Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts
Showing posts with label climate change. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Donald Trump is our only hope

I told you last week that President Trump had turned a corner with his State of the Union address. He is in full campaign mode, and no one is better on the campaign trail than Donald Trump. But the liberals are handing him ammunition. The Green New Deal is a dream come true for Trump. That’s why it’s so important in this moment of American history that we have someone like Trump in the White House. He is the clear delineation between capitalism and socialism.

This is where the Democrats have been heading for a long time. It could be argued that this is where they’ve been for a long time. Tip O’Neill didn’t start the slide to socialism for the Democrats, but he’s emblematic of the bridge between the likes of Sam Rayburn and Nancy Pelosi. When my father was a Democrat in Congress in the ‘80s, people like Pelosi and Barney Frank were considered the left fringe of the party. Now they’re the middle of the road of the Democrat Party. They’re also being edged out by the more radical voices of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris.

Some are frightened of these radical new voices, and well they should be, but these voices also offer a clear contrast to capitalism in this country. Trump is capitalism personified. He loves this country. He knows what made it great. He’s an American success story. Had we even had someone as business-minded as Mitt Romney as president we wouldn’t have this clear distinction. Romney tends to be mushy on the important issues like illegal immigration and global warming. He would surely be compromising with the likes of AOC.

Trump understands his role in history. He is the bulwark against a total transformation of this country from capitalism that made it great to socialism that has failed wherever it’s been tried. That is the litmus test. Ask any proponent of AOC and socialism to cite any example—past or present—where socialism has worked. They can’t. The irony of all of this is they cry for taxing the ‘tippy top’ at 70 percent while Venezuela, which did exactly that, crumbles before our eyes.

Speaking of irony, Sen. Amy Klobuchar announced her candidacy for president and scolded the Republicans about the dangers of global warming in the midst of a blizzard. Of course, the people who spent decades telling us the earth was going to burn are now telling us the frigid weather is climate change. These are the same people who point to floods as climate change but were just telling us we were running out of water.

Any other Republican president would be buckling to the pressure from the radical global warming crowd. Not Trump. He made fun of Klobuchar’s announcement, and well he should. The liberals are fond of saying, “Speak truth to power.” Trump is speaking truth to liars. This Green New Deal would be a disaster for America. It would cut off the lifeblood of capitalism which is affordable energy. It would reward people who don’t work. It would cost the taxpayers trillions they don’t have.

Global warming like Occupy Wall Street and myriad other left-wing causes are merely vehicles to destroy capitalism and give rise to socialism. Socialism is complete government control. If you don’t know what that looks like remember this. The Nazis were socialists. Like I said, socialism has been tried many times before and failed.


Trump is now above 50 percent in approval. He is what stands between us and another Venezuela. Our only hope is that he prevails. 



Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning talk radio show, 
The Phil Valentine Show. He's also the co-host of The PodGOATs podcast.


Wednesday, November 14, 2018

Trump was right about California wildfires

I’ll be the first to admit that President Trump’s tweet about forest management in the midst of a wildfire catastrophe was not the most artful thing to do. However, it doesn’t change the fact that he’s right. Governor Jerry Brown blames ‘climate deniers’ for the devastation. The truth is he had a chance to minimize the destruction, but he chose instead to bow to extreme environmentalists.

It’s instructive to understand what causes wildfires. It’s not spontaneous combustion because the earth is warming. An estimated 90 percent of wildfires are caused by humans. This includes campfires left unattended, cigarettes being tossed out of automobiles, and arson. The remaining ten percent are caused either by lightning or lava. The environmentalists will claim that wildfire devastation is exacerbated by drought. That’s certainly true, but California’s droughts these days are mere blips compared to historic droughts.

Scott Stine is a professor of geography and environmental studies at Cal State East Bay. He told the Mercury News, “We continue to run California as if the longest drought we are ever going to encounter is about seven years. We’re living in a dream world.” There have been multiple droughts over the last 1,000 years that have lasted 10 to 20 years. There was a drought around 850 AD that lasted 240 years. After a 50-year respite, another one lasted 180 years.

