Fox to the … Um … “Rescue”?

Fox to the … Um … “Rescue”?

©2013  Ross Williams

The only redeeming quality possessed by Fox News is that they are not MSNBC.  They are no more “fair and balanced” than any of the other political hacks posing as upstanding – let alone objective – journalistic media outlets [and I’m looking at you NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, and the aforementioned MSNBC]; it’s only that when you add Fox to this litany of socialism apologists – and for all practical purposes in terms of popularity as measured by ratings, Fox weighs about what these others do when they’re added together, and BOY! does that gall these others [and apparently Jim Carey as well] – what you end up with is roughly balanced.  I won’t get into whether that balance is fair to the news-needing public; I prefer honesty without editorial, myself, and have yet to find a place that delivers it.  I can editorialize quite well on my own and need no assistance from anyone.

But Fox in and of itself?  Their writers are credulous, their editors are illiterate, their online format is ponderous.

Still, I wander through from time to time to see what they have.  This morning what they had was a credulous piece [go figure] by some dimbulb named Doug McKelway about recent news on the anthropogenic [i.e., “manmade”] Global Warming front.  The basic gist is that there is no news and hasn’t been for a decade.

Only – and this is what bugs me so much about the media – this seems to be news only to the people who report news.  It isn’t news, and hasn’t been for a decade, to those who pay attention.  We have known for nine years out of the past decade that no, indeedy, “Global Warming” is no longer occurring.  All the scientific discussion in that time has been centered on “How can you call it ‘Global Warming’ when it is no longer warming?” and “Oh, I see that you’ve renamed it to ‘Climate Change’ because even you have to admit now that it’s no longer warming!”

But Fox – clever as those of its namesake who starved for lack of a hen – is right on the ball, if only ten years late.  They must work on geologic time at Newscorp.

In any event, this formulaic article quoted a Global Warming skeptic who claimed that Global Warming supporters could no longer claim rising CO₂ levels as the cause for the increase in temperature, and then quoted a Global Warming supporter who claimed that the decade “lull” essentially means nothing.  Following formula, the article goes on to cite others with no [known] vested interest.  And then, because they are Fox, they ended with a final swipe by the Global Warming skeptic; if it had been written by any of the other media giants [not that they would voluntarily acknowledge that their pet alarmism is running aground] it would have ended with a final swipe being made by the Global Warming supporter.  This is the journalistic formula that must never be deviated from.

The sad thing about the whole article is that those who are cited here are allowing Fox News to treat this anti-revelation as if it’s current and print-worthy; it’s not.  And several of those cited only end up looking like blithering idiots to those who’ve paid attention for the last decade.

For example: James Hansen, ex-director of NASA’s Goddard Institute [he recently resigned to devote his energies to joining Daryl Hannah at rallies protesting any technology beyond pointy sticks] has “acknowledged the ten-year lull” in temperature increases.  What those of us who paid attention already understand is that Hansen has HAD to acknowledge it, because he’s been caught several dozen times trying to falsify NASA climate data to create a temperature increase that didn’t exist.  He was caught, in large part, by junior NASA scientists who were ordered to do the falsification of the data for him – and who refused – and who were sometimes fired for their refusal to falsify data.  Several of them got together and made it their life’s mission to follow James Hansen around double- and triple-checking every ounce of math the boy did.

…to the point that Hansen stopped doing math altogether, and instead resigned to chain himself to the idiot Daryl Hannah.

Next: Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com [the Global Warming skeptic in the article] says, “The idea that CO₂ is the tail that wags the dog is no longer scientifically tenable.”  Here’s the thing, big-guy: IT NEVER WAS.

Every bit of geological data amassed by the Global Warmers – not some, not a lot, not even most; EVERY bit of data – shows that CO₂, despite having the chemical property of a thermal insulator, is a lagging indicator of the planet’s temperature.  The planet warms up first, and then the CO₂ arrives.  Every. Single. Time. 

