Scott Spiegel

In 2000 the British paper The Independent ran a story with the wistful headline “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.”

Faithfully advancing the theory of anthropogenic global warming like a good leftist media foot soldier, the author nostalgically declared, “Snow is starting to disappear from our lives.  Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture.”

The Independent cited Dr. David Viner of the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia, who predicted that in a few years, snow will be “a very rare and exciting event…  Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

That would be the same climatic research unit involved in last year’s Climategate scandal, in which a whistleblower released thousands of e-mails documenting researchers manipulating, covering up, and losing data used in the UN’s report on dangerous manmade global warming.

In The Independent’s story, one researcher at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research envisioned a world in which British children might have to settle for experiencing online “polar scenes” or feeling “virtual cold.”

Meanwhile, in the decade since, Brits, Americans, and the rest of the world have gotten to experience actual polar scenes and feel real cold in spades.

Eight of the past 10 winters have seen above-average snowfall and below-normal temperatures across North America, Europe, and Asia, not counting the cold spell of December 2010.

The entire Eastern seaboard of the U.S., most of the Midwest, and much of the South were recently rocked with a series of paralyzing storms that stranded Christmas travelers, crippled airlines, stalled vehicles, collapsed sporting complexes, cleared Times Square, shut down New York City’s mass transit system, halted Amtrak service, destroyed marine life in the Carolinas, and cryogenically froze a functioning lighthouse on Lake Michigan.

The British Transport Secretary recently sought the advice of the UK’s top science advisor regarding whether, in light of the massive snowfall that shut down Heathrow and other major European airports last week, extra levels of preparation and spending should be budgeted in future years for harsher winters.

Just as it was becoming clear that snow was not on the verge of extinction, global warming fanatics began to air the theory that climate warming actually predicted increased snow, because warm air “holds” more precipitation.  (The same could be said for liberals’ attempts to fool the public: the more hot air they spew, the more likely they are to wallop us with a snow job.)

Note that this cockamamie notion that increased snow results from global warming was conveniently produced after the harsh, snow-drenched winters of the past few years, not before—and certainly not back in 2000.

Global warming alarmists laugh at skeptics who point out that temperatures have not increased over the past 10 years, but rather have decreased.  Though there has been no measurable global warming since 1998, Al Gore worshippers insist that trends of a few years prove nothing, and that temporary ups and downs are to be expected when addressing a phenomenon that can be measured only over decades or centuries.

This is not, of course, what the alarmists were saying in the 1990s, when they cited every melted popsicle and bare midriff as incontrovertible proof that the globe was dissolving.

So we now know that global warming can eliminate snow (pace The Independent), but can also produce more snow and gargantuan, historic blizzards.  Global warming can lead to slightly above-average temperatures (as in the 1990s), but can also result in a 12-year decline in global temperature, cold and miserable springs, and brutal winters.  (See The New York Times’ recent op-ed “Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming,” in which the author explains that “the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes.”)

Global warmists are quick to give birth to a litter of ad hoc explanations about why “warming” has led to cooling.  But if the past 10 winters had been unusually warm and snow-free, the warmists inarguably would have cited that data as iron-clad proof of their prognostications.

Alarmists pull after-the-fact hypotheses out of thin air to compensate for their failed forecasts, but their routine is getting old.

Manmade global warming is, given our current state of scientific knowledge, and the way the majority of the world’s climate centers and media outlets treat the evidence, an unfalsifiable theory.

In liberals’ view, the only outcome global warming can’t lead to is mankind being let off the hook from the charge of destroying our natural habitat through the sin of industrial civilization.



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Related articles

• NYT: “Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming” (theblogprof.blogspot.com)
• ‘Children Aren’t Going to Know What Snow Is’: A Global Warming Classic Flashback (michellemalkin.com)
• Horrid, Frigid Snowbound Winter. Must Be Global Warming. (minx.cc)
• Global Warming Skeptic Predicts Brutal Winter, Warns “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet” (mediaite.com)
• Monday Links: Climate Fraud Edition (nicedeb.wordpress.com)

If you, like most Americans, doubt that scientists will ever demonstrate a direct causal link between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming, try wrapping your mind around any of the following deeply implausible scenarios in the wake of the recent Climategate scandal:

(1) The Climate Research Unit at the UK’s University of East Anglia, origin of the thousands of pages of leaked e-mails and computer code two weeks ago, will honor requests to release the CRU data used to produce results showing steady global temperature increases over the past 150 years.

