The Patriot Post® · Coldest Thanksgiving and Thriving Polar Bears: Climate Lies Exposed by Reality
By Vijay Jayaraj
Last month, parts of the U.S. experienced what Newsweek called “the coldest Thanksgiving in a century.” Indeed, November was 2.03˚F colder than the 1981-2010 average for the month in the lower 48 United States.
Many brush that off as a one-off weather event because it’s local and short term. And that’s reasonable. What’s not reasonable is for climate alarmists, who often point at local and short-term record heat events as evidence of global warming, to brush it off that way.
Many skeptics rightly point out that if heat events are evidence for global warming, cold events should be evidence against it. Deny that, and you take away a lot of the “evidence” that alarmist reporters, politicians, and — sad to say — even some scientists routinely cite for man-made warming.
What can the 100-year low on Thanksgiving Day tell us about climate change (also known as global warming)?
Thanksgiving, for a foodie from India like me, reminds me of turkeys. My first Thanksgiving turkey, in 2016, came with a side of gravy and plenty of talk about climate doomsday.
There was a reason why climate talk was at its peak: 2016 was the year of El Niño, a weather phenomenon when periodic oscillations in the Pacific Ocean cause an increase in global temperature.
Climate scientists and graduate students in climate sciences are well aware of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation climate pattern — made up of El Niño and La Niña — which cause periodic and contrasting changes in global temperatures.
Despite that, climate alarmists touted the warmth driven by the 2016 El Niño as a sign of man-made global warming. They said global temperatures were going to get worse and would have unprecedented negative effects on all life forms on earth.
Among their extraordinary list of things they blamed on climate change, a few captured my attention: the claim that global temperatures would only increase in the future, that polar bears were dying because of man-made climate change, and that snow would be a thing of the past.
Two years later, temperatures had swung in the opposite direction. Parts of the U.S. experienced the coldest Thanksgiving in 100 years. But it was not just Thanksgiving Day.
Earlier in 2018, many parts of Canada, the U.S, England, and Northern Europe saw record lows. New York City had the highest seasonal snowfall in 130 years.
The intensity and duration of the 2017-18 winter surprised many climatologists, and some predict another severe winter for 2018-19. North American snowfall was already at a 10-year high by Nov. 28 — and winter doesn’t technically begin until Dec. 21.
Last month, the majority of Canadian provinces were experiencing below-freezing temperatures. Environment Canada reported that parts of Ontario experienced temperatures colder than they had ever recorded. The province of British Columbia, where I used to work in climate-change research, has already set 18 record lows since October.
In fact, Northern Hemisphere snow cover in November was the highest since 1966.
These record lows and snows do not disprove global warming. In fact, all climatologists agree that the earth has been on a gradual warming trend since the Little Ice Age in the 17th century. Academically noted and well-acclaimed climate skeptics never denied the warming but only disagreed on its magnitude, how much human activity influenced it, and its potential hazards.
However, the record lows undercut climate alarmists’ dire forecasts of a coming climate apocalypse.
The fears propagated by climate alarmists have no scientific basis. Hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers have proven them false. Alarmists’ temperature forecasts have consistently failed to reflect real-world temperatures for at least the past 18 years.
Senior climate scientist John Christy made this public during his testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology. Staunch alarmist scientists like Michael Mann reluctantly acknowledged the same in a peer-reviewed scientific paper that highlighted the failure of computer climate models. The paper reaffirmed the absence of significant warming in the past 18 years.
This stability in temperature levels was backed up by healthy polar sea ice levels. Both the Arctic and Antarctic are at their 10,000-year highs, except for the Little Ice Age in the 17th century, when their ice mass was much higher.
Moreover, Arctic sea ice volume has been stable in the past decade, showing no correlation with the rapidly rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Both the short-term trend and the long-term trend in the polar sea ice volumes suggest that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions have little to do with global temperatures.
Nonetheless, alarmists continue to employ strategic methods for propagating climate fear. For nearly two decades, they have used polar bears as the icon of climate change. Climate alarmists like Al Gore have constantly lied to the public about their plight.
But contrary to his claims, polar bear populations have remained healthy during the past two decades. They are doing so well that their excess numbers have become a problem in the Nunuvat territory of Canada. Local authorities have been urged to cull the bears to maintain ecological balance and residents’ safety.
The mainstream media seldom cover these stories because they pose a direct threat to the existing climate doomsday narrative.
Fear about climate change will thrive as long as climate alarmists influence public perception through aggressive campaigning in news media, academia, and at political institutions like the United Nations.
Not surprisingly, the United Nations’ annual climate summit, just ended in Katowice, Poland, issued the standard propaganda, amplifying the existing doomsday narrative and issuing strategies to save the ill-advised Paris climate agreement — complete implementation of which would reduce global temperature at the end of the century by no more than 0.3˚F after costing $70 to $140 trillion.
Such conferences provide the perfect platform for alarmists to propagate climate fear by misinforming the public. They do this by using big names in Hollywood and bombarding the media with a political message disguised as science.
But not for long. Climate alarmism’s nemesis is not the skeptics but the climate itself. Cold winters like this year’s, and stable ice levels in polar regions, will continue to unmask the alarmists’ lies and hypocrisy.
Meanwhile, it would be a good idea to pray for those suffering from record cold. Cold snaps kill 10 times as many people per day as heat waves.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Chennai, India.