The Global Joke
Monday, December 22nd, 2008 3:56 pm by NealGlobal warming is now entering the laughingstock phase. Read Hell Freezes Over:
On Friday, the Las Vegas Sun reported that eight inches of snow had hit the Las Vegas Valley. The 3.6 inches that had already fallen as of late Wednesday near McCarran Airport added up to the most snow recorded for the area in December since they began keeping records 70 years ago.
The white powder even dusted Malibu as a winter storm hit parts of California.
We commented recently on an Associated Press story claiming that, rather than being “evidence of some kind of cooling trend,” such events “actually illustrate how fast the world is warming.” But not everybody is convinced.
“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.
“The mean global temperature, at least measured by satellite, is 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.”
Speaking of rising sea levels, is Al Gore smarter than a fourth-grader? James O’Brien, emeritus professor at Florida State University who studies climate variability and the oceans, thinks not. “When the Arctic Ocean ice melts, it never raises sea level because floating ice is floating ice, because it’s displacing water,” he points out.
“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. . . . After the ice melts, the sea level didn’t go up in your glass of water. It’s called the Archimedes principle.”
Uh oh. O’Brien just utilized actual science in arguing that the GW claims are absurd. Doesn’t he know that science makes these lemming’s heads explode?