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Fri 30 May, 2003 08:44 am
Global warming: The French connection
By Ann Coulter
Posted: May 28, 2003 - © 2003 Universal Press Syndicate
Inasmuch as June is around the corner and it's still winter, it is time to revisit the issue of "global warming." A sparrow does not a spring make, but in the Druid religion of environmentalism, every warm summer's breeze prompts apocalyptic demands for a ban on aerosol spray and paper bags. So where is global warming when we need it?
In 1998, President Clinton denounced Republicans for opposing his environmental policies, citing Florida's inordinately warm weather: "June was the hottest month they had ever had - hotter than any July or August they had ever had." This, after the Senate rejected the Kyoto Treaty by the slender margin of 95-0. In fact, all the world's major industrial powers initially rejected the treaty, including Japan. That's right: Even Kyoto rejected Kyoto.
That same year, CNN's Margaret Carlson remarked that when her neighbors experienced temperate weather at Christmas, global warming was the word on everyone's lips. Adding to the world's supply of hot air, she said global warming was the big sleeper issue.
Well, this year, Washington, D.C., had the coldest February in a quarter-century. What are the scientific conclusions of Ms. Carlson's neighbors now? In a single day in February, New York got its fourth-deepest snowfall since 1869. Baltimore got more snow in February than in any other month in recorded history. I wish there were global warming.
In 1995, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produced a computer model purportedly proving "a discernible human influence on global climate." According to the U.N., there was not enough evidence to determine if Saddam Hussein was a threat, but the evidence is in on global warming.
The key to the U.N.'s global warming study was man's use of aerosol spray. You have to know the French were involved in a study concluding that Arrid Extra Dry is destroying the Earth. In a world in which everyone smelled, the French would be at no disadvantage. Aerosol spray. How convenient.
According to global-warming hysterics, global warming would begin at the poles, melt the ice caps, and then the oceans would rise. On the basis of such fatuous theories, in August 1998, the host of NPR's "Science Friday," Ira Flatow, told his listeners to look out their windows and imagine the ocean in their own back yards. Explaining that receding glaciers in Antarctica would dramatically lift sea levels, he warned that their grandchildren could be "hanging fishing poles out of New York skyscrapers," thus qualifying as the world's all-time greatest "fishing story."
Since then, evidence disproving "global warming" has been pouring in. God knows how many trees had to be sacrificed to print new data refuting global warming.
In January 2002, the journal Science published the findings of scientists who had been measuring the vast West Antarctic ice sheet. Far from melting, it turns out the ice sheet is growing thicker. The researchers were Dr. Ian R. Joughin, an engineer at the jet propulsion laboratory of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena, Calif., and Dr. Slawek Tulaczyk, a professor of earth sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
About the same time, the journal Nature published the findings of scientist Peter Doran and his colleagues at the University of Illinois. Rather than using the U.N.'s "computer models," the researchers took actual temperature readings. It turned out temperatures in the Antarctic have been getting slightly colder - not warmer - for the last 30 years.
The chief scientist for Environmental Defense, Michael Oppenheimer, responded to the new findings by urging caution and warning that "there is simply not enough data to make a broad statement about all of Antarctica." That's interesting. We didn't have to wait for more data when lunatics curtailed the use of nuclear energy in this country on the basis of the movie "The China Syndrome." That was hard scientific evidence.
We didn't wait for more data when DDT (dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane) was banned on the basis of Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring," which brainwashed children into believing DDT would kill all the birds. American soldiers in World War II were bathed in DDT. Jews rescued from Nazi death camps were doused in DDT. It was a miracle invention: Tiny amounts of DDT kill disease-carrying insects with no harm to humans, protecting them from malaria, dengue and typhus. But in 1972, the U.S. banned one of the greatest inventions in modern history.
Now environmentalists are in a panic that African nations will use DDT to save millions of lives. Last year, 80,000 people in Uganda alone died of malaria, half of them children. The United States and Europe have threatened to ban Ugandan imports if they use DDT to stop this scourge. Environmentalists would prefer that millions of Africans die so that white liberals may continue gazing upon rare birds.
Liberals don't care about the environment. The core of environmentalism is a hatred for mankind. They want mass infanticide, zero population growth, reduced standards of living and vegetarianism. Most crucially, they want Americans to stop with their infernal deodorant use.
