Tuesday afternoon, Clay Waters at NewsBusters noted how two September 18 items in the New York Times ridiculed Texas and Florida, two recently hurricane-ravaged states whose governors and legislatures are pro-growth and Republican.
Josh Boak, an economics writer at the Associated Press, was actually a day ahead of them on Florida, filing a Sunday item which claimed that "Irma's destructive floodwaters renewed fears about how to manage the state's population boom as the risks of climate change intensify."
Meanwhile, as if to mock the Times and AP reporters, a study published Monday in Nature Geoscience admitted that the earth "warmed more slowly" — actually far more slowly — than the supposedly sacrosanct global warming models of a decade ago predicted.
Despite the fact that nothing in Boak's LinkedIn profile would seem to indicate expertise in any of the related sciences, his Sunday afternoon writeup has no co-author or contributing reporter. Apparently, graduating from Princeton and Columbia J-School while believing in "climate change" and "rising sea levels" supposedly vindicated by two severe hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. in a single year after 11 historically quiet years qualifies Boak to go it alone in opining on Floridians' foolishness (bolds are mine throughout this post):
IRMA'S DAMAGE A REMINDER OF FLORIDA ECONOMY'S VULNERABILITY
Florida's economy has long thrived on one import above all: People.
Until Irma struck this month, the state was adding nearly 1,000 residents a day - 333,471 in the past year, akin to absorbing a city the size of St. Louis or Pittsburgh. Every jobseeker, retiree or new birth, along with billions spent by tourists, helped fuel Florida's propulsive growth and economic gains.
Actually, we need to stop there. Though obviously a haven for sun-seeking retirees and the already well-to-do, Florida has thrived while it has imported and otherwise increased its number of employed (not just job-seeking) people.
This is not a minor quibble, as the following table shows:
Florida's population and employment growth have not always been "propulsive." The table above shows that job growth was indeed that way under Governor Jeb Bush from 1999 to 2006; Florida weathered the recession during the early part of his two terms far better than most states, and its population grew by an an average of about 325,000 per year during his two terms in office.
It absolutely was not that way under the disastrous Charlie Crist from 2007 to 2010. Thanks largely to Crist, that era's recession began earlier in Florida than it did in the rest of the country and was far worse than in any state besides perhaps Michigan. Boak should note that the state's annual population growth in 2008 and 2009 averaged only about 130,000, because the job opportunities weren't there.
Rick Scott returned Florida to "propulsive" growth, and the state's population growth, especially since 2013 (average annual growth: about 340,000) reflects that.
But despite the predominant and nation-outperforming prosperity — it's not as if the vast majority Floridians sit around on the beach all day, though doing so must surely be tempting — Boak's portrayal contains a definite undercurrent of contempt mixed with astonishment that so many ignorant people continue to move there. Boak seems to believe that they should recognize that they're going to be flooded out of existence in due time, but don't:
Irma's destructive floodwaters renewed fears about how to manage the state's population boom as the risks of climate change intensify. Rising sea levels and spreading flood plains have magnified the vulnerabilities for the legions of people who continue to move to Florida and the state economy they have sustained.
Florida faces an urgent need to adapt to the environmental changes, said Jesse Keenan, a lecturer at Harvard University who researches the effects of rising sea levels on cities.
"A lot is going to change in the next 30 years - this is just the beginning," Keenan said.
Keenan needs to do a recalc on that "30 years." The UK Independent — forget about trying to find any of this at a U.S. establishment press outlet — cribs from a registration-only UK Times report indicating that "Global warming may be occurring more slowly than previously thought, study suggests." The word "may" is almost certainly unnecessary:
Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”
The original forecasts were based on twelve separate computer models made by universities and government institutes around the world, and were put together ten years ago, “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”, Professor Allen added.
According to The Times, another of the paper’s authors, Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admitted his earlier forecasting models had overplayed how temperatures would rise.
Well, what's the impact? The underlying Nature Geoscience item (availability may only be temporary, and appears to depend on clicking through from the UK Independent item) doesn't make determining that easy, and its conclusion appears to underestimate the additional number of years before it becomes an alleged "geophysical impossibility" to turn back the anticipated point of no return.
Overall, the computer models have projected an average warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100, and seem to have defined that as the point of no return. But because the warming is demonstrably occurring much more slowly than anticipated — in fact, the idea that there has been no meaningful warming for the past 20 or even more years still has traction, but we'll ignore that for now — it means that a great deal more in carbon-based greenhouse gases must be emitted before that much warming occurs:
The previous scenario allowed for the planet to emit a total of 70 billion tonnes of Carbon after 2015, in order to keep temperature rises to just 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.
But the reassessment allows for a “carbon budget” of another 240bn tonnes of emissions before catastrophic damage is done.
“That’s about 20 years of emissions before temperatures are likely to cross 1.5C,” Professor Allen said.
“It’s the difference between being not doable and being just doable.”
Perhaps someone can explain how more than quadrupling the "carbon budget" (from 70 billion tonnes to 310 billion tonnes) — defined as "a tolerable quantity of greenhouse gas emissions that can be emitted in total over a specified time ... in line with what is scientifically required to keep global warming and thus climate change 'tolerable'" — only extends the "tolerable period" by about 23 percent (from 85 to 105 years). I can't.
Meanwhile, Josh Boak's quoted Harvard lecturer speaks of major changes in the "next 30 years" based on allegedly rising sea levels affected by global warming, which has at a minimum been happening much more slowly than originally thought. No, I can't make sense of it either, but it does give AP a better chance of seeing its content returned in Google's heavily-biased climate change-alarmist search results.
What seems to be happening here is that the warmists are seeing the scientific hoax they've perpetrated over the past several decades begin to visibly dissolve. Of course, they won't let it go without a fierce fight. So they have to maintain some semblance of urgency, despite the fact that their lying models have been exposed, and despite decades of circumstantially proven data manipulation.
The longer they hold out, the more likely it will become that John Hinderaker's Tuesday assessment at Powerline is spot-on: This is "the greatest scandal in the history of science" — aided and abetted by an utterly unskeptical advocacy press.
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
