By Al Gore

With all the climate deniers spreading lies about the climate crisis in the media, it’s vital we arm ourselves with the facts. Thankfully, Repower America put together a great fact sheet explaining the relationship between the climate crisis and extreme weather:

“Fact: Climate change causes more frequent and severe snowstorms
Record snowstorms need two things: temperatures below freezing, and very high humidity. On a planet warmer by a few degrees on average, the Northeast US will still have plenty of days below freezing; the big difference will be warmer seas producing higher levels of moisture in the air - and therefore more severe cold-season storms.”

“Fact: We can expect more extreme weather
Scientists tell us that climate change has already led to more extreme weather in the United States and we can expect stronger hurricanes, more wildfires, heatwaves and droughts, to name a few.”

“Fact: The world is warming at a quickening pace
Weather in one region over days or months should not be confused with climate or the patterns of weather over decades and centuries. And the science is clear here: the last decade was the hottest on record. And to put this year’s weather in perspective, January was warmer than average for the continental United States”

As usual the Goracle is clueless. He is wrong on all three points. For examples, this winter featured snowmagedden for the Mid-Atlantic states. The longest duration cold ever in Florida and the southeast including snowflakes in Miami and Naples and damage to the citrus. Yes with the January thaw which is strongest and most reliable in the coldest winters, the average for the US for the month was a little above, much of the central and southeast was much below normal. And here is what the winter since December 1 looks like so far.

February (through 2/24)
Record high maximums 80
Record low minimums 240

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Bill O’Reilly hosts Bill Nye The Science Guy and AccuWeather’s Joe Bastardi in Fox News Debate
By Anthony Watts, Watts up With That

Heh, this is entertaining.

While Bill Nye argues for “in whose best interest is denial?” and brings up the ridiculous CO2 on Venus argument, Joe Bastardi runs circles around him with technical graphs and explanations on forcing factors and their magnitudes.

Warmists scream “weather is not climate!”. We need to shout back “Venus is not Earth!” since the Venusian atmosphere is entirely different in compositions and forcings, and we understand it far less than Earth’s. Icecap note: as commenters said also 26 million miles closer to the sun and days 150 of our days long and has an atmosphere that is denser and deeper with surface pressures 90 times earth producing compressional warming. In the Venusian atmosphere at the same pressure as earth’s, temperatures are comprable to earth. Of course Nye did not mention Mars, where even though its atmosphere is mainly C02, the air is colder because the atmosphere is thin and pressures lower and of course Mars is farther away. See comments for much more.

Meanwhile, Bill O"Reilly seems more concerned about making his commercial break on time than saving the planet.

Nye needs a better argument, as Fox News viewers can see past the appeal to emotion. Bastardi while far more technically competent than Nye, needs to focus on explaining a bit about natural cycles, since few viewers would know what the “PDO” is.

A caveat for both men, doing live TV debate by the seat of your pants is tough. You can’t see each other, and you are communicating via earpiece audio. Live TV is never easy, live via satellite interlinks is even tougher.

Watch the segment => here.

Icecap Note: Agreed TV interviews are no walk in the park. When on tape you have no control over what they use. When you are live, often, as Anthony said, you are unable to see the other parties or the interviewer (I did one interview for a major cable network at a local station from what was no more than a closet with a camera and lighting and no monitor). Often the host keeps interrupting or allows your opponent to go on a monologue (especially with the college professors) with too little chance for you to reply. Sometimes when they give you a few questions to prepare for, they come in from left field with another often oddball question frustrating you because you had in your mind exactly how you were going to reply). Nye proved hand held graphics usually don’t work. The only one that did was the SPPI temperature plot which showed the cooling for a blend of the station data sets and satellite data sets since 2001. Nye followed that with an unintelligible statement to the effect if you leave out 1998, you get a warming. Well I thought 1998 was before 2001. How foolish of me.

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A worldwide fervor over climate change orthodoxy
By Christopher Essex, Toronto Sun

Can you hear me? You’ve been incognizant, but it’s over and you’re going to be OK. Take deep breaths and relax until your vision clears. The world is not going to end because of climate change, at least not in the near future. You are a most fortunate individual. You have been a participant in the biggest inter-dimensional cross rip since the Tunguska blast of 1909! No wait, that’s Ghostbusters.

Let me put it differently: There has never been anything quite like this - ever. The entire world has been embroiled in a persistent, free-floating global fervor (and a really nasty one, too) allegedly based on fervor-less, dispassionate science.

Recently, there was a huge explosion in the climate change orthodoxy factory that was set off by objective evidence we have been deceived and manipulated. The evidence was the leaked e-mails of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), which are now subject to several official investigations, forcing the head of the CRU to step aside. The e-mails tell a lurid tale of unbecoming, unwarranted, organized and fierce hostility to skeptical climatic researchers, as well as data tampering, anti-scientific secrecy, manipulations of scientific journals, and distortions of peer review that make George Orwell look like a prophet.

This could be dismissed as an isolated case if the CRU were some marginal backwater. But what was produced there was central to the scientific case, such as it was, mounted by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The CRU was global warming central! That makes the recent admission by its deposed head to the BBC stunning. He said there was actually no statistically significant global warming for 15 years. That’s contrary to more than a decade of overheated, hysterical rhetoric and news stories, ultimately based in large part on the CRU’s now-discredited positions.

Of course the counter spin was desperate and pathetic: The e-mails were illegally obtained; it was a plot by skeptics/deniers funded by corporations, facilitated by foreign governments; OK, it’s bad, but even putting CRU data aside there’s still “overwhelming” evidence.

This was blown away in the subsequent explosion of pent-up complaints about faulty science that have been hushed up for years by silencing skeptics and likening them to criminals. With new eyes paying attention to the complaints, what was old seemed new.

For example, one IPCC myth was even debunked before it was adopted. In the first, 2002, edition of my book, Taken By Storm, with Ross McKitrick we showed the Himalayan glaciers were not at risk due to global warming. Yet this invention, attributed to the World Wildlife Federation, still appeared, five years afterward, in the 2007 IPCC report. The IPCC author responsible subsequently admitted he put it in to scare people. Finally in 2009, seven years afterward, the head of the IPCC had to answer embarrassing questions about it.

Rule number one: Don’t believe anything you read or hear in the news about ice. Count on it to be a tart up of a pre-tarted position.

So many of these seemingly “new” one-sided “errors” have burst out that unanticipated developments ensued: India threatened to pull out of the IPCC, Greenpeace called for the head of the IPCC’s head, while IPCC stalwarts rushed to distance themselves from the IPCC.

It’s been like watching the conclusion of a classic Bond movie where an enormous explosion consumes Dr. No’s fortress. The serious damage of the great fervor was not from these noisy secondary cultural explosions. It was from the sustained, immoral attacks on scientific skepticism and skeptical scientists. The attacks began the moment science became subordinate to policy.

That is corruption of science, and we will all eventually suffer if it is not consciously stopped. Read more here.

Dr. Christopher Essex is a professor of applied mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming