by Bob Adelmann
Oh, no! In its latest attempt to be erudite and yet supportive of the calls for more government regulations to stop global warming, The Economist noted that the real temperatures of the air over the last fifteen years have remained flat!
How can that be? After all, there are 20 “models” designed by scientists that have predicted that temperatures would – must! – increase, some showing predicted increases about twice what’s actually happening.
It’s very distressing when facts get in the way of predictions:
Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models. If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.
But no one can explain it!
How can that be? Aren’t these people experts? Don’t they have all the answers? Apparently not:
The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.
The article goes on for pages and pages – eight long pages – investigating the impact aerosols and CO2 and wind variations and clouds and such might possibly be having on the globe.
But the author finally gives up:
The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before.
This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.
In other words, all this hyperbole and end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it might just be wrong.
And that would end-the-world-as-we-know-it, at least for the catastrophobes predicting such. She even suggests that all the hand-wringing might possibly be wrong:
Perhaps the world should seek to adjust to (rather than stop) the greenhouse gas splurge. There is no point in buying earthquake insurance if you do not live in an earthquake zone.
Given that The Economist is a certified mouthpiece for the establishment, this might be an official announcement that the global-warming, global-cooling, climate change meme isn’t capturing the hearts and minds of the rubes, and – to coin a phrase – to cool their jets on the whole matter.
—————————
A graduate of Cornell University and a former investment advisor, Bob is a regular contributor to The New American magazine and blogs frequently at www.LightFromTheRight.com, primarily on economics and politics. He can be reached at badelmann@thenewamerican.com.
No comments yet.