IN HIS TED LECTURE ON CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE SCIENTIST PATRICK BELMONT DESCRIBES THE SILLINESS OF CLIMATE DENIALISM BY CITING THE COMICAL JIM INHOFE SNOWBALL AFFAIR OF 2015 AS FOLLOWS:

BY 2015 WE WERE SWIMMING IN OCEANS OF DATA FROM METEOROLOGICAL STATIONS ALL AROUND THE WORLD. We collected thousands of sediment cores from lakes and ice cores from glaciers that allows us to re-construct what past climates have been like. And they are all telling us how much outside of normal conditions we were. What these data tell us is that this is no natural cycle. We are way outside of natural conditions. We had little gadgets we could use to measure CO2 coming out of individual leaves on trees at the scale of entire cities and whole continents. And all of this information was feeding into some of the most sophisticated computer models ever created to help us predict what future climate scenarios will look like. DESPITE THIS MOUNTAIN OF INFORMATION: that were all pointing in the same direction and screaming at us about what a disaster we had created, in February of 2015 Jim Inhofe brought a snowball on to the floor of the US Senate as evidence that climate change was just a hoax. He brought a snowball. This was his attempt to undermine a century and a half of science. This was his response to the recent observation that 2014 had been the hottest year on record. Well guess what? 2015 was even hotter as was 2016 and 2017 and 2018 and 2019 and 2020. They were all hotter!!! Inhoffe was the definition of a climate change denier at that time. Some call these people skeptics. I don’t think so. Skeptics substantive arguments to the debate. Inhoffe and the other deniers responded to all the overwhelming science. They’re just saying nyaaa!! And it worked! It was enough to continue to delay action. And we as a society, we just let that go.WE LET THAT GO! …. WE LET THAT GO!

CRITICAL COMMENTARY

(1): JIM INHOFE: In the year 2000, the science of climate science had taken the position that snow was disappearing due to climate change and that our children won’t know what snow is. In their words … “Snow is starting to disappear from our lives. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries … Global warming, the heating of the atmosphere by increased amounts of industrial gases, is now accepted as a reality by the international community … According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is. The comical Jim Inhofe response as a comical chapter in climate denial must be understood in the context of this comical chapter in climate science that was apparently based on mountains of data all pointing in the same direction.

(2): HOTTEST YEAR: It is proposed that the observation that 2014 was the hottest year on record and that the follosing six years 2015 to 2020 were also the hottest years on record provides all the empirical evidence needed for certainty beyond all doubt that the theory of anthropogenic global warming proposed by climate science is correct beyond all doubt and that therefore to be a denier like Inhofe and to argue against the science is comical foolishness. This argument, intended to defend science, is itself unscientific and it also violates climate science itself. According to climate science, only long term trends in global mean surface temperarure longer than 30 years have an interpretation in terms of AGW. Therefore “hottest year on record” is an event and not a long term trends and therefore it must be understood as internal climate variability that has no AGW interpretation. It is an oddity of climate science that this kind of science denial is actually seen in climate science itself whenever the denial serves their needs of the moment. It should also be mentioned that “the record” is a reference to the instrumental record, a rather brief period and irrelevant in the context of the warming and cooling cycles of the Holocene not to mention the previous interglacial the Eemian.