Lies Lies Lies, Yeah...

The old saying goes, "Tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth". As we have seen over the past 7 years of creeping crypto-fascism, that old saying is true. There are few examples of this more obvious than the misinformation campaign being waged against the harsh reality of Global Climate Change.

Recent commentary from media sources (Lawrence Eagle Tribune, Michael Graham on WTKK FM, assorted websites affiliated with townhall.com) would have us believe that global warming/climate change either: a. stopped happening 10 years ago and is being replaced with global "cooling" or, b. isn't really happening and is all due to mathematical errors by scaremongering scientists and Al Gore. The post from "The Natural Truth", a blog by Michael Graham illustrates this problem|(I hate to give Graham a plug, he really is a nit-whit):

" The verdict on catastrophic man made climate change is still out, but the one thing we know for sure: Global warming kooks have no interest in facts. Point out the fact that the earth hasn't warmed at all since 1998--they don't care. Point out the fact that all four international temperature monitoring sources tracked a record DROP in temperatures last year--they don't care. Point out that there are record amounts of ice in the Antarctic and record numbers of happy, health polar bears--they don't care. And on and on. The facts, by the way, aren't hard to find. This news story, for example, is easy to read and understand and contains almost no speculation of any kind. Just the facts about the latest trends in our actual weather:

"No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Be sure to read the part about the information we're now gathering from a new NASA satellite tracking water temperatures. It's all "wrong," if you're Al Gore. Then again, Al Gore has no use for such information. He's too busy predicting with certainty what our weather will be like 200 years from now to pay any attention to the fact that he's wrong about the climate right now."

and:

"As I've already shared with you on this blog, NASA has updated its figures on global temperatures, correcting previous errors. The warmest year on record is 1934. Five of the 10 warmest years were before 1954. And temperatures have been flat since 1998, despite ever-increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere. In fact, the biggest 12-month drop in temperatures ever recorded is happening right now."

So, What's wrong?

All of it...every point is either an outright fabrication or a grotesque intentional misrepresentation of the facts. Let's take this one step at a time.

• NASA has updated its figures, the rankings are all wrong.
  

The truth is that NASA made corrections to U.S. TEMPERATURE readings to account for an error in combining different data sources. The adjustments were on the order of hundredths of a degree, changing the U.S. RANKINGS slightly but having NO IMPACT ON GLOBAL TEMPERATURE DATA.

• Global warming stopped in 1998, temperatures have remained flat since 1998.

The truth is that short term trends are meaningless. You can pick any point in the temperature record and find a 2 to 5 year trend to suit your need. That's called weather, not climate. Moreover, Global warming doesn't require, nor do any climate models predict, constant year round, global warming year after year with every year hotter than the last. This reflects an adolescent view of science and the climate. A graph illustrating this point from NASA GISS data brings the data into better perspective|:

As anyone can see, the long term climate trend is going in one direction. The official assessment from NASA's Goddard Institute sums this up nicely( it's a little long but it illustrates the difference between an ideological viewpoint and a scientific one):

"The year 2007 tied for second warmest in the period of instrumental data, behind the record warmth of 2005, in the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) analysis. 2007 tied 1998, which had leapt a remarkable 0.2°C above the prior record with the help of the "El Niño of the century". The unusual warmth in 2007 is noteworthy because it occurs at a time when solar irradiance is at a minimum and the equatorial Pacific Ocean is in the cool phase of its natural El Niño-La Niña cycle. ....The cooler than normal equatorial region just to the west of South America is a reflection of the ongoing La Niña phase of a phenomenon dubbed the Southern Oscillation. In the La Niña phase of the El Niño-La Niña cycle the equatorial winds in the Pacific Ocean blow with stronger than average force from the east, driving warm surface waters toward the Western Pacific. This induces upwelling of cold deep water near Peru, which then spreads westward along the equator....The Southern Oscillation and the solar cycle have significant effects on year-to-year global temperature change. Because both of these natural effects were in their cool phases in 2007, the unusual warmth of 2007 is all the more notable. It is apparent that there is no letup in the steep global warming trend of the past 30 years (see 5-year mean curve in Figure 1a)."Global warming stopped in 1998," has become a recent mantra of those who wish to deny the reality of human-caused global warming. The continued rapid increase of the five-year running mean temperature exposes this assertion as nonsense. In reality, global temperature jumped two standard deviations above the trend line in 1998 because the "El Niño of the century" coincided with the calendar year, but there has been no lessening of the underlying warming trend.|"

• Global cooling has started, the current cooling trend is the largest 12 month drop in temperatures in recorded history.
  

The global cooling idea has already been partially addressed, it's the difference between climate and weather. There will always be short term fluctuations in weather, this is the "noise" in the data that surrounds the "signal" of climate. The current cooling is caused by a combination of la Ninia with a naturally occurring low point in the cycle of solar radiance. This was predicted a year ago. The assertion that the recent drop in mean temperatures is somehow unprecedented or record setting, is simply false.

Once people abandon reason, turn away from primary sources, ignore science and search for news that comports to their ideology(and comforts them from the harsh reality), they can be spoon fed vast amounts of bullshit. Whether the issue is climate change, the decision to go to war, economic policy or education, America has embraced this bankrupt, quasi-religious dynamic of comfortable self-delusion. If we, as a people, cannot return to the enlightenment principles of reason, honest and open dialogue and a search for objective truth...the future of our nation is in grave danger...a danger that no election can save us from.


Interested in more info? Go to: www.realclimate.org a site run by climatologists at NASA.