THE LATE, GREAT GLOBAL WARMING SCARE
By Ben Lieberman, Washington Times coluimnist February 12, 2010
Global-warming skeptics were hit with numerous setbacks over the past
few years -- from a major 2007 U.N. report that seemingly confirmed the
warming crisis, to Al Gore's popularization of this gloomy message
through his book and Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."
And let's not forget the shifting political winds that elected a
greener Congress and brought in an administration that made climate
change a priority.
But now those skeptics are facing a new challenge: overconfidence.
That's because everything of late has been breaking their way.
OK, overconfidence may be an exaggeration, but the wheels are really
coming off the global-warming cart.
"Climategate" -- the recent leak of e-mails showing gross misconduct
among scientists with key roles in the U.N. report -- raises serious
questions about how much of the global-warming science we can trust. The
scientists were, after all, manipulating the temperature data to show
more warming and subverting requests by independent researchers to see
the underlying data.
Other scary claims in the U.N. report, such as the assertion that
Himalayan glaciers are on pace to melt completely by 2035, also turned
out to be false and have been retracted recently.
Climategate and other scandals only add to the reasons for doubt. At
the same time, Mr. Gore's many terrifying predictions are not
withstanding the test of time.
His book and movie really played up the supposed link between global
warming and Hurricane Katrina. Unfortunately for the scaremongers (and
fortunately for those who live on the coast) we haven't seen anything
even close to Katrina since. The 2006 through 2008 hurricane seasons
were at or below average, and the 2009 season went down as the weakest in
more than a decade. So much for a global-warming-induced hurricane
trend -- and many other such scares.
Another thing missing from the global-warming crisis? Global
warming. Temperatures have been flat for more than a decade, and 2009
adds one more year to that trend.
Polling shows that the American people increasingly see Mr. Gore (and
others) as the boy who cried wolf, and they are drawing their own
common-sense conclusions. The number who believe global warming is real
is dropping, and the number who consider it a crisis has plummeted.
Also declining is the number of those willing to accept substantially
higher gasoline prices and electric bills -- the intended result of
domestic global-warming bills or international treaties that raise the
price of fossil fuels so we are forced to use less.
Even studies conducted by the Obama administration find reduced
economic activity, higher energy prices and lost jobs from such measures.
In other words, global-warming policy promises plenty of economic pain
for little if any environmental gain -- a hard sell at any time, but
especially now, given the lingering recession.
For all their stated concern for the issue, President Obama and
Congress have an uphill climb to turn this into law. Consider one recent
poll, conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press,
asking the American people to rank 20 issues in terms of importance.
Global warming came in 20th -- dead last -- while the economy came in
at No. 1. It won't be easy to enact a law or yoke the U.S. to a global
treaty that addresses America's No. 20 priority at the expense of No.
1 -- and do so in an election year.
There is still plenty to worry skeptics. One example: the
Environmental Protection Agency's attempt to impose global-warming policy
through costly regulations.
Also, there's no room for complacency so long as the forces in favor
of global-warming measures remain powerful and persistent. But the
facts -- and the politics on this issue -- are moving away from alarm.
We may look back on 2010 as the year when the great global-warming
scare really started to fade into history.
--Ben Lieberman is senior policy analyst for energy and environment at
the Heritage Foundation.
-----------------------------------
PSEUDO-SCIENTISTS AND CORRUPT SCIENTISTS SCAM
There is a philosophy that some people won't believe evidence when
they don't like what the evidence shows, especially if it disproves what
they want to believe.
There is plenty of evidence to show that global warming is just a
scam. The normal pattern of weather cycles allows one area to
temporarily overheat while another area temporarily overcools, according
to weather reports covering the past 150 years.
When is the Global Warming going to happen that Al Gore has been
preaching about the past 16 years since his book "Earth In The Balance"
was published in 1992. Perhaps Al Gore can't believe the weather
observations showing evidence of Global Cooling.
Man-made Global Warming is still touted by scientists beyond their
expertise and scientists who really know better but have an entirely
different agenda such as research grant money -- or the Marxists ideas of
redistribution of wealth, harming capitalism, population control, and
One-World Government. --REAL NEWS Editor
thenewsman@ij.net
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