by William Thomas

(See Illustrated version here)

Feeling the heat? How about some Coolers?

Not the drink.

The cult.

You know. Folks like Alex Newman, who in August 2013 slammed “wildly inaccurate supposed 'climate models'… that predicted major warming based on increasing CO2 levels.”

Computer programs failing to factor seesawing ocean temperatures known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation had slightly overestimated the rate of 1998-2012 warming, which began with an extremely warm year and the strongest El Niño yet recorded and ended in somewhat less warm years of reduced El Niño activity. The corrections due to El Niño fluctuations “were in the range of a few hundredths of a degree” and did not affect the overall upward warming trend, Earth scientists point out. There was no “warming hiatus”. [Real Climate June/15]

Temperature records everywhere were still being torched. In late July 2013, China’s meteorological center issued a nationwide “Red” temperature alert for 14 straight days as an ocean “heat dome” stalled off the China coast, cooking Shanghai at 105ºF. High humidity made record temperatures lethal as residents fried eggs atop manhole covers. [Robert Scribblers Aug 6/13; Washington Post Aug 8/13]

“The decade of slowdown has still seen the warmest years on record, with 2005 and 2010 both hotter than 1998,” climate modeller Stuart Corney pointed out. “The first decade of the 21^st century was the warmest decade on record.”

The second is growing even hotter. As climatologist Matthew England warned of the next swing in Pacific variability causing “accelerated surface warming”, the carbon-amped PDO teeter-totter was already sending a fresh blast of heat through Equatorial Pacific waters. Raising sub-surface temperatures 6°C to depths of 400 feet across hundreds of miles, this monster Kelvin Wave raised already anomalous land temperatures another 1.8°C from New Guinea to the Central American coast.

Now a second Kelvin Wave is surging still more heat energy into the panfried Pacific. If a forecast Super El Niño starts pumping heat from that vast ocean radiator into the already overheated atmosphere this fall, global warming could ratchet up to levels imperilling denial. [Nature Climate Change July 20/14; Robert Scribbler Apr 9/15; Washington Post May 21/15; Weather Network May 22/15]

FREEZING HOT?

While waiting for looming hell on Earth to freeze over, the Coolers insist that global warming somehow stopped in a very warm 1998. “2012 was among the coldest so far this century,” Newman asserts. [The New American Aug 1/13]

This sounds cool. Except 2012 was a scorcher. The first eight months were the hottest ever recorded in the continental United States. At least, according to the National Climatic Data Center, which admittedly only examines actual ground-based and satellite data. [CNN Sept 18/12]

As the Coolers shivered in delicious denial, 34,008 high temperature records burned across the crispy country. The New York Times described the hottest year yet in the continental United States as “a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the Corn Belt and a huge storm that caused broad devastation in the Middle Atlantic States.” One in three Americans experienced 10 or more days of continuous summer temperatures exceeding 100°F. “The heat was remarkable,” exclaimed NDC scientist, Jake Crouch. “It was prolonged. That we beat the record by one degree is quite a big deal.” [New York Times Jan 9/13]

He meant, gigantic. And when rapid warming jimmied the jetstream and kicked open the Arctic's freezer door, southern heat rushed north and continental winters turned polar. In 2014, the US upper Midwest and Northeast plunged into a drawn-out deep-freeze as a relentless succession of storms buried New England and western Canada under record snowfalls. Even when it rained it snowed, thanks to the geoengineers, whose artificially nucleated “flash snow” clung to trees like wet concrete.

Like those overburdened limbs, global warming gadfly Jim Inhofe snapped. When the senator and author of The Greatest Hoax cooly lobbed a snowball at the Senate president, delighted denialists declared that by irrefutably demonstrating snow in February the Cooler's chief clown had “disproven climate change once and for all.” [Washington Post Feb 26/14]

COOLERS VS. HOTTIES

The snowball farce was an updated replay of a record US cold snap in the mid-1970s, which prompted Newsweek's now infamous cover story warning of “The Cooling World”. [Newsweek Apr 28/75]

Edward Teller must've missed that issue. Because just two years later, Hiroshima's dad urged the 1977 International Seminar On Planetary Emergencies to fund an aerosol “sunscreen” of sunlight-reflecting particles to slow quickening greenhouse warming.

Then as now, “Imminent Ice-Age” proponents ignored the science strongly favouring Svante Arrhenius' common sense 1896 observation that greenhouse emissions trap sunlight and heat the atmosphere. (2,043 citations in 44 1970's studies.) Newsweek published a full retraction of its egregiously erroneous “Cooling World” hoax in 2006. [Daily Explainer Aug 8/14;Scientific American]

Newman never did.

