Latest on global warming...wait, "climate change"

For those of you who have some interest in the on-going debate on global warming climate change...Wait, what am I saying?  The elites--in government and the media--don't allow any debate at all on global warming climate change.

Because according to them it's "settled science."  And "settled science," like settled law, cannot thereafter be revisited.  Ever. Sorta like when the experts in Roman times took it as settled science that the world was flat.

You know...that kind of settled science.

In any case, I just ran across a study in which carbon dating of sea-floor sediments showed that the ocean surface east of the Bahamas today is warmer by ONE degree Celsius than it was 400 years ago!  (At the link, scroll down to "North Atlantic.")

So there ya go:  One more piece of solid evidence that global warming is real.  Settled. science.

(To my liberal readers:  The above line was *sarcasm.*)

Wait:  400 years ago was during a period called the "Little Ice Age," when temperatures in the northern hemisphere were--can you guess?--a LOT colder than today.

Dude, if the Sargasso Sea is only one degree warmer today than it was during the Little Ice Age, doesn't that change the entire perspective on global warming climate change?  I mean, the LIA was a period of miserable cold, so being a whole one degree warmer shouldn't be alarming to anyone.

At least not to anyone rational and not trying to shake the grant-money tree.

Another piece of data from the same study is equally revealing--and is a powerful argument against "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW):  They found that the same sea was one degree *warmer* a thousand years ago than it is today.

Wait, how could it have been warmer a thousand years ago?  Cuz I thought the whole AGW theory was that global warming climate change was caused mainly by humans putting vast amounts of carbon dioxide into the air by burning icky fossil fuels.  Was there a secret group a thousand years ago that burned vast amounts of coal or similar and we just never knew?

Uh, no.

BTW, the study noted above was published in 1996.  I've been looking for the carefully-footnoted scientific rebuttal--the warmenists have had 17 years to discredit the study--but so far nothing.  Hmmm...guess the great gurus of global warming were too busy going to conventions in Geneva to bother with such trivia.

Then last January another study was published refuting global warming climate change, this one of tree-line elevations in Scandinavia. 

If you've been around mountains higher than 10,000 feet or so you've seen for yourself that there's a nice sharp line on the mountains, above which trees simply don't grow.  That's because it's too cold above that line.  So measuring the elevation of the timberline in historic times is a very accurate way to compare ancient temperatures with today's.

The researchers found that in Roman times the timberline in the area they studied was almost 2000 feet higher than today.  That would mean the local temperatures 20 centuries ago were--are you sitting down?-- warmer than today.  By a couple of degrees, which the experts say is quite a bit.

But that's probably because the Romans were doin' all that metal smelting, burnin' stuff to make swords and spears and other nasty metal things, so they were probably dumping, oh, gazillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, and...

Uh, no.

One more time for the stubborn:  We used to think the sun's output hardly changed at all, but now there's ample evidence that the sun's activity changes far more than we previously thought.  So IF the globe has warmed overall in the last century--and that's not at all certain due to the deliberate altering of temperature data by researchers pushing the theory that humans are causing global warming--it's probably *not* due to CO2 but to changes in solar activity. 

Oh, and for those who are curious as to how far the AGW pushers will lie and cheat to win:  A division of the UK government had the only copy of the most extensive archive of modern (i.e. measured) temperatures on the planet.  Skeptics suspected the record custodians were lying when they claimed this record supported the AGW theory, and sued under the UK version of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain a copy of the records.  After all, the temperature records were purchased with taxpayer funds and were clearly not the property of the folks who controlled them.

Since the bureaucrats who had the records were scientists and interested in discovering the truth, they promptly gave a copy of the records... Just kidding: they told the group seeking a copy of the unique temperature records to fuck off.  Fortunately the British courts found in favor of the group that filed the lawsuit, and ordered the guys who had the temperature records to provide a copy.

But about a week before the deadline the court set for the defendants to provide plaintiffs with the temperature data, something...unlikely happened:  the British bureaucrats who had the unique data claimed that their only copy had somehow accidentally been destroyed.

Yep.  They claimed no one had thought to make backup copies of these absolutely unique, irreplaceable records.

That's literally what they claimed.

One is astonished at such brazen lying to a court.  But hell, they're doing it for a great cause, so everyone gave 'em a pass.

It's a good rule of thumb that any scientists who refuse to make their data public, and to debate their pet scientific theory in public, are trying to hide evidence that they've been conning you.