Posted on 04/02/2013 6:44:34 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
There are few things sadder than the “climate denier.” He ignores the data and neglects the latest science. His rhetoric and policy proposals are dangerously disconnected from reality. He can’t recalibrate to take account of the latest evidence because, well, he’s a denier.
The new climate deniers are the liberals who, despite their obsession with climate change, have managed to miss the biggest story in climate science, which is that there hasn’t been any global warming for about a decade and a half.
“Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,” The Economist writes. “The world added roughly 100 billion tons of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, no more warming.
The Economist has been decidedly alarmist on global warming through the years, so it deserves credit for pausing to consider why the warming trend it expected to continue has mysteriously stalled out.
The deniers feel no such compunction. They speak as if it is still the late 1990s, when measurements of global temperature had been rising for two decades. In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama said that “we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science and act before it’s too late.” In a passage devoted to global warming, though, he didn’t mention the latest trend in global warming.
A denier feels the same righteous sense of certitude now, when warming has stopped, as he did a decade ago. Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson recently opined that “sensible people accept the fact of warming” — but apparently not the fact of no-warming. He scorned those “who manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has halted or even reversed course.” Does he include James Hansen, the famous NASA scientist, among these dastardly manipulators? No one this side of Al Gore has warned as persistently about global warming as Hansen. He nonetheless admits that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
None of this means that the Earth didn’t get hotter in the 20th century, or that carbon emissions don’t tend to create a warmer planet, or that warming won’t necessarily begin again. It does mean that we know less about the fantastically complex global climate system than global-warming alarmists have been willing to admit. The Economist notes the work of Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Britain. He has found that if global temperatures stay the same for a few more years, they will fall below the range of 20 climate models. In other words, the scientific “consensus” will have been proven wrong.
Why the stall in warming? According to The Economist, maybe we’ve overestimated the warming impact of clouds. Or maybe some clouds cool instead of warm the planet. Or maybe the oceans are absorbing heat from the atmosphere. Although the surface temperature of the oceans hasn’t been rising, perhaps the warming is happening deep down. James Hansen thinks new coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the stasis in temperatures.
Hansen writes that knowing more about the effect of aerosols on the climate “requires accurate knowledge of changes in aerosol amount, size distribution, absorption and vertical distribution on a global basis — as well as simultaneous data on changes in cloud properties to allow inference of the indirect aerosol forcing via induced cloud changes.” Is that all? He ruefully notes that the launch of a satellite with a sensor to measure all of this failed, with no follow-up mission planned.
Hey, but don’t worry. The science is all “settled.”
What is beginning to seem more likely is that the “sensitivity” of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated. If so, the deniers will be the last to admit it.
— Rich Lowry is the editor of National Review.
“Every man has a right to his own opinion, but no man has a right to be wrong in his facts.”
— Bernard Baruch; Jan, 1950
Ping for later.
Chicken little had no facts, but it never stopped its cries either. The only reason Global Warming ever got a microphone is Al Gore figured out how to get rich from giving it a voice.
Silly conservatives,
accepting leftist reasons for doing anything
at face value.
I learned this in middle school and I'm 61 years old. It seems science is always learning something "new" and "different". When I got married in the 70's, we were supposed to freeze to death within a decade.
The other thing I learned was socialists cause panic, then offer to fix things with taxes. When you pay the taxes, they run your life. The carbon tax is just an excuse to control people with their own money. The EPA, or endangered species act, and others are just a method of control and to raise unlimited amounts of funds to buy what they want. They have effectively destroyed public education by bribing us with 7% of our own money. Tell them to jam their 7% Federal subsidy and the insanity would slowly end. As the control migrated closer to the homeowner, we might not be sending kids home with pop tart guns. Maybe we could teach that the sun warms the earth again and keep your panties up and you won't need an abortion.
Or maybe it's that big yellow thing up there.
The world hasn’t warmed since 1933.
We have had a decline in all but two years in the period since.
Remember all the reports that “weather stations” were placed in areas that were warmer than the surrounding area in defiance or ignorance of established standards, which for decades gave “hot” reports?
Ever remember hearing were any of that bad data was thrown out and Globull Warming was adjusted accordingly? No.
This “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat” obviously is due to those weather stations being corrected and the “Warmers” dare not admit anything regarding them as that would erase even more of their bogus data.
We are seeing the disappearance of this Globull Warming horsehockey. It won’t be long before Flim-Flam algore will be running a new scam. Maybe it won’t be long before clogged arteries will do the world a favor.
The “solutions” are always the same.
If this does get widely rejected, which I don’t see happening in the near future,
they’ll find another problem and apply the exact same solutions.
The solutions do seem to end up filling some pockets.
What I never understood about the likes of algore, once you have more money than you can ever spend, what is the point of continuing the scams? Algore surely understands he will never ever be elected to anything again.
As someone so right named it “watermelon”, green on the outside, red in the middle. I do think a lot of “commy socialists” saw that they could not gain support by plain politics and had to latch on to a common human interest theme like “the environment”.
Like most scams, they eventually fade away because even the sheeple finally grow tired of the ever louder and more outrageous “sideshow” hawking.
When it’s hotter than usual somewhere, it’s global warming. When it’s colder than usual somewhere, it’s global warming. /s
Although I believe most of the public is 'warming' up to the fact that this man-cause Global Warming hysteria is a farce -- the Government(s) are still going to use it as an excuse to raise taxes or fees. Like I said, data be damned -- they want the money and they are going to take it.
Eventually even the government will be stopped, one way or the other.
And this article from a recent freerepublic post.
The Economist essay was linked. It's worth the read and wide dissemination. The Economist was always hawking global warming alarmism!
There is another possibility. The temperature stations that were intentionally sited in specifically warmed locations, biased what was a neutral or slightly rising temperature period (1990's to 2005) into an extremely rising one. And now that they are reading that temperatures have been recently steady (2005-present), they have actually been falling dramatically.
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