At first we were told that anthropogenic global warming was a result of man's CO2 emissions and that we'd see less and less snow and ice. Ice would melt and raise the sea levels, flooding cities. Then, when it was obvious that empirical data showed we were actually cooling more than warming, they said that dynamic weather variability was the result of manmade 'climate change.' Another group said that global warming was merely being 'masked' by the La Nina effect; that was why we were experiencing cooler summers and winters. Dynamic weather referred to anything deemed 'unusual,' such that a blizzard or freezing temperatures would give the same support to the renamed 'climate change' as a would a heat wave or tornado outbreak. I call these sudden grasps at explaining non-correlating empirical data CLIMATE REVISIONISM.
Somewhere in the midst of the mounting empirical evidence to the contrary, climate scandal upon climate scandal erupted. Interested powers tried to put the genie back in the bottle, but it was too late.
As the public continued to reject the idea of manmade global warming or climate change, Thulsa Doom Obama decided to go with the new moniker of 'global climate disruption.' And most recently, the term 'global weirding' came into vogue. No matter what alias they use, it still all comes down to an indictment of capitalism as the driving force behind a climate gone mad. Americans aren't buying it, and neither are Europeans. The rat radar is up and detecting something foul.
Last week a severe storm froze Dallas under a sheet of ice, just in time to disrupt the plans of the tens of thousands of (American) football fans descending on the city for the Super Bowl. On the other side of the globe, Cyclone Yasi slammed northeastern Australia, destroying homes and crops and displacing hundreds of thousands of people.
Some climate alarmists would have us believe that these storms are yet another baleful consequence of man-made CO2 emissions. In addition to the latest weather events, they also point to recent cyclones in Burma, last winter's fatal chills in Nepal and Bangladesh, December's blizzards in Britain, and every other drought, typhoon and unseasonable heat wave around the world.
But is it true? To answer that question, you need to understand whether recent weather trends are extreme by historical standards. The Twentieth Century Reanalysis Project is the latest attempt to find out, using super-computers to generate a dataset of global atmospheric circulation from 1871 to the present.
As it happens, the project's initial findings, published last month, show no evidence of an intensifying weather trend. "In the climate models, the extremes get more extreme as we move into a doubled CO2 world in 100 years," atmospheric scientist Gilbert Compo, one of the researchers on the project, tells me from his office at the University of Colorado, Boulder. "So we were surprised that none of the three major indices of climate variability that we used show a trend of increased circulation going back to 1871."