Contrary to what the alarmists tell you about this being the driest time in California’s history, Professor Stine says the past century has been among the wettest in the past 7,000 years.

Perspective is what so many knee-jerk environmentalists lack. They get locked in a world they can only remember, or a world that goes back to when the first records were kept. That’s a tiny world compared to the big picture. The longest droughts in recent California history occurred between 1928 and 1934, and another between 1987 and 1992. The problem is as more people overbuild California the property loss is naturally going to be greater.

Here’s why President Trump is right when he tweeted, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.” The policy from the U.S. Forest Service used to be quite simple. When a forest became too difficult to walk through it was thinned. They cut out underbrush and made space between large trees. Strategic logging was employed that not only made the forests less prone to wildfires, it actually made the Forest Service profitable. This all began to change in the ‘70s and accelerated during the ‘90s under President Bill Clinton. The Rio Earth Summit was the big turning point where prevention of forest management kicked into high gear and war was declared on the timber industry.

The Roadless Area Conservation Policy directive put a stop to nearly all logging and roadbuilding, not to mention coal, gas, oil, and other mineral leasing on 58 million acres of land. President George W. Bush tried to reinstitute common sense forest management but was stymied by a federal judge.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA) told Canada Free Press that the forest service used to auction off national forest timber. He said this not only saved the forests, it helped the local economy. That has “all but dried up,” he said.

And Jerry Brown vetoed a 2016 bill that passed unanimously in the California Assembly and Senate that would’ve given locals more say-so when it comes to fire prevention.


Liberal politicians continue to run California into the ground, and, in typical fashion, they always blame somebody else.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, 
The Phil Valentine Show.



Wednesday, January 3, 2018

We could use some global warming about now


The new year came in like a lion. The average temperature in the contiguous 48 states was eleven degrees. Over 85 percent of the country was below freezing. Nearly a third was below zero. For much of the U.S. east of the Rocky Mountains, temperatures were about 30 degrees below normal. Omaha, Nebraska hit minus 20, breaking a 130-year-old record. Other records were shattered all across the nation. Now, I understand that weather is not climate, but this whole global warming narrative is becoming more and more ridiculous.

From KING5.com
The U.K.’s Metro newspaper announced with glee that a mini Ice Age could hit by 2030 and “save us from global warming.” Save us from global warming? How many folks would love a little global warming about now? According to Science Daily, the cold kills about 20 times more people than the heat. Think about that for a moment. If we really care about saving lives then these climate change zealots should be praying for global warming. Oh, that’s right. They don’t pray. Well, maybe to a graven image of Al Gore.

It’s funny how the Branch Algorians are nowhere to be found when the temperatures hit single digits. Yes, there are a few die-hards braving the cold and the wind to preach the gospel of Al. The Guardian claimed 2017 was the hottest year on record without an El NiƱo. Of course, when you dig down you learn they’re using surface temperature data that we now know is not only highly inaccurate due to human error but has been purposely manipulated by NOAA and other so-called scientific institutions.

But authors of a study defend NOAA’s fudging of temperature data. “Stations have moved to different locations over the past 150 years, most more than once,” they write. “They have changed instruments from mercury thermometers to electronic sensors, and have changed the time they take temperature measurements from afternoon to morning. Cities have grown up around stations, and some weather stations are not ideally located. All of these issues introduce inconsistencies into the temperature record.”

Isn’t this exactly what those of us who argue against using surface temperatures have been saying for years? Surface temperatures are too unreliable to be used as a true picture of climate. Yet this study argues that NOAA should not only use them but manipulate them as they see fit. NOAA, like many U.S. agencies, has been infiltrated by global warming zealots. We’re witnessing a scattering of so-called scientists and policymakers from the EPA now that President Trump is demanding hard science rather than hysteria.

The hard science is the satellite temperature data. We’ve been measuring surface and ocean temperature via satellites since 1979. What it shows is virtually no warming since 1979.

