by Bruce S. Thornton<\/p>\n
FrontPage Magazine<\/em><\/p>\n The victims of the tornado that hit Moore Oklahoma had not even been counted when Democrat politicians made fools of themselves by trying to link the disaster to global warming and Republicans. California Senator Barbara Boxer said, \u201cThis is climate change. We were warned about extreme weather, not just hot weather but extreme weather . . . you\u2019re also going to see snow in the summer in some places. You\u2019re going have terrible storms. You\u2019re going to have tornados.\u201d<\/p>\n Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse made the same dubious claim and explicitly blamed Republicans. \u201cWhy do you, Sheldon Whitehouse,\u201d the Senator said, \u201ccare if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I\u2019ll tell you why. We\u2019re stuck in this together. When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn\u2019t just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms.\u201d Whitehouse later apologized, but only for his timing, not for his smear.<\/p>\n But Boxer and Whitehouse are simply following the lead of President Obama, who made the same unscientific and partisan claim in his inaugural address:<\/p>\n \u201cWe will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Once again, the party of science and reason has exposed itself as hopelessly unscientific and irrational.<\/p>\n These self-styled rationalists and defenders of science could have saved themselves embarrassment by consulting the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration\u2019s National Climate Data Center. As the NCDA\u2019s U.S. Tornado Climatology\u00a0site<\/a>\u00a0explains, \u201cWith increased national Doppler radar coverage, increasing population, and greater attention to tornado reporting, there has been an increase in the number of tornado reports over the past several decades. This can create a misleading appearance of an increasing trend in tornado frequency.\u201d A chart is provided which \u201cindicates there has been little trend in the frequency of the stronger tornadoes over the past 55 years.\u201d<\/p>\n But science and fact have had little to do with the apocalyptic climate change movement. The absence of global increases in temperature since 1998 has raised serious questions about all those dramatic computer models predicting disaster from human-caused CO2\u00a0<\/sub>polluting the atmosphere. For true believers to hold on to their belief in CO2<\/sub>\u00a0caused warming, they have to admit that some unknown factor is causing temperatures\u00a0not<\/i>\u00a0to rise even when CO2\u00a0<\/sub>is increasing. But to admit\u00a0that<\/i>\u00a0is to admit that they don\u2019t fully understand how climate works, at least not enough to justify subjecting our economy to a multi-trillion-dollar hit from the war against carbon in order to ward off those dire consequences that\u00a0may<\/i>\u00a0happen. As a recent\u00a0editorial<\/a>\u00a0in the\u00a0Wall Street Journal<\/i>\u00a0signed by 16 scientists writes, \u201cThere is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to \u2018decarbonize\u2019 the world\u2019s economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC [the U.N. International Panel on Climate Change], aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.\u201d<\/p>\n But the unproven claim about the link of CO2\u00a0<\/sub>to warming is just one of the many holes in apocalyptic global warming theory. Remember when warming-cult high priest Al Gore claimed that the 400 parts per million (ppm) of CO2<\/sub>\u00a0present today would be \u201ca sad milestone, a call to action\u201d? Given that hundreds of variables govern climate, isolating one trace gas as the engine of climate change was always dubious. Indeed, scientists outside the global-warming cult have argued that doubling or tripling CO2<\/sub>\u00a0ppms would have no major impact on the planet. As\u00a0Human Events<\/i>\u2019s Marc Morano\u00a0reports<\/a>, \u201cScientists also note that geologically speaking, the Earth is currently in a \u2018CO2 famine\u2019 and that the geologic record reveals that\u00a0ice ages have occurred when CO2 was at 2000ppm to as high as 8000ppm<\/a>. In addition, peer-reviewed studies have documented that there have been temperatures similar to the present day on Earth when\u00a0carbon dioxide was up to twenty times higher<\/a>\u00a0than today\u2019s levels. And, a\u00a0peer-reviewed study this year found that the present day carbon dioxide level of 400ppm<\/a>was exceeded \u2014 without any human influence \u2014 12,750 years ago when CO2 may have reached up to 425 ppm.\u201d<\/p>\n An even greater problem with the CO2<\/sub>\u00a0obsession is the uncertainty about what levels of the gas establish the baseline with which to compare the current levels that are so dangerous. Back in 2010 the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>\u00a0explained how this baseline is established: \u201cBubbles of ancient air, trapped by glaciers and ice sheets have been tested, and they show that over the past 800,000 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air oscillated between roughly 200 and 300 parts per million. Just before the Industrial Revolution, the level was about 280 parts per million and had been there for several thousand years.\u201d<\/p>\n That seems definitive\u2013\u2013unless you ask how long CO2<\/sub>can remain in the atmosphere, or whether the volume of CO2<\/sub>\u00a0trapped in ice has remained stable all those millennia and so can provide an accurate baseline. According to Dr. Tom Segalstad\u2013\u2013past head of the Geological Museum in the University of Oslo\u2019s Natural History Museums, an associate professor of resource and environmental geology at the University of Oslo, and a past expert reviewer for the IPCC\u2013\u2013abundant research evidence suggests that CO2<\/sub>\u00a0stays in the atmosphere for at most 12 years. If that is true, then people cannot possibly have pumped enough CO2<\/sub>\u00a0into the atmosphere to account for the alleged increases they caused. Either something other than humans is increasing CO2<\/sub>, or the way the gas is measured is flawed.<\/p>\n That brings us to those \u201cbubbles of ancient air\u201d that are used to establish how much CO2<\/sub>\u00a0was in the atmosphere before humans started burning fossil fuels. Many scientists, including Zbigniew Jaworoski\u2013\u2013 the author of four books and nearly 300 scholarly articles, and the senior scientific advisor of the Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Poland\u2013\u2013have challenged this assumption that ice cores accurately record CO2<\/sub>\u00a0concentrations in ancient air. Jaworoski\u2019s research suggests that the ice is not a closed system that preserves air bubbles unchanged and keeps gas concentrations stable. Because of ice liquefying, the different solubility levels of gasses in cold water, cracks in the ice, and extreme pressure that crystallizes CO2\u00a0<\/sub>into a solid, CO2<\/sub>\u00a0in ice can be reduced. Thus the baseline alluded to in the\u00a0Times<\/i>\u00a0article that establishes the notion of dangerously increasing CO2<\/sub>is put in doubt.