Manbearpig Is Real

The weather report for Des Moines for the next few days:

Overnight: Cloudy, then gradually becoming partly cloudy, with a low around 2. Wind chill values between -5 and -10. North northwest wind between 7 and 9 mph.

Thursday: Partly cloudy, with a high near 15. Wind chill values between -10 and zero. Northwest wind between 7 and 9 mph.

Thursday Night: A 20 percent chance of snow after midnight. Mostly cloudy, with a low around 4. Wind chill values between -5 and zero. North northwest wind between 6 and 8 mph.

Friday: Mostly cloudy, with a high near 14. Wind chill values between -10 and zero. North northwest wind between 3 and 8 mph.

Friday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 1. North northwest wind at 6 mph becoming west southwest.

Saturday: Partly cloudy, with a high near 15.

Saturday Night: Partly cloudy, with a low around 0.

Oh yeah, here's Newsweek back in 1975:

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

Just a reminder of the bullshit aimed at me in the past week:

And the ridiculous statements continued over at State 29. State 29 has recently had a couple posts attacking Al Gore and basically saying global warming can't exist because it is cold outside. This statement shows how ignorant State 29 is. If State 29 actually spent 5 minutes researching global warming, he would know that global warming increases extreme weather patterns such as hurricanes, tornados, droughts, heat waves, and cold spells.

Global warming increases cold spells! It's a floor wax, it's a dessert topping. It's anything that you want it to be, so long as the corrupt UN can impose a tax on "rich" and successful countries like America so Kofi Annan The War Criminal and his worthless family, friends, and various dictators and Communists around the world with their Swiss Bank Accounts can continue to live their lifestyle of Armani, cocaine, and underage prostitutes.

Yet the media continues to lie:

The original research was bad enough, but the reporting of it was horrendous. No telling where NBC's Andrea Mitchell got the figure that "nearly half [the scientists] were pressured to eliminate the words' climate change' or 'global warming,' but it clearly wasn't from the survey, which said no such thing. Not to be outdone in the patently wrong department, the New York Times reported that 60 percent of the scientists "personally experienced" interference. ABC's Jake Tapper said, "scientists say their work on global warming has been watered down and twisted by the White House..." even though such hyperbole is not a conclusion warranted by the survey.

Naturally, editorial writers, egged on by faulty science and faulty reporting, raised the usual alarms, such as the Minneapolis Star Tribune's "Bush's blatant abuse of climate scientists."

One explanation for such appalling journalism is the industry's willingness to be spoon-fed by the likes of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), who gladly sanctified the bad science by giving it a platform on his Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. "It appears there may have been an orchestrated campaign to mislead the public about climate change," Waxman said.

And if anything makes Bush look bad, some in the media will show up. Like NBC's Brian Williams, for example, who intoned on his nightly newscast: "The question in Washington was this: did the Bush administration...try to cook the books on the topic of global warming?"

Meanwhile, Al Gore flew to Spain in order to spew some more hot air:

"They've lost the argument and they don't want to stop dumping all this pollution into the Earth's atmosphere," Gore said in a short interview. "The only thing they have left is cash and now they're offering cash for so-called skeptics who will try to confuse people about what the science really say. But it's unethical because now the time has come when we have to act. And it's always easier to pretend that a big problem does not exist, because then you have no moral obligation to solve it. But our responsibility to our children and those who come after is sacred and we must discharge our responsibility. And the good news is the changes we need to make are ones that will improve the quality of life. They're things that we should be doing anyway."

Al Gore deserves an Oscar just for his acting job alone. They gave Oscars to John Wayne and Reese Witherspoon, so it's not like the award really means anything anyway.