For those too young to remember (such as Jim Hansen’s coal protesters in Washington this past week), Clara Peller, pictured above, started a national catchphrase with “Where’s the beef?” that even made it into the 1984 presidential campaign. Today, the Boston Globe asks: where’s the global warming?
Watch the original commercial that started the catchphrase. It seems applicable today. – Anthony
JEFF JACOBY
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | March 8, 2009
SUPPOSE the climate landscape in recent weeks looked something like this:
Half the country was experiencing its mildest winter in years, with no sign of snow in many Northern states. Most of the Great Lakes were ice-free. Not a single Canadian province had had a white Christmas. There was a new study discussing a mysterious surge in global temperatures – a warming trend more intense than computer models had predicted. Other scientists admitted that, because of a bug in satellite sensors, they had been vastly overestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice.
If all that were happening on the climate-change front, do you think you’d be hearing about it on the news? Seeing it on Page 1 of your daily paper? Would politicians be exclaiming that global warming was even more of a crisis than they’d thought? Would environmentalists be skewering global-warming “deniers” for clinging to their skepticism despite the growing case against it?
No doubt.
But it isn’t such hints of a planetary warming trend that have been piling up in profusion lately. Just the opposite.
The United States has shivered through an unusually severe winter, with snow falling in such unlikely destinations as New Orleans, Las Vegas, Alabama, and Georgia. On Dec. 25, every Canadian province woke up to a white Christmas, something that hadn’t happened in 37 years. Earlier this year, Europe was gripped by such a killing cold wave that trains were shut down in the French Riviera and chimpanzees in the Rome Zoo had to be plied with hot tea. Last week, satellite data showed three of the Great Lakes – Erie, Superior, and Huron – almost completely frozen over. In Washington, D.C., what was supposed to be a massive rally against global warming was upstaged by the heaviest snowfall of the season, which paralyzed the capital.
Meanwhile, the National Snow and Ice Data Center has acknowledged that due to a satellite sensor malfunction, it had been underestimating the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles – an area the size of Spain. In a new study, University of Wisconsin researchers Kyle Swanson and Anastasios Tsonis conclude that global warming could be going into a decades-long remission. The current global cooling “is nothing like anything we’ve seen since 1950,” Swanson told Discovery News. Yes, global cooling: 2008 was the coolest year of the past decade – global temperatures have not exceeded the record high measured in 1998, notwithstanding the carbon-dioxide that human beings continue to pump into the atmosphere.
None of this proves conclusively that a period of planetary cooling is irrevocably underway, or that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are not the main driver of global temperatures, or that concerns about a hotter world are overblown. Individual weather episodes, it always bears repeating, are not the same as broad climate trends.
But considering how much attention would have been lavished on a comparable run of hot weather or on a warming trend that was plainly accelerating, shouldn’t the recent cold phenomena and the absence of any global warming during the past 10 years be getting a little more notice? Isn’t it possible that the most apocalyptic voices of global-warming alarmism might not be the only ones worth listening to?
There is no shame in conceding that science still has a long way to go before it fully understands the immense complexity of the Earth’s ever-changing climate(s). It would be shameful not to concede it. The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”
But for many people, the science of climate change is not nearly as important as the religion of climate change. When Al Gore insisted yet again at a conference last Thursday that there can be no debate about global warming, he was speaking not with the authority of a man of science, but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot. Dogma and zealotry have their virtues, no doubt. But if we want to understand where global warming has gone, those aren’t the tools we need.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
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Tenney Naumer (05:23:44) “use natural within bounds variability in the weather to make absurd claims about the climate”
How about calling warming from the El Ninos of the 90s ‘global warming’, hmm?
Indeed. Where is the heat?
Where are the cataclysms and divers alarums that the media has been thick with? Was all the fuss only to sell newspapers?
And the band played on!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article5853261.ece
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/theroyalfamily/4952918/Prince-Charles-we-have-100-months-to-save-the-world.html
Tenney Naumer (05:23:44) : Way to go — use natural within bounds variability in the weather to make absurd claims about the climate — soooooo typical of you flat earthers.
Well, those of us with our feet firmly planted on old Mater Terra — be she flat or otherwise — are claiming that ALL of the weather we’ve been seeing is natural, within bounds variability. Nice of you to agree.
Tenney, it is fine that you have joined our conversation. I would suggest that you begin reading basic books on chemistry, atmospheric science, how our solar system works (like how the spin of Earth affects weather producing winds and oceanic currents), then progress to journal articles. You will need to develop a rather large vocabulary so that all the acronyms used here will make sense. If you are not in to reading basic books, there are lots of websites, with pictures, that will help explain all of these things that have major effects on our weather pattern variations, in the short AND long term. If you do, your posts will be taken more seriously.
Tenney Naumer (05:23:44) : Way to go — use natural within bounds variability in the weather to make absurd claims about the climate — soooooo typical of you flat earthers.
Tenney. Pot. Kettle. Black.