KING5-TV in Seattle greeted readers of their webpage with this headline: “Yes, it’s freezing. But climate change is still real.” They seemed to be trying to convince themselves more than their readers. They dragged out a Miami meteorologist who claimed the rest of the world was warmer than usual “with the warmest readings in the poles.” So, I checked the temperature for the poles. Minus 28 Celsius at the North Pole. The average for January is minus 24. At the South Pole, as of this writing, it was minus 29 Celsius. The average for January is minus 31.


The KING5 piece warns that climate is “the average weather conditions that prevail” at any given location. Agreed. Then if satellite data show we haven’t warmed globally in 40 years then the science is settled. Stay warm. 

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.





Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Don't fall for the hurricane hype

It was inevitable. You go through 12 years of a hurricane drought, the longest stretch of a category three hurricane hitting the U.S. in American history, and when we get hit the climate hysterics come out of the woodwork. See, they say, global warming caused these storms. Even the pope chided ‘climate deniers’ saying, “When you don’t want to see, you don’t see.”

Well, Francis at least got that right. Let’s see if we can see the facts.

Hurricane Harvey dumped a torrent of rain on Texas but it barely exceeded the downpour from Tropical Storm Amelia in 1978. Back in 1979, Tropical Storm Claudette dumped 42 inches in just 24 hours near Houston, the amount it took Harvey three days to do.

So-called scientists like Michael Mann—who gave us the biggest hoax in global warming history, the debunked hockey stick graph—led with this headline: “It’s a fact: climate change made Hurricane Harvey more deadly.” He claimed Gulf sea surface temperatures have increased by a degree over the past few decades which, he claims, cause 3 to 5 percent more moisture in the atmosphere.

First of all, how does he explain the floods from Amelia and Claudette nearly 40 years ago? There are four major studies on sea surface temperatures according to Anthony Watts at the website WattsUpWithThat.com. Two of them show “weak warming” while the other two show cooling since 1998. This coincides with the land temperature warming “hiatus” that climate hysterics are having a difficult time explaining away.

And then there was the claim that Hurricane Irma was “the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.” Fox News alert: The Gulf of Mexico is in the Atlantic. This was another attempt to exaggerate a hurricane to score global warming points. In fact, if you judge the strength of hurricanes by maximum sustained winds then Irma was tied for second with three other hurricanes. The others were in 2005, 1998, and 1935. Yeah, I think I see a pattern, don’t you? 

If you judge a hurricane by its minimum atmospheric pressure then Irma was tied for 12th place. Again, the top hurricanes were all over the lot ranging from 2005 to 1988 to 1935. And keep in mind, this is only since we’ve had the capability to accurately measure different aspects of a hurricane which only dates back to 1924. That’s a blip in time.

And obviously hurricanes are not increasing in severity or frequency as Al Gore and his minions keep saying. If we’ve just ended the longest hurricane drought in history then that stat speaks for itself.

Climate hysterics have been predicting each year since 2005 was going to be a horrible year for hurricanes. We listened as they droned on about this each year for twelve years. Eventually they were bound to be right. After all, a stopped watch is right twice a day. This is their year to be right. What that means is they were wrong every other year for the last 12 years. They have no credibility whatsoever.

The irony is that Irma came through and blew the last vestiges of Al Gore’s summer flop out of theaters. The jig is up. The evidence is now overwhelming. CO2 continues to rise yet the temperatures have remained flat for 20 years. There is no correlation between CO2 and temperatures.


Oh, and by the way, there’s a new study out that shows plants are globally getting more efficient because of the rise in carbon dioxide. Hilarious. CO2 is not the boogeyman. It actually feeds the planet. I love it.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, 
The Phil Valentine Show.



Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Obama going for broke on climate change, uh, climate disruption


Well, let’s see, in the last 40 years we’ve moved from global cooling to global warming to climate change and now climate disruption. That’s the latest ration of rubbish being issued by the White House. Their economic policies are a joke. Obamacare is an unqualified disaster. They’re trying to latch on to something that will connect with voters here before the mid-term elections so they’ve issued yet another Chicken Little report to try and scare people into their arms.

Apparently it’s not working. Most national polls show global warming, uh, climate disruption is a concern for only about 30 percent of Americans. Why so low? Because none of what
these people have predicted has come true. 

