I don't remember when I noticed the term "global warming" had been replaced with "climate change," but it was some time after a number of prominent scientists had declared their skepticism of man-made global warming.
There are still liberals claiming that Barack Obama is the second coming of Christ because he's appointing "real scientists"(i.e., global warming believers) to his cabinet. These fools continue to argue that skepticism that humans have that much to do with any particular warming trend across the globe constitutes a blind allegiance to religion or something. I use the word "fools" pointedly, because stories like this one point that the trend is in favor of skeptics, not against them.
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
It hasn't simply been "greed" that caused the Bush administration to reject the draconian measures Kyoto and other measures would place on American business, although the effects would be devastating to our GDP. As skyrocketing gasoline prices showed last summer, high prices and caps hurt the poor far worse than "the rich" they are aimed at, and it seems a little absurd that the same people constantly railing about equality and justice see absolutely nothing wrong with crushing the poor in order to punish "the rich."
More to the point, pulling the emergency brake on our economy isn't (or wouldn't) necessarily have stopped global warming. That's one reason so many scientists didn't jump on the Inconvenient Truth bandwagon. There are plenty of reasons to explain the warming of the planet (normal cyclical changes comes to mind), but American use of CO2 isn't necessarily one of them.
BTW, this is not to say that searching for alternatives to gasoline is a bad thing. I support the interest in other technologies. But the liberal whingeing that George Bush is personally responsible for every tornado, hurricane, tsunami, and mudslide of the last eight years is not only delusional but gives us one more reason to ignore them and leave them to their delusions while the rest of us move in more logical and normal directions in terms of energy use.
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