ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (January 29, 2019) – National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) today tweeted a cartoon explaining warming oceans result in more extreme winter weather. Some media reports cast it as a response to President Trump tweeting on Monday of global warming “please come back fast” while record cold temperatures will strike the Midwest this week.
The Heartland Institute last month released an audit of government websites, including NOAA, that “aggressively push the assertion global warming is a human-caused crisis resulting from fossil-fuel use.”
From the audit’s examination of the NOAA climate website:
* The “Teaching Climate” sub-portal has an especially egregious section titled “Teaching Essential Principle Seven: Climate Change Will Have Consequences for the Earth System and Human Lives.” The webpage warns that without proper teaching and messaging, students and the public might “succumb to [climate change] denial.”
* The webpage then asserts numerous false warming scares, such as “dying forests” and “species extinction.” The entire “Teaching Climate” portal should be rewritten or taken down.
The audit states: “Federal agency websites should only contain scientific facts about climate change, not left-wing propaganda. This means numerous existing websites must be corrected to reflect climate realism or taken down altogether.”
The following statements from climate experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/377-4000
“The alarmist claim that global warming is causing record cold is idiotic, unsupported by any scientific evidence, and laughable. It also directly contradicts what they told us was ‘settled science’ in the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) full report.
“IPCC stated in its last full report, published in 2014, there will be ‘warmer winters and fewer cold spells, because of climate change.’ Anybody who questioned IPCC’s speculative assertion was ridiculed for challenging ‘settled science.’ Since then, we have been pounded by multiple cold winters and frequent severe cold spells. Knowing they can no longer defend the indefensible, alarmists now claim global warming causes more frequent and severe winter cold spells, and they want us to forget they so recently claimed exactly the opposite.
“The truth is that temperatures have risen just one degree since the Little Ice Age ended a little over a century ago. One degree of warming is nearly inconsequential, will not make heat spells or cold snaps go away, is well within natural variation, and still leaves global temperatures colder than what has existed for most of human history.
“Alarmists and federal bureaucrats trying to save their jobs come up with all the b.s. philosophizing and ridiculous logic of a king’s jester trying to save his neck. Isn’t it ironic that they invented this latest theory out of mid-air only after their previous theory was embarrassingly proven false by Mother Nature?”
James Taylor
Senior Fellow for Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“It was a relief to go a month without having to read the totally unscientific government websites that chant ‘man-caused global warming’ as though it was a fact instead of mathematically generated conclusions based on piles of unconfirmed conjecture by scientists.
“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt. The very fact that these websites preach certainty in the face of more unknown variables than you can shake a stick at is nothing short of a disgrace. These sites are no more than free advertising for those who want the United States government to hand over $3 trillion dollars of our tax money as required in the Paris Climate Accord.”
Jay Lehr, Ph.D.
Science Director
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“This shows why climate scientists are the new theocracy and climate ‘science’ is a religion not science. No matter what happens, warmer than usual or colder than usual, more or less moisture than average, more snow, or less snow, the answer is human climate change. That’s why they stopped talking about global warming because they couldn’t explain why warming stopped for 18 years.
“In the end in science you make predictions about what should happen based on a hypothesis, and then you check the data to see if it disconfirms the theory or makes it more likely. But you can’t test the theory of human-caused climate change, because no matter what weather event occurs or what the temperature or climate trend line shows, proponents of the theory will say it confirms humans are causing dangerous climate change. They can’t issue a set of predictions and stick to it based on the theory.”
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Environment & Energy Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
[email protected]Paste
312/377-4000
The Heartland Institute is a 35-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Arlington Heights, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our website or call 312/377-4000.
Jay Lehr was an internationally renowned speaker, scientist, Senior Policy Advisor with the International Climate Science Coalition and Senior Science Analyst at CFACT.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
