Someone please help me out here. Everyone is yelling about fixing the “climate crisis”, but I still can’t find it – the crisis, that is.
There appears to be no significant change in either the frequency or intensity of hurricanes and in fact the last two seasons have been pretty quiet. Katrina hit land as a pretty standard CAT 3 and hurricane intensity isn’t measured by the measure of property damage at any rate.
Global “temperatures” appear to be dropping ( if that term has any meaning at any rate ) and the solar scientists are complaining about a quiet sun which is starting to show many of the same characteristics as the Maunder Minimum, which led to the “little ice age”. Well, that’s a crisis, I suppose, but not the same color as the present one.
Sea levels continue to rise a minuscule amount each year as they have since the last ice age when sea level was perhaps 400 feet lower than it is today. I just can’t see New York under water anytime in the 21st century at the present observed rates which don’t seem to be changing.
Even the oceans seems to be cooling a bit based on data from the new diving buoy system, but perhaps NOAA is cooking the data and we can’t trust them any more than we can trust NASA anymore.
The Antarctic Ice Pack continues to grow and is now larger than ever in the 30+ years we’ve been able to take highly accurate radar altimeter measurements. The Arctic Ice continues to expand and shrink annually as it seems inclined to do, and we note some pretty good sized volcanoes have recently been discovered on the Arctic Ocean floor which might be helping the shrinking part a bit.
Polar bear populations are at near record levels and seem healthy, and even I have seen them playing around on floating ice chunks in the Arctic summer. They are a terrestrial animal, after all, as anyone can see who visits the Churchill area in the summer and takes a polar bear cruise on one of their giant bear-proof buses.
Droughts and floods seem to be more strongly correlated with changes in ENSO and his friends than with a one degree temperature rise over the span of a hundred years, but maybe I’m missing something.
When I wrote the WE Campaign suggesting they take a closer look at things before falling off the turnip truck I immediately started receiving email bulletins from them referring to me as a “fellow campaigner”, so I guess I now know how they grew to be a “million strong”.
So, while hordes of folks continually call for Weapons of Mass Taxation to be hauled out to fight the “climate crisis”, I still can’t seem to find the crisis anywhere and note that the likely beneficiaries of carbon taxes and such will be the folks tolling the alarm.
As I said at the beginning: I’m having trouble locating the crisis, so I’m hoping some of the many experts here on this forum can give me a little guidance.
Jim Peden
Middlebury,
Vermont, USA
This comment posted by Jim Peden in this thread at popular blog realclimate.org was disallowed. I tend to think it is the alarmist scientists that are really in denial?
Jim Peden is Webmaster of Middlebury Networks and Editor of the Middlebury Community Network, spent some of his earlier years as an Atmospheric Physicist at the Space Research and Coordination Center in Pittsburgh and Extranuclear Laboratories in Blawnox, Pennsylvania, studying ion-molecule reactions in the upper atmosphere. As a student, he was elected to both the National Physics Honor Society and the National Mathematics Honor Fraternity, and was President of the Student Section of the American Institute of Physics. He was a founding member of the American Society for Mass Spectrometry, and a member of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. His thesis on charge transfer reactions in the upper atmosphere was co-published in part in the prestigious Journal of Chemical Physics. The results obtained by himself and his colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh remain today as the gold standard in the AstroChemistry Database. He was a co-developer of the Modulated Beam Quadrupole Mass Spectrometer, declared one of the “100 Most Significant Technical Developments of the Year” and displayed at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.