Another year without global warming has gone into the history books. Depending on who you read, the Earth has had no statistically significant warming in 18, 21 or 25 years.
As we march along, unwarmed by our emissions, and as we experience the current blasts of cold weather that Mother Nature has decided to bestow, we might wonder – what’s going on? We might also think, more and more, that the big global warming scare isn’t all we’ve been told it is.
A report from the Times of India brings to light an interesting aspect of the global warming debate. One of the under-reported or un-reported elements of AGW is the fact that even many who believe in anthropogenic global warming (AGW) don’t agree that it’s a dire problem requiring immediate and drastic cuts in carbon output. This isn’t new. As one example, there exists a group/effort calling itself The Copenhagen Consensus, founded by environmentalist Bjorn Lomborg, that operates from the premise that AGW is real but takes a distant back seat to far more pressing global concerns like clean water, malaria, nutrition, and childhood immunization, among others. This effort goes back at least a decade.
We don’t hear much about that when alarmists speak of the “consensus” or declare that 97% of scientists believe that AGW is real. The accuracy of that number aside, belief that AGW is real doesn’t necessarily include belief that it’s severe enough to warrant action or belief that the action proposed by the alarmists (carbon caps and taxes) is the correct or even an effective course of action. Yet a false conflation of the three is presumed by those who push the carbon cap/tax agenda.
For those that aren’t devoting a lot of attention to the subject (i.e. the vast majority of people), there’s little out there to counter or rebut this false conflation. Critics and skeptics are marginalized, yelled down and called anti-science, or, worse, deniers. The last is particularly offensive, because it is a different sort of conflation. Denier is a term often used in conjunction with the Holocaust to describe people who claim that atrocity didn’t happen. It’s difficult to go out in the world and stake out a position that says “I believe humans are contributing to global warming, but I don’t think it’s something we need to worry about or address at this time.” Not only is there too much nuance therein, such a position undermines the demands of all the people who make their livings off AGW and all the people who see AGW as a tool with which to draw greater control and more money out of societies. It’s easy to marginalize someone who flatly declares AGW’s a load of bunk (no matter how rational, reasoned or supported his arguments may be), and it’s almost as easy to marginalize someone who states a belief that AGW theory is unproven and unvalidated. It’s much harder to marginalize someone who says AGW’s real but not that big a deal, so in response the alarmists often accuse those who take that position of lying.
Mother Nature isn’t cooperating with the alarmists, and this makes their job harder. The folks who aren’t paying super-close attention, i.e. most of us, are offered a dissonant message by the world. Humans are haranguing us with demands for action and warnings that we’re crossing a point of no return, while Nature is gob-smacking us with bitter cold, snow and ice. In response, most of us break into one of two camps: those who are paying enough attention to hear what the politicians and their favorite opinion sources tell them, and those who only go so far as to compare AGW alarmism to what’s happening outside their homes. The latter are likely the most numerous by far, and cold winters and ‘meh’ summers are going to win out over alarmists demanding money, power and control to fight the heat.
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