ALL CLEVER people -- including the clever people who write editorials for the Houston Chronicle -- believe these four propositions with near-biblical certainty:
(1) the world is getting warmer;
(2) it's all our fault;
(3) the only possible salvation is to give clever people our money and do whatever they say; and
(4) Propositions (1), (2), or (3) may never be debated.
Meanwhile, less clever people keep asking questions that the clever people can't, or won't, answer.
Good recent additions to the literature, first on Proposition (1): "The world is getting warmer."
Allen Brooks, "Climate Change Debate Highlighted by Business Summit," Musings From the Oil Patch, May 26, 2009:
[Lord Monckton] showed how the UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS) data had been altered to help build the case for global warming, which was supposedly accelerating and necessitated immediate and drastic remedial action. . . .
. . . . Lord Monckton showed . . . that we have experienced seven years of global cooling at a rate of [2 degrees C] per century rate . . . . The data is in direct contradiction of the IPCC forecast for warming at a 5.3 degree C rate per century.
Roy Spencer, "Latest Global Temperatures," drroyspencer.com:
A reliable graph of global temperatures (which is to say, a graph not prepared by NASA's Dr. James Hanson).
Roy Spencer, "A Layman's Explanation of Why Global Warming Predictions by Climate Models Are Wrong," drroyspencer.com, May 29, 2009 (scroll down):
So, I'm going to make yet another attempt at explaning why the computerized climate models tracked by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- all 23 of them -- predict too much warming for our future.
"So far, June's chill is one for the records," wgntv.com, June 12, 2009:
So far, June is running 12 degrees cooler than last year . . . . The average temperature at O'Hare . . . has been only 59.5 degrees: nearly 7 degrees below normal and the coldest since records there began 50 years ago.
Christopher Booker, "Crops under stress as temperatures fall," telegraph.co.uk, June 13, 2009:
After a fearsomely cold winter, June brough heavy snowfall across large parts of western Canada and the northern states of the American Midwest. In Manitoba last week it was -4 degrees C. North Dakota had its first June snow for 60 years.
There was midsommer snow not just in Norway and the Cairngorms, but even in Saudi Arabia.
Proposition (2) -- "It's all our fault" -- also comes in for drubbing.
Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, "The Green Bubble," New Republic, May 20, 2009:
And then, almost as quickly as it had inflated, the green bubble burst. Between January 2008 and January 2009, the percentage of Americans who told the Pew Research Center . . . that the environment was a "top priority" dropped from 56 percent to 41 percent. While surveys have long showed that enthusiasm for all things green is greatest among well-educated liberals, the new polling results were sobering. For the first time in a quarter century, more Americans told Gallup in March that they would prioritize economic growth "even if the environment suffers to some extent" than said they would prioritize environmental protection "even at the risk of curbing economic growth." Soon thereafter, Shell announced it would halt its investments in solar and wind power.
George F. Will, "Green With Guilt," Washington Post, June 4, 2009:
Helen shops at the One Earth store, where community shaming enforces social responsibility: "Attention One Earth shoppers, the driver of the SUV is in aisle four. He's wearing the baseball cap."
The New York Times television critic disapproves. . . .
. . . . [W]hen a Good child apologizes for driving too much, and the parent responds, "It's OK . . . what's important is that you feel guilty about it," the program touches upon an important phenomenon: ecology as psychology.
Proposition 3: "Give us your money and do as we say":
Jim Manzi, "Dunce Cap-and-Trade," nationalreview.com, June 8, 2009:
Climatologist Chip Knappenberger has applied standard climate models to project that, under the scenario for global economic and population growth [used in this article], Waxman-Markey's emissions reductions would have the net effect of lowering global temperatures by about 0.1 degrees C by 2100.
"Winners and Losers in the Waxman-Markey Stealth Tax," Institute for Energy Research [Houston's premier energy think-tank], May 22, 2009:
Even amng those economists who want the government to "do something" about global warming, most prefer an explicit carbon tax to the stealth tax of "cap and trade" under discussion in the Waxman-Markey bill. Many economists . . . have explained the technical reasons that a stealth tax . . . would be more damaging to the economy than a transparent carbon tax. [B]eyond these technical issues[, however,] cap and trade is also much more susceptible to simple corruption. Precisely because it is so confusing . . . the stealth tax . . . allows politicians to transfer wealth from consumers and hand it over to special interests in much disguised fasion.
Finally, Proposition (4): "Never, never, never debate Propositions 1, 2, or 3."
Editorial, "'Worse Than Fiction,'" Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2009:
Global warming alarmists are fond of invoking the authority of experts against the skepticism of supposedly amateur detractors -- a.k.a., "deniers." So when one of those experts says that a recent report [by former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan] is "worse than fiction, it is a lie," the alarmists should, well, be alarmed.
* * *
Sooner or later a mainstream publication with a higher regard for truth than for convenience will kick the traces and signal the beginning of the end for a mass delusion the likes of which the world has not seen since all clever people invested in tulips.
UPDATE: Thanks for the link from PubliusTX.
Comments