2008 has been a notable year in the global warming debate. For starters, there’s now concrete evidence of the global cooling that has been going on for some time. Also, some of the scientists creating the computer models of global warming have now found the evidence wanting. Christopher Booker in the Telegraph thinks that the tide may have definitively turned in the debate this year:

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flattening, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century…

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent.

(The controversial mathematical physicist from Tulane Frank Tipler recently commented to William Katz: “Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is a scam, with no basis in science…a scientific theory makes non-obvious predictions which are then compared with observations that the average person can check for himself. As we both know from our own observations, AGW theory has spectacularly failed to do this…The AGW people are trying to do a disappearing act on these observations. Some are trying to deny the existence of the Maunder Minimum.” As one reader noted, a Tipler/Gore debate might be very amusing to watch. HT: Powerline)

We agree with the Booker piece above. Global Warming is finished, done, dead (at least for the moment). But that doesn’t mean the foolishness is going away. It’s just that the name has changed. The New Planetary Emergency and Religion of the Trendy will be Climate Change, cleverly fashioned so that we’re doing something wrong both when it gets hotter and when it gets colder. The name of the naughty thing that mankind is doing to the planet may have changed, but the cast of characters remains the same — as well as their many plans to separate you from your money.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 2:54 pm and is filed under business, Democrats, General, Left of Left, Republicans, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.