Climate alarmists hate good news

Oct. 19, 2012

By Joseph Perkins

Two new pieces of climate change data caught my attention this week.

One, from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (nope, I’d never heard of it before either), indicates that Antarctica is now surrounded by the greatest area of sea ice ever recorded in the region — some 7.5 million square miles worth, according to satellite data.

The other, jointly produced by the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, indicates that global warming actually stopped nearly 16 years ago. The finding, an update from the HadCRUT4 global temperature dataset, was compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea.

I thought surely the climate change community would be cheered by these developments; that they might even concede that maybe, just maybe, they exaggerated a wee bit about the clear and present danger posed by planetary warming.

But, boy, was I wrong. For no sooner were the data released before climate change adherents rushed to discredit them.

Like Eric Rignot, an earth systems professor at UC Irvine, who told National Geographic that, while the Antarctic’s sea ice has increased to record proportions and while the Antarctic has not heated up as fast climate change models predicted, “it’s all consistent with a warming planet.”

And like Michael Mann, the UC Berkeley alum and well known climatologist, who keynoted the 5th annual Orange County Water Summit this past spring. Commenting on the HadCRUT4 data, he told LiveScience this week, “Global warming hasn’t stopped by any objective measure; it is proceeding right on schedule.”

Now I don’t know either Prof. Rignot or Dr. Mann. I don’t know why they so adamantly cling to the global warming orthodoxy: That Mother Earth is overheating because her 7 billion human occupants (including 37.7 million here in California) refuse to curb their greenhouse gas emissions.

Billions and billions

But I do know there are thousands of scientists and academics, including hundreds here in the Golden State, who derive all or part of their livelihoods from global warming research and advocacy.

Just look at the UC campuses.

Both UC Berkeley and Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego are sites of the California Climate Change Center, which was created by the California Energy Commission. UCLA boasts both the Center for Climate Change Solutions and the Emmett Center on Climate Change and the Environment.

UC Santa Barbara has its Climate Variations and Change Research Group, UC Riverside its Global Climate & Environmental Change program and UC Santa Cruz its Climate Change and Impacts Laboratory.

So why are the UC campuses so invested in climate change? Because that’s where the money is.

Global warming has become a pot of gold for universities — and the purpose-driven scientists and academics they employ — with the debt-ridden federal government “investing” a staggering $42 billion in climate change research and mitigation through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

And with even our deficit-ridden state, government is throwing  many tens of millions of dollars each year at climate-change researchers and mitigators.

So, then, given how many grants and awards are dependent on global warming, not even the onset of a new ice age will get scientists like Rignot and Moore to renounce the dubious — albeit prevailing — wisdom on climate change.