THE MORNING RANT: Periodic Update on the Climate Follies

No, the Ocean Waters Off of Florida Are Not 100+ Degrees

The climate misinformation being pumped out this summer by the media and purveyors of the climate hoax has reached a hysterical frenzy. Normal summer swelter from regularly recurring summer heat waves is being reported as “records” through deliberate conflation and misrepresentation of what is being measured. Surface temperatures and heat indexes in 2023 are being compared to historic air temperature records.

Well here’s another example of climate hyperbole from the past week. If you watch or read any mainstream media outlet, you probably heard about the all-time record, near-boiling water temperatures in the ocean off of Florida. Let me prepare you for a surprise. They’re being dishonest. Again.

South Florida Ocean Temperature Tops 101 Degrees Fahrenheit, Potentially a Record [CNBC – 7/25/2023]

A buoy in Manatee Bay, Florida, showed an ocean temperature reading of over 101 degrees Fahrenheit on Monday evening, the latest sign of record heat in the coastal waters.

It was not, in fact, “record heat” nor was it even “an ocean temperature reading.” It was a not-unusual-at-all summer reading from still water in a very shallow bay.

Drilling Down on 101-Degree Water Temperature Recording Near the Florida Keys [Fort Myers News-Press – 7/28/2023]

It's not even the record for Manatee Bay, the observing site where the data came from, said David Zierden, state climatologist at the Florida Climate Center in Tallahassee. The record for the Manatee Bay site is 102 degrees. It was set on Aug. 15, 2017. Going further back, Zierden said the site recorded a temperature of 100 degrees in 2010.

Do the media hysterics even know what an ocean is? On the other hand, they probably don’t care. They just want to instill fear by reporting that there is a weather apocalypse.

"Keep in mind that the observations in Manatee Bay are in shallow water in a closed-off cove with dark seagrass on the bottom," Zierden said. "I would not consider them a ‘sea surface temperature,’ as that implies open ocean."

Why Isn’t “Record Heat” Melting the Polar Ice Caps

Speaking of oceans and the climate hoax…

Back in 2009, the Prophet Al Gore of The Sustainable Organic Church of the Carbon Apocalypse stated that “Some of the models suggest that there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”

John Kerry, who is currently on the government payroll as Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, also made the same claim in 2009, but with even more absolute certainty: “In 5 years, scientists predict, we will have the first ice free Arctic summer.” You can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth in the clip below.

Well guess what, the polar ice cap is not anywhere near ice-free this summer, nor has it ever been in any summer since 2009. Below is a picture of the current ice extent, with ice still covering most of the Arctic Ocean in late July. It’s actually the greatest ice extent in 19 years, and the summer thaw is just about to end, so the ice cover is about to start expanding even further.

It’s funny, but I knew with 100% certainty 14 years ago that the North Pole would not be ice free in 2023, yet somehow I am an anti-science climate-denier while John Kerry and Al Gore are considered knowledgeable experts.

Most of the US is Still Waiting for Summer to Finally Heat Up

Unless you’re in the southwest part of the US, you are quite likely experiencing one of the coolest summers ever. In fact, for most of the US there has been an extreme absence of anything near record heat.

The graph below shows the percent of US weather stations that had hit 95°F by July 24, going back to 1895. 2023 is a record low, with only 43% of stations having hit 95° even once so far this year. By contrast, in 1931 91% of stations had hit 95° by this date, and the most recent 10-year moving average is 67% for July 24. In the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s, the 10-year moving average showed 80% of all stations hitting 95° by July 24.

This graph actually shows a decline over the past 90 years, indicating either an overall cooling trend, or that heat has started arriving later each summer.

One casual observation of mine is that the wild blackberries are ripening later than they used to where I live. Six years go I was picking blackberries for July 4, but in the past couple of years they haven’t started ripening until mid to late July. Fruit generally ripens earlier where it’s hotter, and later where it’s cooler, and this has been an exceptionally cool spring and summer in my part of Tennessee.

Graphic Climate Fraud

One way that the climate panic is being pushed is by the use of dishonest statistics and graphics.

The Lancet, a British medical journal, just published an article comparing excess deaths related to cold weather and to hot weather.

Excess Mortality Attributed to Heat and Cold: a Health Impact Assessment Study in 854 Cities in Europe

To their credit, they properly ascertain that there are many more deaths due to cold weather than to warm weather, but they attempt to convey the opposite finding, including this explicitly dishonest graph.

You’ll see that on the X-axis the increments for excess heat-related deaths is 10 per 100,000 persons whereas the increment for excess cold-related deaths is 50 per 100,000.

