Vin Suprynowicz

The National Resources Defense Council has placed Nevada first in the West and sixth in the nation for heat records broken in the year 2012.

According to the environmental activists, 36 heat records fell across Nevada last year, with 12 of the state’s 17 counties experiencing record-breaking temperatures.
Nevada also experienced 14 rainfall records in seven counties, 11 snowfall records in five counties and 86 wildfires that charred 90 acres or more.

The results were emblematic of a year of extreme weather across the country, the Council argues.

“2012’s unparalleled record-setting heat demonstrates what climate change looks like,” intoned Kim Knowlton, senior scientist for the New York City-based environmental advocacy group. “This extreme weather has awoken communities across the country. … Now our leaders must act.”

Actually, 2012 was the warmest year on record in Las Vegas by only two-tenths of a degree, some of that doubtless attributable to more concrete and pavement that absorb heat and keep the valley from cooling off at night the way it once did.

Meantime, Southern Nevada this month endured the longest spell of sub-freezing nights in a decade, and many a local resident has the ice-split sprinkler pipes and valves to prove it. Why is it that when it’s cold, the global warming activists scoff “That’s just weather, not climate,” whereas a tiny, statistical temperature increase — Reno hitting 90 degrees on April 22, 2012, when the previous high for an April date was 89 degrees on Aptil 30, 1981 (and mind you, Reno set a new record last year ONLY FOR APRIL) — “is what global warming looks like”?

Our leaders “must act”? Really? To further drive up energy costs in a still fragile economy?

In fact, it would be foolish to allow ourselves to be stampeded into counterproductive measures by accepting at face value the analyses of groups with pre-existing agendas — in this case, blocking access to cheap energy in order to reduce overall standards of living.

As Norman Rogers, Ph.D. in physics from the University of Hawaii and member of the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society, noted last fall: “The advocates of global warming are beginning to have the classic doomsday cult problem. The Earth hasn’t been warming for 16 years, and that’s starting to get very embarrassing. The first adjustment to the dogma was to stop talking about global warming and start talking about climate change. The latest version of the party line is that we are going to have more extreme weather. The reality is that the weather is not any more variable or extreme than in the past. But with suitable fishing in the data, it is easy to make a case that this or that weather phenomenon has become more extreme.”

Nine months ago, on April 23, London’s Daily Mail reported “‘I made a mistake’: Environmental scientist James Lovelock, renowned for his terrifying predictions of climate change’s deadly impact on the planet, has gone back on his previous claims, admitting they were ‘alarmist’. … He added that other environmental commentators, such as former vice president Al Gore, are also guilty of exaggerating their arguments.

“The admission comes as a devastating blow to proponents of climate change,” the Daily Mail reported.

“Five years ago, he had claimed: ‘Before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.’

“But in an interview with msnbc.com, he admitted: ‘I made a mistake.’”

And it’s only been a couple of years since, on Feb. 14, 2010, the Daily Mail reported “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995. …

Professor Phil Jones was the inventor of the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support their theory, but has since been unable to produce supporting documentation.

“Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now — suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.

“And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.

“The best scientific data show there has been no warming for 16 years, something none of the computer models that predict an eco-catastrophe predicted or can explain,” agrees Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute. “Data show no connection between man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, or floods. … Global warming, simply put, is not a crisis.”

“The reality is that apocalyptic Green predictions are regularly shown to be wrong,” concludes the Arizona-based medical group Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. “This doesn’t matter because the real agenda is not to protect human health or to promote clean, economical energy, but to reduce human population and jettison free enterprise and individual rights in favor of a state-managed economic system.”