Isn’t it interesting when experts make grand predictions and then turn out to be wrong? For all of the rhetoric used by the drive-by legacy media, you’d think they’d be apologizing this year for doing so…. What am I talking…

I just want to point out that there were ZERO hurricanes to hit the U.S. this hurricane season (2006).

Link to Experts wrong again (Baklava)

I feel like blogging about scientific predictions today. The more I read about the history of science the more I believe that Mother Nature has a sense of humor. It seems that whenever some prominent spokesperson stands up and makes a politically correct statement about the number of hurricanes that will occur next year or some other difficult to forecast natural event, they are setting themselves as the straight man for Mother Nature. We all want to be gracious but having lived on the Gulf coast for eighteen years, I know that predicting hurricanes still has a lot of  guess work in it. You would think the head of NOAA would have more common sense than to publicly make these types of predictions. When you say,

“The 2005 Atlantic hurricane season is the busiest on record and extends the active hurricane cycle that began in 1995””a trend likely to continue for years to come.”

and the next year you have zero hurricanes hit the U.S. coast, you can slice yourself a big piece of humble pie. He obviously was paying too much attention to global warming politics. Most hurricane scientists believe that global warming plays a minor part in the science of hurricanes. Despite the attractiveness of the global warming argument the recent studies confirm that the temperature of the water is just one of many variables, its effect on the storm is complex, and it has limited effect. Cranking up the temperature does not necessarily result in more hurricanes. The zero hurricane season is a blessing in disguise for these scientists. Now they can go back to work on the science with less global warming distractions.

Do stalagmites grow from the ceiling or the floor of cave? Time is up ”“ they grow from the floor of caves (stalactites grow from the ceiling), but the key is that they grow over long periods of time. Some stalagmites are thousands of years old and if they are in just the […]

Link to Stalagmite Story

The folks over at World Climate Report have been very busy this month digesting recent climate research and presenting it in a readable form. For those of us who are more interested in the science rather than the politics, this makes for an interesting read. Most of the research papers they wrote about lend credence to the view that the global temperature has not been flat but has fairly wide flucuations in the past 10,000 years. If I am reading their article correctly, several different researchers confirm that it is likely that at multiple times in the last 10,000 years, we experienced temperature that exceeded today’s temperature.

Don’t Believe the Hype

Al Gore is wrong. There’s no “consensus” on global warming.

I feel like I am constantly being bombarded with global warming stories and my skeptic antenna is constantly tingling. The greater the volume for the argument, the more I doubt it. The volume is loud. My reaction to the global warming hype is just the way I am hard wired. For the most part, I get this “Deja vu all over again” feeling. Everytime I see someone writing in popular magazines or newspapers about a “consensus of scientific research”, I get worried. Then after a little research the “consensus” is not really a “consensus”. The “consensus” is that the climate is changing, that carbon dioxide levels are higher than in the past, and that carbon dioxide is not the only cause of global warming. There is considerable debate and continued scientific research on the impact of carbon dioxide on global temperatures. If Al Gore can say that scientists “don’t have any models that give them a high level of confidence” then the scientific debate is ongoing. The political and media debate on the subject is more perplexing. Sometimes I feel like I am living out a chapter in the book, “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds” by Charles Mackay.

As Richard Lindzen says in this Opinion Journal article it does not take much scientific digging into the science behind the articles to see the weakness of the global warming arguments. Global warming is a macro prediction based on climatic changes resulting from increases in one variable, carbon dioxide. Basically it is a very simple model. The increase in carbon dioxide raises global temperatures. Unfortunately Mother Nature has rarely been so accommodatingly simple so I doubt this would be the first time. Don’t get me wrong! There are some fascinating climatic changes going on what I call the micro level. In fact almost of the research is being done on this level. I find the World Climate Report a good read on climatic science. However, when someone says they can plot out the temperature for the last 2,000 years to an accuracy of 1 degree I tend to ignore them and focus on the interesting science based on more reliable facts.

The scary part of this over-simplification of climatic change is that the global climate maybe dramatically changing but carbon dioxide effect is playing a minor role. It is our human nature that we are much happier with a dire global warming prediction we can do something about rather than the possibility that we do not know what is causing global warming or even worse, we cannot stop it.

The fact that we can do something about carbon dioxide is the most alluring idea to politicians in this election year. It is an issue that Democrats must use to capture the minds of the voting population before the impact of higher oil prices ripples through our economy and changes our priorities on spending for energy conservation. Businesses have always kept a watchful eye on energy costs and frequently have lumped energy conservation and reduced emissions projects together in the same project. Considering how many Toyota Prius have been sold this year so do the consumers. For the same amount of miles driven, energy efficient cars emit fewer pollutants. Higher oil prices will change the behavior of both businesses and consumers much quicker and more effectively than any government program. Energy conservation will put a dent in the production of carbon dioxide. For politicians the political opportunity presented by global warming could be short lived.