Month 8, Day 13: L.A. Heat Edition.

There’s a heat wave expected in LA this weekend, says the LA Times.

Not a standard boilerplate LTE.

A midsummer heat wave is not particularly remarkable. They happen all the time. But there are more and more of them happening these days, in the U.S. and around the world. As a consequence of climate change, we’re getting very extreme weather, and we’re getting it more often. While it’s impossible to say that global warming caused a specific weather event, climatologists have predicted for two decades that it will bring about ever more frequent extremes of temperature and precipitation. In the past, climate change was something that would happen in the future. But the past is gone and the future is now. Climate change is happening to us. News media must begin including this information as part of their print and online articles on weather conditions. People need to understand what’s going on so they can make informed decisions; ignorance is no longer an option.

Warren Senders

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I only became aware that there was a TV show by that name a few seconds before hitting “publish.”

Month 8, Day 6: 2010 is Already the Stupidest Year On Record

The Boston Herald ran an AP story on our current heat wave.

My reaction is, of course, unprintable.

It’s revealing that the phrase “climate change” appears in this article exactly once: when mentioning a Maine-based research center. The facts are unequivocal: the heat wave pummeling the Northeast is exactly what climatologists have predicted for decades (and what Republicans have been mocking and ignoring for just as long). 2010 is on track to be the hottest year on record. According to scientists, even if we took dramatic and immediate action to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, we’d still be looking at worldwide crop failures, droughts, storms, and ecological collapses. How much worse will it have to get before our newspapers and broadcast media decide the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced is more important than, say, celebrity prison experiences? The Boston Herald’s treatment of climate change has long been a flagrant disregard of journalistic responsibility.

Warren Senders

Month 7, Day 7: It’s Too Darn Hot

We’re having a heat wave up here in Boston, as the Boston Herald helpfully reports. But since as all of us climate alarmists kept pointing out in December, local weather events aren’t proof of anything. Look for that to be the new meme of the idiocracy, if they’re ever called upon to comment on our blistering high temperatures. Which they won’t be.

Sheesh. If it’s 100 degrees here in July, what will August be like?

It was only a few months ago that climate-change deniers were trumpeting the unusual snowfall in Washington, DC as proof that global warming was a hoax. Senator Jim DeMint said, “It’s going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries ‘Uncle,’ “ and Senator James Inhofe built an igloo with Gore’s name on it. And at the time, people who understood even a little bit about science knew that climate scientists had predicted exactly what was happening: more extreme weather events, everywhere. Extreme snow, extreme rain, extreme heat. Now an early-July heat wave is debilitating cities throughout the Northeast. Is the heat wave proof of global warming? No — local weather doesn’t prove anything by itself. But the fact that more places all over the globe are experiencing unusual and destructive weather than ever before is a confirmation that climatologists had it right all along. When will the rest of us pay attention?

Warren Senders