If you have paid attention to the global-warming hysteria, you know that the threat of which the alarmist industry warns is not, in their sales pitch, so much a long-term one as one that is supposedly here, today – or rather, just over the horizon in Shelbyville (or New Orleans), as is typical of such scares, be they economic, environmental, or otherwise. And the warming is accelerating right now, according to Al Gore and IPCC head Pachauri, and of course will be far worse in just a few short years.

Roger Pielke, Jr. rips into the first wave of defense, that global cooling is consistent with global warming, here.

But with the forthcoming release of the highly touted Nature piece discussed below, the alarmists’ next rhetorical sleight of the hand is to murmur that the threat about which they have warned is a long-term threat undiminshed by recent and projected cooling. (The NYT “Dot Earth” post linked above quotes uber-alarmist James Hansen with wonderful selectivity, considering that Hansen has previously predicted that parts of New York City would be under water within a decade. Hmmm.)

Rubbish. The alarmist industry has for a decade been scaring children, voters, and policymakers with nonsense about our hellish present and worse near-term future, attributing everything they can to “global warming” and promising more of the same only worse next year.