Jonah, re your item on Mark Hertsgaard, the “climate correspondent” of The Nation, and the sad tale of his recurring “Oh, sh*t” moments: In a sense, his job depends on an endless procession of OSMs. The “climate correspondent” is by definition the OSM correspondent: that’s the basis on which newspapers and magazines created the position. A “climate correspondent” without OSMs is like a ballet critic in a town with no ballet company.

That’s why the piece by Paul Hudson, the BBC’s Climate Correspondent, is so striking:

What Happened To Global Warming?
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

This rang a vague bell with me. Back in July, responding to Thomas Friedman’s call for a million eco-youths to stage a carbon march on Washington, I wrote:

If you’re 29, there has been no global warming for your entire adult life. If you’re graduating high school, there has been no global warming since you entered first grade. There has been no global warming this century. None. Admittedly the 21st century is only one century out of the many centuries of planetary existence, but it happens to be the one you’re stuck living in.

Obviously, it sounds better coming from a bigshot BBC climate wallah than from a wackjob denialist like me — although, reading between the lines of this follow-up, evidently poor Mr. Hudson is getting barraged from ecopalyptic types denouncing his apostasy. Yet, as he says, none of the models saw it coming. Including presumably all those German experts Mark Hertsgaard is hot for.

The choice for the “climate change” industry is either to do like the BBC man, step back and take a cool look at things; or, like The Nation’s excitable chap, dash ever more frantically from one “Oh, sh*t” moment to the next. Mr. Hertsgaard already seems only one or two Belgian Government advisory-panel briefing papers away from running through the streets pounding on your hood and demanding you rip out your internal combustion engine right now. But, putting him to one side, judging from these latest exercises in “environmentally responsible” child abuse and parental abuse, the OSMers have decided to turn up the heat.

I don’t think that, as they would say, it’s sustainable. In fact, in the real battle of our times — against ever more regulation, taxation, and big government — the obvious hysteria of the climate crowd may prove one of our best friends.