American Elephants

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha: From the Daily Caller today —On Wednesday morning’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the Center for American Progress’ very own Christie Heffner, former CEO of Playboy Enterprises announced that Chicago’s sky-high murder rate could be blamed — at least in part — on climate change.

Yes, last year we hit a record number of murders from guns [in Chicago], And this year we are already outpacing last year’s numbers. Now there are contributing factors that are not under anybody’s control and may seem odd, but it is factually true. One of them is actually the weather. There is a dramatic increase in gun violence when it is warmer. And we are having this climate change effect that is driving that.

The average high temperature in July, the hottest month in both Chicago and the much-safer New York City is the same for both at 84°. Scarborough thanked her on behalf of conservative bloggers across America.

Meanwhile back in the real world, there is a splendid article at WattsUpWithThat from Australian Climate Scientist Professor Robert (Bob) Carter. He is a senior research geologist who has published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers on palaeo-environmental and palaeo-climatic topics, and the author of several books, the most recent  Climate: The Counter Consensus, available at Amazon as well

He introduces Katharine Hayhoe, PhD, who wrote the December AITSE piece “Climate Change: Anthropogenic or Not?” is an atmospheric scientist and director of the Climate Science Center at Texas Tech University. She is senior author of the book “A Climate for Change; Global Warming facts for Faith-Based Decisions.”

Quite clearly, Dr. Hayhoe and I are both credible professional scientists. Given our training and research specializations, we are therefore competent to assess the evidence regarding the dangerous global warming that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) alleges is being caused by industrial carbon dioxide emissions.

Yet at the end of her article Dr. Hayhoe recommends for further reading the websites RealClimate.org and SkepticalScience.com, whereas here at the outset of writing my own article I recommend the websites wattsupwiththat.com and www.thegwpf.org (Global Warming Policy Foundation). To knowledgeable readers, this immediately signals that Dr. Hayhoe and I have diametrically opposing views on the global warming issue.

The general public finds it very hard to understand how such strong disagreement can exist between two equally qualified persons on a scientific topic, a disagreement that is manifest also on the wider scene by the existence of equivalent groups of scientists who either support or oppose the views of the IPCC about dangerous anthropogenic (human-caused) global warming (DAGW).

Dr, Carter goes on to lay out the common ground between the two, explain how the science works, and then asks:

What evidence can we use to test the DAGW hypothesis? He presents five simple tests. I urge you to read the whole thing. It’s a very clear exposition of the current state of the argument in the climate scientist community.  We’ll leave Ms. Heffner out of it, because there have always been a huge number of silly arguments from people of little understanding, but lots of faith. The list of things supposedly caused by global warming is very, very long, and remarkably senseless.

Dr. Carter here offers a really clear, non-partisan review of the argument for those who don’t know a lot about climate change, without getting into the politics at all. And there is an astounding amount of politics concerned with climate change all over the world.