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Friday, March 10, 2017

Scott Pruitt Causes Heads to Explode

The new Administrator of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, has just caused something close to mass suicide among a big chunk of the Washington liberal elites.  Pruitt actually said that he doesn't believe that carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are responsible for global warming and that measuring the effect of human activity on the climate is extremely difficult.  OMG!  The environmental crazies are in hysteria!  There's a scientific "consensus", don't you know!

Let's take a look at what Pruitt said.  And let's try to do this scientifically and rationally, not emotionally and hysterically.  Do atmospheric levels of CO2 really cause warming?  The only way to determine that is to compare warming with measured levels of carbon dioxide.  There isn't really a lot of data for climate analysis.  Temperature records only go back about 140 years.  Before that, there are some temperature records and some items like tree rings or ice cores that allow us to estimate temperatures, but those are rather inexact.  So what do the last 140 years tell us?  There was an overall warming trend during that entire period.  That is not surprising.  Earth had a mini-ice age from the 14th to the beginning of the 19th century.  It got bad enough that 1816 was known as the "year without Summer".  Not long after that, however, things started warming.  And how about carbon dioxide levels?  The levels of that gas really began rising with the widespread use of automobiles and other fossil fuel intensive activities.  This is generally accepted to have happened after World War II.  So the levels of carbon dioxide reached the level where they supposedly would cause warming in the 1950s with accelerating levels after that.  That's fine, except that the warming of the climate began seventy years earlier.  What that means is that there is no causal relation that could be shown here.  In other words, the overall data doesn't show that higher levels of carbon dioxide caused warming.

But there's more.  The supposed link between carbon dioxide and warming has been set forth by scientists in computer models.  Indeed, it is this batch of models that underlie the entirety of global warming theory.  We also know that during the last 20 years, the actual data on atmospheric temperatures around the world has proven that the models do not predict the observed temperatures.  That's a scientific way of saying that the climate models on which all global warming theory is based are WRONG!  Warming stopped; there has been a pause of nearly 20 years.  And before someone tells you that the pause isn't real, remember that we learned not long ago that some scientists actually created fake data to support that view and then gave the phony data to world leaders right before the Paris climate summit.

It's nice to know that we now have an Administrator at the EPA who understands reality rather than the liberal/environmental narrative of the moment.  America has to live in the real world.

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