I ran across an article in the Powell (Wyoming) Tribune called Yellowstone Lake defies warming temperature – what’s its secret? I originally saw the article in the Billings Gazette, but it was paywalled. I went to its city of origin, and again, paywalled. Finally I saw it in the Powell newspaper, where I get four visits before the walls go up.
The original piece was by Zak Sonntag, who works for the Casper (Wyoming) Star Tribune. It’s a mercifully short story, but I do want to take time to point out its generalizations, false claims, and weasel wording.
Along the rim of an ancient volcanic caldera, flanked by lodgepole pine and Engelmann spruce standing 7,733 feet above sea level, Yellowstone Lake sits at the heart of Yellowstone National Park. It is covered in thick ice, which is simultaneously consistent and — against a backdrop of warming temperatures — very surprising.
That “backdrop” is not reported by honest scientists, but is rather the product of climate models that have never been accurate or predictive, and dishonest scientists and public agencies that have falsified the temperature record. When I want an honest reporting of temperatures, I go to two sources: The University of Alabama at Huntsville, and balloon records. Both show only very modest warming. The UAH records are taken from satellites, which have been in use since 1979.
Lusha Tronstad, lead invertebrate zoologist with University of Wyoming’s Department of Zoology,
… is among the team of researchers who show that Yellowstone National Park’s eponymous lake is bucking a profound trend amongst lakes planetwide, a counterintuitive finding in light of the region’s rising temperature.
“Lakes planetwide”? Care to name one? Care to show by convincing evidence that there is anything going on anywhere that is not the result of mere climate variability?
I grew up in Montana, lived there for 59 years before we moved to Colorado. During the 1980s I remember a trip we took to the Pryor Mountains to look at some petroglyphs. Of all the trips we took, all the places we traveled to in Montana, I remember that day. Why? It rained! That was a rare occurrence in those times. Montana was in perpetual drought. But it passed. That is climate variability. Over any given 30-year stretch, there are going to be droughts and floods, and Montana has had its share of both.
Since 1950, annual temperatures have increased by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit across the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The warning [sic] is even more pronounced at the high elevation of Yellowstone Lake, where air temperatures lifted by 2.5 degrees between 1980-2018. With air temperature increase driving ice phenology changes at lakes elsewhere, it’s expected to see freezing patterns here similarly impacted, but that isn’t the case.
I have on hand temperature records from NOAA (which once upon a time kept reliable records) showing that in the period 1918 to 2018, Wyoming’s temperatures have increased by .142°F per decade, or about 1.4°F over the last century. That mild, beneficial warming has been going on since around 1860 or so, the end of the Little Ice Age. That is not uniform statewide, of course, but can be used as a reference. Those temperature records were downloaded by Bob Tisdale, who claims that his data from NOAA is data that NOAA itself should have given us. Instead, using sweat labor, Tisdale had to do it himself. (Keep in mind that these past few years, climate alarmists at NASA and NOAA have been monkeying with past and present temperatures, making the past appear colder, the present warmer. It’s just another way they lie. The 1930s are still the hottest decade on record.)
So 1.8°F over 74 years is 1.7 times higher than the official (pre-adjustment) NOAA records claim for Wyoming. 2.5°F over a 38-year period is a full 6.58 higher than official (pre-adjustment) NOAA records. Why, pray tell, is Yellowstone so much hotter than the rest of the state? It sits on a high plateau (the lake is at about 7,800 feet). I live at 7,900 feet here in Colorado, and it is much cooler up here than in the lower elevations. Denver proper is miserably hot in summer. Have air temperatures at Yellowstone Lake really risen by 2.5°F since 1980? I seriously doubt it. Someone is cooking the books, so to speak, to give us extremes like that.
Concludes Tronstad:
“Things aren’t changing right now. But at some point, they will start changing and we need to keep an eye on the ecosystem and keep collecting data to understand how these changes will affect the ecosystem and how our species of interest could be affected by these changes in the future,” said Tronstad, who has researched the lake for 20 years.
This statement is yet another in a very long list of climate predictions that won’t come to pass. One of my favorite John F. Kennedy quotes concerned his economic advisors who regularly left him holding the bag for bad predictions and advice. Said JFK, he had to live with them, while the economists “merely go on to new advice.”
Failed predictions are nothing new in the alarmist community, but they never suffer from them! Then Prince, now King Charles predicted in 2009 that we had but “100 months to act” before the damage caused by global warming became irreversible. That was about 8 years, or 2017. When it did not come to pass, Charlie merely moved the goalpost down the road, giving himself until 2030 to be right. That’s how lies are told, by placing fake consequences in the distant future.
I do know how it works for Tronstad and the team of scientists from the zoology department at the University of Wyoming. Climate science research depends on grants, most often from the federal government. In his famous farewell address to the nation, Dwight Eisenhower warned us of the prospect of the domination of science through federal funding and, conversely, the domination of science-based public policy by what he called a “scientific-technological elite”. People remember his “military-industrial complex” but few know he warned of the same outcome in science. It has long come to pass.
For Tronstad and company, who were most assuredly depending on some handout from someplace, most likely federal, to be paid, they know intuitively that if they do not come up with “correct’ conclusions regarding climate, their funding days are over, and nuthin’ but an honest living awaits. What they are doing is groupthink writ large.
I wonder how she [or Sontagg] would do waiting on tables?
So take my word on it, as I am self-funded: Yellowstone Lake is OK. There’s no appreciable warming in its future, and its ice levels will remain stable, as they have done throughout the period of fake warming. As with Arctic ice, which has been stable now for 30 years, it is much ado about nothing. People like Tronson (and Sonntag) live in a world where real punishment results from searching honestly for truth. I don’t envy them that way of living, on one hand, but on the other have zero respect for either of them.
Piece of Mindful 