Crrraazzzy Climate Crock

We’re having a rotten wet and cold summer locally. I had to lift my garlic early to stop it rotting in the ground. In the UK there are huge floods – the wettest drought they have ever had! In America, they are burning up, breaking all time heat records. The U.S. government declared more than 1,000 counties in 26 states drought disasters on Thursday.

Here below is another in the Climate Crock of the Week series that I occasionally feature here. Peter Sinclair does many more “Crocks” but, to be honest, he has now convincingly debunked just about every argument and piece of misdirection that the sceptic/denialists have ever come out with so I just feature the more noteworthy and newsworthy ones these days.

This video is called  “Welcome to the Rest of Our Lives”. It showcases this year’s extreme out-of-the-ordinary weather events in the USA.  Final proof that the very latest extreme weather events are the climate changing up a gear can only be finally shown statistically to be happening after 20-30 more years data, although people’s common sense must be beginning to let them know what their future is likely to be.

What we are seeing are already statistically unusual/unprecedented events full stop. If people didn’t believe the previous clear statistical proof that the planet has been warming, owing to the misdirecting efforts of the “sceptic” deceivers and misleaders, perhaps they’ll start to take notice when their homes are burnt or swept away in floods and food prices start to shoot up. The US has got such a severe drought now that there is likely to be an extreme failure of the corn (maize) harvest.

Was that all just climate alarmism? I think not. The weasel word “alarmism” suggests there is no real problem – that it’s just those doomsayers crying wolf again. Move along, there's nothing to see here. The actual situation we are in is very alarming. The wolf really is at the gate. Bear in mind that it is believed that there is around a thirty year lag, from any increase in greenhouse gases, before the planet responds fully by reaching its new equilibrium temperature (just taking the “fast feedbacks” into account let alone the long term slow ones…). If we stopped using all fossil fuels tomorrow morning, things will continue to get worse for at least thirty years, if the science is right. If there are positive feedbacks and tipping points that are stronger or closer than anticipated, things might not stop getting worse for a very long time.

There are those who say that people won’t respond to such dire predictions – that somehow they will turn a blind eye to the threat because they don’t like the idea of anything shaking their "glass half full" ideology. Well what WILL get through to these crazy arrogant irresponsible people? Does their wishful thinking based on ignorance of reality give them the right to vote to expose the rest of us to whatever might happen? That would be democracy gone mad and yet we still have the apparently mindless mainstream media spreading the B.S. of the denialists in a misguided attempt to regurgitate what they were taught at journalism college – that they must always show “balance”. Journalistic balance is based on the clearly fallacious idea that there are always two sides to every story;  the media present the two sides in the climate wars as if they were of equal value and give them equal prominence. Truth and science trumps lies, stupidity, deceit and ignorance and it’s about time the media woke up to their true responsibilities. Start investigating the truth and report on it. Stop taking the money until you do your jobs right!



This is a companion video about sea level rise

Some like it hot – not! Climate Crock of the Week

Another masterpiece from Pete Sinclair. In it he contrasts the views and rhetoric of the usual suspects such as Rush Limbaugh, Lord Monckton, Alex Jones and Joe Bastardi, who misrepresent the truth, with actual events in the real world. He also shows just how long science has been warning the public about the dangers of altering the atmosphere  - at least 55 years. Now that the pigeons are coming home to roost climatically, and eventually climactically, it’s about time for the “we told you so”s to start. As an illustration of just how insane and incorrigible some people are, the propaganda blitz from the denialist pundits is still in top gear.

Climate crock time

Plants need CO2 to grow. Therefore, more CO2 must be good? Not necessarily. Very poor logic.
If you're a denialist, with limited morals or knowledge or thinking skills, spreading the idea that CO2 is "plant food", to discourage vital attempts to limit the overloading of our atmosphere with it, is one of those sound bite arguments that sound so plausible to the unwary. Like many generalisations, sooner or later it runs afoul of the real world. Here below is Pete Sinclair's "Climate Crock of the week". It features one of the most prominent of the denialists, "Lord" Viscount Monckton of Brenchley. A very articulate and highly dangerous propagandist - allegedly (litigious, too). The material and "arguments" in his presentations have been repeatedly torn apart, yet he still keeps on presenting them to new cannon fodder. What should we make of someone like that?

