Unpacking Climate Lies

Much of the U.S. was frosted and frozen by bitter winter weather last week. But this is just further proof of manmade global warming, the media claim. Because even as America freezes, “most of the rest of the world is feeling unusually warm weather,” which is merely a “contradiction” that “fits snugly in explanations of what climate change is doing to Earth,” says the Associated Press.

Of course what doesn’t fit “snugly” is ignored. And there’s plenty of that.

For instance, we’ve been assured for decades by all the right people that Arctic ice will disappear due to man’s wanton combustion of fossil fuels. At a United Nations climate conference in 2009, Al Gore, always a gushing font of climate disinformation, said polar scientists had told him, according to CBS News, “that the latest data ‘suggest a 75% chance the entire polar ice cap will melt in summer within the next five to seven years.’”

A couple of months earlier, the BBC reported that “the Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as 10 years’ time,” basing this statement on the word of Peter Wadhams, a University of Cambridge “top polar scientist.”

But the reality is that in the middle of January 2024, “Arctic sea ice for this date stands at its highest level in 21 years,” says Climate Change Dispatch.

No, it’s not summer. It’s the dead of winter in the Northern Hemisphere. But this peak arrived immediately after Earth went through the “hottest” year on record. (It’s a meaningless claim, as our friend from Junk Science Steve Milloy has shown.) How could Arctic ice be so healthy after a year that was so warm we’d guess from all the media and political fuss that it broke thermometers all over the world?

Furthermore, Arctic ice levels for the summer months of 2023 don’t show enough of a difference from the long-term averages to be alarmed.

Another fear that is supposed to paralyze us – as well as convince us to surrender our liberties and dollars to the mountebanks who promise they can tame our savage climate – is the loss of land to the rising seas caused by global warming. The world’s biggest (and of course most important) cities, and the elites’ favorite tropical vacation spots, are on track to be flooded. (Didn’t Barack Obama’s very presence in the White House fix this)?

But reality and the global warming script simply aren’t in sync. Or as Roger Pielke Jr., a University of Colorado environmental studies professor, puts it, there’s “a large gap between narratives promoted in the media and real-world evidence.”

Pielke writes that “From 1985 to 2015 – a period when global sea levels increased by about 60 millimeters (about 2.4 inches) – the areal extent of global coastal land increased by almost 34,000 square kilometers (about 13k square miles), or about the size of Belgium, home to more than 11 million people.”

The additional terrain is due to “‘landification,’ or the emergence of new land area,” he says. He cites a team of Dutch researchers whom he says have “warned that popular anecdotes can present a misleading picture of global trends in changes in the earth’s surface from land to water and vice versa.”

The researchers themselves argue that “general conclusions cannot be drawn from a limited sample of case studies.” Rather, “planetary-scale monitoring is” necessary if we are “to understand (and disentangle) the causes of detected changes and their attribution to natural variability, climate change or man-made change.” 

Everything that proceeds from the mouths of the climate alarmists must be taken with a boxcar of salt. Truth has long been a casualty in their war on fossil fuels.

— Written by the I&I Editorial Board