CBS's morning show chimed in with this report from correspondent Daniel Sieberg: " ... a dire new warning from scientists says the amount of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is higher than predicted ... Scientists say those higher temperatures are fueling the intensity of wildfires, now raging in places like Australia ... (It's) a vicious cycle -- each changing ecosystem affecting the other and made worse by human activities. For environmentalists and many others, it's a cycle that needs to be broken. And soon."
When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf coast, "warmist" gnomes were thick on the ground, inviting us to conclude that Katrina's deadly force resulted from global warming and that the world was entering an era of fierce storms, fires, and floods -- a green apocalypse. Al Gore mentioned Katrina in "An Inconvenient Truth," asking, "How in God's name could that happen here? There had been warnings that hurricanes would get stronger. There were warnings that this hurricane ... would cause the kind of damage that it ultimately did cause. And one question that we, as a people, need to decide is how we react when we hear warnings from the leading scientists in the world."
Those scientists (whether they are "leading" or not is a subjective matter) supplied their own panicky conclusions. A study published in the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Scientists" concluded that "Global warming caused by humans is largely responsible for heating hurricane-forming regions of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, probably increasing the intensity of the storms." The Boston Globe quoted lead scientist Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, "Natural variability doesn't cut it for the observed ocean temperatures. The study suggests we are responsible."
Just by the way, the 2009 hurricane season was unusually mild.
For more than a decade now, the climate avengers have seized upon every warm summer, forest fire, hurricane, and tornado to grind their ax. Here's one last example from the Washington Post two years ago: "Last year was the warmest in the continental United States in the past 112 years -- capping a nine-year warming streak 'unprecedented in the historical record' that was driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, the government reported yesterday ... Many researchers are concerned that rising temperatures could lead to widespread melting of the polar ice caps, resulting in higher sea levels and more extreme droughts and storms."
They hooted when a British politician cited the cold weather as evidence of a "cooling trend." But she learned her "science" from the masters.