Climate drivel from the heads of the EPA

I came across this utter howler of a quote today:

There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts: our world continues to warm, with the last decade the hottest in modern records, and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere. Sea level is rising. Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected…we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet. The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon. What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.” - WILLIAM D. RUCKELSHAUS, LEE M. THOMAS, WILLIAM K. REILLY and CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN (heads of the EPA under Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George Bush and George W. Bush), NYTimes, 8/2/13

The planet is awash with nonsense like this, but this one got my goat, probably because the collective bunch of shysters who penned it have taken a whole lot of taxpayers' money to come up with this dangerous pack of lies. It needs to be taken apart, piece by piece.

There is no longer any credible scientific debate about the basic facts

The only true bit in the whole farago of lies and nonsense. (I am going to call the fallacies lies, because the heads of the US EPA are either competent enough to know the facts, or they held the job under a false pretension to competence - either way, they're a bunch of liars.) And this bit is true, of course because the alarmists refuse to debate the science with any qualified skeptics.

our world continues to warm

Lie. The warming stopped 18 years ago. In any case, this has nothing to do with the truth or otherwise of their pet theory. That theory, remember, is about the cause of the warming and the likelihood that it will continue to dangerous levels.

with the last decade the hottest in modern records

Depends on what's "modern". The Australian BOM snipped late-nineteenth century temp. data that showed murderously hot weather that required trains to evacuate the inland. And in 1789, the year after the first fleet, the weather was so hot that tens of thousands of bats dropped dead. But the real answer to this deception is in two parts: (1) the well documented fiddling with the recorded data that increases the small amount of warming that has actually happened - take any place you care to name and look at the raw data as recorded on real thermometers; go on, do this exercise for yourself and see if you can find a place that replicates the "adjusted" data; and (2) of course it is the hottest! The world has been recovering from the little ice age that froze the Thames over, wiped out the Vikings in Greenland, and so on.

and the deep ocean warming faster than the earth’s atmosphere

This is evidence against the catastrophic global warming theory! The theory is that CO2 in the atmosphere has its effect enhanced by extra water vapour, causing a hotspot in the troposphere that then heats up everything else. If heat is increasing faster somewhere else, it isn't being caused by the mechanism this theory posits, and is therefore evidence that the theory is not the cause of the warming.

Sea level is rising

So what? Leaving aside the, by now, boring, fact that the data has been "adjusted", sea level has a very slow response to atmospheric changes due to the massive mass of the oceans and their slow turnover. Almost nothing going on in the seas can be due to human actions since about 1950.

Arctic Sea ice is melting years faster than projected

Lie. It's a bit less than normal, but they predicted it would be all gone by now. That's slower than expected, last time I checked on the meaning of "expected". And Antarctic ice is breaking records year after year.

we must continue efforts to reduce the climate-altering pollutants that threaten our planet

Some pollutants have a small effect on temperature - sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide, etc. - but CO2 is not pollution, it is plant food. And please don't waste my time with "but too much of something is pollution". On that basis, pure water is pollution, food in the supermarket is pollution. But I don't think any of the individuals quoted above ever told anyone "Just popping down to the supermarket to buy some pollution".

The only uncertainty about our warming world is how bad the changes will get, and how soon.

So far we are cooler than the medieval warm period (used to be called the medieval climate optimum, before people went nuts), a lot more cooler than the Roman warm period, and cooler than 90% of all years in the current holocene interglacial. The holocene has run longer than most interglacials, and it might just be that humans have postponed the next deadly ice age. These people are not only dishonest, but dangerously deranged.

What is most clear is that there is no time to waste.

Well if the world cools naturally as its next major climate change, this mob want to take credit for it, so for sure, they have no time to waste to persuade us to buy into their deadly planet-hating, anti-wildlife, anti-human poison.