The global-warming propaganda knows no bounds. NASA and NOAA have just announced that 2015 is “the hottest year on record,” confirming a similar statement by the UN IPCC last fall — a spurious claim that CNN and other elements of the pro-environmentalist establishment media are only too happy to amplify. In other words: Two more government agencies, funded entirely by government money, have found still more evidence that more government will be needed to avert the alleged manmade catastrophe of global warming. The fact that the most ardent proponents of anthropogenic (manmade) global warming are all affiliated with either the UN or with the U.S. government should arouse suspicions about scientific objectivity.
Putting the lie to such pronouncements, as The New American noted only two days ago, is the absurd yet insistent claim that reliable global temperature data stretch all the way back to the 1880s — an era when the high Arctic, Antarctica, Siberia, the Sahara, Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, and large stretches of Oceania had yet to be explored, let alone equipped with weather monitoring facilities. Virtually nothing was known of the high Arctic, for example, until well into the 20th century, when airplanes gave access to areas unreachable by boat. Yet we are expected to believe that the data pre-1979 is as reliable as that furnished by the satellites and sophisticated weather monitoring equipment of the past few decades.
Quite apart from such obvious and juvenile misinformation from the global-warming lobby, there are a range of scientific objections to the entire anthropogenic global warming hypothesis (AGW), including the falsification of data and the willful ignoring of inconvenient truths that do not support AGW, which the agenda-driven leaders of the movement ignore. For one thing, the famous “hockey stick” chart produced in the last decade, which purported to show an unprecedented spike in global temperatures over the last century, has been conclusively debunked. The chart completely ignored the broad temperature swings during the Medieval Warming Period and the Little Ice Age. Yet the global-warming alarmists made little mention of the deliberate and sensational distortion of data, and have simply moved on to other spurious claims.
In point of fact, satellite temperature data show no discernible warming for the last 18 years and eight months — despite the enormous worldwide growth in industry and greenhouse gas emissions, especially in developing economies like Brazil and China, during this same interval. As Dr. Richard Lindzen, MIT professor emeritus of meteorology, commented, “I feel it is proof of dishonesty to argue about things like small fluctuations in temperature or the sign of a trend. Why lend credibility to this dishonesty? All that matters is that for almost 40 years, model projections have almost all exceeded observations.”
The notion that any discernible warming of the climate over the past several decades is caused by greenhouse gas emissions is flatly contradicted by data from the troposphere in the tropical zone. According to every greenhouse gas warming model, the atmosphere in the troposphere should get warmer for several kilometers above the Earth’s surface, a trend that ought to peak at about 10 kilometers in altitude. Instead, the atmosphere has been found to cool with altitude — consistent with an external heat source (the sun), but not with system-internal, greenhouse gas-driven heating.
We are told that the 20th century has been the warmest on record, yet the 20th century saw a prolonged cooling trend from the 1940s to the 1970s that is difficult to explain in the context of already robust global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. As TNA’s Alex Newman reported in November 2015, “NASA dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the United Nations’ climate-alarmism machine, noting that ice across Antarctica has been growing at break-neck speed for decades,” contrary to NASA’s past repeated claims that it has been melting. Moreover, leaving aside the recent El Niño event, the 21st century has seen no discernible warming — for which the reason is now glibly asserted that we would be entering a new Ice Age, were it not for the countervailing effect of AGW.
Sober minded observers are appalled at the persistence of this deplorable propaganda campaign masquerading as science. Since the late 1980s, the global radical environmental establishment has been pushing AGW as an obvious pretext for more government control, especially at the international level. Scientists who have boarded the AGW bandwagon have been awash in government grants and fulsome media praise; those who have remained objective, like Dr. S. Fred Singer, have been marginalized and ridiculed.
In response to the latest claims of the “warmest year ever,” Lindzen was unequivocal. “When someone says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,” he told a climate conference in Texas last November.
Most false scientific theories are swiftly falsified and discarded as a result of the natural skepticism that drives modern science. In most realms of scientific enquiry, there is as much professional acclaim to be garnered from the debunking of a popular claim (such as Pons and Fleischmann’s famous “cold fusion” experiments) as there is from spinning a successful new theory. In this way is the advancement of scientific truth incentivized. In a scientific establishment where such time-honored theories as general relativity and quantum mechanics are constantly being tested in the quest for a higher “Grand Unified Theory” of physics, the notion that “the science is settled” — as global-warming propagandists routinely claim — is outright pseudoscientific.
Good science is never “settled,” but is subject to constant testing, challenging, and refinement. Anthropogenic global warming is a sorry example of political propaganda masquerading as science, and enlisting all the power of the state to entrench and perpetuate itself. As Dr. Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, bluntly put it, “We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science.”
But, inasmuch as AGW propaganda has been selected as a crucial talking point on behalf of global socialism, don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.
