The Padded Cell

Polar Defense Project Deletes The Tough Questions

Originally posted at Watts Up With That.

It's funny. The concept of Global Warming caused by human industrial CO2 activity has a huge following. Countries have been making fiscal policy based on this chimera for a number of years now, yet the evidence just hasn't materialized. Al Gore will tell you "the science is settled", David Suzuki will want to put you in jail for crimes against humanity for denying what he believes, yet there's no evidence that CO2 is driving anything related to climate.

There are plenty of hypotheses, pseudo theories, falsified data (Mann and Hansen, et al), and hyperbole (Hollywood activists, Al Gore, David Suzuki, Greenpeace, WWF, ad nauseum, ad infinitum). But where are the facts? Where is the smoking gun?

There are actually things that humans do which affect regional weather and climate, such as land use changes, soot deposition, etc, but there just isn't any proof that the small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is capable of driving anything. All of the ice core and borehole data proxies show that CO2 almost always follows temperature, whether it's rising or falling. Sometimes temperature will rise while CO2 falls, and vice versa. There just isn't a causal link established by any stretch of the imagination, at least no rational person's imagination.

Of course, people will say "What about the melting ice caps? Are you blind??" Well, this story is a perfect example of how little we know (or how little journalists and activists know), and how soon we forget. We've lost our long-term memory, like we've received a collective blow to the head. Which is why I've decided to start calling AGW proponents "Climate Amnesiacs". They look at a very small snapshot in time, call anything that happens "unprecedented", and declare a catastrophe.

Which brings us to this story. Anthony Watts very eloquently and succinctly shows us that the Pugh "mission" was a farce from the beginning. None of the claims made by the PDF or Pugh are true. It was a publicity stunt, nothing more, and an abject failure.

We know there has been less Arctic sea ice in the relatively recent past than there is now. We know global temperatures have been higher in the more distant past than now (Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, etc). We also know that the average global climate over the last few million years has been that of Ice Ages, or Glacials. The Interglacials, one of which we're experiencing now, are relatively short. We shouldn't worry about a few tenths of a degree of warming, if it's really even "unprecedented", but we SHOULD GREATLY worry about the next ice age. We know it's going to happen, we just don't know when.

By allowing environMENTALists to de-industrialize us back to the stone age we will be woefully unprepared for even small drops in temperature, as the recent plunge has shown those whose blinders aren't on.

Lest you come to the opinion that I'm against any kind of conservation or environmental awareness, I am not. I'm all for renewable energy sources, as long as they're done practically and rationally, not shoehorned into place when they aren't ready and can't handle the load. If you think CO2 is bad, can you imagine what trillions of solar panels and wind turbines would do to the Earth's albedo and wind patterns? Now THAT would be Anthropogenic Climate Change.

Revenant