“The ongoing freeze is just the start of a new period of global cooling sparked largely by decreasing solar activity,” Newman nattered as Space and Science Research Corp's John Casey excitedly prophesied a“Little Ice Age” beginning in 2014. “The worst cold in over 200 years is now upon us,” said this “rocket scientist”, quoting unnamed sources.

Newman helpfully noted that Casey's pseudo-scientific institute “has arguably among the best track records on climate issues.” [The New American]

Arguable indeed. Pointing to record cold 2014 winter temperatures, Cliff Harris warned the warming world, “We've entered a prolonged period of INTENSE GLOBAL COOLING that should persist for at least another 15-20 years.”

The all-caps CLIMATOLOGIST was apparently unaware that by nearly erasing the north-south temperature differential barricading the jetstream within its usual high-latitude west-east course, human-induced warming-had opened the Arctic freezer. Polar wintertime cold across the USA was yet more proof of intense interactive warming north and south of Alaska. [CAD Press]

BREAKING THE ICE

“The judgments we’ve already made are impervious to facts that contradict us,” reminds Alternet’s David McRaney. Proving the point, Coolers like Alex Newman still claim, “temperatures have not risen for some 17 years.” Worried Arctic experts were no doubt shocked to learn that throughout 2014 both north and south poles had apparently luxuriated in “the highest amount of sea-ice cover since records began.” [AlterNet June 26/11; The New American Jan 6/14]

But saying something is so doesn't make it so. As Mark Twain remarked, “It's not what you don't know that kills you, it's what you know for sure that ain't true.”

Back in the real Arctic Ocean, an expanding zone of melting surface slush continued to shed thickness and mass. Under a three-way onslaught of inrushing hot water from the Pacific and Atlantic and north-flowing rivers, in June 2015 yet another “unprecedented” heatwave melted 320,000 square kilometers of thinning reflective Arctic sea ice into heat-absorbing dark waters in a single day. [Robert Scribbler June 18/15]

Pooh-poohing the previous century's disastrous warming as “virtually insignificant,” at a virtually insignificant university in Bellingham, Washington, Prof. Don Easterbrook taught that there has been “no global warming in 10 years.” Replacing data with Dada, the denialist declared that despite 35,000 European corpses from a 2003 heatwave, “global warming is over.” [Global Research June 28/14]

Unaccountably, both NASA and the Japan Meteorological Agency dismissed the bulletin from Bellingham. Quoting extensive temperature readings, both government agencies instead independently awarded the title of “Hottest Year On Record” to 2014. [Scientific American Jan 5/15]

“CHEMTRAILS” CAUSING CLIMATE CHANGE?

In late November 2014, Luis Miranda spoke for many Coolers when he headlined without explanation, “Climate Change More Likely Caused by Chemtrails/Geoengineering”. Miranda admitted “the planet is indeed getting warmer.” But he assured readers that the “maybe hoax” of “anthropogenic activity” spread by “climate alarmists for decades” can't compete with “solar activity.” [Chemtrails Planet]

Jim Channell, a distinguished professor of geology at the U. of Florida, analyzed ice core and ocean sediment data over one million years of geologic history. Around 780,000 years ago, Earth's climate-altering orbit, tilt and wobble were “a dead ringer for the orbital states that we have today,” Channell found. Based on this long natural cycle, our current warming period should end within 1,500 years.

But 780,000 years ago, CO2 levels in the atmosphere were 240 parts per million. Today, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports CO2, methane and nitrous oxide concentrations equivalent to 497 ppm of CO2. [Natl Geo Sept 3/09; NOAA]

By the mid-1990s, human-induced warming had overwhelmed the orbital variables that determine the amount of radiation received from the Sun. The astronomical processes that have driven Earth's long-term climate over millennia were “no match for the excessive levels of CO2 in our atmosphere,” Prof. Channell concluded. The current cooling from slow changes in the Earth’s solar orbit can't keep pace. [VOA Jan 9/12]

As I learned in Kuwait City, with raw petroleum raining from a sky midnight-dark at noon, denial is the strongest human propensity. We believe what we want to believe. Emotions trump reason. And when core convictions that anchor personal identity confront contrary evidence, beliefs get stronger. While the pot boils, Coolers like Jürgen Lange Heine stubbornly insist on “a drop in global temperature over the next few years.” [Climate News Network Nov 12/14; Bringing The War Home by William Thomas; ABC News Dec 8/05; EIKE Feb 3/15]