Wow, to think DDT is actually good for us! Thank you, Ann Coulter. I'm going to go home now and douse myself in the stuff--I've been feeling a little under the weather lately. I wonder if I can use another pesticide in case DDT is hard to access?
D'artagnan & DDT
D'artagnan, I will try to remember a very old joke about DDT.
The scientist that developed DDT was meeting resistance to the chemical from other scientists who feared adverse long time effects. The scientist became frustrated and call a news conference during which, he announced, he would prove the DDT was safe for humans and other life forms.
Before a group of reporters, he filled a glass with pure liquid DDT and proceeded to drink the entire contents. The room was silent as the assembled reporters waited to see if the scientist would fall over dead.
When nothing happened, a reporter approached the scientist to congratulate him for his courage when he noticed that the scientist's pants appeared to be unzipped. He leaned over and whispered the news to the scientist. They both looked down and discovered, to their astonishment, that the scientist's fly had died.
---BumbleBeeBoogie
It's freezing here. We had all of two days of warm weather all year so far. Bring on the global warming, please!
By the way, even if the global warming really takes place, it may have nothing to do with human activities and be a result of the multi-millennial climate cycles of the planet Earth. I want to give a link to one of
my previous postings on the issue
I recently heard on NPR (a source I'm sure Ann Coulter would never consider accurate) that the glaciers in Glacier National Park are shrinking dramatically. Seems like evidence of something, no?
More reliable, at least, that "Gee, it's been really warm/cold lately, must mean global warming is/isn't happening..."
Maybe we should ignore the fact that Mrs. Coulter was an author of the article (I know that many of the A2Kers are not her active fans) and refer to different scientific versions regarding climate changes, that are very far from being uniform and monosemantic?
Why is Lake Michigan so low? Where has the water gone?
D'artagnan
D'artagnan
Poor Ann Coulter must have had a cold day and confused it with an ice age.
Anyone who did five minutes of research would find that aerosol sprays haven't contained greenhouse gases for twenty years, and are not part of any treaty on climate change.
Many scientific studies do, in fact, predict that the Antarctic ice sheet will grow thicker as a result of global warming. Sea level rise will be due to melting of glaciers in Greenland and the mountains, and the possible slide of the West Antarctic sheets into the ocean.
BBB
Hey, he's no Ann Coulter, but here's a little something from Richard Lindzen and friends that might add to the discussion:
Quote:Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?
Richard S. Lindzen, Ming-Dah Chou, and Arthur Y. Hou
ABSTRACT
Observations and analyses of water vapor and clouds in the Tropics over the past decade show that the boundary between regions of high and low free-tropospheric relative humidity is sharp, and that upper-level cirrus and high free-tropospheric relative humidity tend to coincide. Most current studies of atmospheric climate feedbacks have focused on such quantities as clear sky humidity, average humidity, or differences between regions of high and low humidity, but the data suggest that another possible feedback might consist of changes in the relative areas of high and low humidity and cloudiness. Motivated by the observed relation between cloudiness (above the trade wind boundary layer) and high humidity, cloud data for the eastern part of the western Pacific from the Japanese Geostationary Meteorological Satellite-5 (which provides high spatial and temporal resolution) have been analyzed, and it has been found that the area of cirrus cloud coverage normalized by a measure of the area of cumulus coverage decreases about 22% per degree Celsius increase in the surface temperature of the cloudy region. A number of possible interpretations of this result are examined and a plausible one is found to be that cirrus detrainment from cumulus convection diminishes with increasing temperature. The implications of such an effect for climate are examined using a simple two-dimensional radiative-convective model.
The calculations show that such a change in the Tropics could lead to a negative feedback in the global climate, with a feedback factor of about -1.1, which if correct, would more than cancel all the positive feedbacks in the more sensitive current climate models. Even if regions of high humidity were not coupled to cloudiness, the feed-back factor due to the clouds alone would still amount to about -0.45, which would cancel model water vapor feedback in almost all models. This new mechanism would, in effect, constitute an adaptive infrared iris that opens and closes in order to control the Outgoing Longwave Radiation in response to changes in surface temperature in a manner similar to the way in which an eye's iris opens and closes in response to changing light levels. Not surprisingly, for upper-level clouds, their infrared effect dominates their shortwave effect. Preliminary attempts to replicate observations with GCMs suggest that models lack such a negative cloud/moist areal feedback.
(bold mine)