“Climate Change” Didn’t Work Out, Let’s Call it “Climate Disruption”

The Obama administration this week released a grim report attempting to link disparate weather patterns to anthropogenic global warming (AGW). “Climate change, once considered an issue for a distant future, has moved firmly into the present,” the report says. Unable to make the definitive scientific connection to AGW, the report concludes, “there is new and stronger evidence that many of these increases [extreme weather] are related to human activities.”

Predictably, with a noncompliant congress, the president vows to use his pen to expand the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) power to wage a war on everything in our country that expels carbon dioxide. I wonder how the EPA will regulate our respiration, since we humans exhale it.

The president coined a new phrase as well. Gone are the references to “global warming,” since, according to NASA GIS data, we haven’t warmed since 1998. And gone is “climate change,” since we haven’t cooled appreciably since then either. The new catchphrase is “climate disruption,” because that way any extreme or aberrant weather can be blamed on human activity.

Surrounded by weathermen and meteorologists, the president said, “We’ve been sounding this urgency for the last five years.  If we don’t do more, we’re gonna have bigger problems, more risk of economic impact and more risk of extreme weather events that can result in people losing their lives or losing their properties or businesses.  And — and we’ve gotta have the public understand this is an issue that is gonna impact our kids and our grandkids unless we do something about it.”

I wish we had known how omnipotent the EPA was. Since the president is convinced they can control the environment and the climate, all future catastrophic hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, and droughts, will be the fault of the EPA! And just think of all of the weather-related damage that has occurred since the 1970 creation of the EPA, all of which could have been prevented if only they had been given more power!

Meteorologist Anthony Watts said of the president’s new report, “To me, this looks more like a glossy sales pitch from a company that is pushing a product they know people may not need, but if marketed just right, it would be something they’d buy.” He concludes with the tongue-in-cheek question, “Who wouldn’t want better weather? Just buy our product.”

Dr. Roger Pielke, a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, was more academic in his response. “The report effectively implies that there is no climate change other than what is caused by humans, and that extreme weather events are equivalent to climate change…This issue was clearly refuted in National Research Council, 2005: Radiative forcing of climate change.”

The NIPCC, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which is a group of over 50 atmospheric scientists, that does not receive any government or corporate funding, and acts as an independent auditor of its U.N. counterpart, had a report of their own that they rolled out a few months ago. They stated many empirically valid conclusions, including, “Global temperatures stopped rising 15 years ago despite rising levels of carbon dioxide, which the IPCC claims is responsible for Global Warming.”

They also pointed out that, “Temperatures were warmer in many parts of the world approximately 1,000 years ago, during the so-called Medieval Warm Period, a warm period that was, obviously, due entirely to natural causes. (Modern industry, transportation, and energy generation, and the ‘greenhouse gas’ emissions associated with modern technology, did not exist.)”

They stated the obvious, that the AGW scientists are wrong, since their “computer models fail to reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10-15 years. In other words, previous predictions failed. (The failure or success of predictions is the key to the scientific method. It’s how theories are tested.)”

Even the co-founder of Green Peace, Canadian ecologist Patrick Moore, admits that it’s pseudoscience to claim a causal connection between human activity and climatic or weather change. “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years. If there were such a proof it would be written down for all to see. No actual proof, as it is understood in science, exists,” he said before a Senate committee just three months ago.

He continued, “There is some correlation, but little evidence, to support a direct causal relationship between CO2 and global temperature through the millennia. The fact that we had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today fundamentally contradicts the certainty that human-caused CO2 emissions are the main cause of global warming.”

There is nothing “settled” about the “science” behind the AGW argument. Their models don’t project reality, so they change them, only to have nature fail to comply yet again. Their terminology changes to adjust to the new realities since empirical data fail to match their catchwords. Meanwhile, our AGW Alarmist-In-Chief cites their ever-changing “science” as justification to expand government control over all human activity. Seems to me, everyone with a modicum of cognitive functionality should be an AGW skeptic by now.

Associated Press award winning columnist Richard Larsen is President of Larsen Financial, a brokerage and financial planning firm in Pocatello, Idaho and is a graduate of Idaho State University with degrees in Political Science and History and coursework completed toward a Master’s in Public Administration.  He can be reached at rlarsenen@cableone.net.