Here’s a list of some of the thousands of weather occurances that have been touted as caused by AGW
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
Tenney Naumer (05:23:44) :
Dearest Tenney,
In your posts on this topic and on the George Wil controversy, you use the debating techniques of a zealot. First, you try to change the topic, then you accuse people of idiocy, you proclaim their false beliefs, and finally you insinuate mentall instability for their failing to follow your faith-based belief system.
Jacoby and Will wrote about people like you the posted articles in this way:
“…but with the closed-minded dogmatism of a religious zealot.”
“It is clearly for some people a surrogate religion. It’s a spiritual quest. It offers redemption.”
I am writing for myself and not Wattsupwiththat or any other posters: Please label your “feelings” based thoughts as such, and try to use facts to buttress your other points.
I get tired of people giving me their feelings; please give me your philosophy, your logic, your facts, or quotations from others. Lose the faith-based zealotry.
Sincerely,
markm
I propose that we all share what we have learned about the AGW scam with everyone that we are able to in order to use a grassroots movement to change the course of our respective governments.
Here in Texas I have put together a PowerPoint presentation of about 45 minutes duration where I cover the main points of the Global Warming debate (thanks mostly to WUWT, ICECAP, and CLIMATE AUDIT sites and contributors). I have shown it to several groups so far and it has been very effective in changing people’s minds. Mind you I have no stake in this debate (I am in the military) other than a quest for truth and I will never recieve any renumeration for my efforts. Next month I will show it to a group of over 200 people and I will not stop until AGW or ACC (anthropogenic climate change) is no longer used as tool/excuse for governments to control people.
Tenney wrote:
“Way to go — use natural within bounds variability in the weather to make absurd claims about the climate — soooooo typical of you flat earthers.”
Besides that being the flat-iron griddle calling the flat-iron black frying pan black….
WHO is saying the earth is flat here??? Nobody here.
We all know which public bozo made that comment about anyone who dares to actually use their brains to question the current cult-religion of AGW.
Yeah…that same individual, while he was Vice President, got LOST in the woods (LMAO)…and the secret service had to come and find him.
Maybe we can blame DIM individuals such as Gore, et.al. on the DIMMING SUN. Who knows.
But back who is REALLY, metaphorically, calling the earth “flat”:
Those that participate in what will go down in history as being the greatest scientific HOAX, the greatest bastardization of the Scientific Method, and the greatest GUTTING of the scientific public trust and goodwill since the days of the Spanish Inquisition.
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Really? I’d really like to know what virtues they might have. I can’t think of any.
Gripegut/Ryan Welch (08:48:27) :
I would really like to see your PowerPoint presentation.
Hmmm….I’m not going to be in Texas soon. Oh well.
markm
The UK Met Office admits that there has been a recent hiatus in the accelaration of global temperatures but states that the last 11 out of 13 years have been the hottest for over a century.
Watt (sorry) do you say to that?
Ryan please email me as to how I can obtain a copy of that Powerpoint. I will pay for a coppy. (Sorry to momentarily interrupt the thread here). My email sharkhearted@gmail.com
Back to the article at hand…the quote from the Boston Globe I loved the most:
“The climate models on which so much global-warming alarmism rests “do not begin to describe the real world that we live in,” says Freeman Dyson, the eminent physicist and futurist. “The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand.”
Case in point. If I had a nickel for every snowstorm the GFS weather model had cooked up for Coastal Virginia, I would be rich, and we would be a coastal ski resort (well, that is, if we had hills and snow and cold LOL).
But that’s just it. Our models….even though they valiantly try, can not even extrapolate correctly into the near future.
Well how in the Sam Hill then, can we even BEGIN to rely upon climate models…that try to predict further??
Chris
Norfolk, VA
Tenny reminds me of local alarmist on our local blogs.
The guy here played the same games.
He crticized skeptics with the “weather is not climate” bromide but when I googled him I found a piece he wrote that attributed a heat wave in France and Hurricane Katrina to AGW.
Over and over again we see hypocricy and dishonesty in the AGW proponents pitch.
Tenny is a poster child for this approach.
That was one sound, kind, sensible, truthful, descriptive article.
Every day I worry about the freedom of speech, and future for Science, that are threatened by the current muzzling, and what I feel is racism, targeted at various luminaries in Climate Science. Courtney, Monckton and Morner debated recently at St Andrews University (see ICECAP) with warmists, and they were glad to win the debate, because as they said, climate skepticism is just not familiar to that generation.
I am looking for some grant money. (Because its all about the $$$, right?)
Any modelers out there care to create a model to try to predict the behavior of climate scientists that are off the deep end about AGW??
Maybe try and predict when ex-scientist / current religious and social activist James Hansen will say or do the next stupid thing??
JimB (21:57:01) wrote:
Just to go the paper’s page, find his column, and read the responses. If I were him, I’d have someone else start my car each day.
I grew up in the suburbs of Boston, across the street from one Andy Bonanno. Northeasterners will recognize that the word “Bonanno” never appears in print without “crime family” right after it. Andy “owned a laundry” but never seemed to go to work.
