Roy Spencer, a former John Locke Foundation Headliner, offers some words of wisdom in Debra Saunders‘ San Francisco Chronicle account of the global watming alarmists who found themselves stuck in ice recently during a voyage to Antarctica.
Years ago, global warming believers renamed the phenomenon “climate change” — probably because of pesky details such as unusually cold weather undercutting the warming argument. Now, just as advocates argue that earth is approaching a tipping point, there’s so much ice floating in Antarctica during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer that the Australasian Antarctic Expedition posted in a statement: “We’re stuck in our own experiment.”
Does this incident mean that climate change is an illusion or a hoax? Of course not. Even during its summer, Antarctica is subject to extreme weather. “Bad weather is the norm in Antarctica,” climatologist Roy Spencer observed.
But it does show that like the rest of us chickens, scientists have feet of clay. Turney had told journalists that his expedition wanted to collect data that could be used to improve climate models. Too bad the folks who are supposed to predict climate decades into the future are guided by scientists who could not manage to avoid ice floes during a five-week trip. …
… Climate changers usually warn about Arctic ice, which has been receding over the past few decades, but rarely address the overall growth of ice in Antarctica.
“I’m sure some researchers can find a possible explanation where humans are causing both Arctic ice melting and Antarctic ice growth, but I’m skeptical of scientists who blame every change in nature on human activities. Nature routinely causes its own changes, without any help from us,” quoth Spencer, himself a climate change contrarian.
“Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up,” the Australasian Antarctic Expedition acknowledges. It’s a conundrum. If warming is melting ice in the Northern Hemisphere, why isn’t it melting ice in the Southern Hemisphere?
Believers seize on all manner of weather — less Arctic ice, more Antarctic ice — as proof of climate change, but as Spencer notes, there is no climate change without man-caused global warming.
