Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing “cap-and-trade” legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America’s traditional carbon energy use.
The theory was that new taxes and greater regulations would make Americans pay more for fossil-fuel energy — a good thing if it reduced our burning of coal, oil, and gas. Obama was not shy in admitting that under his green plans, electricity prices would “necessarily skyrocket.” His energy secretary, Steven Chu, at one point even said, “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe” — that is, about $8–10 per gallon. Fairly or not, the warming movement appeared to be a tiny elite attempting to impose costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.
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But despite a Democrat-controlled House and Senate in 2009–2010, President Obama never passed into law any global-warming legislation. Now the issue is deader than a doornail — despite the efforts of the Environmental Protection Agency to enact new regulations that would never pass Congress.
So what happened to the global-warming craze?
Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. “Climategate” — the unauthorized 2009 release of private e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom — revealed that many of the world’s top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar-bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.
Unfortunately, during the last three years “green” has also become synonymous with Solyndra-style crony capitalism. Commonsense ideas like more windmills, solar panels, retro-fitted houses, and electric cars have all been in the news lately. But the common themes were depressingly similar: few jobs created and little competitively priced energy produced, but plenty of political donors who landed hundreds of millions of dollars in low-interest loans from the government.
Of course, it didn’t help that the world’s most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.
But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of the theory of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last ten years, “global warming” gave way to “climate change” — as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.
Then, when “climate change” was still not enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: “climate chaos.” Suddenly some “green experts” claimed that even more terrifying disasters — from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes — could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.
Current hard times also explain the demise of global-warming advocacy. With high unemployment and near-nonexistent economic growth, Americans do not want to shut down generating plants or pay new surcharges on their power bills. Most people worry first about having any car that runs — not whether it’s a more expensive green hybrid model.
Over the last half-century, Americans have agreed that smoky plants and polluting industries needed to be cleaned up. But when the green movement began to classify clean-burning heat as a pollutant, it began to lose the cash-strapped public.
While the Obama administration was subsidizing failed or inefficient green industries, radical breakthroughs in domestic fossil-fuel exploration and recovery — especially horizontal drilling and fracking — have vastly increased the known American reserves of gas and oil. Modern efficient engines have meant that both can be consumed with little, if any, pollution — at a time when a struggling U.S. economy is paying nearly half-a-trillion dollars for imported fossil fuels. The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands, and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.
We simply don’t know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it has are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.
I also attribute the movement's demise to the fact that few people, even among its strongest adherents, are interested in personally sacrificing much of anything tangible for "the environment". Lifestyles of family, friends, neighbors, and co-workers who are self-described AGW Believers are for the most part indistinguishable from Deniers.
Those that have them run pool pumps on schedule with the rest of us. Computers and televisions are on until late in the evening, often unattended. Weekend activities are often orgies of consumption. Vehicles are purchased more for (unneeded) capacity and style than for efficiency. And one of the most efficient, straightforward, and historically utilized personal uses of solar energy...the drying of clothes...is completely non-existent.
Indeed, the only real difference I see among Believers and Deniers is what comes out of their mouths.
I've gotten a lot of mileage among my acquaintances with the Emerson quote:
"What you DO stands above you and shouts so loudly, I can't hear what you're saying"
I have yet to personally meet a Believer who can't be reduced rather quick to a pile of mumbled excuses when made to answer for their own behavior.
The head of the NRDC has her own private jet to whisk her back and forth between estates on the east and west coasts. When at Martha's Vineyard, she can be seen paving over ecologically sensitive areas on her estate.
We, hoi polloi, are expected to bow, scrape, tug the forelock, and accept the foibles and orders of her and our other betters.
"We simply don’t know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels."
The scientific consensus, however, is that it will. Hanson chooses the past tense instead of the future tense for good reason, because if he used the future tense the question would arise: What if the scientific consensus is correct and we are actually harming the world, perhaps in a big way?
Make your scientific case for imminent Catastrophic Climate Disaster. The science is settled and irrefutable. It is urgent we must implement comprehensive regulatory reform to reduce CO2 emissions to avoid climate catastrophe.
1) In this century please list the catastrophic climate events in North America that will be aberrations to what has occurred in the past 100 years? Please be specific (range estimate is fine) as to the event, scope, region, and timing? How are these disasters outside what we have observed and experienced in the previous century?
2) Please provide the scientific data that substantiates that public policy to control CO2 will in fact reverse climate change? Please quantify this reversal from current trends?
3) Please make the scientific case that man cannot effectively adapt to changing weather patterns just as he has done in previous centuries without the help of extravagant public policy to regulate the climate?
4) Please make the scientific case that catastrophic global warming and climate disaster must be a higher priority than entitlement reform, economic prosperity, balancing the budget, reducing sovereign debt, jobs, etc., etc.? Why is mitigating catastrophic climate change such an urgent and high priority?
5) How much sleep have you lost in the past year worrying about climate disaster? Please compare this to your worry over retirement and career security? If you are not losing any sleep over climate doomsday then why should I?
6) What is the ideal standard climate for North America? Is this a static state that we must achieve? How much does climate change over geologic time naturally?
7) Please provide the % of climate change this century that is natural vs. human-caused?
