Global Warming: Thirty Years of Hype, Hysteria and Hullabaloo
Unhappy Anniversary
By William M Briggs Published on June 24, 2018
https://stream.org/global-warming-th...ia-hullabaloo/
In the late spring of 1988, Senator Tim Wirth from Colorado (guess his party) called the Weather Bureau and asked what historically was the hottest day of the year in Washington, DC.
He needed heat for the theater he was cooking up.
He got it. That June, he recalled, was "stiflingly hot." To give nature a boost, on the night of June 22,
he snuck into the Senate hearing room and opened all the windows. The air conditioning was either switched off or chose that moment to break.
Wirth later boasted to PBS that...
when the hearing occurred there was not only bliss, which is television cameras in double figures, but it was really hot ...
So [NASA's James] Hansen's giving this testimony, you've got these television cameras back there heating up the room, and the air conditioning in the room didn't appear to work. So it was sort of a perfect collection of events that happened that day, with the wonderful Jim Hansen, who was wiping his brow at the witness table and giving this remarkable testimony.
In that manufactured swelter on June 23, 1988, Global Warming was born. Happy Anniversary.
Today, thirty years later, Global Warming is dead. Make that undead. Its corpse still walks among us, awaiting its final stake through its heart.
Winter is Coming
Politicians like Wirth, and the scientists in their employ, had a streak of good luck.
Hansen said it would get hotter, and then it did. People
doing things like breathing and driving cars were adding "greenhouse gases" to the atmosphere at rates faster than ever before. The correlation between increasing heat and gas was obvious, and it quickly became a cause. Both in the physical and social sense.
There was some reason to believe Hansen was right in those early days. It is a trivial truth that man influences the climate. And scientists had already accepted the idea that man could significantly affect it.
A decade before Hansen's performance, the
consensus was that man was driving temperatures
dangerously down. Pollution from cars and the like was knocking back the sun's rays, which was going to cause
global cooling.
Global cooling was no small thing. In April 1975 Newsweek spoke fear in
"Our Cooling World." Global cooling was going to cause "serious political implications for just about every nation on earth," "The drop in food production could begin quite soon," "devastating outbreak of tornadoes," "national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields," and so forth.
Sound familiar? .....
...The Great Stall
Amidst all the marches, protests, dire warnings of "tipping points," announcements of "record" heat (in very short periods of time), and cries of climate "denial" something funny happened.
The temperature stopped cooperating with climatologists' models.
Scientists said the mercury had nowhere to go but up.
The atmosphere disagreed. A fundamental tenet of science is that its theories must match reality.
When reality differs, the theory is wrong. Scientists in control of the Consensus knew they were in deep kimchi, but they were loathe to admit their critics' points.
Then some wag hacked the emails of Consensus scientists. They spoke of using tricks and hiding declines in temperatures. They
boasted of
political prowess in keeping peers from publishing skeptical views.
Climategate revealed scientists to be as
backbiting, manipulative, hateful, suspicious, and cocky as, well, politicians.
Doubt in global warming catastrophe grew.
This worried the catastrophists. If global warning was not a problem, then it didn't need a solution. But the solution was too intoxicating to abandon.
Neither Hot Nor Cold
Enter "climate change." Global warming became like that movie where the lady on the train vanishes, and where everybody claimed never to have seen her. Climate change, not global warming, was
always the real worry.
This was a brilliant move. The earth's climate was never static; it is impossible that it should ever be static; therefore, it will always change. When anything bad happened, which was certain, it was climate change. When anything good happened, it was Look! Squirrel!
Every ill and misfortune could once again be blamed on lack of government.
Wouldn't you know it, though. The atmosphere again refused to cooperate! Oh, sure, there was the occasional hurricane or drought to keep things spicy. But on the whole it was nice outside. And nobody would ever admit that it being nice outside was because of climate change.
Climate change by definition brought only evil....
...The undead corpse of global warming is animated now only by the hopes of a handful of true believers.
Smarter activists see the futility of climate change and have begun the work of
metamorphosing the cause into something grander.
The seeds for this growth were planted in the Paris "climate" accord, which called for "gender equality, empowerment of women, and intergenerational equity" as well as "climate justice."
All that was missing was transgender "rights." But don't worry. That's being taken care of, too.