What Happened to Global Warming?
Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
"What happened to global
warming?" read the headline -- on BBC News on Oct. 9, no less. Consider it
a cataclysmic event: Mainstream news organizations have begun reporting on
scientific research that suggests that global warming may not be caused by man
and may not be as dire and eminent as alarmists suggest.
Indeed, as the BBC's climate correspondent
Paul Hudson reported, the warmest year recorded globally "was not in 2008
or 2007, but 1998." It's true, he continued, "For the last 11 years,
we have not observed any increase in global temperatures."
At a London conference later this month,
Hudson reported, solar scientist Piers Corbyn will present evidence that
solar-charged particles have a big impact on global temperatures.
Western Washington University geologist Don
J. Easterbrook presented research last year that suggests that the Pacific
decadal oscillation (PDO) caused warmer temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s.
With Pacific sea surface temperatures cooling, Easterbrook expects 30 years of
global cooling.
EPA analyst Alan Carlin -- an MIT-trained
economist with a degree in physics -- referred to "solar variability"
and Easterbrook's work in a document that warned that politics had prompted the
EPA and other countries to pay "too little attention to the science of
global warming" as partisans ignored the lack of global warming over the
last 10 years. At first, the EPA buried the paper, then it permitted Carlin to
post it on his personal Web site.
In May, Fortune reported on the testimony
of University of Alabama-Huntsville Earth System Science Center Director John
Christy's before the House Ways and Means Committee. Christy is a 2001
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report signatory who believes human
effects have a warming influence, but rejects the disaster scenarios.
As Christy told the committee, climate
models rely on land temperature data that are distorted and exaggerated by
surface development -- that is, asphalt and buildings. In a nice bit of
research, Christy, who is also the Alabama state climatologist, debunked the
temperature-increase predictions made by NASA scientist James Hansen in 1988.
"The real atmosphere," Christy testified, "has many ways to
respond to the changes that the extra CO2 is forcing upon it."
Add Christy, Easterbrook and Corbyn to the
long list of scientists who see climate as a complex issue rather than an opportunity
to sermonize and lecture the general public.
Over the years, global warming alarmists
have sought to stifle debate by arguing that there was no debate. They bullied
dissenters and ex-communicated non-believers from their panels. In the name of science,
disciples made it a virtue to not recognize the existence of scientists such as
MIT's Richard Lindzen and Colorado State University's William Gray.
For a long time, that approach worked. But
after 11 years without record temperatures that had the seas spilling over the
Statue of Liberty's toes, they are going to have to change tactics.
They're going to have to rely on real data,
not failed models, scare stories and the Big Lie that everyone who counts
agrees with them.