Climate Change Jumps the Shark
[column for 11-11-09]
If you’re reading this article, there’s a good chance you remember the television show Happy Days. My dearest after-school memories include Henry Winkler as the tough-but-affable Fonzi. With his leather jacket and motorcycle, Fonzi was the paragon of cool for an entire generation.
In 1977, three episodes aired in which the central drama revolved around Fonzi jumping a shark tank while on water skis. This is widely and appropriately remembered as a prelude to the long, painful decline of the Happy Days dynasty.
“Jumping the shark” has since become a colloquialism for the single point in time when something has reached its zenith and has nowhere to go but down.
In the July 23rd, 2009 edition of the Journal of Geophysical Research, three Australian scientists released a study showing that climate variations over the last 30 years are largely due to the “El Nino Southern Oscillations” – fancy talk for the clashing warm and cool weather patterns over the Pacific Ocean.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations panel of 52 climate researchers who claim global warming is man-made, responded: “it is clear that future modeling must incorporate the ENSO effect if it is to be meaningful.”
This is a crucial admission, because if this research is true, then the warming effects of carbon released into the atmosphere are either non-existent or infinitesimal. If El Nino is the culprit, as this study claims, then global temperatures have nothing to do with human activity.
But how can this be? We’ve been consistently informed by reliable journalists that global warming is our fault, and there is universal consensus in the scientific community that says the same.
There is indeed consensus that the Earth is roughly 1 degree warmer now that it was a hundred years ago, but this is where the agreement ends. Anyone who tells you differently is accepting donations. Contrary to what you might see on CNN, there are legions of scientists who disagree with the notion of man-made global warming:
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine has a petition signed by over 16,000 members of the climate industry, all asserting that global warming is not man-made. The US Senate committee on Environment and Public Works recently released a list of over 700 prominent scientists aligned against carbon-based climate change, including Dr. Steven M. Japar, a former member of the IPCC.
With so many reputable dissenters, why is man-made global warming accepted as gospel in both politics and pop culture? Perhaps history can grant perspective:
On April 28th, 1975 Newsweek printed an article on climate change. Here is the opening line: “There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth.”
Sounds like a story on global warming, yes? Actually, no. In this article, increased snow cover and tornado activity were offered as evidence that the civilized world was facing destruction from an impending ice age.
On January 2nd, 1939 Time Magazine ran an article that stated “Weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer.”
On October 12th, 1912, the Los Angeles Times warned us that a “Fifth ice age is on the way” and that the “Human race will have to fight for existence against cold.”
Warming today, cooling in 1975, warming in 1939, cooling again in 1912.
Since the emergence of this newest global warming scare, we have been told to trust the veracity of the popular media and the UN – arguably the two least trustworthy information gathering institutions in the known universe.
The media has changed its mind four times in the last hundred years about which type of catastrophe will destroy humanity, and the UN cannot pass out food to the hungry without a subsequent scandal. I think a little skepticism is warranted, don’t you?
In one last ironic twist of history, the Global Climate Change Digest published a story in 1989 that pointed to the potential cause of global warming as – wait for it – El Nino!
After twenty years of guilt, gloom, and Greenpeace, we’ve made no headway in discerning the cause of rising thermostats, and we are now revisiting theories from the late 80’s. The global warming alarmists have had a generation to make their case, and what have they produced? Cue the crickets.
Popular culture embracing the notion of man-made global warming should come as no surprise. Nothing sells like a good disaster, which explains the press, and politicians toe the warming line to gather votes. But on this issue, neither the press nor Washington has any incentive to be accurate. It’s much easier to ride the hype than fight it.
With the science still unsettled, Congressional Democrats are even now revving up their engines to ram an energy bill through Congress that will eviscerate our economy in an attempt to save us from the climate change boogeyman.
Before they do, they might want to glance down at the shark tank and wave for the camera.