Yesterday, NOAA announces they are finishing updating America’s high-tech climate monitoring stations that are improving the historical climatology network. The change is to insure “very high accuracy” in data collection, and corrects misplacement of older monitors in artificially heated areas such as asphalt parking lots in urban centers. Today, the Isthmus Green Day eco-celebration features a speaker on global warming.
Lola and I decide to take a slow drive on back roads down to Oregon, WI, and then a tour through the UW Arboretum before heading home. There is a great deal of melt water everywhere which is consistent with the record snowfall of the preceding winter. Other than that the ecosystem looks pretty normal for this point of the year. I simply don’t see a planet in the need of human salvation and I am reminded of the following thoughts.
Lord Monckton’s address to the Cambridge Union Society: AL GORE says, “I believe this is a moral issue.” So it is. To “announce disasters” or “scary scenarios” or “over-represent factual presentations” in place of adherence to the scientific truth – that is a moral issue.
To let politicians insert data into official scientific documents; to alter those documents so as to contradict scientific findings; to manipulate decimal points so as to engender false headlines by exaggerating tenfold – those are moral issues.
To exaggerate by 2000% not only the atmospheric lifetime of a trace gas but also the effect of that gas on temperature; to reduce the magnitude of its predicted influence on temperature without reducing the predicted temperature itself – those are moral issues.
To claim scientific unanimity where none exists; to assert that catastrophe is likely when most scientists do not; to exalt theoretical computer models over real-world observations; to misstate the conclusions of scientific papers or the meaning of observed data; to overstate the likely future course of climatic phenomena by several orders of magnitude – those are moral issues.
To reverse the sequence of events in the early climate; to repeat that reversal in a propaganda book intended to infect the minds of children; to persist in false denial that past temperatures exceeded today’s; to state that climate events that have not occurred have occurred; to ascribe these non-events as well as specific extreme-weather events unjustifiably to humankind – those are moral issues.
To propose solutions to the non-problem of climate change that would cost many times more than the problem itself, if there were one; to advocate measures to mitigate fancifully-imagined future climatic changes when adaptation would cost far less and achieve far more; to ignore the real problems of resource depletion, energy security, bad Third World government and fatal diseases that kill millions – those are moral issues.
