’s not surprising that Greenland would have lost some ice. The last 12,000 years have been what’s known as an “interglacial period,” a warming interval following a glacial period; the latter typically lasts approximately 100,000 years. The bad news is that since interglacials last only about 10,000 to 12,000 years, we’re due for another glacial period soon.
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  The reality is that climate is cyclical, not stable. There have been four or five major ice ages during the Earth’s existence and numerous minor ones. It’s said that during the Cryogenian period the world was almost completely covered with snow and ice, and during the Triassic and most of the Jurassic periods there was little if any snow or ice at all. There are also 1,500-year cycles of warming and cooling. And the atmosphere and oceans reflect our mercurial climate: CO₂ levels in the dinosaur age were five to 10 times today’s. At one time, the sea around Florida was 300 feet lower; at another time, 100 feet higher.
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