Hank Paulson, whose claim to fame in the public sector is panicking and browbeating the nation and its Washington politicians into accepting the Troubled Asset Relief Program in late September 2008, and who just two weeks later "put a (figurative) gun to the heads" of large-bank CEOs to "persuade" them to accept federal "investment" in their enterprises, has re-emerged to tell us, according to the Hill, that "Republicans are 'ready for a serious discussion' on climate change."
As a reminder, in 2007, the late Robert Novak wrote that Paulson "contributed to Bill Clinton in 1992, Democrat Bill Bradley's 2000 presidential campaign, the feminist Emily's List and Wall Street's favorite Democrat, Chuck Schumer," before financially supporting George W. Bush in 2004. Paulson was also "regarded in his own administration as less a true Republican secretary than a transition to the next Democratic Treasury." One of Paulson's current assertions parrots global warming alarmists' claims in mid-May that that a serious and supposedly irreversible collapse of Antarctic Sea ice will catastrophically raise worldwide sea levels. Over the weekend, meteorologist Joe Bastardi, Chief Forecaster at WeatherBell Analytics LLC, relayed some very inconvenient data (bolds are mine):
Readers who believe that the above represents some kind of record are correct. Here's the underlying report from self-described "lifelong environmentalist" Harold Ambler at the Talking About the Weather Blog (HT Climate Depot):
Antarctica sets new record for sea ice
The sea ice surrounding Antarctica, which, as I reported in my book, has been steadily increasing throughout the period of satellite measurement that began in 1979, has hit a new all-time record high for areal coverage.
The new record anomaly for Southern Hemisphere sea ice, the ice encircling the southernmost continent, is 2.074 million square kilometers and was posted for the first time by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s The Cryosphere Today early Sunday morning.
It was not immediately apparent whether the record had occurred on Friday or Saturday. Requests for comment to Bill Chapman, who runs The Cryosphere Today, were not immediately returned.
The previous record anomaly for Southern Hemisphere sea ice area was 1.840 million square kilometers and occurred on December 20, 2007.
Global sea ice area, as of Sunday morning, stood at 0.991 million square kilometers above average. (The figure was arrived at by adding the Northern Hemisphere anomaly and the Southern Hemisphere anomaly. A graph provided by The Cryosphere Today showed the global anomaly as 1.005 million square kilometers.)
Although early computer models predicted a diminishment of both Northern Hemisphere and Southern Hemisphere sea ice due to anthropogenic global warming, subsequent modeling has posited that the results of warming around Antarctica would, counter-intuitively, generate sea ice growth.
The steady growth of Antarctic sea ice and its influence on global sea ice appeared to provide a public relations problem, at a minimum, for those warning of global warming’s menace.
Imagine that.
The modelers' attempt at a "counter-intuitive" argument seems to indicate that they are trying to have it both ways. If Antarctic sea ice continues to grow, it's due to global warming. If it diminishes, they'll quickly forget their "counter-intuitive" argument and say that any net melting which is occurring is due to warming.
Readers can count on both Hank Paulson and the vast majority of the establishment press pretending that this news from the earth's southernmost continent doesn't exist.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
