Latest Fact Free Climate Garbage From The Telegraph

By Paul Homewood

The latest climate garbage from the Telegraph:

I would not be as impertinent as to guess the political leanings of Maine’s lobstermen. But it would be fair to say they could be characterised as blue-collar workers and part of the demographic targeted by the Trump campaign.

A couple of weeks ago I spent some time with them and learned at first hand the impact climate change is having at least on one industry.

Blah, blah, blah

You can read the full article here, though it is on Premium.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/09/02/donald-trump-should-take-global-warming-seriously-voters-red/

But let’s take the examples he gives of how climate change is supposedly affecting the US:

1) Warming sea waters have seen lobsters migrate north. The same has been happening with cod – which are now in scant supply in Cape Cod. Melting ice caps and changing current patterns are threatening to have a devastating impact on the fishing industry.

GHGs cannot have any measurable effect on the temperature of deep oceans, it is simply not physically possible. Oceanographer, Dr Robert E Stevenson, explained this succinctly here.

Warmer seas there are purely the result of oceanic currents, which change all the time.

HH Lamb wrote about many of these changes in “Climate, History and the Modern World”. For instance, cod were plentiful even off west Greenland during the Middle Ages, but were forced to migrate to warmer waters during the Little Ice Age.

More recently, during the 1960s, Greenland cod again migrated to warmer waters:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/09/04/cod-and-haddock-going-north-says-grauniad/

As for lobster, maybe Millward would care to tell us how many miles they can walk in a day!

2) Take Texas and Florida which, only a few months ago were hit by devastating hurricanes. Both states backed Donald Trump in 2016. Hurricanes are not new, but the latest scientific evidence suggests that they have increased in intensity.

A study in Nature Geoscience, which was published in 2010, proved both prescient and alarming. Stripping the study to its basics, it warned that the number of category four and five hurricanes has roughly doubled since the 1970s.

He conveniently ignores the fact that the US had just recorded the longest period on record without a major hurricane, dating back to 2005. The study he quotes references the period since 1970, but this is a dreadfully misleading starting point, as it was in the middle of the cold phase of the AMO.

According to NOAA, during warm phases of the AMO, the numbers of tropical storms that mature into severe hurricanes is much greater than during cool phases. Hence we see major Atlantic hurricanes at similar levels to today during the 1940s and 50s:

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/09/27/this-years-atlantic-hurricanes-in-perspective/

3) In Arizona, another solidly Republican state, records are being shattered as temperatures soar. Last month it was so hot that airlines cancelled dozens of flights to and from Phoenix. Motorists started carrying ice packs in their cars along with oven mitts so they can grasp the steering wheel

Ohio, a swing state which backed Trump in 2016, is suffering from a plague of algae blooms, which are killing fish and making water so toxic that signs are being posted at lakes warning people of high bacteria levels.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, which remains part of the federal government, climate change is warming the lakes creating a favourable environment for toxic blue-green algae.

Yet according to the Federal Climate Science Special Report from the US Global Change Research Program, heatwaves across the US used to be unbelievably worse than anything faced nowadays:

As for Millward’s dig at Trump, even if he had not exited Paris, would the US climate have been any different at all? The whole precept is ridiculous.

Meanwhile, thanks to shale gas, the US is one of the few countries in the world that actually reduced emissions last year, Trump or no Trump.

Perhaps next time the Telegraph wants to publish an article like this, they might like to actually check the facts first with someone who knows what they are talking about.

Something that David Millward patently does not.