Climate change or not, the United States is still a pretty cool country — and getting cooler, according to temperature data of the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The readings show temperatures dropping throughout the United States over the past decade.
Nearly 10 years ago, the agency, in response to criticism that its temperature station readings had been skewed higher by poor sitings and questionable adjustments, set up temperature stations in pristine locations throughout the United States. Those stations, known collectively as the U.S. Climate Reference Network, have, a decade later, made the temperature readings available. The records show the United States has cooled by 0.4 degrees Celsius since the networks began operating in January 2005.
The news is not likely to spark a bull market in fur coats or igloos. A decline of 0.4 degrees is not a precipitous drop. And, as noted at Forbes.com by James Taylor, a frequent contributor on issues of energy and the environment, the data of 10 years does not necessarily indicate a long-term trend. But it does show a disconnect between predictions made by climate change theoreticians and what is actually happening here on Earth. Taylor notes, for example, the prophecy of “prominent alarmist” James Hansen, who as recently as 2010 declared, “Global warming on decadal time scales is continuing without letup … effectively illustrat[ing] the monotonic and substantial warming that is occurring on decadal time scales.”
The United States is, of course, a small part of the entire planet, but the findings of the U.S. Climate Reference Network add credence to the Remote Satellite Systems data showing no increase in temperatures worldwide since September 1996. According to the Climate Depot website, “The 213 months without global warming represent more than half the 425-month satellite data record since January 1979.” The record also refutes the claims of those who insist the planet is warming at a rate that poses an imminent and unceasing threat — a “monotonic” threat in Hansen’s word — to man and beast alike. “No one now in high school has lived through global warming,” Climate Depot noted.
Other data keep cropping up in contradiction to the warnings about our allegedly overheating planet, including the increase of sea ice in Antarctica. Yet President Obama continues to indulge in the fashionable ridicule of those who question or challenge the climate change dogma, referring in his June 14 commencement address at the University of California-Irvine to “climate change deniers,” who would have, in the early days of American space exploration, argued “that the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese.” Such people, he claimed, pose “a fairly serious threat to everyone’s future.”
And the “constitutional lawyer who sits in the Oval Office” continues to push for curbs on carbon emissions from U.S. power plants, despite the refusal of the Constitution’s designated legislative branch — the Congress of the United States — to write those curbs into law.
Across the ocean, the British Broadcasting Corporation has instructed its staff to stop airing the views of climate change deniers. No doubt a monopoly of viewpoint well suits the management of a corporation that enjoys a monopoly in broadcasting.
