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Another Reporting Snow Job
December 13, 2013 Environment

It should be clear that by now if a reporter says something, then it simply must be true. I hate giving the blow by blow in the Climate Wars, because too much of it is yet another food fight and not well-intentioned people disagreeing. So here is Seth B., a regular climate reporter for the AP with the latest scare story, arguing basically that any let-up in boiling the planet is not a reason to not freak out:

Mild 2013 cuts Arctic a break, warming woes remain

After a heading like that, what would you expect to see from such a “scientific” writer? Well, call me childish, but it would be nice to see examples and evidence of … warming woes. Go read the piece and tell me how many bits of warming woes we see. Keep looking. Look closer. Come on, try again. Try harder. You see all of those dying seals? How about the diseases spreading? And agriculture around the world suffering? And storms increasing? And sea levels rising and inundating cities? OK, so now that you see all of the woes, let’s dig slightly deeper into the piece.

But one of the biggest climate change indicators, summer sea ice, wasn’t as bad as expected. Sea ice reached its sixth-lowest level since NOAA began measuring — up from the lowest ever in 2012. But the seven lowest levels have all occurred in the last seven years.

“This is simply natural variability,”

So, a year when the ice extent is thicker than in recent years is just natural variability. I can’t argue with that. I’d just like to see that mentioned when the ice extent is thinner next year. Or when the next bad winter storm strikes. Don’t hold your breath. You can’t possibly ask readers to take the issue of “variability” seriously when it is dismissed when a skeptic uses the term and invoked as a reason to be terrified when a warmist uses it. There is not science there. Or at least tell us what climatalogical time scales to pay attention to? Are decadal time scales appropriate? Yes or no and why? Can someone please help me figure out when changes are natural variability and when they are not. It may even be helpful to learn what “natural” and “variability” mean in the context of sea ice. Also, is it helpful to compare the Artic ice with the Antarctic ice? Did we catch a breather down there too? Why or why not? 

It gets better:

He added: “Looking back 20 years from now, the world will be warmer and we’ll have much less sea ice than today. We’ll see that 2013 was just a temporary respite.”

I don’t know how you look back 20 years from now. But again, he is telling me that it gets worse – we’ll have less ice. And I ask yet again … SO WHAT? 

It gets better:

More ominous are long-term trends, NOAA’s report card said.

Ahhh, so now we can expect to see all the death, disease, sadness, destruction from warming …

The growing season has lengthened by nearly a month since 1982.

Fish species are moving north, permafrost is melting, and shrubs are greening in ways that weren’t seen before

Wait, what? WTF? So, we have an additional month to grow food now? Bushes are having the pleasure of doing more photosynthesis? And some fish are moving around? And presumably less ice means it’s easier for other species, including humans, to catch those too? So in an article lamenting the disasterous loss of sea ice, which wasn’t really that bad this year, we are told that the bad stuff is really going to come, and what we see is not a shred of evidence of anything actually “bad” but rather something we all ought to be celebrating. I ask any serious reader or climate junkie to provide me with solid evidence that warming, now, is causing environmental and economic damage. I also ask that you demonstrate that the positive feedbacks required to get catastrophic warming actually exist and that “worst” case warming will exceed 3 degrees (from pre-industrial times). I also ask that you demonstrate that warming at even those levels is actually bad – for based on what is in this “science” above alone, it would seem to me to be a good thing. What does the actual corpus of economic literature say about the net benefits/costs of a warming world. Bueller? Bueller?

Here is Borenstein’s sciency-good way of answering that for us:

University of Virginia environmental scientist Howard Epstein warned that changes in the Arctic reverberate around the globe.

“The Arctic is not like Vegas,” he said. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.”

So, let me get this straight. CHANGES will reverberate. And the only changes mentioned in this SCARE article are GOOD ones. So astute readers should be dizzy with excitement, since the better farming and greener bushes and more fishes are not just going to be up in the Arctic, but we are told all over the globe too. Consider me warned. I’ll be raising a Guinness tonight to that. 

 

"4" Comments
  1. Last summer Joe Bastardi, famous in Pennsylvania as the impresario of Accu-Weather, was on TV (probably Fox) discussing the weather.

    He said that the current setup for the continental US resembles a similar situation from 1955 to 1965, when the Pacific Ocean was relatively cold to the Atlantic Ocean.

    Now, please forgive my paraphrase, but cold Pacific air travels east over the mountains, collides with warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, and you get weather similar to, but not of course never the same as we had back during the snows of yesteryear.

    People in Rochester or Cleveland do not fully appreciate climate change, because every winter is measured by yards of snowfall.

    Joe’s point was that weather runs in long cycles, and he did make the point that ACO2 was highly unlikely to have much to do with it.

  2. Aren’t the costs of climate change/warming supposed to come in the next half decade? Or from abrupt and catastrophic impacts that MAY come sooner? How could evidence be shown?

  3. My point was that they don’t even point to THAT … and what catastrophe comes from less Arctic ice. They simply say it must be, and I guess so it must be.

    As far as evidence on catastrophe, the IPCC models are showing this to be highly unlikely, far less likely than other perhaps equally serious catastrophes. It would be nice in any case if ANYONE actually pointed to the meta-analysis of the climate models that show this – but it is almost never done. Contrast that to how much people jump all over the Card-Krueger minwage findings …

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