Yes, Houston, you do have a problem, and – as insensitive as it seems to bring it up just now – some of it is your own making.
Let’s be clear upfront. I unreservedly wish that all of your millions of citizens get safely through Tropical Storm Harvey, and the biblical-scale deluge and floods that are forecast to swamp your city in coming days.
But, as the self-styled “world capital of the oil and gas industry”, there’s a connection between rising global greenhouse gas levels and the extreme weather now being inflicted that some of your residents have understood for decades and had a hand in.
Actually, no, there is no connection at all. Obviously you wouldn’t expect an Environment Editor to know this. But there is no evidence whatsoever of any positive link between “climate change” and hurricane intensity.
On the contrary, the incidence of hurricanes in the US has actually decreased markedly since the global warming scare began:
But his efforts are being resisted at every turn by all those lying scientists, bent politicians, rent-seeking businessmen, and Soros-funded activist groups who insist: “What swamp? What crocodiles? What leeches? Nothing to see here!”
What the whistleblowing NOAA insider John Bates has just done is prove beyond reasonable doubt what some of us have long claimed: that from NASA GISS and NOAA across the pond to the UEA and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, the world’s leading temperature data sets have been hijacked by climate activists and abused to advance a political agenda.
Here at Breitbart we smelt a rat from the moment NOAA released its dodgy, “Pause-busting” study two years ago.
The thrust of Karl’s paper is this: that far from staying flat since 1998, global temperatures have carried on rising. It’s just that scientists haven’t noticed before because they’ve been looking in the wrong place – on land, rather than in the sea where all the real heat action is happening. And how did Karl et al. notice what everyone else has missed until now? Well, by using a specialised scientific technique called “getting your excuses in early before the Paris climate conference in December.” Essentially, this technique involves making adjustments to the raw temperature data (sound familiar?) and discovering – lo! – that the sceptics were wrong and the alarmists were right all along. Karl’s paper makes much of the fact that the methods used for gathering sea temperature data have changed over the years: in the old days it used to involve buckets; more recently, engine intake thermometers. Hence his excuse for these magical “adjustments”. Apparently (amazingly, conveniently), the measurements used since 1998 have been “running cold” and therefore needed correcting in a (handy) upward direction in order to show what has really been happening to global warming. Once you realise this – global warming turns out to be as real and present and dangerous as ever it was.
This reported on how NOAA had refused to give up its documents in response to a subpoena by Rep Lamar Smith (R-Texas) who also smelt a rat – and just needed some raw data to prove it.