The tornadoes = global warming argument reminds me of something we read over and over during the past several winters of severe cold and snow: "Weather is not climate."
The zealot AGW cult chanted this phrase as if it were The Mantra Against Facts, every time someone pointed out that climatologist's models did not predict the cold weather we've been getting (until AFTER we started getting it).
As soon as a weather related tragedy strikes they hypocritically ignore what they said and started bleating, "IT'S CLIMATE CHANGE!! IT'S CLIMATE CHANGE!!"
Example:
Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century. Worldwide, the litany of weather’s extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began.
From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone.
The climate has been stable for the last 12,000 years? Yeah, that Little Ice Age between the 16th and 19th centuries was the picture of stability.
And though this has been a very active tornado season, it's hardly biblical as well as likely caused by this year's La Niña according to a majority of meteorologists on both sides of the global warming debate.
Alas, science really isn't important to this "science editor" who also seemed to miss an obvious point with her hyperventilation "The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years." That means 116 years ago, when there was far less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the planet was a bit cooler, the Midwest suffered a wetter April.
Example:
Picture California a few decades from now, a place so hot and arid the state's trademark orange and lemon trees have been replaced with olive trees that can handle the new climate. Alternating floods and droughts have made it impossible for the reservoirs to capture enough drinking water. The picturesque Highway 1, sections of which are already periodically being washed out by storm surges and mudslides, will have to be rerouted inland, possibly through a mountain.
So in just a few decades, all the orange and lemon trees in my state will be gone, there won't be enough drinking water, and much of the gorgeous Pacific Coast Highway will be kaput.
That's going to wreak havoc with property values.
Example:
Because of the CO2 that has already been emitted, we're on track for an additional 5 degrees of warming...New York, which is looking at an average temperature increase of up to 3 degrees Fahrenheit by 2020, is planning to paint 3 million square feet of roofs white, to reflect sunlight and thus reduce urban heat-island effects.So, it took 155 years for temperatures to rise 1.37 degrees Fahrenheit. If we continued at this pace it would take 565 years for us to rise another five degrees.
Yet this so-called "science editor" claimed New York could see its temperatures increase by as much as three degrees in only nineteen years.
Which is why Newsweek should be ashamed of itself for allowing such nonsense to be published.
If only the folks associated with this publication possessed such a thing called shame.