Including this time, in fact.  The Little Ice Age ended – depending on who you ask – between 120 and 160 years ago, and it had been warming up for centuries getting to that point.  Our notorious CO₂ increase is just over 50 years old.

Do you know what it’s called when the “cause” portion of the Cause-Effect dichotomy occurs after the “effect”?  That’s right: a non-cause.

But when the anthropogenic skeptics – and I am very carefully making the point here that the skepticism is not that the planet has not warmed up and may not warm up again, but that it is only warming due to mankind’s efforts, because most Global Warmers are certified idiots who do not understand this distinction – … when the anthropogenic skeptics have pointed out that the Global Warmers’ data shows that CO₂ is a lagging indicator of the effect, and not the cause, the Global Warmers have always declared, “well, this time it’s different… this time we have mankind in the mix, and that changes everything.”

Yet, the Global Warmers always get quite offended when *I* point out that their arrogance of biblical proportion – literally, read about the Tower of Babel, sometime – to assert that a planet which can survive a few billion years of KT events and other massive cosmic bombardment can come completely unraveled by two centuries of Industrial Revolution, is astoundingly stupid.  The auto-delusional masturbatory self-involvement needed to come up with this rationalization takes your breath away.

The cited skeptic claims that the climate-prediction equation is far more complex than the Global Warmers ever realized when they were over-simplifying the problem to my SUV … or my neighbor’s farting cows.

In response to this, the Global Warming supporter – some dingbat named Elgie Holstein [to complete the farting cow image], now of the Environmental Defense Fund, and formerly of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration – advertises that apparently a working knowledge of science is not needed to be in charge of a scientific organization, whether private or government.  She claims that no increase in temperature only means that it’s increasing more slowly than it was before.

No, sweetie; no increase in temperature means, instead, that it’s not increasing AT ALL.  Fast or slow is out of the equation when the temperature graph flatlines.  There is no slope.  Y=mX+b, and when m=0 then Y=b … you get a flat line.   X is taken out of the picture; the rules of multiplication require it.  This is mathematics; stop pretending you’re James Hansen.

For the last decade, m has equaled zero.  Get it through your head.  Your benighted and arrogant self-righteousness as seen in this article pretty much explains why I stopped donating to EDF.

On the plus-side, she does acknowledge that the climate equation is highly complex.  At least that’s progress over a decade ago.  But she still believes that science boils down to how many scientists are on each “team”, and that her team has more scientists.  The scientists on her team, “literally thousands … around the country”, still say that it’s getting warmer – so therefore it is – and the fact that it’s not is beside the point.

Science does not need to be bound by reality.  Who knew?

One of the “independent” analysts cited – in this case, The Economist, in an editorial – suggested that perhaps the role of CO₂ in the climate equation is something that climatologists didn’t really understand as well as they thought.

Ya think?

The UN’s Global Warming bandwagon – IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – has admitted, openly, that they are not interested in any other climate research apart from CO₂; they’ve hitched their integrity wagon to CO₂ acting as the cause of atmospheric temperature increase despite the absolute and undeniable reality that it has always shown up after the fact, and now that CO₂ is proving itself to be functionally irrelevant to the equation as the Global Warmers framed it, … yeah, I’d say they didn’t understand CO₂ as well as they claimed.  Spot on, there, guys.

The Global Warming skeptic, to finish up the formula, is finally quoted citing a recent National Academy of Science report – NAS is a noted Global Warming supporter, being once headed by the idiot Stephen Schneider who finally had the courtesy to die – which blames the slopeless temperature increase on the increased use of coal by China during their roughly decade-old economic boom.  Coal – a hydrocarbon fuel which creates abundant CO₂ when burned efficiently and soot when it isn’t – has apparently offset the global warming caused by the rest of the world [i.e., the US, primarily] which uses coal … and oil … and natural gas … all three efficiently … making all that CO₂ that’s warming up the planet.

