It’s time to chill on global warming.
Has the polar vortex got you down? Are you feeling sympathy for friends in Atlanta who’ve endured temperatures frigid enough to drive southerners into the warm embrace of Johnnie Walker Scotch — if only they can chop themselves out of snow and ice in time for happy hour? This seems a good time to stop the deafening chatter of teeth and develop a coherent thought: I envy Al Gore.
I’m jealous of all deluded salesmen of the junk science known by the politically correct term “climate change’’ who see a near future in which our entire planet turns into sunny Florida. No, wait — during the polar vortex that hit this country like a cold slap in the face last month, all 50 United States and Washington, DC, recorded temperatures below freezing. That includes Florida. Hawaii, too.
Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice president who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has reinvented himself as the world’s leading warming guru, a career that’s turned him into a kind of zaftig version of Hollywood movie star Brad Pitt.
The Oscar-winning 2006 documentary that shows Gore giving a scary slide show, “An Inconvenient Truth,’’ catapulted him into winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, which he shared with fellow climate hysterics of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
So, will we soon be wearing bikinis in Bismarck in December? (I wish.) Gore’s vision of a world plagued by rising seas and rampant tropical diseases, which he preaches can be averted only if Americans drive hybrid cars and replace energy-guzzling dryers with outdoor clothes lines, is as false as the notion that the ice sheet is melting in the North Pole, threatening to drown frisky polar bears.
The “entire North Polar ice cap will be gone in five years,’’ Gore, now 65, told a German TV audience in 2008. Wrong.
In fact, receding Arctic ice rebounded between 2012 and 2013, growing by 29 percent into an unbroken patch more than half the size of Europe and within 5 percent of what it was 30 years ago, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Last month near the South Pole, a Russian ship carrying scientists and tourists traveled to the bottom of the Earth so passengers might document global warming and shrinking ice caps. But the ship got stuck on ice that was thicker than at any time since records started being kept in 1978. The warming fans were airlifted to safety by helicopter, leaving behind confused penguins.
And — whoops! — climate scientists conceded last year that the Earth’s surface temperature stopped rising in 1997. (Or did temps take a temporary “pause,’’ as warmists say?) Too bad for makers of jet-skis and tank tops: We might see global cooling into the 2030s.
Warmists blamed Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and Superstorm Sandy in 2012 on greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But the hurricane season that ended on Nov. 30, 2013, was among the quietest since 1960, according to an opinion piece by journalist and attorney Michael Fumento published in The Post.
Just two relatively meek Category 1 hurricanes (’canes go up to Category 5) formed in the Atlantic Ocean last year. Neither made landfall in the United States.
Doubt is growing. (Warming disciples dismiss this trend as “global-warming denial.’’) By last November, 23 percent of Americans said they don’t believe global warming is happening — up from just 12 percent in September 2012, according to a survey by Yale and George Mason universities. Less than half of Americans, 47 percent, believe global warming is caused by humans, a 7 percentage-point drop from 2012.
But don’t express your disenchantment with the cult of warming to the Los Angeles Times. An editor announced in October that the newspaper does not publish Letters to the Editor that say global warming isn’t real.
President Obama is down with warmists. His administration has proposed regulations to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. And in his proposed budget next month, he will ask Congress to set up a $1 billion “Climate Change Resilience Fund,’’ a waste of cash that would be used for research, helping communities prepare for climate change (by building more swimming pools?) and funding “breakthrough technologies and resilient infrastructure,’’ a White House spokesman told Politico.com.
But can Obama persuade Congress to go for this at a time when more Americans than ever are asking why it’s so cold?
This frosty winter, be daring and curl up under a blanket made of nonrecycled fiber. You’re bound to have company.
Sports Illustrated – way too old to be playing with dolls
If a Barbie doll were a life-size woman of similar proportions, she’d stand 5 feet 9 inches, weigh 110 pounds and bear massive breasts that would force her to walk on all fours, a college student found in 2011. So what is this freak doing in Sports Illustrated?
For the 50th anniversary of SI’s swimsuit issue, toymaker Mattel paid for some 1,000 cover wraps featuring a photo of the busty anorexic to be distributed at the American International Toy Fair in Manhattan.
Due out Tuesday, the issue has a four-page advertising spread inside, a campaign labeled #Unapologetic. Is this a statement about SI readers’ unreal expectations about female beauty? Or does someone have a plastic fetish?
Sports Illustrated should stick to breathing dolls.
Blaz weak after week
It stinks to be Mayor de Blasio.
Hizzoner outraged those of us who lack political connections by making a late-night phone call a week ago to a police official, asking about the arrest of a pastor pal. And his friend was sprung from jail.
On Thursday, the mayor made the bonehead decision to open schools in a bad snowstorm. Then knucklehead Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina declared, “It is absolutely a beautiful day out there right now.” Tweeting from the Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, “Today’’ show weatherman Al Roker predicted one-term for de Blasio, then apologized.
And he’s been in office just a day shy of seven weeks. Is it already time for de Blasio to step aside?
No rest for Etan
Are you Etan?
An American living in Europe received a jarring e-mail and a phone call from FBI agents asking if he was Etan Patz, the man told ProPublica.com.
Etan was 6 when he vanished while walking to his Soho school-bus stop in 1979.
Former bodega clerk Pedro Hernandez confessed to killing the boy in 2012. But Manhattan prosecutors are second-guessing whether they have the right man, The Post reported.
There is no end to this sad case.
Facebook ‘fairer’ sex
Facebook individuals, rejoice! US users no longer must decide whether to describe themselves as male, female or none of the above. Now they can pick from some 50 terms, including androgynous, intersex, gender fluid and transsexual. Will it catch on worldwide? Can folks from Saudi Arabia be androgynous?