President Obama issued this threat to the American people in his 2013 State of the Union Address (SOTU): âBut for the sake of our children and our future, we must do more to combat climate changeâ¦.Now, the good news is, we can make meaningful progress on this issue while driving strong economic growthâ¦.But if Congress doesnât act soon to protect future generations, I will.â
President Obama talks as if only he was reelected in 2012. He fails to recall that the entire House of Representatives was on the ballot with him. And the American people elected a majority of Republicans to the House, not to be a rubber stamp on anything Obama wants, but as a check on Obama excesses, which is what they serve as.
Obama cited as support for his threatened global warming regulatory jihad, âYes, itâs true that no single event makes a trend. But the fact is, the 12 hottest years on record have all come in the last 15.â The fact is also, however, that years of decline from a peak in global temperatures, as occurred in 1998 due to the entirely natural El Nino effect that year, can also be among the warmest on record. (That global temperature record he is talking about only goes back about 125 years, most of which has been reflecting recovery of global temperatures from the âLittle Ice Ageâ occurring roughly from 1350 to 1850.).
That global temperature record has been flat lining for 16 years now. As the website Climate Depot reported in response to Obama, âThe halt in global temperatures has shown up in multiple data sets and peer-reviewed literature.â Even NASAâs James Hansen, the bureaucratic godfather of global warming hysterics, admits that the global temperature standstill is real, according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. âThe five-year mean global temperature has been flat for the last decade,â Hansen said on January 15.
Professor Werner Kirstein of the Institute for Geography at the University of Leipzig told MDR German Public Radio that sensational PR claims of the hottest year or hottest decade on record are just political spin, because they are based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few hundredths of a degree. As Hansen told reporters on January 13, â2010 differed from 2005 by less than 2 hundredths of a degree F (thatâs 0.018F).â And those are global averages reflecting a composite of hundreds of local weather station observations worldwide, a concoction that borders on alchemy.
Top Swedish climate scientist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson, who has served on the UNâs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the official global warming advocacy body, was also quoted publicly on February 3 as saying,
âWe are creating great anxiety without it being justifiedâ¦there are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic. The warming we have had the last a 100 years is so small that if we didnât have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldnât have noticed it at all. The Earth appears to have cooling properties that exceed the previously thought ones, and computer models are inadequate to try to foretell a chaotic object like the climate, where actual observations are the only way to go.â
The award winning Bengtsson, highly decorated by scientific bodies across the globe, also pointed out that the heating effect of carbon dioxide (CO2) is logarithmic, which means the higher the concentration is, the smaller the effect of a further increase. That is why historical proxy data going back millennia show much greater concentrations of CO2 â 10, 20 or 30 times todayâs levels â with no associated catastrophic global temperatures. That lack of association between temperature trends and CO2 has continued over the last century, as the up and down pattern of global temperatures over the past 100 years does not follow the upward climb of CO2 as the industrial revolution has expanded globally. It follows instead the pattern of natural causes, such as sunspot cycles, and ocean temperature cycles.
Bengtsson reported as well, âThe sea level has risen fairly evenly for a hundred years by 2-3 millimeters per year. The pitch has not accelerated.â That is because the sea level has been rising as the Earth has been recovering from the freezing period of the Little Ice Age. It is not due to man-caused global warming.
President Obama also told us in the SOTU, âHeat waves, droughts, wildfires, and floods â all are now more frequent and intense.â But that is a fairy tale. On the website of Obamaâs own EPA is a chart of a U.S. Annual Heat Wave Index, 1895 to 2008, which supports this statement, indicating that heat waves were much worse in the 1930s: âHeat waves occurred with high frequency in the 1930s, and these remain the most severe heat waves in the U.S. historical record (see Figure 1). Many years of intense drought (the âDust Bowlâ) contributed to these heat waves by depleting soil moisture and reducing the moderating effects of evaporation.â The EPA also acknowledges that there is no trend in the historical record of heat waves becoming worse.
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