For new year be grateful for a great climate

Never underestimate the number of very profitable prophets of climate doom whose wealth depends upon depressing us about conditions we should actually celebrate.

Like, just for example, a former vice president turned Goracle who made hundreds of millions of dollars warning us that our evil ways will produce global warming Armageddon unless we ditch fossil fuels, purchase taxpayer-subsidized “green energy” and carbon offsets from his corporate interests, and basically change every aspect of our business economies and lives.

And, oh yes, otherwise the polar bears would die as well. Well maybe not after all.

Let’s take a moment to look out the window and review some facts:

Overheated temperature predictions

First, no one I know denies that climate changes, or that recent warming has occurred. This latest multi-century spell began before the Industrial Revolution brought CO2-belching smokestacks and SUVs, has continued in fits and starts ever since, and can be expected to do so until the next estimated 90,000-year-long ice age begins about 3,000 years from now.

It just hasn’t been happening recently. Despite “record high” atmospheric CO2 levels, satellite records which have been available only since 1979 show that other than naturally occurring 1998 and 2015 El Niño temperature spikes, no statistically significant global warming has occurred for nearly two decades.

On the other hand, satellite imagery shows that the plant-fertilizing CO2 has increased global greening by 25% to 50% since then — lots more veggies for all God’s creatures.

So-called “hottest year” claims both dutifully and giddily reported in mainstream media echo chambers during 2005, 2010, and 2015 are based upon temperature data that differ by only a few hundredths of a degree Fahrenheit — well within the margin of error.

That extreme weather

Regarding that “extreme weather” we’ve been warned about, let’s review some basic facts. Like, for example, that no Category 3-5 hurricanes have struck the U.S. coast since October 2005, setting a record lull since 1900.

Additionally, the frequencies and intensities of hurricanes have decreased during the last several decades; frequencies of storms and tsunamis have decreased during the 20th and 21st centuries; tornado occurrence has remained stable or decreased since 1950; there are far fewer wildfires today than centuries ago; there are no significant trends (including decreases) in extreme precipitation events in recent decades over past centuries; and drought frequencies and intensities are stable or even decreasing.

Incidentally, there is nothing new about attributing severe weather anomalies to dire and irreversible climate changes. Global cooling which occurred from the mid-1940s to late 1970s was linked by many “leading experts” to a catastrophic 6-year-long drought throughout the continent of Africa.

As NOAA reported in 1974, “Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently in India — indeed, through much of Asia, the world’s hungriest continent.

“Some climatologists think that the present cooling trend may be the start of a slide into another period of major glaciation, popularly called an ‘ice age.'”

Rising ocean claims on thin ice

Yes, a warming climate does actually cause sea levels to rise over time. After all, it has risen about 400 feet since the peak of the last ice age around 18,000 years ago.

Sea levels have actually been rising at a constant rate of barely 7 inches per century over the past 3,000 years without any measured acceleration.

If patterns hold, they will probably continue to do so with little or no influence from us until the arrival of that next ice age. Even the latest UN’s 2013 IPCC report states, “It is likely that GMSL [Global Mean Sea Level] rose between 1920 and 1950 at a rate comparable to that observed between 1993 and 2010.”

Regarding polar ice melting sweats, the Arctic, which goes through regular 60- to 70-year-long warming and cooling cycles, has most recently been losing some ice mass, while most of the vastly larger Antarctic continent has been gaining.

In 2016, Arctic sea ice was 22% greater than in the recently ballyhooed low point of 2012.

Since then it has been in a 10-year pause — no significant change over the past decade.

A 2015 NASA study found that Antarctica has not been losing ice mass nor is it currently contributing to sea level rise.

Finally, those polar bears

Polar bear populations are doing great with numbers way up since the 1960s — at or near record highs. Evolutionary biologist and paleo zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford at the University of Victoria, Canada, reports, “Polar bears have survived several episodes of much warmer climate over the past 10,000 years than exists today . . . There is no evidence to suggest that the polar bear or its food supply is in danger of disappearing entirely with increased Arctic warming, regardless of the dire fairy-tale scenarios predicted by computer models.”

Even they have much to be thankful for.