There goes el nino!

Politicians like to pretend that climate is pretty straightforward… especially when their climate predictions benefit their pet projects or campaign fund-raising.  This year especially, they like to pretend that there is such a thing as ‘big oil’– a faceless giant, destroying the planet, unless the President of the US sweeps in to save the day by ‘kicking ass.’  Of course, only OUR asses will end up being kicked, through the double-whammy of higher energy prices (from cap and tax legislation), higher unemployment (from higher business taxes and other expenses that stifle growth), and higher taxes at the gas pump and on April 15th.    Funny how something so unpredictable– like climate– is so closely paired with something so predictable– like the current administrations love for government and tax revenue.

I came across this paragraph this morning from the Browning Newsletter:  

Amazing. It was the vanishing act that completely changes this year’s climate. The El Niño disappeared!

More Amazing. Last winter’s El Niño has already been one for the record books. It usually takes a year or more for the Tropical Pacific to gradually warm up from a cool La Niña to a balmy El Niño. Instead, last year the ocean flipped from one to the other in only three months. By June, the trade winds had weakened, the ocean waters had warmed and the globe began to experience typical El Niño weather.

Amazing continues. Now, against all expectations, the Pacific waters have cooled equally rapidly.

To say that this development is a surprise is an understatement. It was completely unexpected. Until mid-March, most oceanologists were expecting the Pacific to cool and the El Niño to fade out by June. Most models then predicted that the Pacific would remain neutral for the rest of the year. Instead, the temperatures plummeted and the El Niño was gone by the end of March. By the end of April, the temperatures had dropped from above average to below average. By now, the temperatures are -0.9°C (-1.6°F) below normal – technically cold enough to be classified as a La Niña if the cool temperatures continue.

For the full report, click here.

You’ll note that the consequences of this dramatic cooling will include more intense weather in some parts of the country and world, and less intense weather elsewhere.  It’s complicated.  It’s too complicated, unfortunately, for reporters to understand, so it will be ripe for picking by those with an agenda.  The violent weather will be blamed on global warming– even when the actual cause is global cooling in another part of the world. 

Don’t assume, just because someone has a microphone, that he/she knows more than you;  If you read the Browning Newsletter, I promise you that you will know more than any newscaster you’ll see on television.

How strange the world has become, when the top Google hits on a story about media lies and Leftist fear-mongering go to… CBS!   I saw the story on Fox, but CBS appears to have the ‘scoop’ about the EPA scientist of 30 years, Alan Carlin, being told to keep his report to himself, as it explained in policy wonk-speak that Global Warming is a myth.  I will get to what CBS reported, but a quick aside:  newspapers have tremendous power to shape opinion in part by choosing what NOT to wrote, what TO write,  and HOW to write it.  The power extends even further though– when printing a story from the wire services, newspapers can use whatever headline best fits the ‘facts’ they want others to learn.  So while most independent media use the headline, ‘EPA suppresses own scientists for raising doubts about global warming’, or ‘EPA covers up science skeptical of global warming’, the New York Times writes ‘Two EPA Staffers Question Science Behind Climate ‘Endangerment’ Proposal,’ and releases the story mid-day on a Friday, when nobody is likely to see it.  What a surprise.

You can read the report by Carlin for yourself, at least the draft report— don’t expect the EPA to spend time using the good fonts with this story!  The news is not new to those who truly follow the science– that global temps have decreased for 11 years now, and that arctic ice is growing, not shrinking– even as China adds billions of vehicles to their roads.  Per CBS:

After reviewing the scientific literature that the EPA is relying on, Carlin said, he concluded that it was at least three years out of date and did not reflect the latest research. “My personal view is that there is not currently any reason to regulate (carbon dioxide),” he said. “There may be in the future. But global temperatures are roughly where they were in the mid-20th century. They’re not going up, and if anything they’re going down.”

Carlin’s report listed a number of recent developments he said the EPA did not consider, including that global temperatures have declined for 11 years; that new research predicts Atlantic hurricanes will be unaffected; that there’s “little evidence” that Greenland is shedding ice at expected levels; and that solar radiation has the largest single effect on the earth’s temperature.

(Note– the solar radiation effect was the topic of a National Geographic article mentioned in an earlier post).

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward… and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be a independent review process inside a federal agency — and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document.

Alan Carlin, the primary author of the 98-page EPA report, told CBS News.com in a telephone interview on Friday that his boss, McGartland, was being pressured himself. “It was his view that he either lost his job or he got me working on something else,” Carlin said. “That was obviously coming from higher levels.”

E-mail messages released this week show that Carlin was ordered not to “have any direct communication” with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

“I was told for probably the first time in I don’t know how many years exactly what I was to work on,” said Carlin, a 38-year veteran of the EPA. “And it was not to work on climate change.” One e-mail orders him to update a grants database instead.

Wow.  Don’t you love the ‘openness’ of the Obama administration?