Climate Alarmists Seek Shelter From Public Storm

Climate Alarmists Seek Shelter From Public Storm

By DENNIS M. MITCHELL AND DAVID R. LEGATES
10/16/13  INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY

Children playing on the beach often discover a fascinating biological behavioral pattern among hermit crabs. Place a dozen in a cardboard box, and in minutes the crabs exit their shells and try to occupy another.

This mild stress-induced behavior probably reflects their lifelong drive to continue growing by repeatedly commandeering larger shells.

Similarly, climate alarmists are scrambling to find new shelter from the stress coming from a public that increasingly realizes their doom-and-gloom predictions of climate catastrophe are based on shoddy data, faulty computer models and perhaps outright deception.

Despite a measured absence of warming over the last 16 years, they repeatedly cried "wolf." Alarmists demanded that the world transform their energy and economic systems, slash fossil fuel use and accept lower living standards to reflect the politically manufactured science.

Even as growing evidence conflicted with their dogma, the money, fame and power were too good to surrender for mere ethical reasons.

Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson wailed her agency would need at least 240,000 new EPA employees (each making some $100,000 per year, plus benefits) that she said would be needed just to administer new carbon dioxide regulations — and control nearly everything Americans make, drive, ship and do!

The EPA currently employs some 20,000 people at an annual budget of over $8 billion. The new hires alone would cost taxpayers another $24 billion annually — plus hundreds of billions of dollars in economic pain, manufacturing shutdowns and new job losses that the EPA's CO2 regulations would inflict.

Year after year, alarmists have changed their protective shells for more absurd answers regarding where the Earth has mysteriously stashed all the energy that greenhouse gases supposedly trapped.

For years, alarmists said ocean waters were storing the missing energy. But when the ARGO project demonstrated that the heat was not in the ocean, at least down two kilometers beneath the surface, one prominent alarmist responded, "We are puzzled at the results."

When the data consistently conflict with their hypothesis, reputable scientists revise the hypothesis. Five-alarm climate scientists desperately seek new shells, and new excuses.

The "puzzling" facts triggered the predictable alarmist tactic of attacking the data and claiming the heat was hiding in the really deep ocean.

Ignoring the physics of the problem — how the asserted heat was transferred from atmospheric carbon dioxide, through the sea surface, and beyond the first mile of ocean waters, without being detected — they expect us to believe that fluid thermodynamics is akin to magic.

The Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change has released its 2013 report "Climate Change Reconsidered II." The world finally has a chance to see the actual science — not the kind that's hidden, massaged and filtered through alarmist shell games.

Unencumbered by political pressure and mega-lobbyists, this 1,018-page review by 50 serious and highly accomplished scientists has exposed the alarmists' fraud.

These real scientists have also exposed as illusory the alarmists' mystical "tropical hot spot." This sacred cow turns out to be as fanciful as planetary warming hidden in the deepest ocean, or the infamous hockey stick of Michael Mann's hidden data and secret computer codes.

Have we forgotten that 1998 was to be the tipping point, after which Earth would warm uncontrollably? The 1988 hearing in Washington one hot summer afternoon was dominated by the always-sly James Hansen, who wiped his brow furiously, in a room made stifling by Sen. Tim Wirth's turning off the air conditioning.

Just because Al Gore switched his CO2 and temperature curves to make it look like rising carbon dioxide levels caused planetary temperature increases — when in fact increasing temperatures always preceded higher CO2 — why should he correct his mistake or return his ill-gotten millions?

Why should his accomplice, IPCC Director and non-Nobel Laureate Rajendra Pachauri, be held accountable for trumpeting made-up stories about melting Himalayan glaciers?

When you're an alarmist, being wrong, lying, cheating, misleading the public and killing jobs simply do not count against you — even when the allegedly human-caused global warming stopped in 1996.

We literally laughed aloud at a so-called "documentary" that's about to be unleashed on an unsuspecting public. It's called "Do the Math: Bill McKibben and the Fight Over Climate Change."

For McKibben and his comrades, "doing the math" is really a matter of "counting the cash" the alarmists rake in.

The serious money has always flowed to alarmists, guilt-ridden environmentalists and control-seeking regulators, whom the world's taxpayers are generously and unwittingly funding. That's also the real meaning of the "green" movement and "green" energy.

• Mitchell has been professionally involved in environmental and tax compliance, monitoring and education for more than 40 years.

• Legates is professor of climatology at the University of Delaware and has been studying climate and its changes for 35 years.