Despite the more hysterical predictions we've heard of late, the evidence continues to mount that if the earth was warming, it stopped quite some time ago.The race between government policy, which is just getting up to speed on dealing with "carbon dioxide" to address "global warming", and the new data refuting the predictive ability of the climate models, will be an interesting one to watch.
Of course, don't expect this fact to be widely reported, if it indeed even makes it into any U.S. newspapers or television broadcasts.
Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.
Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"
She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."
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Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."
Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"
Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.
"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."
Al Gore? Any reaction? Hello? Anyone home?
If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.
A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.
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I wonder what those who called the truth-tellers deniers will have to say?
How about those who characterized skeptics as being on par with Holocaust deniers?
What will they have to say?
Likely nothing. In fact, we'll still see apocalyptic stories of impending doom, with reports how global warming is hastening the arrival of spring, despite cool temperatures across much of the United States.
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The cost to the public may be even greater as a result of legislation forcing overly ambitious controls over carbon dioxide emissions which in the end may do little or nothing.
And by interesting, I mean nail-bitingly exhausting! The EPA is this close (now that the Supreme Court has given them the green light) to regulating harmless carbon dioxide gas, which is a natural biological product we produce by breathing, as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act! They have already found its emission to be "harmful to welfare", and it is apparently only the White House and DOT directing the career bureacrats to not act on their finding...
Some background:
The most worrisome regulation now under consideration is a declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles endanger public health. The so-called endangerment finding would spark many costly measures with the potential to harm the U.S. economy and intrude on citizens' daily activities. The EPA should refrain from initiating any regulation that would jump ahead of Congress on global warming.To hear some in Congress and elsewhere, the administration is breaking the law by not moving forward with regulation, but that is a falsehood.
In April 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in a 5-to-4 decision against the EPA over its refusal to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, from motor vehicles. However, Massachusetts v. EPA did not require the agency to change its position; it required only that the agency demonstrate that whatever it chooses to do complies with the requirements of the Clean Air Act. In the Court's words, "[w]e need not and do not reach the question whether on remand EPA must make an endangerment finding," and "[w]e hold only that EPA must ground its reasons for action or inaction in the statute."
Nonetheless, it appears that some people in the Administration and the EPA want to read this case as a mandate to begin cracking down on carbon dioxide. But doing so is not required under the law.
Carbon dioxide is a naturally occurring component of air that is created by breathing and other natural processes. It is also the ubiquitous and unavoidable byproduct of fossil fuel combustion, which currently provides 85 percent of America's energy. Thus, any effort to substantially curtail such emissions would have extremely costly and disruptive effects on the economy and on living standards.
But unfortunately the Court's four level-headed justices weren't enough to squelch the whole issue by declaring CO2 is not a pollutant as defined by the Clean Air Act of 1990.
