Damn It's Hot Outside!

Now, I know in my last message of peace and love, I expressed concern about being the one-trick-pony that rants about nothing but the scam of the century (yea, global warming). But until another terrorist attack on our soil originates from the welcome mat we call the southern US border, it seems nothing else is filling the news broadcasts these days. Well, nothing else besides the nipple-shattering cold we are experiencing here in the northeast and ice storms in Texas.

Technically, this diatribe is not about global non-warming, but on how the media is trying to separate you from your cash by accepting global warming as fact - without proof of course. Take a look at the picture that comes with this rant. It was sent to me by a Thinker. It shows an ominous image of a nuclear power plant and comes with this opening paragraph:

WASHINGTON - Human-caused global warming is here, visible in the air, water and melting ice, and is destined to get much worse in the future, an authoritative global scientific report will warn next week.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070123/ap_on_sc/warming_climate_report

So why does a story from an "AP Science Writer" include this photo? Because the AP thinks you are bunch of IDIOTS! Here's the lowdown on that spooky-looking "smoke" coming from the top of the cooling tower from Pennsylvania:

The heat boils water, creating steam. The steam or water turns a turbine, which spins the shaft of a generator. Inside the generator, coils of wire spin in a magnetic field and electricity is produced. The steam condenses and changes back to water, and then is returned to the generator to be heated again, producing more steam. The white cloud you can see coming out of the top of a nuclear power plant isn't radioactive-it's just steam rising from the cooling tower.

http://www.energy.vt.edu/vept/education/Nuclear.asp

So the other day, I am watching Fox News, when the lovely Megan Kendall reported on Congressional grandstanding over a new report on the competition for research grants - I mean global warming. The quote was from Moonbat CA Rep Henry Waxman and is done to the best of my memory.

"It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public..."

So what's the first thing that pops into your mind? Well, if I was a non-thinker, it would be something like 'CONSPIRACY!! CHENEY!! HALLIBURTON!! BIG TOBACCO!! SCOOTER LIBBY!! THEY ARE OUT TO KILL US ALL!'

But I'm like you - I think. Thus what popped into my head was 'I wonder what part of his quote was not captured in that draconian, alarmist, video clip. A quick google search showed this result from the AP and was carried by USA Today and ABC NEws:

"It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change," said Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. Waxman is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee and a critic of the Bush administration's environmental policies, including its views on climate.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-01-30-congress-climate_x.htm
http://www.abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=2836034

Hmmm. So now we have gone from "mislead the public" to "mislead the public about climate change." A few more clicks and we get this story, ON THE SAME QUOTE, from the LA Times:

WASHINGTON -- The new Democratic chairman of a House panel charged today that the Bush administration tried to mislead the public about climate change "by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimizing the potential dangers."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-ex-climate30jan31,0,253239.story?coll=la-home-nation

So now, we have gone from "mislead the public" to "mislead the public about climate change" to "[mislead the public about climate change] by injecting doubt into the science of global warming and minimizing the potential dangers."

Well isn't that what science is all about? Being skeptical? Expressing doubt? Not calling something a 'fact' until it can be mathematically proven? It seems the LA Times has unwittingly done us skeptics a service in their single-minded effort to drive the alarmist message home. Next time you run into a global warming chicken-little, ask them this:

Explain exactly how we know the amount of CO2 produced by man and how much is produced from other sources.

Explain exactly how we know that CO2 leads to global warming - please cite an empirical source, not the knee-jerk greenhouse gas theory.

Explain how the temperatures that are used to illustrate warming over the last two centuries were taken, how accurate they are and how the measurements were used to create the data seen in the media - and why are they not listed with percentage margins of error?

Can we tell the exact temperature range for a given day/week/month/year, oh say, 400 years ago?

Explain how we can know the number and intensity of hurricanes for a given location before historical records and satellite imagery.

How was storm strength measured before the barometer was invented?

Explain exactly how you know sea levels are rising. Is it everywhere?

You get the idea. I could opine more, but I need to throw another log on the fire!