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Freezing weather: Just another example of global warming? View Enlarged Image
Climate: Nothing makes fools of more people than trying to predict the weather. Whether in Los Angeles or London, recent predictions have gone crazily awry. Global warming? How about mini ice age?
The sight of confused and angry travelers stuck in airports across Europe because of an arctic freeze that has settled across the continent isn't funny. Sadly, they've been told for more than a decade now that such a thing was an impossibility — that global warming was inevitable, and couldn't be reversed.
This is a big problem for those who see human-caused global warming as an irreversible result of the Industrial Revolution's reliance on carbon-based fuels. Based on global warming theory — and according to official weather forecasts made earlier in the year — this winter should be warm and dry. It's anything but. Ice and snow cover vast parts of both Europe and North America, in one of the coldest Decembers in history.
A cautionary tale? You bet. Prognosticators who wrote the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, global warming report in 2007 predicted an inevitable, century-long rise in global temperatures of two degrees or more. Only higher temperatures were foreseen. Moderate or even lower temperatures, as we're experiencing now, weren't even listed as a possibility.
Since at least 1998, however, no significant warming trend has been noticeable. Unfortunately, none of the 24 models used by the IPCC views that as possible. They are at odds with reality.
Karl Popper, the late, great philosopher of science, noted that for something to be called scientific, it must be, as he put it, "falsifiable." That is, for something to be scientifically true, you must be able to test it to see if it's false. That's what scientific experimentation and observation do. That's the essence of the scientific method.
Unfortunately, the prophets of climate doom violate this idea. No matter what happens, it always confirms their basic premise that the world is getting hotter. The weather turns cold and wet? It's global warming, they say. Weather turns hot? Global warming. No change? Global warming. More hurricanes? Global warming. No hurricanes? You guessed it.
Nothing can disprove their thesis. Not even the extraordinarily frigid weather now creating havoc across most of the Northern Hemisphere. The Los Angeles Times, in a piece on the region's strangely wet and cold weather, paraphrases Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert as saying, "In general, as the globe warms, weather conditions tend to be more extreme and volatile."
Medicine: The FDA has reversed its approval of a widely used cancer drug approved in Europe to treat breast cancer on the grounds it doesn't provide a "sufficient" benefit. Let the terminally ill and their doctors decide. One of the blessings of blocking the omnibus spending bill was that it ...
The United States has been a world leader in many of the best ways possible. Our devotion to freedom and our tireless ingenuity have kept America in the vanguard of the global community. But unless we change our tax code, the U.S. is about to take the lead in a very unfortunate category. With ...
Net Neutrality: Federal raiders have seized the Web like an invading force captures a city. But a planned counterattack by lawmakers could liberate the Internet from its captors' iron grip. By a 3-2 party-line vote, the Federal Communications Commission approved Tuesday a regulatory ...
Security: James Clapper's ignorance of a major counter-terrorist success is less distressing than why he got his job as director of national intelligence: to "Obamacize" America's spy operations. Why was the nation's top intelligence official unaware in an ABC News interview this week that ...
Sometimes even small changes in process can have enormous symbolism. The incoming House Republicans, now in the majority, have been talking about keeping the House of Representatives out of Washington every third week during the new 112th Congress. It is hard to overstate the importance of this ...
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