Obama’s Prophecies of Climate Doom in Alaska Fall Flat
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Unless you repent of your sin of carbon emission and allow the United Nations to shackle humanity to a planetary “climate” regime, the end is near! Whole nations will be “submerged underwater,” cities will be “abandoned,” and “climate refugees” will flee from global warming-induced war, famine, and pestilence. At least that was Obama’s apocalyptic prophecy of climate doom delivered this week during his Alaska tour. Indeed, the whole tax-funded global-warming industry and its supporters — especially the Obama administration — are ratcheting up hysteria over alleged “climate change” like never before. And it is only going to get worse in the months ahead.

But it is not because “global warming” is getting worse. And it is certainly not because the alleged evidence of man’s alleged role in global-warming is getting stronger. In fact, uncertainty is only increasing, and it has now become clear that self-styled “climate experts,” assuming they actually believe their own statements, really have no clue what they are talking about — practically every falsifiable prediction they have made over the past five decades, from global cooling to global warming to just “climate change,” has proven to be embarrassingly wrong. In fact, according to the undisputed satellite record, there has been no warming in close to two decades, contrary to every single “climate model” produced by the UN and its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Instead, the real reason for stepping up the doom-and-gloom prognostications is the upcoming UN “climate” summit scheduled for December in Paris. At the conference, Obama and his fellow warming alarmists see what may be their final chance to impose a “climate” regime on humanity — global wealth redistribution, energy rationing, carbon taxes, and much more. In the run-up to the summit, humanity can expect the climate hysteria peddled by the establishment press, government officials, UN bureaucrats, Third World regimes demanding “climate reparations,” and the entire $1 billion-per-day alarmism industry to steadily increase, regardless of what temperatures do.  

In Alaska this week on a mission to hype the alleged dangers of “global warming” and humanity’s puny CO2 emissions, Obama made that plainly evident, as he and his traveling posse of self-styled “journalists” offered what might amount to one of the most stunning and audacious deceptions of the president’s entire tenure. “If we stopped trying to build a clean energy economy and reduce carbon pollution, if we do nothing to prevent glaciers from melting faster and oceans from rising faster, and forests from burning faster and storms from growing stronger, we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair,” Obama prophesied at a “GLACIER Conference” in Alaska.

Of course, that is all baloney — CO2 is the gas of life, not pollution (you exhale CO2 and drink it in your soda); glaciers are not melting more quickly, and in many cases are growing; oceans are not rising, forests are not burning faster, and storms are not growing stronger. In fact, in many cases, the opposite is closer to what has been observed. The establishment press, though, was equally complicit in the fraud — and not just because they all failed to mention the summer snow and unusually cold weather forecast during Obama’s visit, attributed by some to the infamous “Gore Effect.”

For example, an article in the Los Angeles Times by Maria La Ganga and Michael Memoli offered falsehood on top of falsehood — and it was hardly unique in that regard, as virtually every “reporter” on the trip with Obama pumped out very similar propaganda. First, the two journalists parrot Obama’s claims about Exit Glacier. “This is as good of a signpost of what we’re dealing with when it comes to climate change as just about anything,” Obama is quoted as saying as journalists obediently snapped photos of him standing next to signs marking where the glacier stood in previous years. “What it indicates, because of the changing patterns of winter and less snow and longer, hotter summers, is how rapidly the glacier is receding. It sends a message.”

First of all, Obama’s claim was contradicted just last year by Obama “Science Czar” John Holdren, the forced abortion-touting advocate for a “planetary regime” and coercive population control. “A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern we can expect to see with increasing frequency, as global warming continues,” he claimed in a widely ridiculed video linking record cold and snowfall to “global warming.” Holdren, of course, was previously a man-made global-cooling alarmist who warned of a new ice age by 2020.  

More importantly, if La Ganga and Michael Memoli at the Times had bothered with even the most basic journalistic procedures and fact checking, they would have found that Obama’s retreating glacier was actually retreating at a much faster rate between 1914 and 1917 than it is now. And it is retreating at the same rate as the average between 1894 and 1899. In fact, the glacier has been steadily retreating since 1816, when records began. All of those inconvenient truths are available right on the National Park Service’s own website, which the L.A. Times and other newspapers should have consulted before parroting fact errors. (H/T Real Climate Science).

Indeed, the same is true of Alaska’s other glaciers, which according to U.S. government data were retreating much more quickly in the 19th and early 20th centuries — long before (largely insignificant) human emissions of CO2 could be blamed — than they are today. According to a chart produced by Dr. Richard Keen at the University of Colorado and reprinted on the Real Climate Science website, Alaskan glacier retreat actually peaked almost 150 years ago while Abraham Lincoln was president. That is probably because of the Little Ice Age, which caused rapid glacier expansion, that ended around the year 1870. Also interesting, though not mentioned by Obama’s traveling circus of journalists, is that the retreating glaciers are exposing ancient forests buried under the ice that grew during the Medieval Warm Period. Back then, global temperatures were much warmer than today — with obvious benefits for humanity.

