One Blue Marble Blog

Every so often at One Blue Marble, we’re going to present the Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award to the man or woman who does something really moronic during the previous week.

Truth to tell, every seven days brings dozens of potential winners… Politicians who put personal gain before the welfare of their constituents… Columnists who are easily duped by simplistic astroturfing campaigns… Oil executives who talk out of both sides of their mouths. Sadly, the permutations and combinations are endless.

Another truth is that it would be far too easy to give the Double Dumb Ass Award to an utter nim-cow-poop like Senator James Inhofe who — by most accounts — isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. We’re going to try to avoid naming the obvious names.

But frankly, I’m shocked to be writing this post. The first-ever winner of the Double Dumb Ass Award is a brilliant Canadian who I never expected to see on these pages.

In Canada, our national broadcaster — the CBC — offers an animated phone-in program every Sunday evening called Cross Country Check-Up, and it’s hosted by the erudite and personable Rex Murphy, a voluble Newfoundlander and Rhodes Scholar who can spin words that float across the airwaves like gossamer. I’ve always enjoyed the show.

Murphy is a right-wing iconoclast, but one that I can usually respect. And that’s why I was shocked after reading his most recent Globe & Mail column called Armageddon Theory: Vancouver. As always, it’s brimming with ten-dollar words and pointed jabs and the irascible Murphy wit. But here the highfalutin’ words are just a cheap conjurer’s tricks hiding a remarkable dearth of facts and a shoddy understanding of science.

Of course, you could lay all the Canadian journalists who don’t know a whit about science end-to-end, and create something that looks remarkably like the Trans-Canada Highway, but I simply didn’t expect Murphy to be among their number. I obviously haven’t been paying attention, as the following two paragraphs relate. Murphy is talking about the perpetual food crisis mentioned in the previous post.

Perpetual? I haven’t seen that word, outside of a prayer book, for 30 years. And as to being “confident” of what’s going to be going on in this busy world in 2080 or 2100, well, let’s not call that science. Let’s call it hubris on steroids. Has the global warming movement given up all pretense of rigor entirely? Because they’re now not only telling us what the weather will be like 30 or 50 years from now, they’ve tied their fanciful projections and ever more intricate modeling to lining up the causes for World War IV. They’re giving us the causes for events that haven’t happened yet. I think Newton would have frowned on that approach.

I tie it all to Vancouver. So much of what the alarmists promised was supposed to be happening now isn’t happening. So many events are running counter to their near-term projections, they’ve decided to go all Armageddon with their long-term ones, projections for a future that none of us will be around to check. So here’s the test: The colder it gets in Vancouver, the hotter the dubious scenarios for the globe a hundred years from now will be.

Murphy is only right about only the most basic of facts. Canada is having a cold winter, the second in a row after a bevy of mild ones. Mild, green Vancouver is being buried by the snow, and the Canadian Prairies have been locked in a deep freeze for weeks.

And none of that comes as a surprise to climate scientists in Canada, or anywhere’s else for that matter.

The planet is warming. This is an undeniable and incontrovertible fact supported by the 2,500 climate scientists who worked on the IPCC, and by the national academies of science of the world’s G8 nations. Over the last two or three years, we’ve seen Arctic Sea Ice retreating to its lowest volume in 125,000 years, and watched as a melting Greenland poured 21 Chesapeake Bays into the Atlantic. Thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies all point in the same direction. But Murphy is having none of it.

The simple explanation is that rising CO2 emissions aren’t the only factors at play in determining Canada’s climate. For the last two years, our weather has been driven by La Niña, the cold sister of the El Niño – Southern Oscillation. Scientists know all about it, and their computer models account for it.

When the influence of La Niña lifts, as the Hadley Centre in Great Britain expects will occur this year, we’ll start hearing about droughts and record-breaking heat waves once again. But I doubt that we’ll hear any five-syllable-word apologies from Murphy.

Rex Murphy is the unfortunate first recipient of the Climate Change Double Dumb Ass Award. (Hat Tip to Desmog Blog).