Alternately referring to Hurricane Sandy as either a “superstorm” or a “megastorm” our friends at the Liberal Press Office have helped put Sandy in perspective by letting us know that this year’s meteorological winner of American Idol was spawned by global warming, intensified by rising ocean temperatures and sponsored by Big Oil.
Citing no actual scientific evidence- why use science when you believe SO strongly?- it’s apparent that the headlines used by the mainstream media to cover the post-Sandy ascendancy virtually wrote themselves well prior to Sandy’s gestation.
Megastorm Sandy injects climate into presidential vote, Agence France Presse
Is Hurricane Sandy the face of climate change? Yes, is the surprising (ha!) answer from UC Berkley’s Jayni Foley Hein, Executive Director, Center for Law, Energy & the Environment.
Hurricane Sandy Aftermath: Why Climate Change is the Key Issue for Millennial Voters, PolicyMic
Sandy Raises Questions About Climate And The Future, NPR
Hurricane Sandy: The Last Straw on Climate Change, says The Daily Beast’s Bill McKibben, with a subhead: “The deniers have been beaten by Sandy and other overwhelming evidence. The question now: what do we do?”
Quick: Let’s pass a human emissions tax. We can start with McKibben, because when there is stench, there’s greenhouse trapping gas.
Settled Science! Hurry, supplies are limited, call now, operators are standing by, As Seen on TV! Superstorm Sandy Backs Barack, Cites War on Women!
Now to be fair to the Big Bird station, NPR only quoted one source in the story on Sandy and global warming. Mayor Bloomberg’s “climate science lead for the science policy team of the New York City Panel on Climate Change,” Radley Horton in an interview offered his own “proof”- sometimes known as an “opinion” outside of global warming circles- that global warming had an effect on Hurricane Sandy.
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Yes, that is the journalistic equivalent of citing Bill Clinton on Bill Clinton, but the Iowa Electoral College vote’s REALLY important.
“It's difficult to know whether this year's rise in ocean temperatures was associated with climate change,” says NPR, “but Horton says that Hurricane Sandy moved over unusually warm waters in the North Atlantic.”
See, the scientists can’t actually PROVE their science, but that’s only because they are really great at speculating about it. Doesn’t implying their views very gravely to taxpayer supported journalists actually count as settled science?
"As the planet continues to warm, we expect ocean temperatures to go up," says Horton. "All things being equal, that does give a storm like Sandy more energy."
Well, at least he got the science right, right?
Naw. Science, facts, truth, justice? Those concepts are as old-fashioned as the American Way.
What matters is keeping the federal bureaucracy going and giving Obama a fighting chance in places like, Iowa, which suddenly has become a Super-Mega Battleground State.
NOAA climate scientist Martin Hoerling said that the sea surface temperatures were actually insignificant in the case of Sandy, directly contradicting the “settled” science offered by Horton.
From the Environmental Editor at the Australian:
Dr Hoerling told US public radio in the aftermath of Sandy that ocean temperatures adjacent to the US eastern seaboard had been running several degrees higher than normal.
But he said the unusually warm waters were in areas where the background temperature was relatively cool. "So adding a few degrees Fahrenheit at that cool water temperature doesn't matter too much for the intensity of a hurricane," Dr Hoerling said.
The guys at the NOAA, although government employees, are the leading proponents for restoring science to the science of global warming.
This isn’t the first time that Hoerling has debunked media claims that current weather events are due to global warming. There is very little evidence that links hurricanes, drought, tornadoes and other extreme events to global warming. There us actually quite a bit of evidence that extreme weather events have not been driven by global warming.
Remember the droughts in Texas and Russia, which the climate scientists and assorted a.k.a.’s from the media declared was more “proof” that global warming was real?
Here’s Hoerling in the New York Times: “Published scientific studies on the Russian heat wave indicate this claim to be false. Our own study on the Texas heat wave and drought, submitted this week to the Journal of Climate, likewise shows that that event was not caused by human-induced climate change. These are not de novo events, but upon scientific scrutiny, one finds both the Russian and Texas extreme events to be part of the physics of what has driven variability in those regions over the past century. This is not to say that climate change didn’t contribute to those cases, but their intensity owes to natural, not human, causes.”
And he concludes by quoting Dr. Harold Brooks in the New Scientist, who warns in an article concluding that there is no evidence to link tornadoes and global warming, against using local weather events as proof of global warming:
“Those who continue to talk in certain terms of how local weather extremes,” writes Brooks, “are the result of human climate change are failing to heed all the available evidence.”
Heedless? Climate scientists?
Naw.
Iowa’s in play.
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