Clawing Back Climate Change Forecasts; The Political Page, T+56 -- March 16, 2017

Dems: 31% do not know who Senator Charles Schumer is. Even fewer know who this person is:

Weather service clawing back their forecast decisions regarding winter storm Stella.

Climate-changers begin clawing back their forecasts. I can't make this stuff up. Over at The Boston Globe: why are climate-change models so flawed? Because climate science is so incomplete. I can't make this stuff up. I thought the science was closed. Now, in Pocahontas' hometown paper the headline is that the science is so incomplete, not just incomplete, but SO incomplete:

"Do you believe,” CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new director, in an interview last Thursday, “that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?”

Replied Pruitt: “No. I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no — I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”

It was an accurate and judicious answer, so naturally it sent climate alarmists into paroxysms of condemnation.

The Washington Post slammed Pruitt as a “denier” driven by “unreason.” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii called Pruitt’s views “extreme” and “irresponsible” — proof of his unfitness to head the EPA. Gina McCarthy, who ran the agency under President Obama, bewailed the danger global warming poses “to all of us who call Earth home,” and said she couldn’t “imagine what additional information [Pruitt] might want from scientists” in order to understand that.

And then this, from The Boston Globe, not from the Trump appointee:

Yet for all the hyperventilating, Pruitt’s answer to the question he was asked — whether carbon dioxide is the climate’s “primary control knob” — was entirely sound.

“We don’t know that yet,” he said. We don’t. CO2 is certainly a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, but hardly the primary one: Water vapor accounts for about 95 percent of greenhouse gases.

By contrast, carbon dioxide is only a trace component in the atmosphere: about 400 ppm (parts per million), or 0.04 percent.

Moreover, its warming impact decreases sharply after the first 20 or 30 ppm. Adding more CO2 molecules to the atmosphere is like painting over a red wall with white paint — the first coat does most of the work of concealing the red. A second coat of paint has much less of an effect, while adding a third or fourth coat has almost no impact at all.