Last I checked, the debate/panic over anthropogenic global warming still centered around CO2-driven warming, specifically man’s marginal contribution to the earth’s CO2 budget. Simple enough. But it now seems that the alarmist industry has simply jumped the rails.

Consider today’s NYT story, “CO2 flow speeds up; Poor Countries Now Lead” (accompanied by a ghastly photo of presumably choking emissions, chosen of course not by accident, as the Times goes so far as to add “A steel mill in Gu Dian, China, emits visible pollution as well as carbon dioxide.”).

The thesis is that things are on track to be worse than we thought. We are told: “the Global Carbon Project, a network of scientists tracking emissions of carbon dioxide, released its latest update, and it shows that emissions are accelerating and are close to the highest scenarios considered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year.”

Leading to: “ ‘If this trend continues and the natural sinks weaken, we are on track towards the highest projections of climate change,’ [the Global Carbon Project’s Corinne] Le Quéré said.”

We’ve already been told countless times that the oceans are about full up with CO2 and just can’t take it any more, so this means our goose is cooked. Emissions are up even higher than the IPCC projected, and we are on track to the upward scenarios modeled as resulting from Man-made CO2 emissions. What’s missing? Ah, yes, any mention of temperatures, either real or merely modeled. Not a word in the story on that tangential factor.

Temperatures – that is, the warming projected to result from increased emissions – are, shall we say, in the lower range of projections, given it’s been cooling for a decade. Even IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri admitted earlier this year, that the warming, well, isn’t.

Team Alarmism seem to have shoved the warming thing out of the calculus of catastrophic man-made global warming, making it actually catastrophic man-made global emissions, I guess.

BTW: Those of you who recall the dust-up over the IPCC’s “chief climatologist” – the economist Pachauri – going after Castles and Henderson over their criticism of IPCC emission scenarios, will recall his risible claim that “There is absolutely no reason to believe that, in the longer term, lower economic development would, all other things being equal, result in lower emissions.” Wanted, instructor in history of Central and Eastern Europe, 1990-present. So, I suppose higher levels of economic activity wouldn’t result in higher emissions, either. Wanted, instructor in history of China, India, Brazil.

So it must come as no small surprise to Pachauri to read in the Times story that “Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press has written a summary of the carbon dioxide findings, with some input from experts who express surprise that a slowing of economic growth in some places hasn’t blunted the growth in CO2 output.” When they’ve lost Seth Borenstein, they’ve lost their base.