Eureka!
Fourth-grade science project flunked by panic-mongering, polemics-pandering AP and associated warmalists, say scientists citing the Archimedes Principle and various inconvenient facts. Cold does not = Hot. Down does not = Up. Floating ice, when it melts in the water it was displacing, doesn’t = rising water levels. FOX News:
“If the issues weren’t so serious and the ramifications so profound, I would have to laugh at it,” said David Deming, a geology professor at the University of Oklahoma who has been critical of media reporting on the climate change issue.
In the article, Obama Left with Little Time to Curb Global Warming, AP Science Writer Seth Borenstein wrote that global warming is “a ticking time bomb that President-elect Barack Obama can’t avoid,” and that “global warming is accelerating.”
Deming, in an interview, took issue with Borenstein’s characterization of a problem he says doesn’t exist.
“He says global warming is accelerating. Not only is it continuing, it’s accelerating, and whether it’s continuing that was completely beyond the evidence,” Deming told FOXNews.com.
“The mean global temperature, at least as measured by satellite, is now the same as it was in the year 1980. In the last couple of years sea level has stopped rising. Hurricane and cyclone activity in the northern hemisphere is at a 24-year low and sea ice globally is also the same as it was in 1980.”
Deming said the article is further evidence of the media’s decision to talk about global warming as fact, despite what he says is a lack of evidence.
“Reporters, as I understand reporters, are supposed to report facts,” Deming said. “What he’s doing here is he’s writing a polemic and reporting it as fact, and that’s not right. It’s not reporting. It’s propaganda.
“This reads like a press release for an environmental advocacy group like Greenpeace. It’s not fair and balanced.”
A spokesman for the Associated Press said that the news agency stands by its story. “It’s a news story, based on fact and the clearly expressed views of President-elect Barack Obama and others,” spokesman Paul Colford told FOXNews.com in an e-mail.
Standing by nonsense, distortion, obfuscation and polemical bias is what the AP does. More finger-wagging scientific fun:
Michael R. Fox, a retired nuclear scientist and chemistry professor from the University of Idaho, is another academic who found serious flaws with the AP story’s approach to the issue.
“There’s very little that’s right about it,” Fox said. “And it’s really harmful to the United States because people like this Borenstein working for AP have an enormous impact on everyone, because AP sells their news service to a thousand news outlets.
“One guy like him can be very destructive and alarming. Yeah it’s freedom of speech, but its dishonest.”
Like Deming, Fox said global warming is not accelerating. “These kinds of temperatures cycle up and down and have been doing so for millions of years,” he said.
He said there is little evidence to believe that man-made carbon dioxide is causing temperature fluctuation. “It’s silly to lay it all on man-made carbon dioxide,” Fox said. “It was El Nino in 1998 that caused the big spike in global warming and little to do with carbon dioxide.”
Other factors, including sun spots, solar winds, variations in the solar magnetic field and solar irradiation, could all be affecting temperature changes, he said.
James O’Brien, an emeritus professor at Florida State University who studies climate variability and the oceans, said that global climate change is very important for the country and that Americans need to make sure they have the right answers for policy decisions. But he said he worries that scientists and policymakers are rushing to make changes based on bad science.
“Global climate change is occurring in many places in the world,” O’Brien said. “But everything that’s attributed to global warming, almost none of it is global warming.”
He took issue with the AP article’s assertion that melting Arctic ice will cause global sea levels to rise.
“When the Arctic Ocean ice melts, it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it’s displacing water,” O’Brien said. “When the ice melts, sea level actually goes down.
“I call it a fourth grade science experiment. Take a glass, put some ice in it. Put water in it. Mark level where water is. Let it met. After the ice melts, the sea level didn’t go up in your glass of water. It’s called the Archimedes Principle.”
Very interesting. Raises … if you’ll excuse the expression … the question of why water levels have dramatically fluctuated, lo these many eons, amid climate change that took the pre-industrial, yea, pre-human Earth from ice age to swamp age and back again, repeatedly. The simple answer to that is, that ice-age ice wasn’t floating. It was sitting on top of continents. That’s my scientifically semi-literate guess, anyway. That would make it melting continental ice, not sea ice, that raised the water levels.
Original AP warmalism here.
Gateway on a CNN weatherman’s anti-warmalism.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:38 am Comments (5) on Thursday, December 18, 2008
5 Responses to “Eureka!”
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December 18th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
But when land bound ice melts . . .
December 18th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
[...] More… Jules Crittenden has today’s 4th Grader science news. [...]
December 18th, 2008 at 11:00 pm
… the land rebounds?
Cheers
December 19th, 2008 at 12:42 am
Umm, we have thirty inches of global warming all over the ground here in the interior Pacific Northwest. Free to a good home. We understand that the East Coast likes the color white. Think of all the polar bears that you could import.
December 19th, 2008 at 6:58 am
“I call it a fourth grade science experiment. Take a glass, put some ice in it. Put water in it. Mark level where water is. Let it met. After the ice melts, the sea level didn’t go up in your glass of water. It’s called the Archimedes Principle.”
I had a better idea. I poured some ice in a glass, added some gin, pretended there was some vermouth in it, threw the ice away, called it a martini, and drank the son of a bitch.
The result of the experiment: The sea level didn’t rise, and I’m a lot happier.
I call that the “If All the Ice is Going to Melt, I’m Going to Put It to Good Use Before It’s Too Late Principle”.