I hate to be the one to say I told you so but I told you 2014 was going to be the year they went for broke on this issue. Since they’ve been so wrong for so long they have to up the hysteria to drown out their failure. They figure if they can just work you into a frenzy you won’t actually sit down and look at what’s happening around you.

Well, we did in our movie, An Inconsistent Truth. We learned that the polar bears aren’t dying off, the hurricanes aren’t getting worse, the sea levels aren’t rising, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. When the earth moved from cooling to warming they changed their tactic from global cooling to global warming. When the earth stopped warming they called it climate change. Now they’re trying to convince you that every time you hear about a tornado or a flood or a drought it’s something entirely new.

There’s really nothing new going on. As we point out in the movie, wild weather isn’t getting any wilder. It’s just that these folks are focusing on it more. Have you ever bought a new car? Right after you start driving that car you start noticing cars just like it all over the place. Before you didn’t notice at all. Do you think there were suddenly more of those cars on the road? Of course, not. You just notice them more.

This is the concept behind drilling “extreme weather” into your head. If you hear that global warming is causing more tornados then every time you hear about a tornado you’ll think it was caused by global warming and, by extension, by humans. Every time you hear about a drought you’re supposed to think global warming. Or, global climate disruption. 

Which brings me to a very interesting point. I heard a report that Miami is experiencing sea level rise. Miami is on the Atlantic Ocean. Now, common sense would tell you that if Miami is really seeing sea level rise then every town on the eastern seaboard would be seeing sea level rise. They’re not. What’s more likely happening is either the coastline is eroding around Miami or the actual land is sinking a bit. This has been shown to be the case in several parts of the world.

By the way, some places on the Atlantic Ocean have seen sea levels recede. If global warming is really global then it would be happening globally. It’s not. But that doesn’t stop people like John Podesta and his boss, Barack Obama, from trying to scare you. And scare you into what? Into joining them in destroying the oil and coal industries that have advanced a civilization farther than most anything else in history.

Maybe if the president is so set on weaning us from fossil fuels he’ll try a stay-cation this summer instead of Hawaii.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.


Thursday, April 24, 2014

More doom and gloom from the Chicken Little crowd

It would be comical if it weren’t so serious. EPA administrator Gina McCarthy went on “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central to tell Jon Stewart’s viewers that global warming is the biggest public health and economic challenge we face. Forget that we haven’t warmed, globally, for at least 15 years, these folks find it necessary to ratchet up the hysteria. It’s akin to people who talk to foreigners who don’t speak English. They think if they just talk louder the person will understand them.

What’s so unfunny about McCarthy’s Comedy Central performance is we have scientists right now proposing that we spray sulphur and aluminum particles into the atmosphere to
block the sun. I am not kidding! Have these people lost their minds? Apparently, but these are the types of scientists who get funded not just by our government but by governments worldwide.

In fact, there’s strong evidence to suggest they have already been spraying these toxic chemicals into the atmosphere. All in the name of stopping some phantom theory of manmade global warming.

The other day the UN’s IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued yet another dire prediction that we only had 15 years to do something about climate change or it would be too late. Don’t they know that we know they’ve been doing the same thing since 1982? 

Here’s a brief history of the hysteria from the website ClimateDepot.com.

The Executive Director of the UN Environment Program warned in 1982 the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” In 1989, the UN said we’d reach a tipping point in ten years. In fact, Al Gore said there would be no Arctic sea ice in the summer of 2013. The truth was, we had 50 percent more sea ice in the Arctic in the summer of 2013 than we did the year prior.

But, as this whole climate scam started to fall apart, they just upped the hysteria. In 2009, the UK’s Gordon Brown said we only had “50 days to save the world.” That same year, Prince Charles was a little more optimistic. He said we had 96 months. It was also in 2009 that Canadian Green Party looney Elizabeth May said “we have hours” to prevent climate disaster.

It seems 2009 was a big year for panic. The godfather of global warming, NASA’s James Hansen, said we just had Obama’s first term to save the planet. Then greenie James Lovelock slowed things down a bit in 2010. He said, “we may have 1,000 years to sort it out.”

