Count Floyd's Monster Chiller Climate Change Theater

Count Floyd was one of my favorite characters on SCTV, the Canadian show that lampooned local TV. He hosted Monster Chiller Horror Theater, a late-night show that was supposed to show horror movies, but the fictional TV station showed cheap films that were not of that genre. After the clip of the film was shown, the show usually flipped back to a bewildered Count Floyd, who would say, “That was some scary stuff,” even though the movie in the skit wasn’t.

When the climate change cult rolls out another prediction that won’t come anywhere near to being true, I think of Count Floyd.

The latest SSS — some scary stuff — is the gulfstream stopping. The water in the oceans will just stop moving around because YOU bought an SUV.

On Tuesday, Nature.com claimed, “The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a major tipping element in the climate system and a future collapse would have severe impacts on the climate in the North Atlantic region. In recent years weakening in circulation has been reported, but assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), based on the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) model simulations suggest that a full collapse is unlikely within the 21st century. Tipping to an undesired state in the climate is, however, a growing concern with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Predictions based on observations rely on detecting early-warning signals, primarily an increase in variance (loss of resilience) and increased autocorrelation (critical slowing down), which have recently been reported for the AMOC. Here we provide statistical significance and data-driven estimators for the time of tipping. We estimate a collapse of the AMOC to occur around mid-century under the current scenario of future emissions.”

We know this is not going to happen because not one previous prediction of climate catastrophe has happened since communists in academia and their unwitting and witless parrots in the press began making and promoting these wild claims back in the 1960s.

Kevin Downey Jr. has a pretty good rundown on these wolves who cry Boy, Will It Be Bad.

And of course the media just bleated what it was told. He included a clip and said, “Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon. An episode of Diff’rent Strokes showed a character whose hair turned green because of the acid falling from the clouds.”

The truth is acid rain is normal. The Ph level of rainwater is 5.6 on a scale of 0 to 14. The lower the number, the more acidic the liquid. Bananas are 5.0 to 5.3. Acid rain is 4.0. Orange juice is 3.0. I am pretty sure I can survive a rain shower of orange juice, but if it starts raining men, I am going to need a bigger umbrella.

I also liked this from Downey: “In 1988, The New York Times assured us the planet had spent the decade getting warmer. The weather trauma had been ongoing for eight years, and we hadn’t noticed. The Times warned us ice caps would melt. Polar bears would drown and also die of sunburn, and Earth would flood Noah-style.”

Polar bears are pretty darned good swimmers and their species has also survived a few meltings of the icecaps before. They also have quintupled in number over the past 60 years after we banned sport hunting of the big guys.

Half-truths and emotionalism are the main ingredients of a Count Floyd-level climate change scare.

The press, of course, went to town with this fairy tale about the Earth standing still and England freezing because the gulfstream is broken. The New York Times screeched, “Warming Could Push the Atlantic Past a ‘Tipping Point’ This Century.

“The system of ocean currents that regulates the climate for a swath of the planet could collapse sooner than expected, a new analysis found.”

But the screeds failed to note that the two Dutch scientists behind this latest forecast of doom admit there is not much science behind their prediction.

The Nature.com story said, “The AMOC has only been monitored continuously since 2004 through combined measurements from moored instruments, induced electrical currents in submarine cables and satellite surface measurements. Over the period 2004–2012, a decline in the AMOC has been observed, but longer records are necessary to assess the significance. For that, careful fingerprinting techniques have been applied to longer records of sea surface temperature (SST), which, backed by a survey of a large ensemble of climate model simulations, have found the SST in the Subpolar gyre (SG) region of the North Atlantic to contain an optimal fingerprint of the strength of the AMOC.”

An eight-year period of cooling — how much of a decline was not disclosed — is hardly evidence. Likely it is cyclical. No responsible journalist would run with such a story but there are no responsible journalists left in America.

And so the Jeff Bezos Washington Post told its readers, “The Atlantic Ocean’s sensitive circulation system has become slower and less resilient, according to a new analysis of 150 years of temperature data — raising the possibility that this crucial element of the climate system could collapse within the next few decades.”

150 years? The scientists said they can only go back to 2004. Unless I overslept this morning, the year is not 2154.

MIT Technology Review — increasingly a run-of-the-mill lefty publication — ran an alarmist piece on the gulfstream in December 2021. It was an anecdotal-filled report until Paragraphs 16 and 17.

They said, “Despite the stakes, scientists have only a coarse comprehension of the currents’ behavior, the balance of the forces that drive them, or their susceptibility to shifting climate conditions. That’s why Moat and others are so keen to observe the Atlantic circulation.

“But much of what has been discovered so far is that the Atlantic circulation is more variable, perplexing, and perhaps unpredictable than previously understood.”

So the piece was purely speculation — spitballing — about what might be occurring.

Spitballing is what these doomsayers do best.

I hate to break the news to them but there is this big yellow thing in the sky that determines the Earth’s temperatures. Its heat is not constant. When the number of sunspots rise, the Earth gets hot. When the sunspots drop, it gets cold.

There also is this white thing in the sky, usually in the night, that causes the tides to rise and fall. I am pretty sure that as long as the Sun and the Moon and the rain are there, we will be all right.

On SCTV, Count Floyd was a second gig for Floyd Robertson, co-anchor of SCTV News.

In the 21st century, network co-anchors are played by actual clowns, not fake vampires.