The past few months have not been good to the still-infant discipline of
climate change alarmism
Mike McNally
May 14, 2008
http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/global-warming-mostly-hot-air/
QUOTE: "This alliance includes politicians who see climate change as a
new way of persuading citizens to give them more power; cor****ations who
play on our concern and guilt to sell us anything from eco-friendly
wa****ng powder to flex-fuel SUVs; scientists keen to get their hands on
a share of the $5 billion handed out by governments and NGOs each year
for climate change research; and the legions of bureaucrats employed to
draw up regulations and run the globe-trotting climate conference
circus."
QUOTE: "Maybe the current cooling will continue, maybe it won't - unlike
the alarmists, skeptics don't claim to be able to see 100 years into the
future."
As more data come in, the dire predictions of Al Gore and company are
being exposed as unfounded alarmism. Is the game close to being up for
eco-mongers and their media enablers?
The past few months have not been good to the still-infant discipline of
climate change alarmism - that strange amalgam of pseudo-science,
crystal ball gazing, and mass hysteria that was formerly known as global
warming alarmism until it became apparent a few years back that the
globe had in fact stopped warming, and the alarmists decided that the
term "climate change" was a more effective way of describing what the
rest of us call "weather."
For around a decade now - since around the time, coincidentally, that
the warming stopped - the alarmists have had things pretty much their
own way, dominating the debate with ever more dramatic predictions of
impending doom as man-made CO2 emissions heat up the planet, and
managing for the best part to keep a lid on dissent, thanks to an
unlikely, and decidedly unholy, alliance of organizations and
individuals with a vested interest in upping the fear factor.
This alliance includes politicians who see climate change as a new way
of persuading citizens to give them more power; cor****ations who play on
our concern and guilt to sell us anything from eco-friendly wa****ng
powder to flex-fuel SUVs; scientists keen to get their hands on a share
of the $5 billion handed out by governments and NGOs each year for
climate change research; and the legions of bureaucrats employed to draw
up regulations and run the globe-trotting climate conference circus.
Then there's the lavishly funded environmental lobby; socialists who see
climate change as their last, best hope of undermining free-market
democracies and cutting the United States down to size; and a media
which understands that "World Ends Tomorrow" stories get more viewers
than "Everything Likely to Be Just Fine" stories, and whose members tend
to side with the leftist, anti-American crowd.
Given such an array of talents and interests it's a wonder any of us are
still allowed to drive a car, fly in a plane, or light a barbecue. And
indeed the alarmist movement has come worryingly close to achieving
critical mass. Its apotheosis probably came around a couple of years
ago, when Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth was doing the rounds, and you
couldn't open a magazine or turn on the TV without seeing photos of
polar bears "stranded" on ice flows, CG renderings of famous landmarks
under 30 feet of water, or interviews in which Al's celebrity
eco-buddies promised to take a long, hard look at their Learjet usage.
Not that there weren't dissenting voices. A sizable minority of
scientists has for years been disputing the basic science behind climate
change alarmism (you can find a list of 400 leading "skeptics" here),
arguing that the relatively small amount of warming (less than a degree
Celsius) observed in the 20th century was well within the natural range
of variation in the Earth's temperature, and questioning the assumption
that human activity was to blame. Climate is always changing, they
pointed out, and there's no such thing as an "ideal" temperature for the
planet.
They also noted that other planets in our solar system had been
experiencing similar warming, notably Mars - despite the fact that,
while NASA has succeeded in sending a couple of robot probes to the red
planet, they have yet to land an SUV there. Back on Earth, they
presented evidence that temperature drove CO2 emissions, and not the
other way round. They suggested that natural factors, such as solar
activity or the oceans, might play a role in regulating the climate, and
that a couple of degrees of warming would anyway have net benefits for
most countries.
And even if the warming was man-made, the skeptics argued, the measures
the alarmists claimed were necessary to stop the warming would have
greater economic and social costs than those that would be incurred by
simply adapting to changes in climate - a particularly sensible course
of action in the event that the warming did turn out to be natural -
while waiting for market forces to make low-carbon technologies viable.
Most significantly, the skeptics pointed out that the increase in global
temperatures appeared to have stopped around 1998, despite the fact that
CO2 output had continued rising.
