By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, April 02, 2013
There are few things sadder than the “climate denier.” He
ignores the data and neglects the latest science. His rhetoric and policy
proposals are dangerously disconnected from reality. He can’t recalibrate to
take account of the latest evidence because, well, he’s a denier.
The new climate deniers are the liberals who, despite
their obsession with climate change, have managed to miss the biggest story in
climate science, which is that there hasn’t been any global warming for about a
decade and a half.
“Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s
surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar,”
The Economist writes. “The world added roughly 100 billion tons of carbon to
the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2
put there by humanity since 1750.” Yet, no more warming.
The Economist has been decidedly alarmist on global
warming through the years, so it deserves credit for pausing to consider why
the warming trend it expected to continue has mysteriously stalled out.
The deniers feel no such compunction. They speak as if it
is still the late 1990s, when measurements of global temperature had been
rising for two decades. In his State of the Union address, President Barack
Obama said that “we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of
science and act before it’s too late.” In a passage devoted to global warming,
though, he didn’t mention the latest trend in global warming.
A denier feels the same righteous sense of certitude now,
when warming has stopped, as he did a decade ago. Washington Post columnist
Eugene Robinson recently opined that “sensible people accept the fact of
warming” — but apparently not the fact of no-warming. He scorned those “who
manipulate the data in transparently bogus ways to claim that warming has
halted or even reversed course.” Does he include James Hansen, the famous NASA
scientist, among these dastardly manipulators? No one this side of Al Gore has
warned as persistently about global warming as Hansen. He nonetheless admits
that “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
None of this means that the Earth didn’t get hotter in
the 20th century, or that carbon emissions don’t tend to create a warmer
planet, or that warming won’t necessarily begin again. It does mean that we
know less about the fantastically complex global climate system than
global-warming alarmists have been willing to admit. The Economist notes the
work of Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Britain. He has found that
if global temperatures stay the same for a few more years, they will fall below
the range of 20 climate models. In other words, the scientific “consensus” will
have been proven wrong.
Why the stall in warming? According to The Economist,
maybe we’ve overestimated the warming impact of clouds. Or maybe some clouds
cool instead of warm the planet. Or maybe the oceans are absorbing heat from
the atmosphere. Although the surface temperature of the oceans hasn’t been
rising, perhaps the warming is happening deep down. James Hansen thinks new
coal-fired plants in China and India, releasing so-called aerosols into the
atmosphere that act to suppress warming, may be partly responsible for the
stasis in temperatures.
Hansen writes that knowing more about the effect of
aerosols on the climate “requires accurate knowledge of changes in aerosol
amount, size distribution, absorption and vertical distribution on a global
basis — as well as simultaneous data on changes in cloud properties to allow
inference of the indirect aerosol forcing via induced cloud changes.” Is that
all? He ruefully notes that the launch of a satellite with a sensor to measure
all of this failed, with no follow-up mission planned.
Hey, but don’t worry. The science is all “settled.”
What is beginning to seem more likely is that the
“sensitivity” of the global climate to carbon emissions has been overestimated.
If so, the deniers will be the last to admit it.
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