More climate idiocy from Walter E. Williams

A tip of the dunce-cap to Walter Williams.

Walter E. Williams: Global warming is a religion

Let's dissect this little "gem".

"Today, the Earth is not covered by a mile of ice; a safe conclusion is that there must have been a bit of global warming. I don't know the cause of that warming, but I'd wager everything I own that it was not caused by coal-fired electric generation plants, incandescent light bulbs and SUVs tooling up and down the highways."

You're right, Walter-the-dunce; it was caused by carbon dioxide, the same thing that we're worried about now, because we've changed the atmospheric concentration of it by 80 parts-per-million or so.

"The very idea that mankind can make significant parametric changes to the Earth has to be the height of arrogance. How about a few questions because temperature is just one characteristic of the Earth. The Earth's orbit is another. If all 6.5 billion of us, all at once, started jumping up and down for a little while, do you think we'd change the Earth's orbit or rotation? Do you think mankind could change the direction and timing of the ocean's tides?"

OK, Walter-the-dunce, we already HAVE made "significant parametric changes to the Earth". That atmospheric concentration of CO2 I just talked about; that's one. Creating ozone depletion and the Antarctic ozone hole (which also affects Earth's temperature); that's two. Measurably changing Earth's total albedo due to land use change (forests converted to agriculture); that's three. Impounding significant amounts of freshwater in reservoirs; that's four.

Changing the Earth's orbit or the tides? What a well-constructed strawman that is.

"Is there anything that mankind can do to stop or start a tsunami or hurricane?"

As for the latter, the answer is: yes, we probably could.


Cloud seeding could tame hurricanes

"A few years back, Dr. Heidi Cullen, the Weather Channel's climatologist, advocated that the American Meteorological Society (AMS) strip their seal of approval from any TV weatherman expressing skepticism about the predictions of manmade global warming."

No, she didn't, Sir Dunce. She said this: "If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval." I.e., to earn the AMS Seal of Approval, a meteorologist should know the basics of climate change. She didn't say take it away from them if they already had it.

But there's more:

Hot Air: Why don't meteorologists believe in climate change?

Let's excerpt some of this:

"Except that it wasn’t. Coleman had spent half a century in the trenches of TV weathercasting; he had once been an accredited meteorologist, and remained a virtuoso forecaster. But his work was more a highly technical art than a science. His degree, received fifty years earlier at the University of Illinois, was in journalism. And then there was the fact that the research that Coleman was rejecting wasn’t “the science of meteorology” at all—it was the science of climatology, a field in which Coleman had spent no time whatsoever."

moving on

"The American Meteorological Society (AMS)—which formally endorsed the scientific consensus on climate change years ago, but counts many of the skeptics among its members, to its chagrin—has started including climate-change workshops for weathercasters in its conferences".

further down

"When asked whom they trusted for information about global warming, 66 percent of the respondents named television weather reporters. ... There is one little problem with this: most weathercasters are not really scientists. When Wilson surveyed a broader pool of weathercasters in an earlier study, barely half of them had a college degree in meteorology or another atmospheric science. Only 17 percent had received a graduate degree, effectively a prerequisite for an academic researcher in any scientific field."

but it gets better!

"But in my own conversations with skeptical meteorologists, I began to think that that earlier effort had helped create the problem in the first place. The AMS had succeeded in making many weathercasters into responsible authorities in their own wheelhouse, but somewhere along the way that narrow professional authority had been misconstrued as a sort of all-purpose scientific legitimacy. It had bolstered meteorologists’ sense of their expertise outside of their own discipline, without necessarily improving the expertise itself. Most scientists are loath to speak to subjects outside of their own field, and with good reason—you wouldn’t expect a dentist to know much about, say, the geological strata of the Grand Canyon. But meteorologists, by virtue of typically being the only people with any science background at their stations, are under the opposite pressure—to be conversant in anything and everything scientific. This is a good thing if you see yourself as a science communicator, someone who sifts the good information from the bad—but it becomes a problem when you start to see scientific authority springing from your own haphazardly informed intuition, as many of the skeptic weathercasters do. Among the certified meteorologists Wilson surveyed in 2008, 79 percent considered it appropriate to educate their communities about climate change. Few of them, however, had taken the steps necessary to fully educate themselves about it. When asked which source of information on climate change they most trusted, 22 percent named the AMS. But the next most popular answer, with 16 percent, was “no one.” The third was “myself.”

Brilliant. So, bottom-lining it, Cullen's suggestion that the AMS withhold its Seal of Approval from weathercaster dunces who don't know jacksh*t about climate change -- but who think they are experts because they read "Watts Up With That", which is managed by an equally dunce-level meterologist -- is tacitly endorsed by the AMS itself, which is endeavouring to educate weathercasters about climate change; the same AMS that endorses the basic scientific consensus on climate change and what's causing it. (Simply: us and our CO2.)

Back to the original dunce that started this, Walter E. Williams:

"Over long periods of time, there is absolutely no close relationship between C02 levels and temperature."

Dead-wrong, Walter. Here's a scientific paper that will bounce off your dunce cap, but anyway, I'm committed.

CO2 as a primary driver of Phanerozoic climate

"Contrary to what educators are brainwashing our children with, polar bear numbers increased dramatically from around 5,000 in 1950 to as many as 25,000 today, higher than any time in the 20th century."

So d*mn wrong, Walter, and elementary to refute your dunceness.

Are Polar Bear Populations Increasing?

"Today's polar bears are facing the rapid loss of the sea-ice habitat that they rely on to hunt, breed, and, in some cases, to den. Last summer alone, the melt-off in the Arctic was equal to the size of Alaska, Texas, and the state of Washington combined—a shrinkage that was not predicted to happen until 2040. The loss of Arctic sea ice has resulted in a shorter hunting season for the bears, which has led to a scientifically documented decline in the best-studied population, Western Hudson Bay, and predictions of decline in the second best-studied population, the Southern Beaufort Sea.

Both populations are considered representative of what will likely occur in other polar bear populations should these warming trends continue. The Western Hudson Bay population has dropped by 22% since 1987. The Southern Beaufort Sea bears are showing the same signs of stress the Western Hudson Bay bears did before they crashed, including smaller adults and fewer yearling bears."

Walter finishes his dunce column with this:

"Political commentator Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956) warned that "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and hence clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." That's the political goal of the global warmers."

Walter's aim is to lie about what he knows and to bloviate about what he doesn't know, so that the Rush Limbaugh listeners who listen to his demented musings continue to have their brains turned to pudding by the disinformation and misinformation that he constantly brings forth.

You're on my dartboard, Walter. Skewered repeatedly.