As 2015 lurches toward the title of Hottest Year Ever Until Next Year, some Congressmen are quaffing Coolers. During a Congressional hearing last April, Republicans in the House Committee on Science, Space and Tech ridiculed Obama's obligatory mentions of climate change. Without providing a specific date, Rep. Bill Posey warned of “a cooling that's eventually going to freeze the planet.” The Floridian must've been unaware of his state's well-publicized fight against accelerating sea-level rise from melting icecaps and the ocean's thermal expansion. [Daily Explainer Aug 8/14]

UP IS DOWN, DAY IS NIGHT, HOT IS COLD

“There has now been over 18 years with no measurable atmospheric global warming and a slight cooling in the past 12 years,” chimed in Geoffrey Pohanka as Spain, France, Greece, South America, California and the Caribbean face drying reservoirs and ongoing drought. [Robert Scribbler July 17/15]

But beliefs trump facts. In the Coolers' never-never land, fast-disappearing Arctic sea ice is still “largely unchanged over the past 35 years” – despite having somehow “grown over 60%” from 2012. [AlterNet June 26/11; Is There Global Cooling.com June/15]

While the Coolers disregarded satellite imagery, climate scientists were warning that Arctic sea ice had shrunk to its smallest surface area since satellite observations began in 1979. [Z Communications Oct 6/12]

“The oceans have been cooling,” Pohanka plunged ahead. Even as he posted this dangerous drivel, the Equatorial Pacific was heating like that proverbial pot filled with slumbering frogs. Ocean temperatures were 7°F above average off South America. [Is There Global Cooling.com June/15; Robert Scribbler June 11/15]

“Deaths from severe weather events are in decline,” this Cooler insisted as Reuters reported five million humans dying every 12 months from air pollution, hunger and disease associated with “climate change and carbon-intensive economies.” [Is There Global Cooling.com June/15; Reuters Sept 26/12]

As Pohanka pontificated “no measurable atmospheric warming” in June 2015, temperatures exceeding 120°F were killing 1,233 people in Karachi. Neighbouring India’s heat wave “simply has no precedent in the history of human civilization,” said Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, as another 2,500 Indians killed by extreme heat joined Pakistan's world warming victims. [Think Progress Apr 2/15; Sam Carana]

Quoting from the Coolers' playbook – which omits contradictions like Hurricane Sandy – Pohanka finished with a flourish, declaring, “Storm intensity is in decline.” [Is There Global Cooling.com June/15]

This was huge news in many places, including Down Under where a three-day “killer storm” sent 50-foot waves over Sydney's coast, causing major blackouts, flooding, “many” injuries and “at least” three deaths. Despite persistent warnings from leading Aussie scientists, “the ferocity of the storm has taken the region by surprise,” the BBC reported as denialists ran for their lives. [Before It's News.com Apr 2015]

In distant Vanuatu where I'd once sailed my trimaran, “declining storm intensity” forced islanders to drink saltwater after Cyclone Pam destroyed villages, roads, crops and communications. As I write during the second week of July 2015, six simultaneous heat-driven cyclones generated by this year's monster El Niño are helping set a record count for Northern Hemisphere cyclones so early in the year. [BBC Mar 17/15; AP Mar 26/15; weather.com May 12/15]

THE COMING ICE AGE WILL BE DELAYED

Pointing to Paleoclimate records showing how massive freshwater releases into the North Atlantic from melting ice shut down that salty thermal circulation, contradictory Coolers can't wait for the glacial melting they insist isn't happening to shut down the North Atlantic's stuttering heat engine and plunge the planet into another Ice Age.

“We have detected strong evidence that the global conveyor has indeed been weakening in the past hundred years, particularly since 1970,” confirms Professor Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. Over the 20th century, the fabled Atlantic heat conveyor has apparently slowed by as much as 20%.

But the cooling effect on Northern Europe is more than offset by global warming. Wallace Broecker of Columbia University, who first proposed that similar slowdowns could explain climate shifts in the distant past, says the media-hyped notion that another total shutdown may trigger even a miniature ice age “is a myth.” [Yale Oct 11/07; Independent March 23/15; July 11/15]

Instead, the weakening warmth of the Gulf Stream will partially offset the full impact of global warming on northern Europe. “We will benefit a little bit from this,” says Helge Drange of the Nansen Environmental and Remote Sensing Center in Bergen, Norway. Instead of warming 5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, northwestern Europe may drastically warm another 4 to 5 degrees. [AP, LA Times July 8/07]

So stay cool. Another ice age is coming. But don't send away for igloo plans just yet. A landmark study factoring CO2-equivalent gases into Earth's orbital mechanics shows that the current Anthropocene Holocaust might persist for another 50,000 years. [SOTT Net]

If epic warming and even stronger denial persist for another 50 years, and all that methane lets go and the world ocean dies, Earth's tottering apex species won't be around to see it end. We can ignore reality. But reality is not going to ignore us.