BY JON BASIL UTLEY
Hardly a week goes by without the New York Times or Washington Post publishing a scare story about climate change. And nothing is hyped so much as rising oceans and warming seas. That’s because few people can get excited about a two or three degree increase in air temperatures but future flooding our great cites certainly draws attention.
However, the major media almost never reports on the incredible exaggerations of the global warming lobby. “Rising oceans” are, most recently, only increasing at a rate of about 2 millimeters per year or one foot in a hundred years. This measurement is also within a margin of error for such tiny amounts.
The “warming oceans” have temperature increases of about one tenth of one degree in ten years. And this is supposed to kill all the coral reefs and melt the Antarctic Ice? The IPCC itself reports that the “upper ocean has warmed by .09 to .13 degrees Centigrade per decade for the last 40 years.” That’s about one tenth of one degree in 10 years. In fact, an EPA graph show a 1 degree Fahrenheit increase in ocean surface temperature since 1980 and 1.5% increase since 1880. The deep ocean has had no measurable increase in temperature.
All of this is important because the oceans are a vast temperature sink which absorb excess heat in the atmosphere as also carbon dioxide. They are the reason that our earth is habitable in the first place.
Yet look at a recent headline in the print New York Times last January 10th, “Ocean Temperatures Rising Faster –new analysis suggests dire effect on food and weather.” It turns out that a new model shows ocean temperature rising 40% faster than a previous model showed. Well 40% faster than one tenth of a degree every 10 years means warming at a rate of one and a half tenths of a degree every 10 years. Big Deal! Similarly I wrote in 1917 in The American Conservative “a New York Times headline stating that rising sea levels are causing a decline in seaside property values. Deep in the article’s text, however, one learns that it was the decline in government subsidies for waterfront property insurance that was causing property value declines.”
Similarly the Washington Post almost every week promotes a climate scare story not to mention blaming nearly every flood, storm, drought or California fire on “climate change.” A recent headline was “Melting Arctic Ice now pouring 14,000 tons of water per second into the oceans,” The Post quotes NASA that seas are now rising three millimeter per year, hardly commensurate with the story’s headline. One needs to keep up with the warmers constant predictions of catastrophe overwhelming the fewer voices answering them. But the main point to remember, ever since Al Gore predicted catastrophe in 10 years, that all their models have consistently been proven wrong.
In a similar vein The Economist hyped an IPCC report that an extra half degree of temperature rise would kill all coral reefs and “wash away the livelihoods of millions more people.” (10/13/2018). Such arguments defy the most minimal degree of common sense but are a constant. The New York Times even published a most brazen assault on reason “Why half a degree of warming is a big deal,” with totally unproven or unprovable assumptions. For me it is the same kind of fantasy thinking which once told the world how socialism (or communism) would bring about paradise on earth.
No wonder our kids are being terrified that the world may end during their lifetimes or even in 12 years! All this from the exaggeration and end of the world fantasies promulgated in much major media.
A version of this article originally appeared at The Heartland Institute.