Phil Jones, head of CRU, who resigned yesterday in light of the fraud, once e-mailed U.S. colleague Michael Mann, “[D]on’t leave stuff lying around on ftp sites – you never know who is trawling them…  If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone…  We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind.”

(2) The CRU physically possesses the data it has collected over the years and the programs used to generate its previously published results, or can figure out how to reproduce these programs.

Here are a few nuggets from the infamous “HARRY_READ_ME” text file containing three years’ worth of notes (2006-2009) documenting one CRU scientist’s attempt to reconstruct published temperature data using the center’s poorly documented datasets and computer code:

“I immediately found a mistake! Scanning forward to 1951 was done with a loop that, for completely unfathomable reasons, didn’t include months! So we read 50 grids instead of 600!!!”

“Wherever I look, there are data files, no info about what they are other than their names…  [T]he filenames… are identical, but the contents are not.”

“I’ve worked all weekend, and just when I thought it was done I’m hitting yet another problem that’s based on the hopeless state of our databases.  There is no uniform data integrity, it’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found.”

“I am seriously close to giving up, again.  The history of this is so complex that I can’t get far enough into it before my head hurts and I have to stop.  Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions…  I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections.”

(3) Phil Jones will come up with a convincing explanation for how his e-mail describing use of “Mike’s trick” to “hide the decline” references anything other than fraudulent manipulation of data to achieve a desired outcome.

The e-mail in question: “’I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature [journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline.”

Jones’ response to the leak: “The use of the term ‘hiding the decline’ was in an email written in haste.”  Note to Jones: So was your lame defense of that shifty e-mail.

The defense offered by Michael Mann, originator of the long-discredited “hockey stick” graph of global temperature increase, was not much better: Mann claimed that the word “trick” referred to a clever method of solving a problem “and not something secret.”  Not anymore, it’s not!

(4) The University of East Anglia, the BBC, and the international mainstream media will get more agitated about the implications of the hacked CRU e-mails than the fact that they were hacked.

The criminal penalties lying in wait for the scientists who conspired to alter, misrepresent, or delete data after FOIA requests, while spending millions in public grant money, are far greater than for the hacker who obtained the e-mails.  The implications of falsified data for global climate change regulations, taxes, and government takeover of industrial economies render the hacker’s moral breech moot.

(5) The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin and other environmental “reporters” will admit Climategate is a big deal.

The CRU is one of two centers that compile global land temperature data; the other is the U.S. Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Roughly 50% of terrestrial temperature data has thus been demonstrated to be worthless—more than 50%, if you take into account the greater weight given the CRU data in the IPCC report, the close working relationship between the centers, and the documented bias and possible fraud in U.S. data.  Yet Revkin claims, “The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument.”  Case closed!

(6) Climategate will backfire against skeptics.

Kenneth Trenberth, CRU crony and researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, insists—hold your laughter—that the hacked e-mails demonstrate “the integrity of scientists.”  Even George “Moonbat” Monbiot, global warming columnist for the UK Guardian—who bitterly wrote, “I apologise.  I was too trusting of some of those who provided the evidence I championed.  I would have been a better journalist if I had investigated their claims more closely”—was ludicrously recalcitrant in his support for CRU researchers: “By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow.”

(7) Any climate change alarmists other than Monbiot will apologize for putting too much credence in CRU data without being able to independently verify it.

The shills at RealClimate.org, for example, write: “There is no evidence of any worldwide conspiracy, no mention of George Soros nefariously funding climate research… no admission that global warming is a hoax, no evidence of the falsifying of data, and no ‘marching orders’ from our socialist-communist-vegetarian overlords.”  Apology accepted!

(8) Global warming alarmists will view the halt in statistically significant global warming over the last 15 years, the demonstrable global cooling over the last 9 years, and the projected global cooling over the next several decades by skeptics whose models correctly predicted both of the above, as evidence that might prove their climate change theories wrong.

See all of the above.