On Friday, EPA air chief Bill Wehrum told reporters at the World Gas Conference that while Pruitt’s red team attack is on ice, Pruitt still “thinks, at a minimum, it's important to give everybody a voice in this process.” Wehrum added that EPA brass are “talking about ways we can provide a platform for people to express a spectrum of views on climate issues.”
We’re all about providing a platform to examine the claims of people on Pruitt’s side of the “spectrum.” Today, we’re going to elevate a voice we’re only just now hearing.
Sunshinehours.net is a simple blog that, at first glance, looks like it’s solely dedicated to posting global sea ice extent graphs. But there’s a couple key clues to the blog’s true leanings: the blogroll on the sidebar lists a few denier sites, and the categories of past posts include topics like “AGW is a cult,” “bird slaughterers” and “evil environmentalists.”
Last week the blog came to our attention because Climate Depot ran a link to the UK denial shop GWPF, who has posted a graph from Sunshine Hours with an all-caps headline shouting that global sea ice is on the rebound--and is a million square kilometers higher than last year. Wow! A million is a big number, and a rebound? This must be important!
Sunshine doesn’t source where it gets its data for the graph from, so there’s no telling if it’s even accurate. But it does look close enough to the graphs NASA has, so we’ll just accept that the data shown is right.
Does that mean we’ve been all wrong about sea ice? That warming isn’t, in fact, melting ice? That this whole climate conspiracy is about to be exposed because ice is making a comeback?
Of course not. Looking at Sunshine’s graph, it’s still quite clear that the sea ice extent is two million square kilometers less than the 1981-2000 average, and a million below the standard deviation from the mean. Not exactly good news for the folks claiming that warming isn’t happening.
We’ll grant that sure, sea ice not as melted as it was in the last record-breaking two years. But is anyone, anywhere, suggesting that it should be? That natural indicators of warming will march single-file in one direction?
Of course not. Despite the allegations that alarmists ignore natural cycles, we don’t. We recognize that the warming signal is overlaid on these natural forces. We also know what “regression to the mean” means: extreme measurements tend to be followed by ones more similar to the average. As Neil Degrasse Tyson explained a couple of years ago in reference to the faux pause, it’s like walking a dog. Human activity sets a baseline path, and the natural wanderings of the dog exploring the limits of its leash meander from that path.
And when the dog decides it’s time to drop a load of crap, Climate Depot and GWPF are there to scoop it up and serve it to their readers.
Can’t wait for Pruitt to give them a platform so the world can get a sense of the honesty and intelligence on that side of the spectrum of climate views.
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