But despite persuasive evidence that the Earth's climate was not
following the alarmist script, and that proposals to "combat" the
hypothetical problems were ill thought out to say the least, the
skeptics have struggled to make their voices heard outside the skeptic
blogs, websites, and think tanks. They've had their reputations
rubbished, funding withheld, and been likened to Holocaust deniers. A
writer for an environmentalist website famously suggested that "we
should have war crimes trials for these bastards - some sort of climate
Nuremberg."
A recent survey exposed the extent of bias among news programs on the
three main U.S. networks: just one-fifth of stories about climate change
featured opinions that dissented from the alarmist orthodoxy. However,
CNN has probably outdone them all in terms of melodramatic re****ting -
hardly surprising given that founder Ted Turner thinks global warming
will have turned those of us who aren't lucky enough to be dead into
cannibals within 40 years. Meanwhile, in the UK the BBC has effectively
seconded dozens of its journalists to the alarmist PR machine,
unquestioningly re****ting new findings that sup****t the alarmist
narrative, while largely ignoring research that questions the
"consensus," other than to debunk it. Reputable science journals haven't
been much kinder to the skeptics, who often find it difficult to get
research published as editors take an increasingly pro-alarmist stance.
But the skeptics have refused to be silenced, and in the past year or so
there have been signs the momentum is beginning to ****ft away from the
alarmists and towards the realm of common sense. Most significantly, it's
becoming abundantly clear that the Earth is not warming in the way the
alarmists have claimed it should be. In February of this year a raft of
data from the leading monitoring centers showed that average global
temperatures had fallen by around 0.65º C, effectively canceling out the
recent 30-year warming trend and leaving the Earth's temperature close
to what the alarmists would consider "normal." And a few weeks later the
World Meteorological Association re****ted that global temperatures would
fall again this year.
Two years of cooling do not a new ice age make, but they do raise
serious doubts about the predictions made by the alarmists, and
undermine the fundamental tenet of climate change theory: that global
temperatures will continue to increase in line with CO2 emissions.
Predictably, the alarmists have simply discounted the cooling, claiming
that the long-term temperature trend is still upwards, and explaining
away the fall by pointing to the cooling effects of the La Nina weather
system - despite refusing to credit the warming El Nino system with
contributing to 1998 being the warmest year since records began.
The alarmists also said we'd see an increase in hurricanes and other
storms as the planet warmed, but this hasn't proved to be the case, and
several studies have shown no link between global temperatures and
hurricane activity. Similarly, there has been no significant rise in sea
levels, despite the alarmists' predictions to the contrary. So much for
the science, which, contrary to the alarmist mantra, is far from
settled.
Another fact that's become clear is that there's next to no agreement
between those national governments and NGOs that have signed up to
climate change alarmism about what to do to reduce CO2 emissions. The
latest talks on how to replace the failed Kyoto Protocol when it expires
in 2012 broke up just last week, with negotiators agreeing on nothing
except the need to have more meetings.
For all their fine words, politicians are understandably reluctant to
sign up to policies that will drive jobs overseas, further inflate
already high energy prices, and generally wreck their countries'
economies. Australia's eco-friendly Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose
election last year was hailed as a major victory by the alarmists,
started backtracking on his commitments as soon as someone showed him
the projected bill. Europe, however, is pressing ahead with emissions
trading, or "cap and trade" schemes, despite warnings that they will
result in vast windfall profits for energy companies and higher prices
for consumers, while doing little to curb emissions.
In the U.S., President Bush's latest plan for tackling climate change,
while criticized by some conservatives, is a model of responsibility in
comparison to polices being proposed elsewhere, combining energy
efficiency regulations with greater investment in nuclear power, "clean
coal," and new energy technologies. And it's telling that both Hillary
Clinton and Barack Obama, who have been critical of the current
administration's lack of action on climate change, have had little to
say on the subject as they campaign in coal-producing Pennsylvania,
other than to talk about creating five million "clean" and "high-tech"
energy jobs. It may come as news to Senators Clinton and Obama, but if
America embraces renewable energy there won't be much call for armies of
laborers to toil amid the acres of wind turbines and solar panels.
There's also no prospect of agreement on who should pay for policies
designed to reduce global CO2 emissions. China - which has overtaken the
U.S. as the world's leading emitter - along with India and leading
African nations, argue that they shouldn't have to pay for measures to
mitigate environmental problems caused by the developed nations. The
developed nations, in turn, argue that they shouldn't be penalized just
because free-market policies enabled their economies to grow more
rapidly than those of countries that persevered with various forms of
socialism.
