I Met Pat Toomey Once - And I Thought He Was Smarter Than This

Honestly.

From Greg Sargent at the Washington Post:

As many people have already pointed out, some of the leading beneficiaries of this season of Tea Party craziness are Republican candidates who hold extreme views on specific issues but nonetheless come across as moderate and reasonable when compared to the likes of Sharron Angle and Christine O'Donnell.

Case in point: Pennsylvania Senate candidate Pat Toomey. In a local radio interview on Friday, Toomey said the degree to which human activity is to blame for global warming is being "very much disputed" and "debated."

And when asked about Global Warming, here's what he said:

My view is, I think the data is pretty clear. There has been an increase in the surface temperature of the planet over the course of the last 100 years or so. I think it's clear that that has happened. The extent to which that has been caused by human activity I think is not as clear. I think that is still very much disputed and has been debated. If we go down the road of legislation like this cap and trade bill...

Sargent asks:

Right, but who, exactly, is doing the disputing and the debating here?

I'd like to know that, too.

Could it be the American Association for the Advancement of Science?

No:

The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society.

That was the first sentence of their statement on climate change from February, 2007.

The World Health Organization?

No:

There is now widespread agreement that the earth is warming, due to emissions of greenhouse gases caused by human activity.

That's from the Summary their 2008 report "Protecting Health from Climate Change."

How about NASA? Any dispute there?

No:

Most scientists agree the main cause of the current global warming trend is human expansion of the "greenhouse effect" -- warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space.

And:

In its recently released Fourth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 1,300 independent scientific experts from countries all over the world under the auspices of the United Nations, concluded there's a more than 90 percent probability that human activities over the past 250 years have warmed our planet.

And don't even try to use the word "Climategate" here. THAT was the hoax.

Anyway, do I need to do this again? Ok one more.

How about the National Academy of Science? Any dispute there?

No:

A strong, credible body of scientific evidence shows that climate change is occurring, is caused largely by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems, concludes this panel report from the America's Climate Choices suite of studies.

Can someone ask Congressman Toomey where the dispute is? Or, in deed, what the dispute is?

I honestly thought he was smarter than this.

The Trib Spins Global Warming. Again.

From yesterday's editorial:

Thought 1998 was the warmest year on record in the United States? That's what Al Gore acolytes have been telling us.

Nope. It was 1934, according to newly revised figures from NASA, released quietly. The error is embarrassing

What sort of error? How big? Here's what happened. This is from Wired.com:

The data involved temperature measurements made at weather stations in the United States. Back in 2001, scientists the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration realized that some data was being skewed by stations making recordings at different times of day, or being located in once-rural areas that have become heavily urban, causing local temperatures to rise.

They published the a formula to account for the discrepancies. Generally, this lowered the average temperatures recorded. However, NASA's weather-crunching programs weren't updated. As a result, subsequent NASA temperature recordings were incorrectly high, and some earlier data needed revision downwards.

How big was the mistake? About .15 degrees celsius, or .3 degrees fahrenheit.

Now, this isn't a huge number, but it's enough to make a difference -- if, that is, the mistake applied to the whole planet. But the mistake involved only the United States, which covers but a small fraction of the globe. [emphasis added]

Ah, well that changes things, doesn't it? They sum it up this way:

We don't have the science to predict accurately what the climate will be in 50 or 100 years. Now we find out that NASA didn't get the previous temperature averages right.

In comparison to making climate forecasts, that ought to have been pretty simple.

Again, the corrections were for data in the US only, not globally. Something the otherwise erudite editorialists working for Dickiecougarmellonscaife utterly failed to inform its readers.

Here's NASA's graph of the data. See that little green line? That's the correction.

And remember that's just for temperatures in the US. Here's some data for global temperatures.

Notice anything? Like the general upward trend from, say, 1910 on? Granted, things reversed themselves from the mid-40s to the mid-60s, but look at what happens after.

Yea, there's doubt about that the temperature's rising.