In June 1988, just 13 years after scientists fretted in the pages of the New York Times about an imminent global cooling, James Hansen introduced to a U.S. Senate committee the phenomenon he called “global warming.”  

As director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Hansen lent NASA’s authority to his claim that “global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect.”

Those of us who were alive and sentient have lived with the threat of global warming – rebranded “climate change” after a “pause” in warming roughly 20 years ago – most of our adult lives. Looking back, however, we have a hard time identifying a single apocalyptic prediction that has come to pass.

Hurricanes have not gotten fiercer, nor tornadoes more numerous, nor seas higher, nor polar bears extinct.

As Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore noted just last week, the Great Barrier Reef, the alarmists’ last redoubt, is not disappearing. In fact, its coral cover has experienced a “third year record high.”

If the ancillary terrors fail to materialize, the alarmists will inevitably fall back on heat. The political axiom “it’s not who votes that count, but who counts the votes” has a parallel in the climate world: “it’s not how hot it is, it’s who mans the thermometers.” 

The media rely on the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. NOAA assures us “2023 was the warmest year in the modern temperature record,” but we have no more reason to trust a captive agency like NOAA on climate than we did the CDC on COVID. 

Congress to the rescue? Really?

As if to dispel any illusions about its agenda, the NOAA website opens with this politically loaded fantasy: “7 ways the Inflation Reduction ACT and NOAA are helping communities thrive in face of climate change.”

The Inflation Reduction Act? Seriously?

With COVID, the people who fared best were those who ignored the Party’s “final, most essential command” and instead trusted the evidence of their eyes and ears. The same holds true for the weather. Our own observations, buttressed by local “weather” reporting, provides a saner view of an always-changing world than NOAA does.

In the final analysis, all climate is local.

Here is what I know.

Kansas City enjoyed its first 90-degree day on June 7 this year about 10 days later than normal. We’ve had one day over 100. As projected through Aug. 31, Kansas City will have had 30 90-plus days.

Add a few hot days in September, and Kansas City will approach its most recent norm. In the 10 years ending in 2023, KC averaged 37 days each summer in which the temperature was 90 or above.

Try these temps — without air conditioning

“Greatest Generation” survivors sneer at these numbers. In the 10 years ending in 1943, Kansas City averaged 62 days above 90.

And these hardy souls did not have air conditioning.  For cooling, thousands of them slept outside, either on their front or back porches, in their yards, or even in public parks. To hear about the apocalypse back then, people did not go to the NOAA website. They went to church.

There was much to pray about. Nationwide, 1934 was the hottest year on record, one of the byproducts of which was the Dust Bowl. Add record heat and sky-darkening clouds of inescapable black grit to the Depression then in full swing, and you will understand why your grandparents always thought you were a sissy.

In the Kansas-Missouri area, 1936 was steamier even than 1934. On one August day that year, the temperature in Kansas City topped out at a balmy 113 degrees, a record that still stands.

Western Kansas reached 121 degrees that same summer. In 1936, Kansas City experienced a will-sapping 53 days with temperatures above 100 degrees, and not even the movie theaters had air conditioning.

In 1954, area residents endured 80 days above 90 degrees, 52 above 95, and 31 above 100. By contrast, Kansas City went four years from the summer of 2018 to the summer of 2022 without a single day over 100 degrees.

True believers will dismiss local weather as irrelevant in the larger climate picture, but the weather in every locality of my acquaintance seems to refute the climate ideology that drives public policy.

As it happens, I bought a property on Lake Erie in New York State in 1988, the same year climate change alarmism kicked into high gear. The following year, in an interview for Discover magazine, Stephen Schneider of the National Center for Atmospheric Research observed that although scientists were “ethically bound to the scientific method,” they also needed “to capture the public’s imagination.” 

To do so required media attention, and to get that attention they needed to “offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts [they] might have.”

Schneider concluded, “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.”

That balance has proved elusive on Lake Erie. In 2002, National Geographic published a much-cited article with the none-too-subtle title “Down the Drain: The Incredible Shrinking Great Lakes.”

That article seems to have vanished into the ether. I learned about it only from reading a 2012 National Geographic article by Lisa Borre – “Warming Lakes: Climate Change and Variability Drive Low Water Levels on the Great Lakes” – that identified the culprit for this shrinkage as climate change.

True to Schneider’s credo, Borre’s article features several alarming images of stranded boats and sandy stretches where water once flowed. On a dozen occasions in the article, Barre cites “climate change” as the likely explanation for the shrinking lakes.

So much for the Great Shrinking Lakes

Those of us on the Great Lakes could not be bullied into ignoring the obvious. Our evidence was much more tangible than the media’s.

Indeed, in 2014 the lake levels started rising and have continued to rise. In 2017, levels reached crisis stage on Lake Ontario.

By the summer of 2019, even the The New York Times had noticed. Wrote Mitch Smith, “The higher water, which set records this summer on some Great Lakes, could be part of an expensive new normal.” Left unsaid was that this “new normal” fully reversed the old “new normal” from just six years prior. 

If there were a Pulitzer for sophistry, it would have to go to the headline writer for the 2019 Scientific American article titled “Climate Change Sends Great Lakes Water Levels Seesawing.” Not wanting to be pinned down, the authors argued that “rapid transitions between extreme high and low water levels in the Great Lakes represent the ‘new normal’.” 

In 2021, the new normal swallowed enough of my lakeside property that I had to have a sea wall built, not my favorite way to spend $100,000. And to think that less than 10 years earlier I was worried that a vanishing lake would diminish the value of my view!

Whatever the alarmists tell us, I would like to report the Midwest has never looked more verdant and abundant than it did during my drive last week from New York State to KC.

Whatever we’re not doing to the environment seems to be working.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is available in all formats.