King Tut's Hummer: ABC Says Temp Increase 'Greatest in Thousands of Years'

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GMA's segment this morning on the big global warming confab in Paris was filled with predictably alarmist rhetoric. But one factoid slipped through the MSM filter that could put a chill on the "it's-all-man's-fault" view of the matter: thousands of years ago, global warming exceeded anything we're currently experiencing.

Oh, and did you know the result of global warming is . . . fewer hurricanes? First, the alarmism. Reporting from Paris, ABC weatherman Sam Champion informed us:

• "It's really kind of frightening stuff, the stuff that science fiction books and movies are made of. Melting ice, heat waves and even stronger storms."
• "Global warming is with us, and it's going to be with us for centuries."
• "It is the definitive report on global warming, and it's frightening."

Champion ran a clip of a panel member with an urbane European accent stating that February 2nd, 2007 "will perhaps be remembered as the day when the question mark was removed from behind the debate on whether climate change had anything to do with human activity on this planet."

Champion: "They're confirming the warming is very likely man-made. . . More than 90% certainty that man's burning of fossil fuels is heating up our planet."

Added Champion: "One result of global warming -- fewer, but even stronger hurricanes." What? Global warming results in fewer hurricanes? How many charts did the MSM treat us to a year or so ago trying to demonstrate that global warming was responsible for more hurricanes? Is this the global-warming lobby trying to explain away the embarrasssing lack of Atlantic hurricanes this season?

Champion then claimed that "among the shocking conclusions of this report, sea levels could rise nearly two feet, swamping areas world-wide by the end of this century." Champion didn't let viewers know that the report actually gave a range: 7-23 inches. Why did he emphasize only the higher end?

Moreover, as he spoke ABC displayed an animation showing islands sliding into the sea with the graphic "2030" on the screen. So what is it? Seven inches by 2100, or islands disappearing in 23 years?

That's when Champion let slip what you might call . . . an inconvenient truth: "the report predicts that the temperature increase this century could be the greatest in thousands of years."

Wait a second! Some time thousands of years ago, temperatures were increasing faster than they are now? Yes. A little Googling bears that out. Have a look at this government paper on the ice age, which includes this statement:

"About 11,500 years ago . . . forests quickly regained the ground that they had lost to cold and aridity. Ice sheets again began melting, though because of their size they took about two thousand more years to disappear completely. The Earth entered several thousand years of conditions warmer and moister than today; the Saharan and Arabian deserts almost completely disappeared under a vegetation cover, and in the northern latitudes forests grew slightly closer to the poles than they do at present. This phase, known as the 'Holocene optimum' occurred between about 9,000 and 5,000 years ago."

Perhaps even more signicantly, the paper paints a picture of mammoth climate changes going back hundreds of thousands of years, repeated cycles of heating and cooling that as recently as 18,000 years ago - a blink in geological terms - had my hometown of Ithaca, NY covered under a huge sheet of ice. Something melted it since then -- and it wasn't man's doing.

We can joke about the Pharoahs' SUVs, but it is obvious that man had no impact on those epochal changes. Is the man's-to-blame movement of today good science, or hubris about the ability of man to influence events?

Pet Peeve: Is their any cheaper shot than the MSMs tendency to show footage, as GMA did here, of the calving of glaciers? While used to suggest dramatic global warming, calving is a phenomenon that has occurred since time immemorial. It's what happens when glaciers reach the sea. In fact, as per this Harvard report, calving occurs when glaciers . . . grow, not shrink!

Mark lives in Ithaca, NY, where the temperature is not forecast to get above freezing any time in the next ten days. Contact him at mark@gunhill.net