The science is settled. The science is irrefutable. There is nothing to debate. We must act now or else disaster is imminent. It is urgent we do so. Therefore, the answers to these questions are obvious.
This is beautiful. One of my favorite hobbies to to engage the members of the Church of Global Warming over their irrational zealotry. With your permission I would like to save this to use in future debates with The Faithful.
What scientific "consensus"? Do you mean like the consensus of Enstein's theory of relativity that may now be disproved? Or the consensus that a fetus's heartbeat can be detected at 2 weeks--yet they are still slaughtered every day?
There isn't a shred of evidence to support the claim that human activity is going to cause the earth to warm to dangerous levels.
That's true in the past, it's even more true today.
The few tenths of a degree warming that is likely from doubling of CO2 not only is not harmfull, it is full on beneficial. As is the presence of more CO2 in the atmosphere.
Far from trying to limit CO2 production, we should be encouraging it. More, faster, please.
Another of the big lies, is the claim that there is a scientific consensus. That has never existed. Indeed, in the recent past, a growing stream of scientists have been coming out to deny the claims of the warmistas.
It would only be a consensus because all critics are silenced as much as possible.
Don't hear too much about molecular biology research proving neo-Darwinism wrong either do you?
Wonder why...follow the money. Science, in a large part, has been bought out by politics, therefore, in certain areas, cannot be considered as scientific fact.
Recently, some "settled science" regarding the speed of light turned out to be wrong. Dealing with the speed of light doesn't impose any particular known costs, so there was little furor at the news.
There seem to be two schools of climate change consensus. One says it is occurring and it's significantly the fault of people. The other says it is not occurring. Some studies purport to show the anthropogenic connection, but do they consider other options and explain why these were rejected? Can they prove they have considered all other possibilities before blaming people?
Even if there were adequately settled proof of the anthropogenic global climate effect, such that 99% of the human beings on earth wanted to do something, there is still the question of how much are they willing to do. We are adaptable creatures and can adjust to a warming planet. If it ever becomes necessary, we could live underground with hydroponic gardens and geothermally generated energy for electricity. It would be possible to live far enough underground to avoid tornadoes and even floods. Earthquakes would still be a problem, perhaps a worse one.
Possible AGW is a long-term problem, and people know they can adjust. A few degrees change over the course of a century means it isn't urgent. There is time to develop technology to cope with it. But it makes it difficult to get people to part with vast sums of money and make huge changes in lifestyle to cope with something they cannot see coming. The science is not adequately settled.
To say, "what if" there is a real problem and say we should take steps just in case is a tough sell. It is an argument that can easily be taken to extremes. (What if you might kill someone someday? Shouldn't we execute you now, just in case?)
I think it is more likely that we will have nuclear war in the next century than that the temperature will rise due to normal human practices. And yet we keep cutting the military. Our enemies are not going to get rid of their nuclear weapons, and they will acquire them if they haven't already. yet we don't maintain even the stockpiles that we have to keep them usable. I have serious doubts our nation will survive, and if it does, the possible climate change will be far from the top of the problem list.
So I am not willing to do anything. If you are concerned, loan your personal money to green companies, but stop telling me I have to live according to your preferences. I don't submit to eco-sharia law.
Sorry, but the faster-than-light thing has been shown to be a calibration error involving (ironically) relativistic speed differences among the GPS satellites that locate positions on the earth and the measure the distance between them.
There are other options as well.
There are some that say that even though the temperature is rising, man had little to do with it.
There are others that point out that while the temperature may be rising, because of well documented problems with the sensor network, it isn't rising as much as is being claimed.
I'm in that last camp. The temperature is rising, but not as much as claimed, and besides, man played little role in that small increase.
Science is not done by consensus. Politics is done by consensus. Science is done by object evidence (data gathering and analysis) and utilization of the Scientific Method, neither of which is present in the global warming argument. And don't bother throwing the tree ring proxy data argument at me. Climategate shot that corrupt data set all full of holes. And spare me the computer modeling BS too. That too has been proven to be the collection of garbage that most of us scientists saw it as from the start. Does the acronym GIGO mean anything to you? No, Mr. Troll, if it is consensus, it most certainly is NOT science.
It kills me how the same people who will tell me that I am a mindless zombie for following the authority of my clergy or, heaven forfend, a uniformed officer of the law, will turn right around and fall prostrate at the altar of scientific authority, and think that this makes them critical thinkers.
If the church tells us we can't abort or blow our minds with psychotropics, well, that's just a few robed authoritarian goons pulling a huge scam over their mindless faithful flock. But when Al Gore and The Scientists (which would be a great name for a rock band) tell us that we have to completely rearrange our lives, well, you better get with it or you're going straight to Perdition!
I agree that the *presumption* should be in favor of the experts in any field. But I refuse to agree that the rest of us can never judge the experts to be wrong. If we never can, then we make them religious authorities with even more power than the Medieval Curia. So the legitimate question is, have the "scientific authorities" done anything to give us a whiff of their own ignorance or worse? And the answer is: Read the freakin' column again, and then reflect that VDH didn't have space to list even half the problems with global warming alarmism.
I commute to work by bike, about 2500 miles a year, for health purposes mostly and to save money. But it does make for interesting conversation with SUV driving liberals who rant about global warming.
