Mark Steyn pens his weekly column for the Orange County Register on the subject of what he calls malignant narcissism in America and the West. He manages to tie fraudulent climate data, Scott Thomas Beauchamp, Jesse MacBeth and cheeseburgers together. The man is an artist.
Something rather odd happened the other day. If you go to NASA's Web site and look at the "U.S. surface air temperature" rankings for the lower 48 states, you might notice that something has changed.
Then again, you might not. They're not issuing any press releases about it. But they have quietly revised their All-Time Hit Parade for U.S. temperatures. The "hottest year on record" is no longer 1998, but 1934. Another alleged swelterer, the year 2001, has now dropped out of the Top 10 altogether, and most of the rest of the 21st century – 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004 – plummeted even lower down the Hot 100. In fact, every supposedly hot year from the Nineties and this decade has had its temperature rating reduced. Four of America's Top 10 hottest years turn out to be from the 1930s, that notorious decade when we all drove around in huge SUVs with the air-conditioning on full-blast. If climate change is, as Al Gore says, the most important issue anyone's ever faced in the history of anything ever, then Franklin Roosevelt didn't have a word to say about it.
And yet we survived.
So why is 1998 no longer America's record-breaker? Because a very diligent fellow named Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.com labored long and hard to prove there was a bug in NASA's handling of the raw data. He then notified the scientists responsible and received an acknowledgment that the mistake was an "oversight" that would be corrected in the next "data refresh." The reply was almost as cool as the revised chart listings.
Who is this man who understands American climate data so much better than NASA? Well, he's not even American: He's Canadian. Just another immigrant doing the jobs Americans won't do, even when they're federal public servants with unlimited budgets? No. Mr. McIntyre lives in Toronto. But the data smelled wrong to him, he found the error, and NASA has now corrected its findings – albeit without the fanfare that accompanied the hottest-year-on-record hysteria of almost a decade ago. Sunlight may be the best disinfectant, but, when it comes to global warming, the experts prefer to stick the thermometer where the sun don't shine.
You'll just have to read the whole thing to admire the way Steyn can tie all those diverse elements together into a coherent structure. His point that America – and the West in general – has reached a point of malignant, narcissistic self-loathing is effectively argued. Everything America does is interpreted as a) evil, b) existing completely in a vacuum where no other country, group or people have any impact on world events and c) really evil. Unless it's an energy-guzzling, strip mining magnate with a huge financial stake in making global warming hysteria into a religion. That's seen as good and benevolent.
I'd modify Steyn's phrase and call them malignant, mendacious narcissists.
The facts now prove that there was rampant, runaway Cheney-planned Halliburton-created global warming back in 1934. Who knew?
I had no idea that SUVs – truly the Original Sin according to the Church of Global Warming – existed back in the 1930s. Apparently these mechanical tools of the Devil were disguised as Model-Ts, Model-As, Three-Window Coupes, “Woodys”, and others. Clever, those dastardly chickenhawk make-war-to-steal-oil neocons!