Indesputable Proof Of Global Warming - The Onion Style

The Onion provides the ultimate proof, especially for pro football fans, of the growing lag in truly cold weather each football season. Key quote:

"The phenomenon of weather-related African-American supracranial vaporous emission, or 'Steaming Black-Guy Heads,' as it is colloquially known, occurs when cold dry winter air comes into contact with hot, humid, shaven heads of football players, causing their personal water vapor to condense and rise on a column of heated air," the statement read in part. "It is then observed by network cameramen, who overwhelmingly choose to film African-American players due to the dramatic contrasts that result—especially when the player in question is backlit—and beamed to millions of households during time-outs, replay reviews, and other stoppages of play. The viewers then realize that winter has come to America."

1998 The Warmest Year? - Not So Fast

Some of us just get a visceral feeling of aversion in the presence of orthodoxy. So, when all debate about the question of human causation of global warming is declared over, I, for one, wonder how long it will be until one should expect the Spanish Inquisition of the Green Era.

For us, today's short note on the NY Times' website contains some heartening news. It reports that NASA, after questions were raised by a blogger about their data, has quietly corrected the data set which purportedly proved that 1998 was the hottest year on record. It turns out that 1934 is now the warmest year.

For those unable to crack the Times' TimesSelect firewall before it soon comes a'tumblin' down, here is the "Opinionator" piece in its entirety.

August 10, 2007, 9:06 am

‘Hottest Year’ Data Meltdown

By Tobin Harshaw

Tags: global warming

You just thought you were sweating? Among global warming Cassandras, the fact that 1998 was the “hottest year on record” has always been an article of faith. Stephen McIntyre, who runs the Climateaudit blog was always puzzled by some gaps he saw in the raw data provided by NASA that supported the claim (data compiled in part by James Hansen, the climate scientist who has long accused the Bush administration of trying to “silence” him). McIntyre says he has “reverse engineered” the data to find NASA’s algorithm, discovered that a Y2K bug played havoc with some of the numbers, and notified the space agency.

Michael Asher at DailyTech explains the fallout:

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as recordbreaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II. Anthony Watts has put the new data in chart form, along with a more detailed summary of the events.

The effect of the correction on global temperatures is minor (some 1-2% less warming than originally thought), but the effect on the U.S. global warming propaganda machine could be huge.

One piece of bad, er...corrected, data does not disprove the entire global warming catechism, but it does surely indicate that the proponents of this concept have arrived first at their conclusion on faith and then sought, unquestioningly, to compile every piece of data that supported their position. Environmentalism is not a corpus of understandings that emerged from a thorough study of all the available information, finally coming to a painful understanding of the scope and etiology of the problem. Rather it is a political instinct that finds humans to be the inferior animals that have befouled paradise, led by corporate greedmeisters.

That, at least, is my belief about the theology at present. I prefer to keep the debate open and to oppose Torquemada, in his current reincarnation as Al Gore, when he uses his full politician's kit of persuasions to convince us otherwise. Hopefully, reports such as this will provide the fuel to sustain some level of environmental agnosticism.

Update: There may have been less than meets the eye in this rearrangement of data. Further analysis here and here would seem to indicate that the reversals in the position of 1934 and 1998 were quite small and were only in the US. Worldwide the more recent years are in fact still the warmest. Given the constant circulation of the atmosphere, worldwide figures would seem to be the only relevant ones. In general, skepticism still seems the healthiest attitude to adopt, especially regarding the dire consequences predicted and the current almost total absence of actual applicable solutions.

Must Ecology Now Be Taken On Faith?

It would appear that the NY Times, along with many other publications, no longer has any intention of providing any data whatsoever to support the claims of scientists who report evidence of human interference and damage to the world's ecosystem. Now that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued its latest summary report, and all debate on the existence of global warming and that human behaviors are its primary cause has been declared irrational, the Times seems to see no need to trouble its readers with any more confusing facts.

The latest example is found in their report today of an article in Science, (brief summary only, full article available for a price), that asserts that overfishing of North Atlantic great shark populations has led to an overabundance of smaller fish, which in turn has led to the depletion of the bay scallop population on the East Coast of the US.

Not once in the Times' piece is any data at all provided to support these claims. Readers are left to ponder on their own such questions as: how much has shark fishing increased over the last several decades; how much has this population of sharks decreased; how many more smaller scallop predators are there now; and lastly, just how depleted is the bay scallop population. One assumes that such data is at the heart of the Science article, but that is only a guess for us nonsubscribers. Apparently the Times didn't what to bother our pretty little heads with such detail. The issue is now a matter of received truth, to be taken on faith.

While I understand that most scientists, especially ecologists, are only one notch below the Saints of the Catholic Church and the Pope himself in terms of their reliability and infallibility, I, for one, stubbornly cling to the quaint desire to have the available facts at hand when I am being asked to accept new information, even about ecology.

Shame on the Times.

An Inconvenient Article

The NY Times has had the temerity to publish a piece in tomorrow's paper (thanks to Drudge) that quotes scientists who publicly worry about the absolutism of Al Gore's claims in "An Inconvenient Truth", his Academy Award winning documentary.

Personally, I think that there is a notable level of warming going on, and that human behavior, along with other factors are responsible. Gore and his crowd of sycophants are far too eager to blame humanity, or more specifically evil corporations, for the entire problem. In fact, the interplay and timing of the causes and outcomes is much less well understood that Gore would have us believe.

I think at some level he knows this, but has concluded that scaring people is the best way to lead us in the correct path. I think there is an old Tennessee joke about having to hit a mule in the head with a two by four in order to get his attention. The problem is that, unlike mules, people sometimes get annoyed when they are treated as stupid by their so-called betters.

Here's A Global Warming Story You Won't See Widely Reported

The National Geographic is reporting NASA evidence that the ice caps on Mars are shrinking, just like those on earth. A Russian scientist, Habibullo Abdussamatov of the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, concludes that this is evidence that the warming trend documented on earth, and now on Mars, is due to "long term changes in the sun's irradiance".

This, of course, might throw a wrench into the steamroller of belief that the sins of man are causing global warming and that righteous penance and reform of our ways is the path of the holy. We can't have this. For Christ's sake, we just canonized Al Gore as saint-in-charge of establishing eco-morality on the planet.