How dishonest is this representation? Graphically it would seem to indicate that countries such as Italy, Croatia, and Slovenia have more heat related deaths than cold-related deaths, because their red bars are longer than their blue bars. For the Total (second from bottom) the red and blue bars are roughly equal length, creating the impression that heat and cold-related deaths are approximately equal, when in reality the cold-related deaths are actually 5 times that of heat.

Bjorn Lomborg fixed the graph such that heat is also measured in increments of 50 per 100,000 and this is what it looks like when presented honestly.

One reason “climate deniers” like me know for a fact that the climate panic is a hoax is because those promoting it are so persistently dishonest. It’s also a reason I don’t believe a single hyperbolic thing promoted by the climatistas. Whatever the new headline is regarding climate, I just assume it’s false until I can learn what the true story is.

Tony Blair Sees the Political Winds Shifting Regarding Climate

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair is an intelligent person, with more savvy and wisdom than most political creatures. He has surveyed the political landscape and is now trying to distance himself from a man-made political crisis that is slowly evolving into a man-made humanitarian crisis. And no, it’s not climate change. The man-made crisis is the response to climate hysteria, specifically the adoption of Net Zero.

Public Must Be Spared Huge Burden of Net Zero, Says Tony Blair [The Telegraph – 7/27/2023]

Sir Tony Blair has warned against asking the public to do a “huge amount” to tackle climate change, saying Britain’s net zero efforts cannot solve global warming alone.

In an interview with the New Statesman magazine on July 18, two days before the Uxbridge by-election, Sir Tony said: “Don’t ask us to do a huge amount when frankly whatever we do in Britain is not really going to impact climate change.”

Tony Blair didn’t previously talk like this. At one time he sounded like Al Gore and most other leftist politicians. This is from 2006:

Blair Warns of Climate Change Tipping Points [The Guardian – 10/20/2006]

"We have a window of only 10-15 years to take the steps we need to avoid crossing catastrophic tipping points," Mr Blair says, in a joint letter with his Dutch counterpart, Jan Peter Balkenende.

Again, Blair may be a leftist, but he is a practical leftist, and he has a keen sense of what is brewing politically. Meanwhile, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is moving forward with outlawing the purchase of non-electric cars by 2030, and he is also still committed to eliminating all energy production that isn’t from wind, solar, or unicorn emissions.

Sunak, a Conservative Prime Minister, is willing to starve, freeze, and immobilize Britons to appease his angry climate God, while at the same time Tony Blair is scurrying away from the impending humanitarian crisis that Net Zero will bring.

There will be some interesting political re-alignment as the punishing effects of climate sharia start to be imposed.

Some Leftists Are Starting to Understand the Ecologic Horror of “Green Energy”

While it seems mind boggling to many of us, people who were once environmental zealots have now become passionate about despoiling nature and killing whales and raptors, all in service to their religion. Others on the left, however, aren’t quite as eager to see the entire planet paved over in solar panels and wind turbines.

Here’s another recent story which indicates that there are some on the left getting squeamish about the practical reality of imposing the green energy agenda.

We Must Stop Climate Solutions From Killing Biodiversity [Financial Times – 7/16/2023]

Sadly, the singular focus on solving climate change has led to the neglect of biodiversity. The alarming result is that many climate efforts inadvertently accelerate nature’s destruction. Take the huge need for solar farms. If not located properly, they will have a big impact on ecosystems and habitats. In Virginia, for example, more than half of solar facilities are being built on forested land rather than areas such as rooftops or parking lots. The state’s push for solar development could lead to the deforestation of nearly 30,000 acres annually.

Also important, those 30,000 deforested acres won’t provide a single kilowatt of reliable baseline electricity.

In California, 161 planned or operating utility-scale solar power developments were built on undeveloped desert with sensitive wildlife habitats. This has been a disaster for a wide range of plants and animals in the Mojave Desert, and the destruction is only going to expand.

Animal sacrifice is prominent in many primitive religious customs. Why would we expect anything different from the Climate Church?

Wind farms present a similar challenge. To meet net zero targets, wind electricity generation needs a massive build out. But in meeting the Biden administration’s admirable goal of deploying 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030, bird deaths from collisions could rise to more than a million per year.

Now I fully understand that when leftists such as those at the Financial Times criticize green energy, it’s not because they prefer carbon or nuclear energy instead. It’s because they want the proletariat to eat bugs and live in poverty until enough die off to reduce Earth’s population to a “sustainable” level. They are no longer pretending that they want to replace carbon energy with green energy. They simply want to reduce energy production. And as for carbon, you are the carbon they wish to reduce.

But it is still a pleasure to see the green energy “transition” being attacked from the left too.

[buck.throckmorton at protonmail dot com]

posted by Buck Throckmorton at 11:00 AM

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