“The supposed poster child glacier for global warming in Alaska is Mendenhall Glacier … except that it had already retreated one mile by the early 1900s, long before human greenhouse gas emissions could be blamed,” explained Dr. Roy Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama and former senior scientist for climate studies at NASA who has long warned of the dangers posed by “global-warming Nazis.” “Furthermore, its retreat is uncovering large tree stumps approximately 1,000 years old, coincidentally coinciding with the (naturally-caused) Medieval Warm Period, back when the Vikings were able to farm in Greenland. Which [brings up] the question: How could it have been warm enough to grow giant trees 1,000 years ago in an area now covered in ice? We don’t know why it was so warm 1,000 years ago — climate scientists don’t like to talk about it because they can’t explain it — but for some reason they are sure that your SUV is causing current warmth.”

In fairness, the L.A. Times was hardly the only establishment media outlet to (presumably) get duped — and thereby misinform its dwindling readership — by the Obama administration’s prophecies of doom. Josh Lederman with the Associated Press, for example, reported that “the 2-mile-long chock of solid ice has been retreating at a faster and faster pace in recent years — more than 800 feet since 2008, satellite tracking shows.” In the real world, the glacier retreated far more than that in less than half the time frame a century ago, as Lederman would have discovered by simply consulting the federal government’s own website. Real journalists might quote Obama or other officials, but they would also point out that the statements were false to ensure the reader receives accurate information.

Other officials quoted by “journalists” who did not bother to check the accuracy of their statements included National Park “science” bureaucrat Deborah Kurtz. She claimed, falsely, that recent years had featured an “unprecedented rate of warming” across the state. In the real world, Alaska cooled by about 0.1 degrees since 1977, according to data from the Alaska Climate Research Center. Again, none of the media organs traveling with Obama bothered to fact-check the claims before printing them — evidence of either major journalistic malpractice or blatant intent to deceive.

Next the L.A. Times report claims that “the public is growing to accept that climate change is real and affecting their day-to-day lives,” followed by the caveat “White House officials argue.” Again, in the real world, the opposite has occurred. A Pew Research Center poll from last year, for example, found that just four in 10 Americans even believe the anthropogenic (man-made) global-warming theory. A Gallup survey from this year, meanwhile, reveals that Americans’ global-warming concerns actually peaked about 15 years ago and have been declining ever since. Even more recently, a global survey of seven million people by a UN-affiliated outfit showed that humanity ranks global-warming dead last among the 16 issues presented.   

At least the L.A. Times got one fact right: “Obama is looking to build momentum not for a vote in Congress, but on behalf of a sweeping, binding agreement to reduce emissions to be reached at a major U.N. climate summit in Paris late this year,” it reported, without noting that any “binding agreement” would have to be ratified by two thirds of the Senate, which climate realists in the Senate have already said is not going to happen. Instead, as Obama and various foreign officials have made clear, the administration is hoping to bypass the constitutionally required treaty ratification by pursuing some sort of non-binding “political agreement.” And even then, Congress could simply refuse to appropriate any funding for the gimmicks.

Aside from Obama’s latest doom-mongering tour, foreign audiences have also been treated to an accelerating avalanche of blatantly dishonest global-warming propaganda. An August 29 article in the U.K. Independent, for instance, claimed, citing “experts,” that 2015 “will be the hottest year on record ‘by a mile’.” “It’s going to be so far ahead of the other record year that it’s going to be beyond the error range,” boasted Phil Jones, the widely ridiculed director of the Climatic Research Unit at the center of the ClimateGate mega-scandal. Really! Beyond the margin of error this time!

In the real world, aside from the fact that temperature is measured in degrees and not miles, without some cataclysmic unforeseen bout of actual warming, it will not even be close to the hottest year on record, as the global satellite temperature records make clear. The Independent article mostly quotes discredited “climate scientists” without noting, as The New American has documented extensively, that those same tax-funded “scientists” have a decades-long track record of being wrong on virtually every falsifiable prediction they have made.

It is more than likely that Obama and his top officials know well that the prophecies of climate doom are based on lies, fantasy, data manipulation, debunked “models,” and cherry-picked “evidence.” Many of the reporters traveling with him probably do as well, or at least they should. In Congress and among the American people, faith in the discredited global-warming theories — widely ridiculed today as a “cult” by serious climate scientists — is dwindling quickly, to the extent that it ever existed at all.

Yet, the doom-and-gloom and threats of climate apocalypse without repentance (and taxes) to absolve humanity’s carbon sins will keep getting louder and shriller — at least until the UN climate summit in Paris wraps up late this year. In the meantime, Americans should educate themselves on climate science and the Constitution to ensure that the globalist dream of a draconian UN climate regime never gets imposed on the people of the United States.

 Photo: AP Images

Alex Newman is a correspondent for The New American, covering economics, education, politics, and more. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU. He can be reached at: [email protected].

 

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