The latest came from the UN on April 16, 2014. “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change,” the IPCC said. “Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming.”

Look folks, I was born at night but not last night. This is basic huckster behavior. You have to get that roof replaced and right now, before it all falls in on you! You have to replace that engine in your car because it’s just not safe to drive! And what’s always at the heart of these scams? That’s right, money. The UN wants producer nations like the United States to pay for our sin of “carbon pollution,” which is another way of saying, “pay for your sin of success.”

None of what Al Gore predicted in his movie came true, so now they’re doing a sequel. Maybe they should name it Gullible’s Travels.  


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.


Friday, March 14, 2014

Green hypocrisy on display in all-night talkathon


Senate Democrats kept the lights burning late at the U.S. Capitol to call attention to global warming. They held an all-night talkathon to call attention to the horrendous problem of global warming. I know you’re probably wondering what the heck they’re talking about given the unusually cold winter. So was I.

Aside from the obvious absurdity of doing business in the middle of the night, these so-called environmentalists needlessly burned untold amounts of energy at a building that is powered
by coal, the very essence of evil in their eyes.

It’s doubtful that many people stayed up to watch the proceedings, unless, of course, they were looking for a cure for their insomnia. If they did, they surely burned more energy than they otherwise would have by keeping their televisions running. Not to mention the countless coffee pots that were purring just to keep the viewers awake.

Majority Leader Harry Reid kicked off the marathon by listing a litany of natural disasters supposedly caused by we humans. Among those listed were droughts in the Midwest, wildfires in the West, lower-than-normal water levels in the Mississippi River, low temps in Georgia and mild weather in Alaska.

So, let me see if I have this right. If it rains it’s global warming. If it doesn’t rain it’s global warming. If it’s hot it’s global warming. If it’s cold it’s global warming. If the forest is on fire it’s global warming. What, no heartbreak of psoriasis? 

Understand one thing. All of this is garbage. No serious scientist believes this junk. Wildfires caused by global warming? Are the forests just spontaneously combusting? No. The National Park Service says 90 percent of wildfires are caused by humans, either through campfires left unattended, the burning of debris, negligently discarding cigarettes and intentional acts of arson. The other 10 percent are started by lightning or lava.

It is an insult to any intelligent person to say that global warming is causing high temperatures and low temperatures. I understand the greenhouse theory. Supposedly, according to the hysterics, we are pumping too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere causing a “greenhouse effect.” The theory goes that everything underneath heats up, as in a greenhouse. There’s absolutely nothing in the theory that points to record low temperatures. That’s something the proponents of this theory simply made up when the weather didn’t suit their cause.

There’s also no scientific evidence that global warming is causing more severe weather. In fact, we’re in the quietest period for hurricanes since the Civil War. In other words, none of this rot-gut is true yet these senators waste time, money and energy preaching to the rest of us about a subject of which they know absolutely nothing

These global warming types fall into two categories. The first is the sinister person who knows he or she is lying but continues the lie to perpetuate an agenda. That agenda can be personal or political. Al Gore is known for this. 
The second category is the group of people who have been lied to and believe the lie. Fortunately or unfortunately, most of the senators who attended the all night gab-athon fall into the latter.

Four Democrat senators facing tough re-elections were conspicuously absent from the spectacle. They were Mark Begich (D-Alaska), Kay Hagan (D-N.C.), Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). If this were such a popular issue with the people, as the rest of the senate Democrats claim, why did these senators stay away?

Because the American people, blessedly, are beginning to wake up.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.


Friday, February 21, 2014

Climate censors: Not up for debate

The danger of media bias is not in what they tell you. It’s in what they don’t tell you. Those on the left preciously guard their positions by desperately trying to keep the truth at bay.

That was never more clearly demonstrated than during my recent trip to Charlottesville for a screening of our documentary, An Inconsistent Truth, at the University of Virginia. What I told the students there is the same thing I tell students at any university stop we make. Challenge everything. I told them that there are people who will go to any lengths to keep them in the dark on the issue of global warming with ad hominem attacks on people like me or anyone who dares challenge their worldview that humans are destroying the planet.

