If you can’t convince all the people with straight-forward advocacy, then conduct a poll and use the results to convince anyone who will listen. Lately, this tactic would seem to be AP’s preferred mode of operation. Abe Lincoln said it somewhat differently.
This time AP thought better of running out its climate guru Seth Borentein to unveil another of his well-worn stories regarding who's more at fault for weather-related disasters—mankind or Mother Nature—and assessing the blame for “man-made" climate change.
It should be realized (but generally is not) that AP, Reuters, and certain other MSM outlets have been gifted several million in grants from one or another of the George Soros-connected charitable foundations. The grants are intended to nudge public opinion in the direction of accepting the scientifically (unsupportable) position that man-made climate change is the principal underlying cause of adverse weather events in recent decades.
Detailed re-analyses of weather data going back to 1950 and earlier show that assertion is not true, but the fact does not deter alarmists from spreading their message of doom and gloom.
But if an AP survey is to be given due credence, then the propaganda campaign in the MSM may in fact be doing exactly what its purveyors intend. The MSM invests considerable time and effort to spread alarmist narratives, so that the casual reader should not be surprised to learn that the AP’s interviewees harbored the opinions they expressed.
Most of us tend to have short memories. Very few present-day Americans even recall hearing about the desperate period of the 1930s, when the Great Depression and “Dust Bowl” with its prolonged heat waves and continent-wide drought became routine across the United States.
Today’s weather announcers often do not report true temperature readings but a calculated “heat index” that factors in the effect of humidity and lack of wind, to come up with a subjective temperature referred to as “real-feel.” It is the number most of us will hear or see tonight on TV.
It should also come as no surprise that the AP pollsters were able to get the kind of public responses they quote. AP reporters also took trouble to include some candid musings of a “Republican”, whom they portrayed as poster-child for those abominable “climate deniers.”
The hard-core among alarmists habitually launch ad hominem attacks every time they label skeptics as “climate-deniers.”
The better-informed among the climate realists are no such thing. As a group, they firmly believe climate changes—and naturally. Climate has changed at its own pace—at times faster, at other times more slowly—ever since Earth first acquired its oceans and atmosphere.
These conscientious skeptics just don’t believe humans play an important part in the overall process. Anthropogenic effects are mostly confined to highly developed urban and industrialized areas, where the urban heat island effect and changes in land use practice play important roles—and where the majority of weather stations used to compile the record are actually sited.
The existing network of rural recording stations is comparatively scant to even non-existent in the more remote regions of the globe. This circumstance introduces a built-in upward bias despite efforts to compile representative temperatures for specific locations, let alone construct a meaningful world average.
The upshot is an unresolved disparity that exists between urban (ostensibly well monitored) areas and the remaining 99% of the Earth's surface. The dynamics of the atmosphere above our heads is overwhelmingly determined by natural influences, even now in the 21st Century, as it has been over the eons.
Notably the AP article quickly disappeared from the Newsmax queue sometime between 8AM on the day I first noticed it and 11 AM later the same morning. I wonder if a tsunami of protest didn't arrive at the editor’s desk, coincidentally.
The past summer’s heat wave in the US southwest is not unique. Heat waves have happened here and in other regions countless times in these United States and around the world. Lay people do not necessarily appreciate the expanse and dominance that natural variation plays in determining whether a location experiences blue-bird weather or events of the extreme kind. With enough media encouragement, we may be very much prone to mistake just another heat-wave for the coming Apocalypse.
Part of the problem is that our society likes to teach that we have an innate right to expect something like an idyllic Camelot when in reality most who live on the planet are subject to the vagaries of severe weather at some point in their lives—or from some other form of natural calamity. No presidential executive order or legislative statute can do much to prevent its happening.
Some knew better. The AP has attempted to cobble together a handful of quotes from the subjects surveyed, combining them with the opinions of an academic sociologist. But he has no particular expertise for judging the pros and cons of the climate-change debate, one way or the other.
A tendency to rely on the opinions of lay persons or academics not directly involved the fray is another example of how climate-change alarmists will attempt to force-feed their politically biases into an immature science through by promoting a popular consensus. No legitimate field of science has ever been constructed or allowed to mature on the sole basis of popular consensus.
Premature consensus is anathema to the proper function of the scientific method, whether in quantum mechanics or climate science.
William D. Balgord, Ph.D. (geochemistry), heads Environmental & Resources Technology, Inc. Middleton, Wisc.