(Playing of Ball of Fire update song.)
RUSH: That’s our global warming update theme, one of three. This is from Florida State University and their climatological division up there. ‘Unless a dramatic and perhaps historical flurry of activity occurs in the next nine weeks, 2007 will rank as a historically inactive year for the Northern Hemisphere as a whole for tropical cyclones.’ Historically inactive! ‘During the past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, and 1983 have had less activity to date than this year. However, the year is not over,’ they say hopefully. Now, we have this little rain event down there near Puerto Rico and so forth. It’s dumping lots of rain, ten to 12 inches, but it’s going to be curving out over the way. It’s never going to become anything more than a tropical storm. According to forecasts, it’s not going to become a hurricane. So this is the fifth storm this year; we had five last year, and a total of ten since Hurricane Katrina. The point here is that the global warming crowd predicted Hurricane Katrinas year, after year, after year after 2005 because sea surface temperatures had risen, and, of course, man was baking the planet and these catastrophic storms were off the charts. So people have been predicting this, and they have been dead wrong. We’re going to post this story at RushLimbaugh.com, because there are just a couple of fascinating charts here that show this lack of activity.
I was out in Las Vegas over the weekend for the annual Prostate Cancer Foundation charity golf tournament, and I had some downtime after playing golf on Saturday morning, and I had my trusted little iPhone with me. So I went back to the massive suite in the golf villas area in which I was happily ensconced and staying. I decided, ‘I’ll call up and just take a look. I haven’t had a chance to look at any websites today.’ So I’m cruising around, and I see tropical storm… No! I take it back. The television was on, and some meteorologist was going berserk about the possibility of a hurricane. So I said, ‘Oooooh.’ That’s when I went to the website and I look at the models for this thing, and they had it getting nowhere near us here in South Florida, according to the models. I just started thinking how excited they are. I started getting warning e-mails from meteorologists. ‘We might have a storm brewing out there, Rush! It may be headed to Florida! You might be…’ The weather community is so desperate for a hurricane. They are so desperate. (laughing)
It’s like even these guys at Florida State who released the story that this is an historically inactive year, ‘Unless a dramatic and perhaps historical flurry riff activity occurs in the next nine weeks…’ The season runs to the end of November. Then they close it out with saying this is — other than past 30 years, only 1977, 1981, 1983 have had less activity — but the year is not over. Hopefully, dot, dot, dot, dot. We could actually use some of the rain from this tropical storm. I wish this guy with the granulated tire idea would go seed some granulated tires into this storm and steer it back our way. Do you realize what ten to 12 inches would do for Lake Okeechobee? It would end the stupid drought down here. We could start watering our lawns and all this sort of stuff. Winds, I think, are going to get to 50 miles an hour.
Other global warming news: ‘Rising temperatures could wipe out more than half the earth’s species in the next few centuries, according to researchers who published a study last week linking climate change to past mass extinctions. The study analyzed fossil records, temperature changes over 500 million years, and found that three of the four biggest extinctions, defined as when more than 50% of species disappeared, occurred during periods of high temperature.’ So, wait. Wait, wait. ‘Five hundred million years…three of the four biggest extinctions…defined periods of high temperature’?
So there’s nothing new about what’s happening now. I mean, how can we have all these extinctions with no talk of manmade global warming 500 million years ago? ‘The upper end of the forecast rise would heat the earth close to the temperatures of 250 million years ago when 95% of all animal and plant species became extinct.’ Of course, that would mean liberal idiodictus would probably fade away and conservo erectus would hang around — the two new species for humanity predicted by some British guy. Here’s another idea on how to cool the globe. This is a guy, Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology. Folks, this was in the New York Times. This is an op-ed. It is not a spoof. It is not satire. ‘Despite growing interest in clean energy technology it looks as if we’re not going to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide any time soon. The amount in the atmosphere today exceeds the most pessimistic forecasts made just a few years ago. It’s increasing faster than anybody had foreseen.’ Yeah, and the temperature rise is negligible! That’s for another moment. ‘Even if we could stop adding the greenhouse gases tomorrow, the earth would continue warming for decades and remain hot for centuries. We would still face the threat of water from melting glaciers lapping at our doorsteps.
‘What can be done? One idea is to counteract warming by tossing small particles into the atmosphere above where the jets fly. This strategy may sound far-fetched, but it has the potential to cool the earth within months. Mount Pinatubo, a volcano in the Philippines that blew up in 1991, shows how this works. The eruption resulted in sulfate particles in the stratosphere that reflected the sun’s rays back to space and as a consequence the earth briefly cooled. If we could pour a five-gallon bucket’s worth of sulfate particles per second into the stratosphere it, might be enough to keep the earth from warming for 50 years. Tossing twice as much sulfate up there could protect us into the next century. A 1992 lottery for the National Academy of Sciences suggests that naval artillery, rockets, and aircraft exhaust could all be used to send the particles up. The least expensive option might be to use a fire hose suspended from a series of balloons. Scientists have yet to analyze the engineering involved but the hurdles appear surmountable.’ So we’re going to pollute our way out of it! This is what I said way back when. Pollution is what cools the earth. Mt. Pinatubo was pollution. This guy has resorted to this. They’re getting desperate. Hoses, fire hoses attached to balloons? That’s a huge hose, and how many hoses are you going to need? Hoses! Sorry.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: There’s one more story here in the Global Warming Stack, and this is from James Lewis at the American Thinker. And no offense, Mr. Lewis, this is something I’ve been saying for many, many moons. The headline says it all: ”Earth Climate is Too Complex to Predict.’ Science magazine just published a critical review of climate models by Professors Gerald Roe and Marcia Baker of the University of Washington, Seattle. It is echoed in the New Scientist magazine (October 25). As New Scientist puts it, ‘Climate is too complex for accurate predictions.’ It is evident that the climate system is operating in a regime in which small uncertainties in feedbacks are highly amplified in the resulting climate sensitivity. We are constrained by the inevitable: The more likely a large warming is for a given forcing (i.e., the greater the positive feedbacks), the greater the uncertainty will be in the magnitude of that warming.’
That’s just science lingo. But what it means is that ‘After hundreds of millions of dollars spent on climate modeling, and decades of screaming headlines, we have no more certainty today about Global Warming prediction than we did decades ago. What’s more, that is a provable inherent limitation of the data and models.’ That means this is a scientific scandal. The earth is way too complex, the atmosphere, to try to predict this.
They’re going nuts there on Fox, this tropical storm. They have the cone barely touching this in Florida. Now, we’re not in the main track area, but they’re moving it a little west. We could get this. Oh my, the local TV stations are going to do stories on going to the store to get wood to board up your windows, and make sure you get plenty of water, get all of your prescriptions filled. They can’t wait for this stuff, disaster, disaster and pestilence and death right around the corner lurking in the Caribbean hopefully heading our way.