Right on cue came Thomas Forman II the Monday morning after my weekend visit. Mr. Forman scolded the UVA College Republicans for even inviting me, as if I had soiled the
hallowed grounds with my presence. He then proceeded to call me and anyone who dares disagree with the propaganda that he and others have been spewing “scientifically illiterate.”

Forman didn’t even have the decency to attend the screening, which is typical of people on his side of the issue, especially in academia. I suspect Mr. Forman knows the truth. How could he not? None of what Al Gore predicted in his movie has come true. The earth’s temperatures are not rising. The polar bears are not dying off. Sea levels are not rising. Hurricanes are not getting more vicious and more frequent. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.

Most important in this discussion, there most certainly is not a consensus on the issue of global warming or climate change or whatever these hysterics are calling it on any given day.

Unlike Gore’s movie, which is all about Gore, our movie features scientists who study the climate on a daily basis. One of the scientists we interviewed is Dr. Fred Singer. Dr. Singer is not only one of the foremost experts on the issue of climate change, he is an emeritus professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia, the very university where Mr. Forman works. Surely he knows this. Surely he doesn’t believe that he is more qualified in this field than the man who was a pioneer in weather satellites and a former deputy assistant administrator of policy at the EPA.

Mr. Forman’s display of arrogance is breathtaking. His description of anyone who disagrees with him on climate change as being scientifically illiterate is the kind of scorched-earth policy the proponents of manmade global warming employ when they sense the truth is knocking down their door.

Commentator George Will summed it up best. He said when anyone claims the debate is over you can count on two things. First, the debate is still raging and, second, they are losing.

Mr. Forman and his fellow travelers are most assuredly losing the debate. Carbon dioxide levels have increased substantially over the past 15 years but global temperatures have remained steady. In short, there is no correlation between the two.

The recent snow storms that have pounded much of the country only serve to drive that point home. I’m certainly well aware that weather is not climate. I’m also aware that theory is not science. The scientific method demands proof. The global warming alarmists have no proof so they fall back to climate models. There are 72 major climate models that have been predicting temperature since 1979. All of the climate models - like Mr. Forman - have been dead wrong.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.


Friday, January 3, 2014

Global warming theory hits the ice


I am such a big fan of God’s sense of humor, especially when it comes to the issue of global warming. You may have heard of the Gore Effect. That’s when temperatures are unusually cold when Gore flies in (on a carbon-polluting private jet, no less) to lecture those assembled on the dangers of global warming.

The Copenhagen Climate Conference in December of 2009 saw frigid temperatures and a blizzard, the first December Copenhagen snowfall in 14 years. The conference in Cancun
the following year saw three days of record low temperatures. God must get a big kick out of such irony. I know I do.

The latest irony is a Russian expedition to Antarctica. It’s summer in the Southern Hemisphere and the team was all set to make headlines about the discovery of record low sea ice. That’s when they got stuck in the frozen waters of the Antarctic. A Russian icebreaker was dispatched to rescue them.

This isn’t the first time that’s happened. A similar fate befell an Arctic expedition some time back, again, trying to demonstrate the lack of sea ice. Al Gore told us the Arctic Sea would be ice-free by the summer of 2013. The fact is Arctic summer sea ice saw a 55 percent increase over a year ago. Once again, Gore was completely wrong.

Meanwhile, back in the states, Green Bay set a new record low this week of minus 19 degrees. Record lows were shattered all over the Wisconsin area. To be clear, weather is not climate but each time we hit record highs or there’s unusually low sea ice the climate hysterics try to convince you it is.

That’s the frustrating dishonesty of the global warming alarmists. They twist and distort data to fit their agenda then insist that anyone who disagrees prove them wrong. That’s not the way science works. The burden of proof is on the one who comes up with the theory. Otherwise all sorts of outlandish claims could be sold to the public as gospel if the burden of proof were only on those who dispute the claim. 

Once upon a time the conventional wisdom was the world was flat. That bogus theory was so widely sold and believed that few even thought to question it.  Contrary to some history books, most European’s of Columbus’ day had already come to the conclusion the earth wasn’t flat long before Columbus sailed. Still, there was a long period of time in which ordinary citizens took the word of the flat earth theorists without question.

