The editorial page of the Baltimore Examiner is turning up the heat on climate alarmism:
The “scientific consensus” that Al Gore and his fellow global warming alarmists rely upon to force radical changes in how Americans live and work is being unraveled by Mother Nature. In addition to the recent freak snowstorms in Malibu, Calif., New Orleans, and Las Vegas, Arctic ice is expanding this year — not shrinking — and there were 115 record-low temperatures reported in the United States in October, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Despite rising carbon dioxide levels, the Earth has actually been cooling — not warming — since 1998, when the warming trend peaked in conjunction with heightened sunspot activity.
It appears that 2008, the National Climatic Data Center now says, will go down as the coldest year in a decade.
“For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming?” asked David Gee, chairman of the 2008 International Geological Congress’ science committee.
That’s an excellent question for President-elect Barack Obama, who promised mandatory caps on carbon emissions and a new international global warming treaty. After meeting with Gore recently, Obama proclaimed: “The time for delay is over; the time for denial is over. We all believe what the scientists have been telling us for years.”
Which scientists? Does Obama believe more than 650 current and former members of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change who are now publicly questioning the non-scientist Gore’s major premise? Or Norwegian Nobel physicist Ivar Giaever, who declared himself a global warming skeptic, as did Joanne Simpson, the first woman in the world to receive a Ph.D. in meteorology? Or the scientists who point out that “100 percent” of the 20th century global warming signal comes from man-made “adjustments” made to a computer model at NASA’s Goddard Institute?
There is no scientific consensus that human activity is causing global warming. The IPCC’s own climate change models predicted rising temperatures for this year, but those actually recorded fall short of the predictions.
Yet Gore and his fellow global warming zealots apparently think the rest of us are sufficiently gullible to believe that the current cooling trend “actually illustrates how fast the world is warming,” as an AP reporter put it recently.
In the absence of credible scientific evidence of global warming as a man-made problem, Obama’s plans to impose draconian climate control measures like those found in the failed Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade proposal are not only unnecessary, they’re likely to leave millions of Americans out in the cold.