Beck 'historian' David Barton: Global warming has been over for 16 years

A so-called "historian," who conservative radio host Glenn Beck has hired to teach at his online university, recently announced that global warming had not occurred for the last 16 years.

During a discussion with Jenni White of Restore Oklahoma Public Education, self-proclaimed "expert in historical and constitutional issues" David Barton explained that the Common Core initiative to create nationwide testing standards was dangerous because there would be a "heavy indoctrination" of students.

"For example, in the math area, they tell you what math things to teach, but they only give you a single example," he explained. "And the math you have to calculate deals with global warming."

"We haven't had global warming in 16 years," Barton insisted. "So, why are we indoctrinating kids with the view of anthropogenic global warming? Now, global warming occurs, we haven't had it in 16 years, but anthropogenic? No, that hasn't been proved at all. Not by a long shot."

"Anthropogenic means man-caused global warming. I mean, we've got cycles. You bet. That's why we have averages. That's why in Texas, we go from summers of 70 degrees to summers of 120 degrees. I mean, it's averages."

According to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) Climate.gov website, "[t]emperatures measured on land and at sea for more than a century show that Earth's globally averaged surface temperature is experiencing a long-term warming trend."

"Though warming has not been uniform across the planet, the upward trend in the globally averaged temperature shows that more areas are warming than cooling," Climate.gov's LuAnn Dahlman wrote. "From 1900 through 2009 the globally averaged surface temperature rose by approximately 0.7° C (1.3°F)."

"The rate of temperature increase has risen as well. For the last 50 years, global temperature rose at an average rate of about 0.13°C (around one-quarter degree Fahrenheit) per decade-almost twice as fast as the 0.07°C per decade increase observed over the previous half-century. In the next 20 years, scientists project that global average temperature will rise by around 0.2°C (about one-third of a degree Fahrenheit) per decade."

Watch this video from Restore Oklahoma Public Education, uploaded on Aug. 13, 2013.

(h/t: Right Wing Watch)