I live in the Pacific Northwest, right on the waters of Puget Sound.  Of the many benefits that living near a large body of water brings, temperature stability is one of them.  It takes a lot of energy to change the temperature of water, and consequently, it doesn’t get super hot or super cold around here much.

I bring this up because we’re currently experiencing both record amounts of snowfall and record low temperatures.  By ‘record’, I mean over the past 4-5 decades.  Quite impressive.

Aside from the fact that I love the cold and snow (to a point), I’m also a bit gleeful because all this blistering cold flies (like snow flurries) in the face of the global warming movement.  How is it that we’re breaking cold records if it really is true that we’re trapping hot gasses in our atmosphere with our carbon emissions?

There’s two answers, both are stupid.  One is, “Did I say global WARMING?  Huh.  That’s funny.  I meant global temperature fluctuations! And they’re just as bad – no, worse – than the global warming stuff I was preaching 10 years ago.”

The other answer is that this winter – a winter where every living organism north of the latitude of Phoenix, AZ is currently trying to unfreeze the snot from the inside of their noses – is just an anomaly.  A blip.  We’re getting warmer, you just don’t notice it.  You won’t notice it until your’re melting into the pavement of your local Dodge Durango dealership.

I will disclaim here that medical doctors are poor scientists, usually.  Our profession is filled with superstition and trendy medicine and popularity contests.  But, we’re trained as scientists, so I will say that we know the rules of empiric discovery.  As such, even as a para-scientist, I say that global warming is not science.  Why?  Because there is no real evidence to support it.  Furthermore, the phenomenon isn’t repeatable.  Both empiric evidence and repeatability are hallmarks of good science.  If you don’t have these things, you have no way of knowing truth from trend.

What global warming alarmists conveniently omit every time they prognosticate the end of human life is that, a) there is no way to determine a unique trend in temperatures on a planet that is thousands of years old (at least) when you only have about 150 years of data.  And b) there is strong financial incentive (in the form of grants) for global warming to actually exist.

I’m a believer in conservation.  I’m a stickered member of the Sierra Club.  I believe in waste reduction and recycling, I’m into alternative fuels and I’m warming (no pun intended) to composting.

But using the social myth of global warming is stupid, dangerous, expensive and disingenuous.

A few years ago, you may have heard about the controversy in Oregon regarding the Spotted Owl.  Tree-cutting was successfully halted because environmentalists claimed that the Owl – a protected species – had a mating radius of 50 miles.  In truth, they were just trying to protect old-growth forests.

I think we’re doing the same thing with global warming.  The problem is that using bad scientific principles to manipulate the public eventually creates an uncritical and intellectually lazy public.  A badly-thinking public is not to anyone’s benefit because over time, somebody will dupe everyone into much worse (see: Peoples Temple, Angkar,  Einsatzgruppen)

We need to limit our consumption of fossil fuels.  We need to reduce, reuse and recycle.  We need to protect our forests and rivers.  But it isn’t because of such a farce as global warming.  So far, there simply is no evidence to support such a brilliant, scary tale.