I get tired of being right all the time and having people not pay attention.

Let’s see if saying the same damned thing I’ve been saying now for, oh, gosh, roughly a decade, will finally sink in.

The concept of “Global Warming” was born – for all practical purposes – in 1980.  The decade of the 70s was devoted, from a climatologic perspective, to fretting about The New Ice Age.  1980 rolled in and almost literally overnight the narcissists in science dropped their Ice Age claims and bought Maggie Thatcher’s coal miners’ union-killing rhetoric and declared Global Warming – with its CO₂ cause – to be the true problem.  …despite them knowing that CO₂ always, always, always shows up after the climate warms up.

Other things were going on at the same time: the 60s American environmentalists had been nagging and pestering Congress for so long that Congress created the EPA [don’t get me started] and the Clean Air/Water Acts, which required “clean-burning” fuel.

What is “clean-burning” fuel?  For the purposes of US federal law and EPA regulation, it is any hydrocarbon fuel which, when burned to get the energy out of it, does not create soot.  Soot is an aerosol which stays wafting around in the atmosphere for days, weeks or months until it finally gets inhaled by some doofus who starts coughing.  Soot is, scientifically, incompletely burned long-chain hydrocarbon fuel.  There’s still unrealized energy in soot; soot means inefficient combustion.

The United States – the single largest industrial force on the planet in 1980, despite jimmy Carter’s best efforts, and even when adding every other nation industry together – went very rapidly from being a soot-making nation when it burned coal and oil and methane, to being a clean-burning nation.  “Clean-burning” turns the long-chain hydrocarbon completely into its component CO₂, H₂O, and NOx [plus a few other] simple compounds.

The more soot you generate, the less CO₂ you generate.  And also, the more people cough.  And vice versa.  The US suddenly stopped producing as much soot, and just as suddenly started producing more CO₂.  Right around 1980.

Bingo: there you have it. CO₂: a US problem that the US imperialistically imposed on the rest of the planet – a serendipitous discovery for America-haters.

The rest of the world generates soot without a second thought.  Particularly China.  Environmentalists tend to be shot on sight in China, regardless of how many movies they were naked in; overkill [ha!] I will admit, but it’s an option that should possibly not be dismissed so lightly.

Here’s the thing about soot and other aerosols: until they get inhaled and make people cough, they get up into the atmosphere and reflect sunlight away from the planet.  The less sunlight, the less warmth.  That’s all there is to it.  Yes, there’s a valid point in the NAS report.  Just as there was a valid point to Stephen Schneider’s caterwauling when he was a New Ice Ageist carping about these aerosols making winter longer, colder and snowier in the 70s … before he found religion and became a Global Warmer willing to whore himself to his new goddess Gaia.

We, as a species, are going to continue our industrial society, period.  Industrial society needs energy and lots of it.  Industrial society is going to get that energy in one of two ways:

1] by using fuels that are cost-effective; or
2] by using fuels that will break our banks.

If we use fuels that are cost-effective, we will do it one of two ways:
1] cleanly, making CO2 in massive abundance and the neo-luddite hair-shirters that go with it; or
2] inefficiently, making soot, making sunlight reflect back into space, and making people cough.

If we use fuels that will break our banks, we will end up with one of two conditions:
1] an eventual loss of our industrial society which runs on the money we just squandered on inefficient energy, and we’ll end up squatting naked in the mud with Daryl Hannah and her pointy stick stabbing at bugs for dinner; or

2] … no, that’s about it.

The choice, as always, is ours, and while the thought of being next to a naked Daryl Hannah in the mud might be a selling point to males of my age [and possibly some females] who fondly remember Splash! [you’re a real fan only if you remember her in Summer Lovers], she’s not getting any younger, and frankly, bugs for dinner loses its appeal rather rapidly.  Not even a naked Daryl Hannah can compensate for long.

Choose well.