Meteorologist James Spann works at an ABC TV affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama, and also authors a blog in his spare time. Thursday night, his blog suddenly gained him national recognition when the Drudge Report posted a link to it.
It started when Spann read comments by global warming enthusiast Dr. Heidi Cullen of Ted Turner’s “The Weather Channel” fame. In an accidental fit of candor, Cullen said, “If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the (American Meteorological Society) shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval.” As a rule, leftists believe that dire remedies are in order for anyone who dares to disagree, which is exactly what Spann did in his Thursday night blog.
Cullen defended herself in part by saying, “…scientists have learned something very important about our planet. It’s warming up — glaciers are melting, sea level is rising and the weather is changing.” What Cullen failed to say is that there is by no means a consensus among scientists on those claims.
Let’s take the rising rising sea level hysteria as an example. The tiny South Pacific island of Tuvalu seems to be at the epicenter of the global warming crisis, at least in regards to rising sea levels. All the devout leftists of the movement are lamenting the soon-to-be fate of Tuvalutians. Yet the evidence that Cullen and her cohorts pass off as science looks more anecdotal than scientific. A storm surge washes over the island, par for the course when the highest point is 12 feet above sea level, and the global warming cheering squad shouts, “We told you so!”
As for the real scientific evidence, well, the global warming crowd simply dismisses it. An article appeared in the Harvard International Review in 2002 entitled, “Tuvalu Little, Tuvalu Late,” that quoted a prominent Australian scientist who actually has conducted scientific research in the area. “Despite this generally-held scientific consensus,” says author Genevieve Sheehan, “there are those who argue against such estimates (of rising sea levels); one study in particular claims to find no evidence of rising ocean levels. Wolfgang Scherer, director of Australia’s National Tidal Facility (NTF) at Flinders University, contends that ‘the data does not support any sea-level rise at all.’ He bases this on data collected from tide gauges installed across the Pacific in the past 10 years, including a gauge at Funafuti, Tuvalu’s capital. ‘The short-term sea-level rise analyses… [show] no change in the average sea level over the period of record.’”
Global warming zealots counter that the study was only over a ten year period and thus, too short term to have any value, yet they present no evidence of their own to support their claims of rising sea levels. In fact, sea level data from Tuvalu over more than two decades supports Scherer’s data:
And as for long term evidence of sea levels in the South Pacific, Capt. James Clark Ross, who explored the Antartic more than 150 years ago, left a benchmark marking the mean tide on the island of Tasmania in 1841. The benchmark is a half meter across (a little more than a foot-and-a-half) and the tidal range is less than a meter, which means that there doesn’t seem to have been a discernable increase in sea level in the South Pacific in the last 160+ years.
