Moon And Rain Prove Global Warming Isn't Real
Welp, Global Warming had a pretty good run, but it's time to just give up the farce, kids. We have no fewer than three absolute refutations today of the crazy wackaloon theory that the Earth's climate is somehow warming due to Carbon Dioxide and other greenhouse gases, so just calm down and burn some coal, will you?
First up, we learn that a real scientist in Congress has blown the lid off the whole "climate change" fraud! Michigan congresspillock Dan Benishek bucked a trend among Republicans lately. Where many of his colleagues have begged off questions about climate change by saying "I'm not a scientist," Benishek proudly announced that heis too a scientist, and therefore he can say with great certainty that there's absolutely no scientific evidence for a human role in climate change, just like his big donors from the oil industry also believe.
“The climate may be changing, but I don’t think man is contributing to it,” Benishek told ABC 10′s news director Greg Peterson, according to a Tuesday report from the Michigan news station.
“I could throw some science at you,” Peterson pressed.
“Well, I am a scientist,” Benishek responded. “You know, I believe in peer-reviewed science. But, I don’t see any peer-reviewed science that proves there is man-made catastrophic climate change.”
Think Progress notes that Benishek's congressional website lays out his extensive science credentials:
Benishek earned a Bachelor of Science degree in biology from the University of Michigan back in 1974. He went on to graduate from Wayne State Medical School in 1978, and has since worked as a general surgeon in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula and worked part-time at the Oscar G. Johnson VA Medical Center in Iron Mountain.
And if you can't trust a Medical Doctor's assessment of the current state of climate science, you probably are the sort of smarty-pants skeptic who wouldn't trust a climatologist to remove your appendix.
This is where we remind you, because Journalistic Responsibility, that 97 percent of climate scientists agree that global warming is real, and no, sorry, surgeons and oil well engineers are not climate scientists. Then again, they're all just in it for the big grant money.
Speaking of money, it's worth mentioning, maybe, that Dr. Benishek’s third biggest source of campaign contributions is the oil and gas industry, but that probably is just a coincidence.
In West Virginia, a Republican running for Senate explained that she is pretty sure that climate change is real, although maybe she's not so sure what "climate" even is, really. Rep. Shelley Moore Capito initially said in a debate Tuesday, "I don’t necessarily think the climate’s changing, no,” but then after the debate, she explained that she'd misspoken, because of course the climate changes from day to day, just look outside your window, she told reporters:
“Is the climate changing? Yes, it’s changing, it changes all the time, we heard it raining out there ... I’m sure humans are contributing to it.”
We will now let Neil deGrasse Tyson and his adorable labrador retriever explain one more time what the difference is between climate and weather, and why looking out the window does not tell you a goddamn thing about climate, regardless of whether you are an MD or a West Virginia congresslady who gets big contributions from the coal industry:
We honestly have no idea why Rep. Capito thinks that humans influence the weather; maybe she saw something online about chemtrails or HAARP.
And finally, there's this peer-reviewed science from Twitchy. ( Nine full-time bloggers surely counts as peer review, right?) Rhode Island Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse is a maroon for suggesting that increasingly high tides have anything to do with climate change, because TIDES ARE CAUSED BY THE MOON,DUMMY!Whitehouse went to Florida to see how high the tides have gotten during a "King Tide," which occurs when the alignment of the Earth, sun, and moon create especially high tides, and hetweeted, while observing the high tides,
If we don’t #ActOnClimate, more coastal communities like these could face worsening effects of flooding & erosion
Stupid congressninny! Tides are all DA MOON, replied Twitchy:
Seems like he’s saying that the tides are part of the climate [...]
Tagging pictures of a king tide with #ActOnClimate is likely intended to make some people think that the extreme tide is caused by climate change. For those who don’t default to that, you can make the claim that this predictable cyclical event will be made more extreme by the global warming that hasn’t happened in nearly two decades. The scare mongering then justifies higher taxes and more government power.
Ah, yes, the old "no global warming for two decades" bullshit, which is, let us just reiterate, bullshit. Happily, several Twitchers jumped on Whitehouse's lies:
Oh, YA BURNT! There is no such thing as long-term trends, and stupid liberals don't even know how da moon got dere. You can't explain it!
[ ThinkProgress / Charleston Gazette via The Hill / Twitchy / Tech Times ]
Sea levels are rising and threatening island nations due to AGW; this is definitely true. Causes of flooding in NW Europe are more complex though. One of the factors is ongoing isostatic adjustment of the lithosphere following the retreat of the ice sheets from the most recent ice age glaciation. For instance, southern England continues to experience massive flooding because it is actually sinking in elevation while the northern part of the island, Scotland, is rising in elevation. During the last glaciation Scotland was buried under something like 1000 feet of ice. The weight of all of that ice compressed the Earth's crust in the Northern hemisphere, pushing it down into the mantle (asthenosphere). This action pushed part of the relatively elastic mantle outward away from the area of compression. The migrated mantle then pushed up the crustal surface that overlayed it. In the case of Great Britain the ice-free southern half of the island rose up as the ice sheet compressed the northern half. Over the millennia since the ice sheet retreated the displaced mantle has been gradually migrating back under the now uncovered regions, causing those areas to rise back up in elevation and causing the areas that it had been previously pushed into to sink back down. This is what is happening in Great Britain and other parts of northwestern Europe. Local increases in sea level due to thermal expansion of the hydrosphere are compounding the effect and adding to the problem.
But who has the gall to de-liver the bad news?