The proponents of manmade global warming are the modern-day flat earth society. Their arrogance is not unlike their flat earth ancestors. Even as late as 1956 there were proponents of the flat earth theory. Space shots, starting with Sputnik, finally put a stake in the heart of the flat earthers.

There will probably be no defining moment for the issue of global warming. Only the passing of time will fully destroy the theory as it passes with a whimper rather than a bang. The sea levels will continue to defy the predictions of the global warming alarmists. The hurricanes will continue to fail to intensify or increase in frequency. The polar bears will continue to thrive. The temperatures will continue to stabilize or decrease. The sea ice will stubbornly refuse to melt.

The theory of global warming will die a death of a thousand cuts. The evidence keeps piling up against it. It will officially collapse under its own weight and people will wonder how anyone could ever have been so gullible.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.


Thursday, November 28, 2013

Are scientists coming back to science?


One of the lighter moments in our movie, An Inconsistent Truth, is when we’re making the point that of all the factors global warming alarmists point to they ignore that big, burning ball of fire in the sky.  We conclude the segment with a paraphrase of political guru James Carville.  It’s the sun, stupid.

Sometimes there’s a point when scientists are so immersed in the science that they can’t see the obvious.  The proverbial not being able to see the forest for the trees.  I believe the great global warming debate will go down in history as one such example.

The French news agency, AFP, recently ran a story on how the sun has been surprisingly
quiet lately.  Scientists like to package things as chaotic as the sun into nice, little packages that can be studied and presented in nice, little, peer-reviewed papers.  The only problem is the sun is unpredictable.  Usually we can expect around 120 sunspots per day in a “normal” 11-year cycle, they tell us.  The most recent cycle was forecast to peak at around 90 sunspots per day.  It’s coming in at about half that, or roughly a quarter of the 250-year average.

Interestingly enough, scientists tell us the last time this happened was around 1650 to 1715.  They refer to that as the Maunder Minimum, named after a 19th century husband and wife scientific team who discovered the anomaly.  Many scientists now believe the Maunder Minimum sparked what is now referred to as the Little Ice Age, a period of prolonged cooling that ran from about 1650 to 1850.

And guess what happens after you come out of a little ice age.  You start to warm a bit, as we have since 1850.  Now that the sun is quiet it would make sense that we’d begin another cooling phase, as many scientists now predict.  Instead of common sense another theory captured the imagination of scientists and that is a theory that manmade CO2 is now driving climate change.  The only problem with that theory is there doesn’t seem to be any correlation.

No one is denying that carbon dioxide levels have risen substantially over the last 100 years.  The problem with the theory is the temperatures haven’t followed the rise in CO2.  In fact, as we point out in the movie, if you go back and closely examine the historic record you’ll find that temperature rise precedes the rise in carbon dioxide.  In other words, as the planet heats the ocean temperatures rise and give off more CO2.

It’s interesting that this week much of the nation has been going through a cold snap.  We must be careful that we don’t confuse weather change with climate change.  The global warming alarmists are famous for this.  Any time there’s an unusual heat wave they trot out their theory of global warming.  On weeks like this they’re conspicuously quiet except for those who call this “extreme weather” and blame it on humans.

The odd thing is there is no scientific scenario in which CO2 would cause dramatic cooling.  This whole theory of CO2 causing weather extremes is nonsense.  Either additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is causing the planet to heat up or it’s not.  The greenhouse effect is just that.  Greenhouses get warmer, not colder or wetter or dryer or stormier.  These folks are so determined to blame humans that they ignore common sense and even science itself.

There is basically one dominant factor that determines whether we’re going to be warm or whether we’re going to be cool. 

It’s the sun, stupid! 


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.


Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Doubling down on the global warming hysteria

Is there any wonder that young folks are losing sleep.  Washed up rocker Bob Geldof continues to struggle for relevance with outlandish statements.  "We may not get to 2030," Geldof warned kids at the One Young World summit in Johannesburg, unless something is done about global warming.

