Being a Climate Alarmist Means Never Having to Admit You’re Wrong

A mountain of evidence shows climate alarmists never learn from their mistakes, be they clear misstatements of facts or repeatedly failed prognostications.

Why should they? The press lets climate alarmists get away with making more false claims than any other group on any other topic, including the efficacy of the COVID vaccines in keeping people from catching the disease or requiring hospitalization. Climate alarmists have nothing to fear from so-called fact checkers in corporate or social media, because the “fact checkers” are either true believers themselves or fellow beneficiaries of the climate alarm gravy train.

Accordingly, I have decided to of expose a litany of climate false alarm claims made in recent months periodically in my lead essay of Climate Change Weekly. These essays won’t be about politics or opinions but instead straight exposés of patently false climate science assertions publicized in the preceding months, for which the authors of those stories were never called to the carpet or forced to issue a correction.

In Climate Change Weekly last July, I poked fun at one of the most mystifyingly wrong but persistent claims made by climate alarmists: that a warmer world would mean the disappearance of snow. This claim is definitively refuted by data cited in Climate at a Glance: Snowpack showing average North American snowpack extent is virtually unchanged in recent years compared to the late 1960s, when satellite measurements began. Beyond America, average snowpack has increased throughout the Northern Hemisphere in the fall and winter months, but you’d never know this if you read the headlines of major newspapers or watch climate-related news stories on corporate media outlets.

For example, in December even as huge storm fronts were striking the Western mountain ranges from California through Washington State, the Washington Post published an article titled “Snow may vanish for years at a time in Mountain West with climate warming.” Not to be outdone in the snow stupidity competition, just last week The New York Times published an article asserting “Skiing is an endangered sport, caught between a warming planet and a global pandemic.” The article states, “In recent years, with snow cover diminishing and untouched powder increasingly difficult to reach, skiers like Ms. Backstrom have been pushed onto groomed trails more often.”

In two Climate Realism articles, Heartland Institute President James Taylor went to the data and resoundingly refuted other false and wrongheaded claims made by the Times and the Post. Citing satellite measurements gathered by the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab (GSL) on global, hemispheric, and continental snow cover dating back to the 1960s, Taylor showed the past 30 years have brought no decline in global or North American snow cover. Instead, there has been a modest increase in snow cover during the past three decades. Taylor writes,

The Times’ article is particularly ironic considering the many snowfall records that have been set in prime ski regions during the past year. North Lake Tahoe, which is home to several of the best ski slopes in the country, enjoyed a record 18 feet of snow last month. Yosemite National Park set a snowfall record, also, last month. Even further south, Mammoth, California set snowfall records as recently as May, 2019.

Indeed, in the beginning of January, data showed snowpack in Oregon’s portion of the Cascades was 126 percent above normal for this time of year. In late December, Newsweek reported snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains was between 145 and 161 percent of the normal amount of snow for this time of year.

Despite former Vice-President Al Gore claiming in his 2006 docuganda An Inconvenient Truth that “within the decade there will be no more snows of Kilimanjaro,” the mountain has had snow cover every single day since Gore made his movie. So much snow fell in 2018 there were record increases in snow depth on the mountain, and in mid-December 2021, which is summer in Tanzania, where Kilimanjaro is located, the mountain received seven straight days of snow, with the temperatures each day hovering around 10 degrees below zero.

Sometimes the reporting on climate is simply idiotic. For instance, in a recent story, the Washington Post displayed a map of the United States purportedly showing every county in the country hit by a climate-related disaster in 2021. Among the eye-opening disasters the Post claimed were caused by climate change was one the public may have missed: the hurricane that hit upstate Vermont and Buffalo, New York. Oh wait, you didn’t miss it: as the people living there and the weatherpersons for the area can attest, no hurricane struck either location.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration confirms no hurricanes or even tropical storms hit or even approached either region in 2021.

With no apparent sense of irony or self-awareness, alarmists regularly cite highly localized weather effects as proof of a climate emergency. In late October, within the space of 24 hours, news reports highlighted both that Lake Tahoe had fallen below its natural rim, threatening water flows to the Truckee River and the Truckee-Carson Irrigation District, and that in response to rain and snowfall in the region the lake had risen above its rim once again, resuming water flows. This climate whiplash showed the reporters and editors either didn’t understand or don’t care about the difference between climate and weather. Both reports also ignored the significant population growth in the region exploiting Lake Tahoe, which makes increasing demands on that body of water.

Drought in the region surrounding Lake Tahoe is not unusual, nor are wildly fluctuating water levels in the lake. My colleague, award-winning meteorologist Anthony Watts, pointed out in Climate at a Glance: Water Levels—Lake Tahoe as recently as 2019, water levels in the lake were regularly exceeding its maximum allowable levels, forcing the agency charged with managing the dam on Lake Tahoe to release water from it. Lake Tahoe reached the maximum allowable water level each year from 2017 through 2019, requiring special water releases into the Truckee River.

As the climate alarmists’ apparent desperation increases, their warnings become shriller and less believable, yet hardly a day goes by without some media outlet parroting their false assertions, such as that Michigan is becoming so hot farmers will soon be unable to grow fruit there (tell that to farmers in Florida or Texas) and global warming is producing late-season frost events and freezes.

Folks, I can’t make this stuff up. My imagination just isn’t that good. Michigan too hot to grow fruit, really! Unrecorded hurricanes in western New York and Vermont! Warmer growing seasons plagued by more freezing nights, as a result of global warming! It is all too fantastic, yet the news media daily swallow such fairy tales hook, line, and sinker and publicize them, giving them undeserved credence.

Sadly, this is what passes for journalism these days. Keep that in mind when you read the next headline claiming some extreme weather event or anomalous occurrence is becoming the norm because of climate change, and check Climate Realism, Climate at a Glance, and other outlets devoted to presenting the facts on climate change before you start stocking up on food or building a bunker in the mountains far from the supposedly fast-rising seas.