Climate of fear

CLIMATE OF FEAR

By Ian Wishart
It’s been a winter of fools in the public debate about climate change in New Zealand. The public trough-snorters at NIWA and other bastions of climate ‘research’ who rely on taxpayer funding to maintain their exotic lifestyles have been hyping up their ‘warmest winter’ and ‘extreme weather’ talking points for an ever-sillier news media.

First reality check, there is no global “climate”. While NZ enjoyed a warmer winter than usual, there was still ice on Lake Superior in the United States into the middle of the northern summer. Cold records were shattered across the northern hemisphere.

Second reality check, if you read the fine print in the official climate reports, and I have, you’ll find that the impact of human-caused CO2 emissions on New Zealand will be negligible, because our climate is dominated by oceanic heat cycles, not atmospheric ones. While Europe, North America and Asia are huge landmasses whose interiors are far from direct oceanic influence, New Zealand is an island state bathed in the Pacific to the north and East, and the Southern Ocean to the rear.

Oceanic heat is primarily driven by the impact of direct sunlight on the surface of the ocean, which is many times more powerful than secondary heat from trace gas molecules – it is not CO2 warming the oceans but sunlight. The fewer clouds or the less dust in the atmosphere, the more the ocean heats up. The cloudier or dustier it gets, the cooler the oceans become.

The New Zealand Herald recently published “Climate Tipping Points to Watch For”, kind of an idiot’s guide to climate change, written by an eco-bible waving believer. He warns us that the West Antarctic region is on the brink of a tipping point that could rise sea levels up to 40m.

But that’s not what the peer reviewed science is telling us.

“The record shows that this region has warmed since the late 1950s, at a similar magnitude to that observed in the Antarctic Peninsula and central West Antarctica; however, this warming trend is not unique. More dramatic isotopic warming (and cooling) trends occurred in the mid-nineteenth and eighteenth centuries, suggesting that at present, the effect of anthropogenic climate drivers at this location has not exceeded the natural range of climate variability in the context of the past ~300 years.”

That finding is backed up by yet another this year, which reports warming cycles in Antarctica like the current one have occurred five times in the past 350 years alone:

“The data suggest that during the past 350 years such events have taken place at least five times.”

We are being conned, daily, by activists trying to get funding, aided and abetted by media who have given up doing their job. Roll on summer, we could do with some warming.