Geldof told the young delegates, "There will be a mass extinction event.  That could happen on your watch.  The signs are that it will happen soon."  This is the same hysterical nonsense that has been recklessly thrown out by global warming alarmists for decades.  The bad news for them is "soon" has
come and gone a thousand times and none of what they've predicted has come true.

Let's review.  Al Gore told us in his dreadfully pessimistic motion picture that hurricanes would continue to grow in severity and numbers.  Neither has been true.  In fact, we've been experiencing an abnormally quiet period for hurricanes since Katrina in 2005.  Gore also warned that the polar bears were nearing extinction.  The truth is polar bear populations have exploded since the 1980s.  Gore and his Branch Algorian disciples told us there would be no sea ice in the Arctic by the year 2013.  Arctic sea ice has not only not disappeared, it's 60 percent larger than it was last year.  The doomsday prophets have predicted all sorts of mayhem if we didn't change our evil ways and none of it has come true.

But the torpedo under the water line to the global warming scare has been their very own climate models.  Way back when they were predicting dramatic temperature rise because of our relentless release of CO2 into the atmosphere.  The day of reckoning has arrived.  There are 73 climate models dating back to 1979, the year NASA launched a satellite to track temperature around the globe.  Even though CO2 has continued to rise, temperatures have not.  In fact, despite the IPCC choosing to ignore the obvious, global temperatures have remained steady for the last ten to fifteen years.  In other words, ALL of the climate models were wrong.

The IPCC tells us we can't draw any conclusions from just 15 years of data then, in the same report, tells us humans have been causing global warming only since 1950.  So, 63 years of data plucked from several million years is definitive but 25 percent of that time period is apparently irrelevant if it doesn't fit their political agenda.

You see, Geldof, Gore, et al use guilt as a powerful motivator to separate people from their money.  If you've been convinced you're destroying the planet you'll pay any price to repair the damage.  These hucksters of hysteria know that.

Perhaps Geldof should've picked a time a little further down the road.  The year 2030 is just 17 years away and Bob Geldof is now 62.  Like Al Gore and the IPCC, he may just live long enough to see how ridiculously wrong he was.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.





Monday, September 9, 2013

Climate change is real...but it's also natural

Each summer supply barges arrive in the remote area of the Amundsen Gulf in the Canadian Northwest Territories to bring supplies of fuel and other necessities.  This year the barges are being held up by ice.  Yes, ice in the Arctic in the summer.  Back in 2007 Professor Weislaw Maslowski told an American Geophysical Union meeting that by the summer of 2013 there would be no more sea ice in the Arctic.  He used so-called supercomputers to reach his conclusion.

Flash forward and here we are.  The global warming alarmists took Maslowski's prediction as gospel and worked the media up into a frenzy yet as summer comes to a close about 40 percent of the Arctic Ocean remains covered in ice.  Of course, Maslowski isn't the first to get it wrong.  There are about 73 climate models out there and all of them have been predicting higher temperatures due to more manmade CO2 in the atmosphere.  Now that we've had time to study these models and compare them to satellite temperature data from as far back as 1979 when we first starting tracking temperature with satellites we find that every single model has been wrong.  Every single one.

But that hasn't stopped the climate change hysterics.  The Center for Climate and Security is now claiming that the Syrian uprising is due, at least in part, to manmade climate change.  They argue that a five-year drought from 2006-2011 caused serious "food insecurity" which led to the uprising.  It couldn't have been the Arab Spring that was sweeping the region or al Qaeda's infiltration of the rebel movement.  It couldn't be that Saudi Arabia is funding the rebel cause in an effort to topple the Assad regime.  It must be due to manmade global warming.  Like droughts are something new to the Middle East or anywhere else.

As the evidence piles up against them the global warming alarmists just up their shrill rhetoric.  The melting ice in the Arctic was their last hope of scaring the producing nations out of their money.  (Of course, they never mention that ice has been growing in Antarctica so whatever's happening couldn't be global)  Now their predictions for the Arctic Ocean are shown to be overblown and made up.  Just like their predictions about polar bears, hurricanes and temperatures linked to CO2.

Facts, like the ice in the Arctic, are stubborn things.


Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.