Sen. Mike Shower, climate-change denier, fails to separate fact from fiction

Sen. Mike Shower takes a graphic of misleading headlines that began with an online conspiracy group and uses it to confirm what he thinks he already knows about climate change.

“Pretty much a ‘fail’ on the coordinated, control the world wide climate change narrative front,” Shower writes on his official state Facebook page.

Mat-Su Mike, who thinks he has found another way to ridicule the notion of climate change, needs to work on separating fact from fiction, an essential ability for any legislator.

The lack of intellectual curiosity, laziness and his eagerness to jump to a conclusion that confirms his denial of climate change is the real “fail” on display here.

Anyone who bothers with a little investigation and looks into this can quickly see that the headlines, packaged this way, create a deceptive and false picture.

One of the first requirements to be a literate media consumer is to not judge a complicated topic based on a grab-bag of oversimplified headlines written in seconds over a period of years. These are all stories about comparing the temperature increase in a single region or country to increases in global averages.

Only a bonehead who did not read the research would say, “So the rest of the world is warming faster than the rest of the world?”

Which is why you don’t draw conclusions from headlines about the “coordinated, control the world wide climate change narrative front” that exists in Shower’s imagination.

Look into the research quoted in each of these articles and you’ll see Shower’s failure.

Finland is warming faster than the rest of the world: This piece is based on an article in Scientific American, which is drawn from this research.

"You would expect that the temperatures in the north would be rising faster than the global average," University of Eastern Finland professor Ari Laaksonen said. "But [researchers] expected a rate that was 50 percent faster; Finland's temperature is rising by almost 100 percent."

“A team of researchers from the University of Eastern Finland and the Finnish Meteorological Society found that over the past 166 years, the country's average monthly temperatures have increased by more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), a 0.14 C change per decade.

“For the planet as a whole, the average temperature had increased by 0.8 C over the same period.”

Canada warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, report says: “Canada's Arctic has seen the deepest impact and will continue to warm at more than double the global rate,” this 2019 BBC story says.

The story is based on this report from the Canadian government about climate change. “The response of the climate system to increasing greenhouse gases varies from one region to another. As a result, the rates of warming around the world are not the same. These variations are a result of climate processes and feedbacks that depend on local conditions. For example, in Canada, loss of snow and sea ice is reducing the reflectivity of the surface, which is increasing the absorption of solar radiation. This causes larger surface warming than in more southerly regions. Because of this and other mechanisms, Canada is warming faster than the world as a whole — at more than twice the global rate — and the Canadian Arctic is warming even faster — at about three times the global rate.”

Study: New England is Warming Up Faster Than the Rest of the World: “A new study led by environmental sustainability professor Stephen Young of Salem State University finds average temperatures in the region increased 3.29 degrees between 1900 and 2020. The rest of the planet warmed 2 degrees over that same time period,” CBS News reported in 2021.

“This research clearly shows that New England is warming faster than the world average temperature change, with every season experiencing a warming trend,” Young wrote in his research paper.

Israel warming up almost twice as fast as rest of the world, data shows: This 2021 news story by ynetnews is based on data from the Israel Meteorological Service, showing significant warming over the last three decades.

China’s heating up twice as fast as the rest of the world: This news story from Quartz is based on remarks from a Chinese official in 2015 that the “warming rate is almost twice that of the world” average.

Australia Is Heating Up Faster Than The Rest Of The World: This 2015 story in Popular Science is based on research from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization and the Bureau of Meteorology about Australia warming faster than the world average.

“The higher warming rate is attributed in part to Australia’s location near the South Pole. Polar areas experience faster warming compared to areas near the equator, mainly because of a loss of sea ice,” the magazine said.

South Pole warming three times faster than rest of Earth: study This 2020 report on the website phys.org draws from a research report about temperatures over the past three decades. “Over the last three decades, the South Pole has experienced a record-high statistically significant warming of 0.61 ± 0.34 °C per decade, more than three times the global average,” the researchers said.

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