Global Warming Update
/I love the global warming issue because even as the cause becomes more and more ridiculous, the advocates just double down again and again. When you think they should be looking to climb down gracefully and hope nobody would remember to associate their names with this scam, instead they become ever louder and more extreme and more shrill in their demands. The end game is going to take a long time, and be a lot of fun.
On March 8 one Shaun Marcott, a new Ph.D. at Oregon State University, and other authors, published in Science a new reconstruction of temperatures over the last 11,300 years. The reconstruction was based largely on cores from undersea sediments, and showed a strong 20th century uptick, thus appearing to vindicate, at least in part, the famous and discredited "Hockey Stick" graph of Michael Mann et al. The article promptly got a lot of publicity.
It took Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org just over a week to completely demolish the article, in a series of posts from March 13 to March 19. By March 31 Marcott et al. had posted a "FAQ" about their article at realclimate.org, admitting that the 20th century portion of their reconstruction "is not statistically robust [and] cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes."
Meanwhile, the real news in the field of climate is the refusal, now for over 15 years, of global temperatures to increase, even as atmospheric CO2 continues to soar. The data are easily available, for example here from the UAH satellite temperature series. Sooner or later somebody has to notice. Well, for example, the Economist magazine, long a group thinker of global warming alarmism, is starting to notice, and published a long article in the March 30 edition beginning the attempt at graceful climb down.
[A]s an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.
And at the Financial Post in Canada, long skeptical environmental columnist Lawrence Solomon writes on April 13 to welcome to the ranks of the skeptics, along with the Economist, Die Zeit of Germany and its top (and very green) columnist Harald Martenstein.
But in a world badly in need of the humor coming from people making fools of themselves, the super-environmentalist Bill McKibben of Middlebury College in Vermont and of the web site 350.org obliges by choosing this time to launch a massive campaign to get university endowments to divest from investment in fossil fuel companies. McKibben is the non-scientist former writer for the New Yorker who chooses to make a career lecturing everybody else on how they are destroying the planet by using fossil fuels. He doesn't know a thing about the subject matter, but he must have some personal charisma or something, because it is remarkable how many in the environmental movement are completely willing to follow him over the cliff of the global warming scam and take the whole movement with them.
According to the Yale Daily News here, McKibben's divestment campaign "has spread to 252 college campuses, including most of the Ivy League" as of February 8. Vassar is one of the colleges most deeply in the grip of the hysteria, and you really need to read some of the stuff to understand the powerful religious fervor of these people. From the February 27 Vassar Miscellany News, by Gabe Dunsmith and Erin Boss:
Divestment from fossil fuels promises to bring about a people-powered transition to a sustainable world. Though the atrocities of fossil fuel may seem far from our campus, Vassar's endowment, like that of so many other institutions, is invested in corporate conglomerates like BP, Exxon, and Halliburton. . . . Perhaps most importantly, divestment is a fight for justice. It brings Vassar students one step closer to the communities that the fossil fuel industry decimates. . . . After all, the brunt of the climate crisis will be felt in communities that are already silenced and oppressed.
You mean you didn't know that the landowners of northern Pennsylvania were "silenced and oppressed" by the fracking boom? Of course, the kids who write this stuff have never gone more than a day or two in their lives without electricity, they fly and drive wherever they want, they have plenty of heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer, and computers and smartphones and everything else you can think of. I wonder how many of them are prepared to give all that up. My bet is zero. You may think you have to be smart to get into these fancy schools, but not really very smart.