An old tale tells that swindlers sold a gullible emperor thin air, under the guise it were a suit of clothes invisible only to the profoundly stupid. None dared publicly doubt these authorities on anthropogenic wardrobe, fearing to appear dull as the veritable blade of a blunt hockey stick.

Finally it took a lowly, uncompromised child to state the obvious: the emperor was naked, exposed, commando; like the centerfold in a peer reviewed skin magazine for mole rats.

Perhaps the common sense of any observant child is exactly what the fawning entourage of global warming pretenders needs. Let’s give it a try.

Swallowed up by sea levels?

The earliest scare was that melting ice is inundating land masses, that a snorkel will soon become essential day wear–in addition to its traditional role as perhaps the most absurd sounding word in the English language. But here’s common sense:

factoid: sea levels are rising at a whopping 3mm per year

…if that, after data jiggering where they add an “isostatic adjustment,” meaning that the land is also rising, offsetting much of that staggering 3mm. Consider that 3mm is as small as the tiniest visible ripple on the ocean, less than the thickness of two pennies, this on seas heaving meters by the moment, bulging erratically here and there according to thermal, gravitational, wind and dynamic forces, evaporating, receiving rain and runoff. Seriously, who is going to measure that Protean target, somehow average it all, and tell you with a straight face they know beyond the margin of error it is rising 0.0576923076923077mm per week (okay, call it an invisible .06mm)?

The fact is no inhabited islands have been deluged by sea level. Not nearly. The world is still safe for gaudy Hawaiian shirts and tacky dashboard hula girls. Rates of sea level increase do not appear to be accelerating by most accounts, in fact in the recent past they even have shown decline. Sea level rises over the last few decades add up to a paltry few inches. So when the climate emperor tells you that rising sea levels contribute massively to flooding after the storm du jour, use some common sense.

Roasted by global warming?

Factoid: surface air temperatures are rising at a whopping 0 degrees per year, for now

…and have been for at least 13 years, according to the average of 5 major monthly datasets, with no lower-troposphere warming for over 17 years according to the RSS Global Mean. The climate fright industry had predicted runaway temperatures encompassing centuries’ worth of terrestrial warming in those years, but the observed result was NO warming, for nearly a generation. Let’s call this the Alarming Non-Crisis of Generation zzzzzzzzzzzzz.

A broken clock is right twice a day, but not the climate emperor’s Rolex. The sky just did not fall on queue. When observation refutes theory, that theory is discredited–but not in the political world of climate science: the rule is, when disgraced, re-double your unfalsifiable claims of future doom, ask for more taxpayer money, rinse and repeat.

A theory predicting everything predicts nothing

According to the theory of catastrophic climate change you might expect to see any or all of the following:

Warm places getting warmer

Warm places getting colder

Cold places getting warmer

Cold places getting colder

Dry places getting drier

Dry places getting wetter

Wet places getting dryer

Wet places getting wetter

Unchanged places getting unchanged-er

Nearly everything is proof of the magic theory, there’s even a list. Heads they win, clichés, you lose. In addition, this “settled science” offers dozens of sometimes contradictory models which spit out a ridiculously broad range of predictions encompassing nearly every outcome. Common sense: if the undeniable, irrefutable, hard science is “settled” why isn’t there just one precise model?

Furthermore, when their predictions don’t come true, like the prediction of more frequent hurricanes and tornadoes after Katrina, they simply find some way of claiming it really was explained by the theory all along. Another gambit is to place predictions so far into the future as to be unfalsifiable until such time as the climate prophesier is either long in his/her grave, or at a minimum extremely elderly, off drooling somewhere in a rest home instead of on the job. According to the infallible theory of anthropogenic global tautology, everything is proof of the theory, either now, or until such time as virtually forever happens.

On the subject of forever, even 100 years is short in climate-scale time. While temperature might not be rocketing ahead at an exponential rate, technology certainly is. Some, like brainy wizard Ray Kurzweil, say that if well documented trends continue, in as little as 35 years, technology will be so advanced as to render the future unrecognizable. Even now we see the cost curves of alternative energy and storage technologies plunging to soon devastate fossil fuels.

Common sense: who will be burning dinosaur fossil fuels for energy in just 100 years? The stone age did not end for lack of stones.

