The Drudge Report had a humorous, eye-grabbing headline up earlier today on the latest inanity from the AP’s Seth Borenstein, who was desperately flailing to support the faltering global-warming pact and give cover to Al Gore for his absurd Poznan speech, the video of which you can find below.
I won’t directly refer you to the tripe — Greg excerpted a bit of it below — but instead to Noel Sheppard’s take for NewsBusters, who has dogged Borenstein’s antics and provides you passage into the kingdom of alarmism.
So Borenstein takes to his word processor to claim that it has warmed since the Clinton inauguration, and therefore global warming is accelerating. Ahem. Has there been anything else since a Clinton administration, like, say, a Bush administration . . . during which it has cooled. Third base!
Chart courtesy of Senate EPW aide Marc Morano, who the Daily Kos now apparently wants censored — the traditional sign by alarmists that you are succeeding.
One scientist on a list-serv replied:
Since Clinton’s inauguration, summer Arctic sea ice has lost the equivalent of Alaska, California and Texas. The 10 hottest years on record have occurred since Clinton’s second inauguration. Global warming is accelerating.Rubbish. Global warming is not “accelerating”: global warming has stopped. There has been no statistically significant rise in mean global temperature (MGT) since 1995, and MGT has fallen since 1998.
The Earth has been warming for 300 years since the Little Ice Age (LIA) so, of course, the warmest years happened recently. But that warming from the LIA peaked in the El Niño year of 1998. MGT has been near but below that peak for the last ten years.
Arctic ice advances and recedes over decades. The year 2007 saw a minimum in Arctic ice cover in the short period that it has been monitored using satellites. But 2008 saw the most rapid growth in Arctic ice cover in that same period and Arctic ice cover is now back to the average it has had in the period. Also, 95 percent of polar ice is in the Antarctic, and Antarctic ice is increasing.
Nobody can know if the recent halt to global warming is temporary, permanent, or the start of a new warming or cooling phase. But it is certain that anybody who proclaims that “Global warming is accelerating” is “a liar, a fool, or both.”
Another wrote:
What does it take to ignore ten years of global cooling, sharply declining temperatures the last couple of years, a record-setting lack of sunspots, the flipping of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation into its cool mode, the failure of computer models to predict real climate, the predictable warming and cooling climates for the past 500 years, etc.?
The answer is really quite simple–just follow the money!
I did, in Red Hot Lies.In the process, I also dedicated a case study in my opening chapter to one Seth Borenstein, the silliest among his tradesmen. I enjoyed it and think you will, too. An individual who I met for the first time in a meeting last week actually took me aside to single that section out, kindly saying that he now reads Borenstein and laughs, catching his tiresome tricks and contortions to communicate sometimes even the very opposite of what he is reporting.