Rush Limbaugh is a Hoax

I have a new hobby! It’s called “Debunking Rush’s claims about climate change”. It’s likely that this hobby will either a) allow me to address climate myths being put out there or b) cause me to go insane from having to deal with an onslaught of self-inflicted exposure to stupidity. I’ve already addressed claims made by Rush in previous posts so here’s how this “hobby” is going to work. It’s rather simple, I’ll take a claim made by Rush and examine the falsehoods. I’ll only look at statements that can be argued against using reasonable evidence, i.e. statements that appear to have some scientific basis but are, since they are coming from Rush, likely to be incorrect. I won’t be bothered to deal with claims such as “climate change is a hoax made by the liberals!” There’s no arguing against that, as in the argument is so wrong as to not even be worth disproving.

Claim: “More people are starting to consider the notion that we actually may be in a cooling phase, 'cause there hasn't been any significant warming in years.” http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_032709/content/01125111.guest.html

Now before I even begin to examine this claim let’s give Rush the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say we are in a phase of global cooling, it wouldn’t be any better than warming. Significant temperature changes in either direction would be disruptive to the Earth’s climate. Ice Age?

What is global cooling you ask?

“Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth's surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles, and a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s” ("Summary for Policymakers" (PDF). Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 2007-02-05. http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/AR4WG1_Print_SPM.pdf. Retrieved 2007-02-02. ).

Poor reporting led to popularity of the global cooling idea. Unfortunately, some have latched onto this as proof that scientists are wrong when it comes to the idea that the planet is warming. It should be acknowledged that there was a trend of cooling from the 40s to the 70s (http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/01/the-global-cooling-myth/), though this doesn’t undermine the fact that the overall trend has been a rise in global temperatures.

As I read through that Real Climate article I couldn’t help but feel an overwhelming sense of irony. The belief in global cooling seems to have grown out of data of which not enough was known to make predictions. In other words: exactly what deniers say about today’s climate data.
Here is more information (from the same article) to help debunk the global cooling myth.

“Most of this post has been about the science of 30 years ago. From the point of view of today’s science, and with extra data available:

The cooling trend from the 40’s to the 70’s now looks more like a slight interruption of an upward trend (e.g. here). It turns out that the northern hemisphere cooling was larger than the southern (consistent with the nowadays accepted interpretation that the cooling was largely caused by sulphate aerosols); at first, only NH records were available.

Sulphate aerosols have not increased as much as once feared (partly through efforts to combat acid rain); CO2 forcing is greater. Indeed IPCC projections of future temperature increases went up from the 1995 SAR to the 2001 TAR because estimates of future sulphate aerosol levels were lowered (SPM).

Interpretations of future changes in the Earth’s orbit have changed somewhat. It now seems likely (Loutre and Berger, Climatic Change, 46: (1-2) 61-90 2000) that the current interglacial, based purely on natural forcing, would last for an exceptionally long time: perhaps 50,000 years.”

It should be apparent by now that the data from the 70s wasn’t accurate, it was a poor judgment on the part of some promote the idea that the information they had found pointed to global cooling.