<\/p>\n For all their talk of \u201cscience,\u201d then, the Democrats are indulging ideological preferences when they holler about climate change. Nor is it difficult to see the origins of that ideology. Partly it reflects the old romantic discomfort with the same industrialism and technology that have made us the healthiest, most long-lived and comfortable humans ever to walk the earth. Disneyfied idealizations of nature and Blakean denouncements of modernity\u2019s \u201cSatanic mills\u201d bestow cheap moral superiority on people who couldn\u2019t live five minutes without the high-tech conveniences made possible by fossil fuels.<\/p>\n Creepier still is the late-Marxist demonization of industrial capitalism that also lies behind the attack on carbon. Having been repudiated by history, Marxism must attack liberal democracy and free-market capitalism with the weapons of environmentalism, which gives them allies among the suburban recyclers and Prius-drivers, Sierra-Club plutocrats, and Occupy Wall Street anarchists. The irony, of course, is that communist economies have historically been some of the worst polluters on the planet. Look at China today, where Beijing\u2019s air looks like coal-burning London\u2019s in the 1840s, and hundreds of dead pigs float in the rivers. Finally, the Marxist-lite big government folks\u2013\u2013i.e. Democrats\u2013\u2013find in the global warming crisis a convenient pretext for expanding government control over the economy and business, thus weakening the most powerful rival to the Leviathan state. Just look at the current war on extracting natural gas through fracking.<\/p>\n Al Gore once sneered, \u201cFifteen per cent of the people believe the moon landing was staged on some movie lot and a somewhat smaller number still believe the Earth is flat. They all get together on a Saturday night and party with the global warming deniers.\u201d More and more scientific evidence suggests that it is Gore and his Democratic brethren who are the flat-earthers, clinging to an exploded paradigm not because of the \u201coverwhelming judgment of science,\u201d but because it gratifies their ideological and political preferences and interests.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine The victims of the tornado that hit Moore Oklahoma had not even been counted when Democrat politicians made fools of themselves by trying to link the disaster to global warming and Republicans.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[603,22],"tags":[56,165,547,291,875,874,1073,527],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-1yL","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1974,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/who-really-is-anti-science\/","url_meta":{"origin":5999,"position":0},"title":"Who Really Is “Anti-Science”?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine In any national election we can depend on the usual liberal\u00a0ad hominemattacks on Republicans and their candidates. One chestnut already appearing is the charge that Republicans comprise the \u201canti-science party,\u201d as even a Republican, presidential primary candidate Jon Huntsman, fretted recently. Huntsman\u2019s angst arose\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Global Warming"","block_context":{"text":"Global Warming","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/global-warming-2\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4113,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/anatomy-of-a-media-bias-nothings-more-closed-than-a-colonized-mind\/","url_meta":{"origin":5999,"position":1},"title":"Anatomy of a Media Bias: Nothing’s More Closed Than a Colonized Mind","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 5, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton RightNetwork.com One of the pleasures of reading the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0is spotting the myriad ways liberal ideology shapes stories and presents as fact what is a debatable supposition. Global warming, for example, is a \u201ccrisis\u201d about which the\u00a0Timeshas already made up its mind. Rather than a contested\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2228,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-lefts-selective-outrage\/","url_meta":{"origin":5999,"position":2},"title":"The Left’s Selective Outrage","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce S. Thornton FrontPage Magazine You know liberals are edging toward a full Jonestown-style meltdown when someone as smart as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman starts losing it. Last week Friedman worked himself up into a paranoiac frenzy over the tone of some of the criticism Obama and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5461,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-passions-of-the-left\/","url_meta":{"origin":5999,"position":3},"title":"The Passions of the Left","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 29, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"CIA's new revelations fans the flames of \"progressive\" myths of our past by Bruce S. Thornton Private Papers The publication of the CIA\u2019s \u201cfamily jewels\u201d \u2014 the record of its domestic spying, hare-brained plots against Castro, and mind-control experiments, among other oddities \u2014 is sure to add fuel to that\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":519,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/time-for-liberals-and-progressives-to-get-new-labels\/","url_meta":{"origin":5999,"position":4},"title":"Time for ‘Liberals’ and ‘Progressives’ to Get New Labels","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine We need to find a new label for the ideology espoused by leftist Democrats. \u201cLiberal\u201d doesn\u2019t accurately describe the party of blinkered intolerance, fanatical certainty, and an eagerness to destroy freedom in order to achieve some dubious utopia. \u201cProgressive\u201d is more historically accurate for ideas\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11679,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/changing-reality-with-words\/","url_meta":{"origin":5999,"position":5},"title":"Changing Reality With Words","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 21, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ American Greatness The reinvention of vocabulary can often be more effective than any social protest movement. Malarial swamps can become healthy \u201cwetlands.\u201d Fetid \u201cdumps\u201d are often rebranded as green \u201clandfills.\u201d Global warming was once a worry about too much heat. It implied that man-made carbon emissions\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5999"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5999"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5999\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6000,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5999\/revisions\/6000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}