Please Babs (and other Stars): Shut up About Climate Change

This is about a month old, but I just stumbled across it. Leave it to “superstar” celebrities like Barbra Streisand, who know nothing of science or anything beyond the end of their marvelous navels, to pontificate to their mindless fans about the “dangers of global warming” in the wake of Sandy (or any other storm). Here’s Babs bloviating about it on BarbraStreisand.com:

In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, I can’t comprehend how there are still climate change deniers out there. Yet there are. These last few days, we’ve all seen pictures of New Jersey and New York LITERALLY under water. And the extreme droughts in the Midwest, the floods in Vermont and the fires in Colorado and Texas this year only validate what nearly every leading scientist has confirmed: Climate change is REAL and causes extreme weather conditions.

No matter how loud Mother Nature screams, we never seem to listen. We’ve got to get serious about investing in solutions to this serious threat before it gets any worse. We know which party thinks that climate change is a hoax. We know whose policies will subsidize polluters over funding FEMA. Think about the opportunity we have to invest in new sources of technology that will produce clean energy and the millions of new jobs that will be created. One party is willing to have this conversation, the other won’t even sit at the table. This is no longer a fight about ideology. It’s a fight about the kind of world we want to pass on to our children. So, let’s start the conversation on November 6th at the voting booth and make our voices heard.

My Foundation started supporting climate change work in 1989, when I donated a quarter of a million dollars to support the work of environmental scientist Dr. Michael Oppenheimer at the Environmental Defense Fund. Since then, I, and others have spent countless millions on this issue. Unfortunately, due to the lack of political courage by some politicians and relentless lobbying and campaign contributions from the powerful oil and fossil fuel industries, progress on this issue has been impossible.

Spare me. I’m glad she’s so knowledgeable  and so willing to share her opinion. Unfortunately, she’s just wrong. There’s no evidence that “global warming” or “climate change” as they like to fashionably describe it now had anything to do with Sandy. Nor is there any evidence that the earth is currently warming – since it hasn’t been for the last 16 years.

As to “warming’s” association with Sandy, here’s some facts from a NOAA scientist:

If even NOAA says Sandy is not attributable to global warming, you can put that in the bank. And that is exactly what NOAA’s Dr. Martin Hörling says: “Great events can have little causes. In this case the immediate cause is most likely little more than the coincidental alignment of a tropical storm with an extra-tropical storm. …

“As to underlying causes, neither the frequency nor the intensity of tropical or extra-tropical cyclones is projected to appreciably change due to climate change, nor have there been indications of a change in their statistical behavior over this region in recent decades (see the IPCC’s 2012 Special Report on Extreme Weather).”

Splendidly, Dr. Hörling concludes: “So, while it will rain like ‘black cats and Frankenweenies’ over the mid-Atlantic, this is not some spell conjured upon by great external forces – unless you believe in the monster flicks of Universal Studios fame.”

Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University produces a monthly-updated accumulated-cyclone-energy index – a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones worldwide. For most of the past couple of years it has been at its least level since satellite records began a third of a century ago.

Here, in one long, breathless sentence, is the complete answer to the bed-wetters who say global warming caused Sandy:

Extreme weather comes and goes in cycles (get used to it); occasionally you get a rare concatenation of circumstances (as we scientists say, “s–t happens”); there are more weather-watching instruments now than there were (think satellites); more reports of bad weather circulate (and reach a wider audience than ever); climate extremists unimpressively blame global warming for opposite extremes (heat and cold, flood and drought); there has been far too little warming so far to make any major difference (1 degree F in 60 years); the warming of recent years is well within natural variability (from 1695-1735, before man could have been to blame, central England warmed by 4 degrees F in just 40 years); extreme events are just as likely in cooler as in warmer weather (mathematically speaking, the climate behaves chaotically); warmer weather causes fewer storms, not more (thanks to temperature differentials that diminish as the world warms); there has been no acceleration in the rate of global warming (it’s stopped for now); and the knock-down argument is that there has been no global warming for almost 16 years (none of the discredited models predicted that: instead, in 2008 the modelers said that 15 years or more without global warming would demonstrate a discrepancy between their computer predictions and real-world observations and measurements).

Now, I’m sure you can go out and find dozens of sources that say “climate change” was responsible for hurricane Sandy and for an increase in severe storms all over the Earth. Given the explanation above, I just don’t buy it.
Read more at WND