Do you hear that hissing sound? That’s the balloon that soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his band of not so merry alarmists have floated concerning a scientific consensus on man’s role in global warming losing air.

As the media continue to pound the table about the debate being over, another state climatologist has come out of the closet so to speak to voice his views about all things climate change.

As reported by the Columbus, Mississippi, Commercial Dispatch Wednesday (emphasis added throughout, h/t NBer dscott):

“First off, there isn't a consensus among scientists,” [Mississippi state climatologist Dr. Charles] Wax told the Columbus Rotary Club Tuesday. “Don't let anybody tell you there is.”

Wax spent much of his presentation telling the audience how the global climate is cyclical. It's always gone through periods of warming and cooling. As for cries of impending doom, Wax says there's tons of data on both sides - and man's ever-changing weather monitoring capability further clouds the picture.

How refreshing, wouldn’t you agree? Yet, Wax was just getting warmed up:

“I don't know if it's going to rain Thursday or not. Certainly I don't know what the temperature is going to be in 2050,” he said.

Wax said political and policy confusion have fueled the debate over global warming, and changes in the way weather is tracked have added to the confusion.

“In 1957, all the thermometers (the government uses to track temperatures) were moved from fields onto airports,” Wax said. “It went from the Weather Bureau, which supported agriculture, to the Department of Commerce. Cities are hotter. (If you look at the numbers) you'll see a major climate change in 1957 alone.”

Those of you familiar with this debate know that this is an issue that many skeptics have pointed out, namely, that in the past 50 years, temperatures have been taken around large population centers which are inherently warmer. As such, comparing these readings to temperatures before this point is comparing apples to oranges.

The article expounded on this theme:

Wax showed Rotarians graphs of climate trends over 11,000 years, pointing out the cycles global temperatures have gone through. He said the rise of civilization coincided with a warming period.

“There was a little ice age from 1400 to 1800,” Wax said. “We're warming back up, but it's not nearly as warm as it was 2,000 or 7,000 years ago.”

Wax then addressed Gore’s contention in his schlockumentary “An Inconvenient Truth” that the 2005 hurricane season was tied to global warming:

Wax said the 2005 hurricane season was the result of a decades-long natural cycle coming around at the same time that all six weather variables needed for hurricanes to form were above normal levels.

Then, when forecasters called for another terrible hurricane season in 2006, all was quiet.

“The vertical wind shear blasted everything off,” Wax said. “There wasn't a single hurricane. It's become known as the ‘Year of Shear'.”

Finally, Wax addressed the folly in comparing recent hurricane activity to that of the past given radical technological increases in the way such storms are measured and observed:

That 2005 hurricane season set a record for named tropical cyclone activity. The previous worst year was 1933.
“Are totally different things happening now? I think probably not - we're just seeing more,” Wax said.

“I think 1933 was worse. In ‘06, we had satellites, radar and people flying around looking at storms,” he continued. “In 1933, we had people on ships and people on land waiting for the storms to hit. When you're on a ship, if you see a storm you head the other way. We still managed to find 25.”

For those unfamiliar, this is quite the same case made by the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration’s Chris Landsea as reported by NewsBusters last August.

Sadly, this is another inconvenient truth the media don’t want to share with the citizenry.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.