Dec-Feb Temperature Anomoly NOAA/ESRL

My colleague and friend Gordon Peterson’s roundtable program “Inside Washington” touched on global warming during its Feb. 6 broadcast. Of course, this subject came up in the middle of another very cold winter, not this past July or August as many in the U.S. endured a record hot summer.

It is a political panel, so Gordon brought up the name Al Gore, the global-warming piñata for the intransigent agendists. Regular (and I hope he would not mind) conservative panelist Charles Krauthammer flailed away, saying:

Look, if Godzilla appeared on the Mall this afternoon, Al Gore would say it’s global warming. (Laughter.) Because the spores of the South Atlantic Ocean, you know, were – look, everything is – it’s a religion. In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.

Krauthammer, being an M.D., does have a scientific background and knows or should know that science cannot prove a negative.

Take a statement like “the Sun will not come up tomorrow,” and show me how science can deny that. Labeling global warming or climate change science a “religion” is silly. Then compounding that statement by saying “in religion everything is explicable” leads one to wonder if Krauthammer has any idea of the difference between science, the observable, the scientific method and faith.

I do wonder if Krauthammer does still read any scientific literature on climate change, or just relies on sources of disinformation that mirror his political agenda on the issue. Maybe he thinks the measurements (see the map above) showing a record warm winter in the Arctic along with record low Arctic sea ice this winter (suggested in some climate research and future outlooks by Warren Washington and others almost 40 years ago) is part of some global conspiracy by a cabal of scientists.

Don’t take it on faith; it’s not religion. It’s science.