The "CO2 is plant food" denialist argument basically ignores that one can have too much of a good thing. Rather as 2500 calories a day intake of food is good, but 10,000 a day will soon lead to big health problems. Come to think of it, Monckton’s brand of urbane poison seems to resonate very well with a lot of Americans who are no strangers to Supersize portions whether of food, oil, rapacious, “too big to fail”, international finance or whatever.

 
Extra CO2 can, in certain circumstances, increase crop yields but it depends on the other things that plants need to grow such as water, fertilising nutrients, temperature etc being optimised at the same time. If we get increased drought and floods alternately drying and saturating land then crop yields are likely to fall, not rise, due to increased atmospheric CO2. Yet denialists keep promoting this piece of misdirection regardless of the truth.

Moments of genesis of more denier garbage pinpointed on Climate Crock

The birth of much of the climate change denial myth and misrepresentation, the straw man arguments and general dangerous silliness, is not always clear but Pete Sinclair's latest "Climate Crock of the Week" (see below or click here for Youtube link) skewers a few of the exact moments when US media talking heads in the denial camp picked up on a perfectly rational and objective scientific explanation and severely misquoted, twisted, changed and added to and subtracted from it (AKA they lied through their teeth - either that or they are breathtakingly stupid and/or cannot comprehend English).

A significant climate scientist was explaining (only one month ago) that global average temperature cannot be expected to go up smoothly in a straight line because that’s just not the way that things work. This rather obvious fact was seized upon and perverted by the US pundits who claimed it  meant exactly what they wanted it to in the same way as Humpty Dumpty did in Through the Looking Glass – “when I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less”.

They tried to make out that this major climate scientist was having second thoughts about global warming but nothing could be further from the truth. Unfortunately, just about everything that the deniers say generally couldn’t be further from the truth. It is a sad fact that over 40% of the US public have fallen victim to at least some of their propaganda. When Voltaire said he would defend to the death people’s right to say stuff he disagreed with, I don’t think in his wildest dreams that he was expecting poisonous stuff like this to crop up… perhaps, faced with it, he would have retracted his view.

This new lying piece of propaganda will now go out into the "denialosphere" of websites and blogs and will get endlessly brought up by their gullible followers, literally for years afterwards! They will in turn probably fine tune the wrongness to suit themselves as they pass it on in a giant Chinese whisper.

Crock of the week – CO2 lags behind temperature

Finally, Peter Sinclair nails probably the most deceptive and cynical piece of deliberately misleading BS that the professional denier/inactivist/sceptics use to fool the gullible.

It’s the argument based on the Vostok ice core records that clearly show that (in most cases) when the climate changed naturally, in the past, first the temperature started rising then, about 800 years later, the atmospheric CO2 levels went up.

The deniers ruthlessly use this cherry-picked piece of evidence along these lines – they claim that as CO2 always lagged temperature rise in the past, then the observed increase in CO2 we are seeing since the start of the industrial revolution must have been caused by a natural temperature change cycle that started before that and that the global warming we are measuring (that even the deniers no longer deny is happening) is just a continuation of this natural cycle. S. Fred Singer is probably the worst denier in this regard because he publishes books about it and other denier classic canards.

This “CO2 lags temperature” argument was ruthlessly misrepresented in “The Great Global Warming Swindle” by carefully deceptive editing – the scientist who was exploited by the producer has completely disavowed what the programme made him appear to say!

By the way, if you want to see a high quality version of this video, double click on the video and you will be taken to YouTube – click on the HQ button (bottom of the video, right hand side)