Year 4, Month 9, Day 28: If You Lived Here, You’d Be An Idiot

Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas is a moron, and he does it for a living. Here’s his column printed in the Clarksville, TN Leaf-Chronicle:

Most bad weather – from hurricanes, which have been few this season, to tornadoes – are unwelcome by those in their paths, but these weather phenomena have existed for centuries. Both sides seem to agree that CO2 levels are elevated, but they don’t agree on whether that will cause dangerous climate change, including rising temperatures and turbulent weather. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) argues, “The human effect is likely to be small relative to natural variability, and whatever small warming is likely to occur will produce benefits as well as costs.”

Yet the climate change cultists continue to focus on melting polar ice caps and “displaced” polar bears as part of their emotional appeal for government to “fix” the problem. Now comes a report in the UK Daily Mail that “eminent scientists” have observed a record return of the Arctic ice cap as it grows by 60 percent in a year, covering with ice almost 1 million more square miles of ocean than in 2012.

In 2007, the BBC reported that by 2013, global warming would leave the Arctic “ice free.” Oops!

Useless. The present-day commentariat is useless. September 20:

Ignorance is excusable, for it can always be corrected. But professional ignorance — deliberately choosing to stay uninformed for purely financial reasons — is both intellectually and morally beyond the pale. Cal Thomas’ attempt to discredit climate scientists by citing an increase in polar ice coverage over last year is a perfect example of the latter; if Mr. Thomas was really interested in understanding the mechanisms by which Arctic ice expands and contracts over time, he could have informed himself with a few minutes’ research — but he’s well-paid to remain ignorant, and we are all the losers thereby.

Two simple points need to be made about polar ice. First, while the surface area covered by ice has indeed grown since last year, the overall trend has been steadily downward. A cancer patient who’s losing weight may gain a few pounds occasionally on a good day, but that doesn’t mean the disease is cured. Second, that expanded surface area is much, much thinner than it’s ever been; like ice cream on a hot sidewalk, it spreads out over a wide area.

Mr. Thomas does his readers a disservice with a simplistic misrepresentation of a genuinely dangerous planetary reality.

Warren Senders