ocean

For almost thirty years, I have taught climate science at three different universities. What I have observed is that students are increasingly being fed climate change advocacy as a surrogate for becoming climate science literate. This makes them easy targets for the climate alarmism that pervades America today.

Death Valley, California, is known as “the hottest place on earth.” But, if you hear the news that the “Hottest Place on Earth Has Record-Breaking Hot June”—when “temperatures exceeded average June temperatures by about 6 °F”—it might be easy to ascribe the heat to alarmist claims of climate change. While Southern California was experiencing power outages due to a heat wave, Death Valley hit 126 °F—though the previous June high was 129 °F on June 30, 2013, and Death Valley holds the highest officially recorded temperature on the planet: 134 °F on July 10, 1913.

Between January 9 and February 4 this year, 29 sperm whales got stranded and died on English, German and Dutch beaches. Environmentalists and the news media offered multiple explanations – except the most obvious and likely one: offshore wind farms.

The January-February 2016 issue of Audubon Magazine (Figure 1) proclaims “Arctic on the Edge: As global warming opens our most critical bird habitat, the world is closing in.” In reality, the magazine’s writers and editors have gone over the edge, with wildly misleading “reports” on the Arctic.

Earth, these authors tell us, has not “yet” reached this “this vanishing point of evolutionary history. But modern civilization already perturbs — if not dominates — various large-scale processes and components of the planet.”Dominates. They speak of a global “metabolism” of carbon and other elements, and of a global “anatomy” that is “largely a product of relentless socio-economic action.” Largely.

When fossil fuels — coal, oil and natural gas — burn, the major combustion products are carbon dioxide (CO2) and water vapor. Water doesn’t matter since it is already everywhere and adding a little bit more to the Earth won’t tip any balances. CO2, on the other hand is considered to be a great evil by those who believe in catastrophic global warming.

In March 2009 while the Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to fulfill a presidential campaign pledge to document that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment, a longtime employee, Alan Carlin, put out a 93-page report challenging the science being cited and the drift of the agency from its initial role to one captured by fanatical activists and alarmists, treating environmentalism more as a religion than based in science.

The hypothesis that “ocean acidification” will kill corals and shellfish due to higher levels of carbon dioxide dissolved in the sea is often used to stoke fear in the hearts of nature lovers.

Where is all the rapidly accelerating global warming that is supposed to be gripping the world? It’s not in the air. Atmospheric temperature readings show global temperatures have been flat…