Obama Flunks his Climate Science 101 at University of California, Irvine

Denying climate change is like saying the moon is made of cheese, President Obama has said in his latest attempt to persuade an unconvinced world that “global warming” is the most urgent crisis of our time.

Obama was speaking to a crowd of around 30,000 at a commencement ceremony at the University of California, Irvine. Justifying the extravagance of his metaphor he said: “I want to tell you this to light a fire under you.”

Here are some lines from his speech which explain why those present would be better off ignoring their pyromaniacal president’s entreaties.

“I’m not a scientist.” Possibly the only factually accurate words in the president’s entire speech.

“But we’ve got some good ones at NASA.” “Did have some good ones at NASA” would have been more accurate. Problem is, the organisation that put man on the moon is now in the grip of climate alarmists like Gavin Schmidt, successor to activist James “Death Trains” Hansen. In 2012, 49 former NASA astronauts and scientists wrote to protest against the anti-scientific, alarmist position being adopted by Hansen and Schmidt at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). They wrote: “We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide ishaving a catastrophic impact on global climate change are notsubstantiated, especially when considering thousands of years ofempirical data.”

“I do know the overwhelming majority of scientists who work on climate change, including some who once disputed the data, have put the debate to rest.” No, you don’t know, Mr President. You’re just repeating the multiply discredited “97 per cent” consensus meme. And even that figure were accurate – which it isn’t – scientific knowledge is not a numbers game. If it were, we would still be going with the majority view that tectonic plates are a myth, that stomach ulcers are caused by stress, that combustion is caused by phlogiston, that leeches can relieve fever, that malaria comes from the bad air in swamps, etc.

“In some parts of the country, weather-related disasters like droughts, fires, storms and floods are going to get harsher, and they’re going to get costlier.” Technically accurate, utterly meaningless. Given the chaotic nature of weather, records are always being broken somewhere in the future. Increased costliness is a given as populations grow and more expensive houses and offices are built to accommodate their needs.

“Today’s Congress is full of folks who stubbornly and automatically reject the scientific evidence.” Indeed. They’re called Democrats and most of them refuse to accept the overwhelming evidence that there has been no global warming since 1997, that the computer models which predicted catastrophic warming have been proved wrong by real world data. If it weren’t such an ugly term you might almost call them “deniers.”

“They will tell you climate change is a hoax or fad.” There is a name for people who say such things. Truth-tellers.

“One member of Congress actually says the world might be cooling.” Only one? Only one person in the whole of Congress knows that the Earth has entered a prolonged cooling period, the result of weak solar activity?

“It’s pretty rare that you’ll encounter somebody who says the problem you’re trying to solve simply doesn’t exist. When President Kennedy set us on a course to the moon, there were a number of people who made a serious case that it wouldn’t be worth it. But nobody ignored the science. I don’t remember anybody saying the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese.” 

As Anthony Watts says, this is ‘grade school level logical fallacy.’ No one said the moon wasn’t there or that it was made of cheese because neither statement is true. There is, on the other hand, a large – and fast-growing – body of evidence, well understood by many distinguished scientists and economists, that the catastrophic man-made global warming “problem” Obama is so keen to fix is, to all intents and purposes, non-existent.