After 15 years without substantial global warming, the climate-crisis crowd is in trouble. For a long time they simply ignored the warming hiatus. Then, about a month ago, The Economist acknowledged the problem with a thoughtful article on the discrepancy between “consensus” climate models and observed surface temperatures. This was followed by articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and most recently, The New Republic. All of these pieces sought to minimize the challenge posed to policies like carbon taxes and emissions caps by the increasingly apparent flaws and uncertainties in climate science.
If the first phase was denial and the second minimization, we may now be entering phase three: outright crisis for policy prescriptions aimed at global warming. Once again, The Economist leads the way with a powerful critique of The New Republic piece, and of the tendency of mainstream acknowledgments of the warming hiatus to pretend that carbon taxes and emissions caps aren’t called into question by new facts on the ground.
I won’t give excerpts here, because the blog post at The Economist deserves to be read in full. All I can add is that, if this is how things are going one month into the new frankness about the warming hiatus, the climate-crisis crowd has a very big problem on its hands.