Warmists are happily tweeting and retweeting tonight a column by John Lindsey of The San Luis Obispo Tribune proclaiming his conversion from climate skeptic to believer. But was he even a skeptic to start with?
Lindsey tries to make it sound like, all of sudden, the evidence for manmade global warming has become to much for him to resist:
…Record low amounts of ice in the Arctic Ocean, temperature records that fall like bowling pins, prolonged droughts, increasing wildfires and epic storms and floods have convinced me that the planet is warming at an unprecedented rate…
But in reality, Lindsey was a believer as far back as April 2009 when he wrote a column that produced the below letter-to-the-editor of The San Luis Obispo Tribune on May 9, 2009:
Of all the attempts to fault humans for global warming, John Lindsey’s column (April 19) must be the most pathetic.
He wrote: This rise in sea level (from the warming of the water) corresponds to the increasing amount of greenhouse gases introduced into the atmosphere. Therefore, he implies, greenhouse gases produced by humans are causing the oceans to warm.
Does Mr. Lindsey understand the difference between correlation and causation ? It is just as accurate to say that, for example, higher crop yields correspond to more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
But does more greenhouse gas cause higher crop yields? Probably not, as there is no known linkage between the two. They correlate, but one does not cause the other.
Similarly, greenhouse gases and ocean temperatures correlate, but there is no causal relationship between them. If Mr. Lindsey knows of one, he should cite it.
There is a reason that recent Rasmussen Reports have shown that just 34 percent of voters now believe that global warming is caused by human activity, compared to 47 percent a year ago. Americans are catching on to the global warming scam, one that Mr. Lindsey should be ashamed to support with his unscientific analysis.
Robert Olson
Arroyo Grande
So Lindsey’s conversion is as phony as Michael Mann’s Nobel Prize claims.
There has never been a documented case of a skeptical scientist turning to an alarmist. Skeptics are too firmly grounded to facts.
Which Arctic Ice low is he referring to? 1817? 1922? How does he know those lows were records?
And that sea level rise that started around the Napoleonic Wars…what produced the CO2? That infernal loud music of Ludwig van Beethoven?
Maybe, if he’s American, he’s been a convert since 1936. If you were living to the west of the Great Lakes you could have seen cold records tumble like ninepins…then a few months later you could have seen heat records tumble like ninepins. And just by way of a convincer, you could have kicked off the previous autumn with a cat 5 hurricane coming to land as a cat 3, an “epic storm” that could have had Sandy for breakfast. As for “prolonged droughts” in the thirties…
Yes, I’d say he’s a 1936 convert from skepticism.
Desperation, even if Lindsay *were* a true convert. Why? He’s only one man.
Look at the polling trends of people who ‘believe in’ global warming, and do the math. You get *tens of millions* of people who have converted from GWers to skeptics.
Against that background, Mann touts the conversion of *one man*. Whoopdee-doo.
Did Lindsey cut and paste an Obama speech?