Predictions Rise.....Temperatures Don't !

It is a bizarre divergence.  The more carbon dioxide rises, the less the world warms, the more the Warmists say it will.  The latest report from the research facility atop the Mauna Loa volcano on the island of Hawaii, says that as of three days ago, carbon dioxide has passed the long-feared milestone of 400 parts per million. This reading, they say, is reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years, in the Pliocene Period, covering the rise of mammals but before humans evolved. Geological research shows that the climate then was warmer than today, the world's ice caps were smaller, and the sea level might have been as much as 60-89 feet (20-30 meters) higher. Al Gore jumped at the chance to Tweet:''CO2 levels breaching 400ppm is a sad milestone. A call to action.''

It is really bizarre at this time for warmist scientists referring to carbon dioxide as a ''heat-trapping'' gas and constantly repeating the manta that ''the evidence shows global temperatures and CO2 levels are tightly linked,'' when the evidence is the exact opposite. Firstly, carbon dioxide represents only a tiny fraction of the air we breathe, which of course we also exhale. As of last Thursday's reading, it was 0.04 percent. To put it in perspective, say you filled a million quart jars with air, only about 400 quart jars of carbon dioxide would have been mixed in. To quote Republican congressman from California, Dana Rohrabacher who said at a Congressional hearing, ''The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rather undramatic.''  So where is all the rapidly accelerating global warming that is supposed to be gripping the world?

Well....it's not in the air. Atmospheric temperature readings show global temperatures have been flat for the last 17 years in spite of rising CO2 (see chart). It's not in the upper ocean. Sea surface temperature readings similarly show no recent warming. It's not in the polar ice caps. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellite data show polar ice is currently more extensive than the long-term average. Antarctica's ice is thicker than in the last 20 years, while the Arctic ice is returning now that strong winds have subsided and Greenland's ice cap is growing too.

Global warming activists have finally come up with a last line of defense of their ideology they know nobody will be able to prove wrong. The missing global warming is in the Bermuda Triangle!  No, I'm not kidding. This is what they are claiming. You see, the alarmists have been telling us for decades that rapidly accelerating global warming was imminent and unavoidable. The problem for the alarmists is the warming peaked in 1999 and now looks like it is in a slow cooling trend. So how do Al Gore, Michael (defunct hockey-stick) Mann, and the rest of the global warming Chicken Little's save face when their warming apocalypse fails to occur? Easy, blame it on the Bermuda Triangle! The NBC News claimed, in a headline last month, ''Where did global warming go? The deep ocean, the experts say'' while the same day USA Today had its headline announcing, ''Where's the heat?  In the oceans depths!''

The headlines reflect a prominent global warming activist claiming that he developed a computer model by which global warming can bypass the atmosphere, bypass the upper ocean, and be entirely hidden the deep ocean; you know, that part of our planet where we really can't measure or find anything. That missing global warming is apparently hanging out at the underwater space alien base in the heart of the Bermuda Triangle. These warmists, of course do their best to make their Bermuda Triangle case sound scientific. The paper claims all this phantom global warming really can directly bypass the atmosphere and the upper ocean if winds start blowing strangely enough and strongly enough to bury the warming deep in the ocean. Thankfully we can spare ourselves the dizzying asserted logic of such  a claim by examining recent global sea surface wind data. As Bermuda Triangle-busting science would have it, NASA satellite instruments show global sea surface wind speeds have declined rather than increased during the past decade.

The Way I See It.....so much for the Bermuda Triangle or any deep sea hideout for this infamous warming. So, is increasing CO2 a harmful pollutant? The answer is absolutely no. In simple terms, CO2 is the lifeblood of the planet. Plant life largely evolved at a time when the atmospheric CO2 concentration was many times what it is today. The lush growth of those millions of years ago is now being dug up from vast seams of coal.  We are, from the plants' point of view, putting more of their food into the air, and they are gobbling it up and are rewarding us with expelled oxygen. So increasing concentration of CO2 does not pose a toxic risk to the planet. Considering that our planet's life system has experienced multimillennial periods of both warmer and colder weather, successful adaptation is the defining characteristic of every living plant and creature in our world today.

Not a single major prediction of ideological environmentalism has come true -- no rising sea levels, no Himalayan glaciers vanishing, no global famines, no cancer epidemics and no resource depletion crisis. So at the moment of its ascendancy, it is environmentalism, not modern civilization, that is tottering. As more critics --including epidemiologists, demographers, toxicologists, climatologists and economists -- point ever more insistently at the yawning gap between claims of political environmentalism and scientific and economic reality, green ideologues and academics who sold out to grants are becoming ever more frantic to deny the growing contradictions.