Bad news comes in clumps for the Church of Global Warming these days. The latest news involves two sad-trombone busts for the movement’s latest efforts to grab headlines, plus a new study that might do fatal damage to the core tenet of the Church: the planet-baking power of Demon Carbon.
“Record high temperatures in Antarctica!” screamed cult members earlier this week. Um, no, not really. The high temperatures were recorded outside the Antarctic region, and temperature data from that forlorn continent is too sparse to make any scientifically valid conclusions about its temperature record. Even if a record high temperature actually was recorded in Antarctica on a particular day, it wouldn’t erase the reality of ice steadily expanding in the region over the past 25 years, exactly the way absolutely none of the vaunted global-warming models predicted.
This sad (and sadly successful) effort to capture headlines is characteristic of the climate-change fraud. Sometimes weather proves climate change, and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes you can’t draw conclusions from a very small set of data, and sometimes you can.
The only logical consistency is that data helpful to the political agenda of climate change is highlighted, while inconvenient data is ignored, or even replaced by “projections” and “models” more useful to the global warming movement. Never mind what the actual evidence says, look at this amazing doomsday computer model I just cooked up!
Such was the case with the second recent busted climate scare, a paper supposedly demonstrating that global warming is causing the Gulf Stream to weaken. This was based entirely on the kind of junk-science “projection” that got the global-warming ball rolling in a big way. Actual measurements of the real-world Gulf Stream display no such weakening, just natural variations. Darn it! That doomsday model looked good enough to shake another billion dollars out of the taxpayers!
This is all reminiscent of a classic Warner Brothers cartoon, in which blowhard rooster Foghorn Leghorn is playing hide-and-go-seek with his egghead nephew. Foghorn hides behind a tree, while the brainy chicken covers the side of a barn with complex equations conclusively proving that his uncle is hiding in a nearby box. When Foghorn jumps out from behind the tree and razzes the kid for getting it wrong, the nephew confidently opens the box… and presto, Foghorn is in there, after all, because those brilliant equations couldn’t possibly be mistaken!
To apply this as a metaphor for politicized science, global warming is Foghorn Leghorn, and the rest of us are all getting plucked.
But maybe not for much longer. The Church of Global Warming will surely hang on long after the “global warming pause” hits its third or fourth decade, because it’s far too useful to greedy politicians. Politics does routinely warp reality to put roosters inside bureaucratically-ordained boxes, at fantastic expense. However, a new study from the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Germany might deliver a “death blow to global warming hysteria,” in the assessment of Patrick J. Michaels and Paul Knappenberger at the Cato Institute.
That’s because the study challenges the degree to which human carbon emissions affect the climate ‚Äì the essential element of climate mythology, the Original Sin for which human industry can never be punished enough, although politicians are eager to try. In essence, if the new study holds up under review, the doomsday climate-change models are overestimating human impact by north of 100 percent. That would explain why there’s never yet been a rooster in the global-warming box, no matter how many times they adjust their equations.
“This basically eliminates the possibly of catastrophic climate change ‚Äì that is, climate change that proceeds at a rate that exceeds our ability to keep up,” write Michaels and Knappenberger. “Such a result will also necessarily drive down estimates of social cost of carbon thereby undermining a key argument use by federal agencies to support increasingly burdensome regulations which seek to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
The climate cult’s response is predictable. First, they’ll try to destroy the authors of the study and everyone who cites it, perhaps by having a pet Democrat in Congress scrutinize their lunch receipts for the faintest hint of evil Big Oil money. Then, they’ll say we should still pay billions in tithe to the Church of Global Warming as “insurance” ‚Äì sure, the models have all been wrong, and their core assumptions are deeply flawed, but can we really afford to take the chance that they might suddenly become accurate someday?
The Cato article references polling data showing the American voter’s concerns about climate change declining, and it never really got all that high, even after decades of relentless media hysteria and political posturing. That’s no surprise, since even the more casual consumers of environmental news can see how the apocalyptic projections they were fed as kids in the Eighties never came to pass. They’re also generally aware that a great deal of effort has been put into battling climate change ‚Äì the cult is its own worst enemy in that regard, because its pervasive influence in media and politics makes it impossible to pretend its issues have been completely ignored.
The public’s conclusion that “climate change” is under control is natural, which is why the cult has lately been so frantic in claiming that everything from droughts to typhoons is a sign of climate-change wrath. Monsters are needed, because the people are no longer afraid. Expect the distinction between “climate” and “weather” to erode further, on a highly selective basis, as the movement’s hunger for nourishing headlines grows more acute.
