Excerpt from Henry Payne in Detroit News:
“First day of spring?” said a WWJ-Detroit Radio forecasterWednesday morning in frigid, below-normal, 21-degree, Midwest temperatures with little relief in sight. “Feels more like the first day of January.”
What a difference a year makes.
Last March, the media welcomed spring in a panic over global warming, as local and national media sensationalized unseasonably warm temperatures. “”Meteorologists and other weather commentators have frequently commented they’ve never seen anything like this, exhausting superlatives,” hyperventilated Washington Post meteorologist Jason Samenow, citing the usual Horsemen of the Apocalypse, NASA’s James Hansen and activist Bill McKibben. “The background increases in greenhouse gases – at levels unprecedented in at least 800,000 years – are stacking the deck for more extreme heat events such as this and we have observed increases in average and extremely high temperatures.”
That was soooo 12 months ago. As usual, the global warming crowd was confusing weather and climate (not to mention hysteria and science). The science tells us the globe hasn’t warmed in 14 years, even as the planet trends warmer out of the Little Ice Age of the mid-19th century.
Weather makes for great anecdotal scare stories with which to push more regulation. Not surprisingly, the media hysteria was non-existent this week as Samenow & Co. went back to reading temperature forecasts. “And the chilly air is here to stay for a while,” deadpanned Samenow. New England welcomed spring with a foot of snow. No screaming headlines. No predictions of disaster. Nothing to see here, just move along.