California Citrus growers were up all night trying to protect their crops from an “epic” cold spell which is dropping temperatures into the twenties and as cold as twelve degrees. Temperatures twenty to thirty degrees below normal are also stranding motorists and threatening zoo animals. A headline in Silicon Valley’s Mercury News proclaimed that California has gone from “golden to frozen.”
Extreme weather in the United States? We read the news reports with great interest looking for the obligatory mention of climate change, but since it’s cold, forget climate. We don’t even get the ever fascinating ‘warming is making it colder’ line of distorted reasoning.
“This is definitely a polar outbreak,” the LA Times reports California climatologist Bill Patzert as saying and goes on to report his prediction that their will likely be record lows.
Record cold is killing people and livestock in Russia and China with China experiencing its coldest weather in decades and Russia the coldest since 1938 — colder than the winter of 1941-1942 which helped destroy the invading German army. “Rare” snow shut down Jerusalem.
Yet, the media is not reporting that California’s deep freeze, nor the destructive cold in eastern hemisphere countries, provides evidence of a new ice age, global freezing, nor final disproof of the theory of man-made global warming. Rightfully so, as nothing of the sort would be valid. What we have here is naturally variable weather, the kind of harsh winter we prepare for and cope with when it strikes.
Yet that same media does not hesitate to attribute unseasonable warmth as evidence of global warming. The New York Times just attributed an overall pleasant U.S. winter in 2012 to the “backdrop of global warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases.” This conveniently ignores the fact that the U.S. occupies less than 2% of the globe. It also conveniently ignores natural weather variability. Focusing on one year of U.S. weather (a year with the kind of winter most people prefer) tells us nothing about global or long-term climate trends.
The Washington Post joined a chorus of media outlets attributing U.S. weather in 2012 to global warming and blaming it for severe storms, despite the fact that storm activity in recent years is in no way unusual and in many ways unusually mild. See CFACT’s Climate Depot extreme weather report in which Marc Morano thoroughly debunks the “extreme weather” myth.
Claims that 2012 was the U.S. hottest, may well fall apart when we look at the way the data has been adjusted to make it seem so and 1934 may regain the crown.
Global warming campaigners and their media echo chamber can’t have it both ways. They can’t continue to report warm weather as evidencing global warming while treating cold weather as natural. ‘Crops destroyed, people dying of cold? Nothing to see here folks, move along.’
So long as the media continues to hype the warm, downplay the cold and attribute storms to global warming, public trust in their reporting will continue to erode. Similarly they should end the sloppy practice of reporting extreme statements by radical climate campaigners (for instance WWF) as scientific fact. When scientists engage in similar propaganda the damage is worse — shaking public confidence in science itself.
CFACT knows the difference between weather and climate and remains prepared to continually educate those who cannot grasp the distinction.
What I really want to know is how chemtrails effect the weather. Do they cause these temperature swings? I have read about seeding clouds and have also read that some people are blaming chemtrails for the drought conditions in the midwest.
It helps immensely if you get your terminology correct. Those things are called contrails – short for condensation. Ice cold air having some amount of moisture is ingested into the jet engines and goes out the back end as very hot exhaust. Such icy air at high altitudes would not otherwise be seen as visible water vapor. The cloud seeding you speak of is entirely related to valiant attempts to generate increased rain, nothing more. See this page as one example: http://water.utah.gov/cloudseeding/ but go look on your own while avoiding the unscientific conspiracy pages. You’ll soon see the irony of people claiming this causes more drought.
The bigger irony as it relates to global warming are the assessments of cosmic rays affecting water vapor high in the atmosphere which – if I have it right – creates more or less high thin clouds depending on the amount of cosmic rays entering the Earth’s atmosphere. See this CFACT article for starters: http://www.cfact.org/2011/09/08/svensmark-cern-cosmic-rays-influence-climate/
Another area hyped was due to an unusual arctic cyclone in August, arctic sea ice fell to its smallest amount September 16 in the 33 year-period arctic sea ice was measured by satellite. The recovery of sea ice since then has been at a record rate. In addition, sea ice in antarctica hit a record extent.
Be prepared for more exaggarations of global warming. The first draft of the Third Climate Assessment Report was released Friday for public comment. A cursory glance at the findings showed predictions of temperatures as high as ten degrees above present for many regions of the U. S. by the end of the century. The report can be used to scare children if they misbehave.
January 11 the first draft of the Third National Climate Assessment Report was released.
The draft report is available for download – both as a single document and by chapter – at
http://ncadac.globalchange.gov Comments can be made from January 14 until April 12.
This is a report that uses weather events in the lower 48 states, 1.5 percent of the earth’s surface area, to show there is “global” warming.
Go to the report and make comments. Also, make comments to the general public about faults in the report.
I am so sick of the media liars and crooked political agendas. Crooks all up in our government.
Very good. But go one step further. Confront the mainstream media about this, and ask politicians where they get their news from.
“PBS NewsHour global warming coverage:
IPCC/NOAA Scientists – 18; Skeptic Scientists – 0” http://junkscience.com/2012/07/13/pbs-newshour-global-warming-coverage-ipccnoaa-scientists-18-skeptic-scientists-0/
Give us all a break you Global Warming religion cranks. Record cold is not global warming. Go and peddle you stupid beliefs to some other religion.