Useful Climate Change Alarmist Idiots

The Santa Rosa Press Democrat had another nonsensical alarmist climate change article. This one was about recent Clear Lake warming (LakesWarming Up: ‘Sentinels for climate change’, August 19, 2013), which sounded significant and ominous until near the end of the article when Thomas Smythe, Lake County’s water resource engineer for 25 years, noted that Clear Lake’s temperature declined from 1970 to 1990, but by 2008 had rebounded to the 1970 level.

Interestingly, Clear Lake cooled for twenty years during a period Al Gore called unprecedented warming, and warmed during the past 23 years, the last sixteen of which haven’t warmed.  

The article also mentioned that Clear Lake warmed at a rate of 0.09 degrees per year from 1992 to 2008, compared to 0.23 degrees per year for Lake Tahoe at the same time. More nonsense, since Lake Tahoe has an average depth of 1,000 feet, and Clear Lake averages 27 feet deep.  Being charitable, the reporter probably got the temperatures reversed. However, Al Gore was at Lake Tahoe on Monday this week, and he said it was getting clearer and never mentioned its warming. Since the warming rate reported in the article is 23 degrees per century, if that were truly the case Big Al would have been all over it.

The article also mentioned the usual panic items: rising sea levels, shrinking glaciers, decreasing snowmelt runoff, and increasing wildfires.  However, sea levels have been rising at a rate of seven inches per century since 1800 (link); glaciers shrank much faster in the 1800s than in the past century (link); Northern Hemisphere snow cover was the highest in 2013 since records began in 1966 (link); and wildfires are at a record low (link).

The Press Democrat article was typical of modern science “journalism” – useful idiots in service to alarmist agendas.