Last week Barack Obama turned the climate change debate into a B-grade movie. In this movie, he play-acts a President coping with a world-wide natural disaster. His act should convince no one who doesn’t already have a motive to push the climate change narrative. Because neither he nor any of his allies have the slightest scintilla of evidence to support it.

Climate change address

Yesterday Obama actually spoke about climate change throughout his weekly address. In fact he led with it:

Wednesday is Earth Day, a day to appreciate and protect this precious planet we call home. And today, there’s no greater threat to our planet than climate change.

Lay aside for a minute the dubious origins of Earth Day. Watch the video below. And watch footage from earlier in the week, when he talks about the globe warming by a degree or two.

He has the act down pat. In the past several decades, at least two African-American actors have played Presidents dealing with natural disasters global in scope. Morgan Freeman played a President in Deep Impact, and Danny Glover played another in 2012. Each actor performed as a viewer would expect a President to perform in the face of such a disaster. That is, the viewer might expect that, if the viewer already believed in the scenario. An actor can do that easily. The viewer has already seen the footage of an approaching comet, or the magnitude-10-to-12 earthquakes another character escapes “by the skin of his teeth.” Obama has a harder job. So when he resorts to such melodrama, he comes off more like…a bad movie actor, imitating his betters and trying to call it method acting.

Where the evidence leads

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Obama has another problem: the evidence does not support the narrative.

Five and one-half years ago, this correspondent put the ugly side of the climate change debate on the map. This article (from the Wayback Machine) tells the first part of a long, sordid story. For at least a decade, the “world’s leading climate scientists” falsified their data, manipulated the peer-review process, and did everything they could think of to convince the people of the world they were headed for a disaster like the one Director Mimi Leder portrayed in Deep Impact. Does anyone remember this quote, from Phil Jones, director of Britain’s Climatic Research Unit?

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

(Dramatis personae: “Mike” = Michael Mann, then of the University of Virginia. “Keith” = Keith Briffa, assistant to Dr. Jones.)

“Extreme” climate change and severe weather patterns do not correlate. Source: Conservative climate consumer. Used as per their standing policy governing their graphics.

Mixing real temperatures with proxies in the same graph constitutes manipulation of data. Universities have expelled students for less.

Add to it: most climate change alarmists have never believed in their own narrative. The Daily Telegraph (London, England) told the story of how the delegates to the Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP-15) got to the conference and treated themselves while at the conference. Twelve hundred chauffeured limousines! (In fact, they rented out every chauffeured limousine on the continent.) One hundred forty private jets! Snacking on caviar! Not exactly good movie drama for a global natural disaster. In Deep Impact you saw people getting onto school buses, the President and his advisers hunkering down, and an astronaut crew paying with their lives to save the world. In real life you saw people indulging themselves in a life of luxury when they thought nobody would be watching.

But the climate change alarmists have a worse problem. This extensive chart archive shows that neither drought nor other severe weather events have gotten any worse or any more frequent over the last fifty years or more. These two sources alone tell the real story of the California drought. Or at least most of it. The one part they don’t tell: California did nothing to manage water. Environmental activists wouldn’t let them.

So, sum up the evidence: the climate change alarmists put out false evidence for decades. They knew they were play-acting and weren’t clever enough to carry the pretense into their lifestyle. And the evidence goes against them, not with them.

But people might actually make public policy after assuming Obama, and the Phil Joneses, and the Michael Manns, are telling the truth. That, not Obama’s B-movie play-acting, should scare people.

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