To get mildly technical, physics tells us the globe should heat about 1°C for each new doubling of CO2 (ignoring other negative and positive forcings). At the current nearly linear increase in CO2, that doubling would take nearly 200 years: by then man will have evolved into Homo GeorgeJetson, the unrecognizably futuristic man.

Warming theorists generally accept this 1°C baseline, but fret that the tiny warming will cause a runaway cascade of water vapor that will steam clean the planet, any three rooms and a hallway or two rooms and stairs, at a minimum.

Common sense: on a planet covered 70% in water, if runaway water vapor warming were likely or easy, wouldn’t we all be cooked medium rare by now?

But evil “deniers” are all paid oil company shills

While refreshing to hear the honest possibility that climate researchers and analysts (on both sides) just might be influenced by whom pays the piper, here’s a bit of irony:

“The Climate Research Unit (CRU) in the UK was set up in 1971 with funding from Shell and BP as is described in the book: “The history of the University of East Anglia, Norwich; Page 285)” By Michael Sanderson. The CRU was still being funded in 2008 by Shell, BP, the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate and UK Nirex LTD (the nuclear waste people in the UK)”

And do you remember “Kenny Boy” Lay, and the fraudulent corporate carbon monger Enron? Well, Enron was a major lobbyist for the original Kyoto climate treaty. Kenny Boy is likely salivating in his grave at realization of his dream of a carbon derivatives market.

The dirty secret is that carbon lobbyists help write environmental legislation and energy policy. If played their way, fossil companies stand to hold all of the chips in the carbon trading casino, squeeze out competition, maintain centralized near monopolies, perhaps even get paid not to drill at some point.

Common sense: With their mega $billions, wouldn’t fossil companies be able hire an army of pseudo-scientists to rival the current army of the imperial climate clothiers, to co-opt easily bought off politicians, universities, broadcast media and publications?

Comforting the afflicted

The climate change gang will tell you that yes, droughts, floods, storms have always happened, but now there are statistically more extreme weather events than ever.

Well, things definitely are more like they are now than they ever were before. But how different?

According to Bayesian probability, you have to toss a coin thousands of times to determine with mediocre certainty that the coin is fair (fair, as compared to a slightly biased coin). How many times must we roll the weather dice before we call the outcome unusual? How are we to find the AGW climate catastrophe signal in the normal climate variation noise? Exactly where is that Waldo, anyway? And if it’s so freaking warm, why the turtleneck sweater and ski cap?

Here is a common sense modest proposal: offer to sell global warming insurance to interested parties for a mere $300 per month. In the event one is swallowed up by rising sea levels, roasted by 1°C temperature increase, or damaged by some weather event provable to be impossible via natural variation, the insurer will pay off. What a great deal! Certainly those panicked by the current, real, undeniable, happening now catastrophe will flock to put their money where their paranoia is. How much this generous offer will comfort the afflicted is incalculable, even using proxy data and perverse statistical contortions.

Picking Cherries

In fairness, a properly-cherry picked time frame can display most any warming or cooling trend you want to demonstrate. But as the small print reads, “Past performance is no indication of future gains.” As any stock trader weeping on a hi-rise ledge can tell you, fresh-picked trends and computer models are not always reliable predictors.

Some of the cherry pickers have the luxury of post-hoc adjusting, value-adding, heat islanding, interpolating, outlier-eliminating, proxy-shopping the data. Others have to sift through the leftover pits. In any event, complaints about “cherry picking” by all parties are reasonable within common sense.

Doom and Gloom

Perhaps the fact that global harvests of wheat, rice and corn have tripled or quintupled since 1960 in the face of all of this terrible warming teaches us a dire lesson. Or maybe the fact that the population has swelled to 7 billion thriving humans, mostly in the warmer tropical latitudes, best expresses the current hopeless doom. Then again, according to the NCPA “tropical disease rates are decreasing on average globally, and at an even higher rate in developing countries,” clearly this is the calamity of which the wise speak. No, it is definitely, as CSIRO reports, that CO2 fertilization correlates with an 11 per cent increase in greening foliage across the world’s deserts that spells doom.

Whatever, doom is certainly upon us. The earth has a fever. The earth has a fever and the only prescription is more cowbell! And by cowbell, of course we mean $trillions in carbon derivatives going to Wall St., in taxes going to government, in gravy going to climate cronies.

Common sense: When science gets tainted with politics, follow the money and power.

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