One of his daugthers, Lulu (I am not making this up) got a brand-new 1964 T-bird for her 16th birthday, and would drive me and my bother to school once in a while. She looked exactly like Nancy Sinatra, chain-smoked Salems with one languid arm dangling it out the window, wore dangerously short skirts and a half a bottle of perfume a day. Her blonde hair brushed the headliner of the T-bird and she took eye-liner lessons from Mo-town album covers. I do believe she could “snap” her gum, but I may be getting her confused with Marissa Tormei, it’s been a while. In a possibly ironic twist Lulu married a state trooper.
JimB, I knew The Bonannos. I was friends with the Bonannos. Clearly, I am still in awe of some of them. AGW folks, JimB, are NOT Bonannos.
The worst thing Jeff Jacoby needs to worry about is being bitch-slapped from behind by an over-caffeinated AGW acolyte. The Greenie better be careful though, if he swings too hard he may fly out of his Birkenstocks.
Hey, I resemble that remark. I had my birkenstock days. Still have my birkenstocks with cork bottoms that I would liberally ;^) coat with Elmers glue to keep them from disintegrating in the Willamette Valley rain. And I am right now severely over-caffeinated with Palermo blend dark roast.
Didn’t you guys get the memo? It’s in the Pipeline! Someone just forgot to open a valve, that’s all.
There’s a valve? Where? My boyfriend would really like to know where the valve is so that I can warm my tush before getting into bed with him.
PamelaGray
OK you caught me. It was a trap for an unsuspecting AGW person strolling-by in cyberspace to induce a bitch-slap of my own.
I myself am wearing Birkenstocks (which is how I knew how to spell Birkenstock) and I’m on my third cup of Starbucks French Roast made from the bean. Listening to Zydeco on a tube amp in my shop with doors flung open and the ceiling fan blasting away. It’s about 78 in here right now, rain clouds on the horizon. Just finished the Sunday Daily Worker, er, NYT. Leftists somehow always get the wrong signal about me. Do you think it’s the beard? Maybe the Che t-shirt. I guess they don’t understand irony.
“Spencer Atwell (09:04:04) :
The UK Met Office admits that there has been a recent hiatus in the acceleration of global temperatures but states that the last 11 out of 13 years have been the hottest for over a century.”
It certainly is nice of the UKMET to FINALLY at least admit there has been a recent “hiatus”….especially since they have been eating humble shepherd’s pie (all be it frozen because it was left outside) about their winter forecast of 08-09 for Western Europe to be mild.
So the next time a bureaucra-science organization such as the UKMET or NASA spouts forth politically-charged data, take it ALL with a grain of salt: Many of the brilliant scientists who work for those organizations are muzzled by whatever New-speak policies they have to abide.
The UKMET has egg (albeit frozen) on their faces with that dismal bust of a winter forecast and so they have no room to prognosticate AGW at this point, especially in light of the fact that there is countervailing data which points to the 1930’s as actually being the warmest in a century.
And even if the foregoing fact is found to be incorrect…. even so there are numerous forcings (solar, oceanic, and some scientists even say cosmogenic i.e. attributing the huge GRB of 1998 which helped to amplify the temperature spike and Super El Nino of that same year)…all of those contribute and line up to perhaps amplify the high temps of the past decade.
I mean combine the super ENSO event of 1998, along with both phases of the PDO and the AMO in warm (that is changing as we speak),
…along with abnormally high solar activity in the past 50 or 75 years (and that is changing as we speak), along with perhaps some small component of anthropogenic forcing (and I say small….not tipping point!)….
combine that with the major loss of temparature reporting stations in the former cold portions of the Soviet Union…..as well as the abnormally high number of temperature measuring stations in localized “heat islands” in our own country (as Anthony has so painstakingly helped to point out)…
…combine that with what I would like to call the PSYCHOLOGICAL FORCING of politically-driven organizations like NOAA or the UKMET….
….and we get what is rubbish the UKMET continues to spout forth.
And they can continue to talk all they want to about the acceleration of temps and Mann’s hockey stick AD NAUSEUM…
(while the Russian scientists are preparing for the OPPOSITE….and what they already know best!)…
….until it’s TOO LATE for the American and British hockey teams…as their hockey sticks and the pucks and the players who are Mann, Gore, Hansen, Holdren, et al…..are all frozen solid to the ice!!
Chris
Norfolk, VA
A reminder to all the rational readers and commenters here.
Mr Jacoby is probably getting a lot of “heat” for his article; he just might appreciate some email support if you are so inclined
jacoby@globe.com [as shown above].
And their Birkenstocks…frozen in the ice too….
Damn….I have a pair.
Oh well, I guess I am a “greenie” in the right places…as my WUWT handle here suggests. 🙂
Chris
MarkM (08:59:40) :
“I would really like to see your PowerPoint presentation.”
Send me an e-mail to ryan.scott.welch@ng.army.mil and I will send you a disc (the presentation is 9 GB). I am of course open to any critique that can be offered. I will not accept any money for this.