Yet another problem is the rush to biofuels, which was seen as a "magic
bullet" by politicians for reducing CO2 emissions and achieving energy
independence - not least in the U.S. - but is rapidly turning into a
disaster worthy of an Al Gore movie all of its own. Dozens of studies
have shown that the production of most biofuels causes more harm to the
environment than the fuels themselves save, while the turning over of
agricultural land from food production to growing crops for fuel is
driving up food prices around the world.
Against the backdrop of these scientific and political developments, the
public is becoming increasingly mistrustful of alarmist rhetoric. Al
Gore's massively hyped Live Earth event last summer was a flop of
suitably global pro****tions - the only headlines it generated were for
the air miles racked up by Gore's troupe of platitude-spewing stars, the
negligible viewing figures, and the mountains of rubbish left behind at
the concert venues. More bad news for Gore followed when a British judge
ruled that An Inconvenient Truth contained nine factual errors - the
court case focused attention on Gore's mendacity even as he was
collecting his richly undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.
Gore is back peddling his patented brand of misinformation and
fear-mongering with a $300 million advertising campaign - an awful lot
of money, given that he's been telling us for years that "the debate is
over." But the old magic seems to have gone, and these days he looks
like nothing so much as the little boy who cried wolf. Short of
appearing on stage with Elvis, and announcing that far from being dead
the King has, in fact, been in self-imposed exile on a Pacific atoll
studying the threat of rising sea levels, Al has played all his cards. A
recent ABC News/Wa****ngton Post poll found that precisely zero per cent
of Americans - yes, zero, that's not a typo - rated global warming as
the most im****tant issue in the upcoming presidential election.
The alarmists are in no mood to give up. Earlier this month the BBC
altered its re****t on those falling global temperatures after a green
activist emailed the re****ter who wrote the story, threatening to launch
a campaign to discredit him. But far from this being a victory for the
climate change camp, it backfired spectacularly - the story was picked
up by bloggers and news media around the world, ****ning a light on the
increasingly nasty tactics used by the lunatic fringe of the alarmist
movement, and further damaging the BBC's already battered reputation as
an impartial news source.
Around the world people are beginning to see the disconnect between what
politicians, environmentalists, and the media tell them, and what they
see with their own eyes. Many countries have experienced record cold
temperatures and snowfall over the past few months, and a person who's
just dug their car out of the snow doesn't appreciate being told that
their power bills are going up because of regulations to combat "global
warming." They're not going to stand for job losses, higher living
costs, and other hard****ps in the cause of shaving a hypothetical degree
or two of warming a hundred years from now.
And as the disquiet grows even elements of the previously supine media
may begin to change their tune. While some journalists are ideologically
invested in attacking the Bush administration and promoting the role of
the UN, or genuinely think they're saving the planet, others are just
chasing the next big story, and if the story becomes that politicians
and cor****ations have been misleading and exploiting the public, they're
likely to jump off one bandwagon and on to another one heading in the
opposite direction.
Maybe the current cooling will continue, maybe it won't - unlike the
alarmists, skeptics don't claim to be able to see 100 years into the
future. If the planet does continue to warm slightly, the billions that
the alarmists want to spend in a futile bid to prevent it would be
better spent tackling the real problems facing the world right now, as
Bjorn Lomborg has so eloquently argued. (Imagine how many vaccination
and water treatment programs Gore's $300 million vanity fund would pay
for in Africa.) And if the cooling continues, our descendants could find
themselves heading for another ice age - and, ironically, desperately
searching for ways to warm the planet.
Too many interested parties have too much invested in climate change
alarmism to admit that the game is up just yet, but sooner or later
their position is going to become untenable. And when it does, while
acknowledging that many people embraced climate change alarmism for
genuine reasons, we'll have to decide what to do with those who knew or
suspected their claims had no substance, but pressed on out of a desire
to get rich or impose their ideologies on others.
Nuremberg-style trials anyone?
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
: "They don't tell you, that, in their computer models, it's assumed
that CO2 drives global warming. In other words, you assume the result
and say the computer model proves we were right. It's garbage in,
garbage out. If you don't program the computers to cause temperatures to
rise with CO2, then you have nothing." Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor
Emeritus Geology, Western Wa****ngton University
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