Whither Global Warming ?

You knew the global warming hysteria was just that ... politically motivated hysteria ... didn't you ?



When the Lack of Sh*t Hits the Fan [Mark Steyn]

Jonah, re your item on Mark Hertsgaard, the "climate correspondent" of The Nation, and the sad tale of his recurring "Oh, sh*t" moments: In a sense, his job depends on an endless procession of OSMs. The "climate correspondent" is by definition the OSM correspondent: that's the basis on which newspapers and magazines created the position. A "climate correspondent" without OSMs is like a ballet critic in a town with no ballet company.

That's why the piece by Paul Hudson, the BBC's Climate Correspondent, is so striking:

What Happened To Global Warming?

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

This rang a vague bell with me. Back in July, responding to Thomas Friedman's call for a million eco-youths to stage a carbon march on Washington, I wrote:

If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None.

Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you’re stuck living in.

Obviously, it sounds better coming from a bigshot BBC climate wallah than from a wackjob denialist like me — although, reading between the lines of this follow-up, evidently poor Mr. Hudson is getting barraged from ecopalyptic types denouncing his apostasy. Yet, as he says, none of the models saw it coming. Including presumably all those German experts Mark Hertsgaard is hot for.

The choice for the "climate change" industry is either to do like the BBC man, step back and take a cool look at things; or, like The Nation's excitable chap, dash ever more frantically from one "Oh, sh*t" moment to the next. Mr. Hertsgaard already seems only one or two Belgian Government advisory-panel briefing papers away from running through the streets pounding on your hood and demanding you rip out your internal combustion engine right now. But, putting him to one side, judging from these latest exercises in "environmentally responsible" child abuse and parental abuse, the OSMers have decided to turn up the heat.

I don't think that, as they would say, it's sustainable. In fact, in the real battle of our times — against ever more regulation, taxation, and big government — the obvious hysteria of the climate crowd may prove one of our best friends.



Good Luck with That [Jonah Goldberg]

From Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation's climate correspondent:

They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, sh*t" moment—an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, groundbreaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, sh*t" moment.It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct—and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists—it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020—i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so.

I think the whole thing's pretty funny (Oh, I know, I know, climate change is no laughing matter!). This Hertsgaard guy writes that "they" say "everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an 'Oh, sh*t' moment" (O.S.M.). "They" really do say some fascinating things, don't they? But, wait, Hertsgaard has apparently had several of these moments. The one he's describing here is just his "most recent." So the O.S.M. isn't, in fact, an epiphany as he makes it sound. If it were an epiphany, there'd be only the one, because he'd "finally" get it. Instead, he keeps having these moments as if he forgets how Super Serious climate change is. My experience is that people who keep having the same epiphany over and over again are quite excitable. Indeed, you might even say they're prone to panic and overstatement. Well, you might not say that, but I have it on excellent authority that They do.

And that would make sense given the rest of Hertsgaard's jeremiad. The notion that some German study "proves" America must abolish all carbon emissions by 2020 is just ludicrous on its face, almost as ludicrous as the possibility that might happen. And just because it gave Hertsgaard another one of his apparently too-numerous-to-count Oh Sh*t Moments doesn't have all that much persuasive power, I'm afraid to say.

That's too bad because, warns Hertsgaard, only a "wartime mobilization" against the carbon enemy "might" save us from merely "the worst impacts of climate change." "The alternative is more and more 'Oh, sh*t' moments for all of us."

Oookay Francis.