By: John ShafferFriday February 19, 2010 The folks who support the theory that humans have been a major cause of global warming are irate about those who point to this year's cold winter is evidence against the theory. "Weather is not climate," they tell us, warning that we should not over-react to individual events. Fair enough...except that the notorious "Yellowstone summer" of 1988, with unusually warm temperatures, was used by the "Anthropogenic [human-caused] Global Warming" proponents not only as evidence of warming, but that warming was an emergency and a threat so dire that immediate drastic steps needed to be taken or else catastrophe would result.

When those immediate drastic steps were not taken, and the world did not melt or bake into oblivion, and the summer temperatures did not increase over the next several years, and the world experienced cold spells and snows in places where they usually do not happen, the line changed - it no longer was "global warming," but "climate change," and the claim of the AGW advocates now was that unusual weather events were evidence of climate change. Some folks disagreed and pointed out the "unscientific" direction that the theory had taken, namely, that if it gets too hot, that proves global warming, but if it gets too cold, that also proves it. It is hard to understand how global warming could ever be disproven under those circumstances, making it a flawed theory.

Anyway, we fast forward to 2005, and the Hurricane season that spawned Katrina and Rita. As he did in 1988, Al Gore used that hurricane year as evidence that "climate change" existed, was caused by humans, and that it proved that hurricanes would increase in quantity and intensity. None of the subsequent years showed the "predicted" level of hurricanes that Mr. Gore warned us about; but who knows, 2010 might be a bad year. The point is, that the 2005 hurricane year was used as evidence that global warming was "settled science," just as the 1988 summer was. Why is it OK for warming proponents to use "weather" to support their theory, but not OK for those who disagree to use weather to oppose it?

The Republicans had bad years in 2006 and 2008, and it seems the Democrats might have a bad 2010, but the last few months have been terrible for the advocates of AGW. The advocates have been shown to have doctored evidence and to have discarded evidence that undercut their theory. They also have been forced to admit that claims they made about glaciers decreasing in the Himalayas, about the Amazon rain forest shrinking and about food production in Africa were not based on peer-reviewed science, but on magazine articles, student papers and anecdotal evidence. There also have been serious questions raised about calculations that did not include proportionate weather data from several very cold places, including Siberia.

Professor Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, one of the most vocal advocates of AGW, admitted earlier in the week that there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming since 1995. We seem to recall that just weeks ago, folks were telling us that this recent year or that was "the hottest" on record; how do such claims stand up in the face of Professor Jones' admission?

There are two parts of the AGW theory - one that the planet is warming and that warming is caused by humans; the second part is that we must rein in "carbon consumption," phase out the internal combustion engine, and impose huge taxes on business, industry and individuals in order to direct them away from those behaviors that allegedly cause warming, or "climate change." It never made much sense to disable our economy over a theory, and in light of the environmentalists' bad 2010, there is even less reason to do so.

Global warming proponents capitalized on the "Yellowstone summer," warning that we might all go up in flames if those trends continued. The knew that the hurricane season of 2005 guaranteed that more hurricanes and bigger hurricanes were on their way. They fretted about the "hole in the ozone layer over Kennebunkport" When is the last time anyone heard the words "ozone layer" or "hole in the ozone" on national television? Now, it seems that it is the global warming theory itself that is going up in flames, thanks to games played with the data, research based on sources that are decidedly non-scientific, and one of the main devotees of the theory admitting there has been no significant warming since 1995.

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