Weather reports and agendas
The Natural Resources Defense Council has placed Nevada first in the West and sixth in the nation for heat records broken in the year 2012. Nevada also experienced 14 rainfall records in seven counties, 11 snowfall records in five counties and 86 wildfires that charred 90 acres or more.
The results were emblematic of a year of extreme weather across the country, the council argues.
"2012's unparalleled record-setting heat demonstrates what climate change looks like," intoned Kim Knowlton, senior scientist for the New York City-based environmental advocacy group. "This extreme weather has awoken communities across the country. ... Now our leaders must act."
Actually, 2012 was the warmest year on record in Las Vegas by only two-tenths of a degree, and experts agree that minimal warming was caused almost entirely by more concrete and pavement, which absorb heat and keep the valley from cooling off at night the way it once did.
Meantime, Southern Nevada this month endured its longest spell of sub-freezing nights in more than decade. Why is it that when it's cold, the activists scoff "That's just weather, not climate," whereas a tiny average temperature increase - largely attributable to last year's pleasant winter and spring - "is what global warming looks like"?
Our leaders "must act"? Really? To further drive up energy costs in a still-fragile economy? While China and India continue to bring new coal-fired power plants online at a rate of one a week? In fact, it would be foolish to allow ourselves to be stampeded into counterproductive measures by accepting at face value the analyses of groups with pre-existing agendas - in this case, blocking access to cheap energy in order to reduce our standard of living.
Ocean levels are not rising. Polar bears are experiencing a population boom. The Dutch, who saw frost in September, are complaining of the coolest, dampest year in memory.
As Norman Rogers, Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hawaii and member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, noted last fall: "The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn't been warming for 16 years, and that's starting to get very embarrassing." The first adjustment to their dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking "climate change," he notes. "The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past."
Nine months ago, on April 23, London's Daily Mail reported environmental scientist James Lovelock, "renowned for his terrifying predictions of climate change's deadly impact on the planet, has gone back on his previous claims, admitting they were 'alarmist'. The admission comes as a devastating blow to proponents of climate change."
And it's only been three years since, on Feb. 14, 2010, the Mail reported that professor Phil Jones, inventor of the famous "hockey stick graph" used by global warming alarmists to gin up panic but now unable to produce supporting documentation, "concedes the possibility that ... global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon," and further admits "that for the past 15 years there has been no 'statistically significant' warming."
Our legislators have bigger priorities right now, trying to promote entrepreneurship and job creation while addressing the exploding national debt. A pressing need to further damage the economy with symbolic gestures that stand minimal chance of ever changing the climate, anyway? Not so much.
