Global Warming

IBD Editorials

Facts Get In The Way–Again–Of A Good Global Warming Story

 Posted 07:09 PM ET

Environment: Hillary Clinton made a well-publicized trip last week to the Arctic to see for herself the impact of global warming. Less well known, however, are two reports that contradict the climate-change alarmists.

Upon her return from Saturday's tour of the Norwegian coastline, the secretary of state announced that "many of the predictions about warming in the Arctic are being surpassed by the actual data." But she omitted a couple of important points:

First, polar ice is now the heaviest "in more than a decade," reports the Los Angeles Times. It is, in fact, so plentiful it could postpone Shell's "start of offshore oil drilling in the Arctic Ocean until the beginning of August."

The Times says the National Weather Service explains it in these terms: "A high pressure zone over the coast of Alaska, cold winter temperatures and certain ocean currents have combined to bring unusually large amounts of ice not only along Alaska's northern coast, but farther south in the Bering Sea as well."

Second, photos taken in the 1930s by Danish explorers "show glaciers in Greenland retreating faster than they are today, according to researchers," tech publication The Register reported.

"It now appears that the glaciers were retreating even faster 80 years ago" when man's carbon output was far less than today's, "but nobody worried about it, and the ice subsequently came back again."

We can understand a U.S. secretary of state visiting a region that's material to American interests. In this case, there is sea bed mining, oil and natural gas production and vital shipping routes to be considered.

But why throw in a political global warming jab?

Oh, that's right: Clinton is a Democrat working in a Democrat's administration that's used global warming alarmism to push its (failed) green energy agenda. Of course. Mixing the practical — and often forgetting the practical altogether — with the frivolous to make political points is the way Democrats roll.

We prefer to deal in facts, which continue to refute the prophets of global warming, who are always dragging up some point they say indisputably proves their claim. But for every argument they throw out, there's always at least one fact that wrecks the credibility of their story that man is causing the planet to warm to intolerable levels.