I have written before about the "Gore Effect," that little understood phenomenon which seem to occur wherever Al Gore showed up to preach on Global Warming: temperatures at the venue seemed always to plunge to record lows. Up until now, the Gore Effect seemed to be a local phenomenon, but since Gore won his prize, we have seen the coldest year in about a century. From the British Telegraph:
Last week, virtually unreported in Britain, the extraordinary winter weather of 2008 elsewhere in the world continued. In the USA, there were blizzards as far south as Texas and Arkansas, while in northern states and Canada what they are calling "the winter from hell" has continued to break records going back in some cases to 1873. Meanwhile in Asia more details emerged of the catastrophe caused by the northern hemisphere's greatest snow cover since 1966.
In Afghanistan, where they have lost 300,000 cattle, the human death toll has risen above 1,500. In China, the havoc created by what its media call "the Winter Snow Disaster" has continued, not least in Tibet, where six months of snow and record low temperatures have killed 500,000 animals, leaving 3 million people on the edge of starvation.
Honey, it's cold outside! Does this mean that Global Warming is finished? No. That, surprisingly enough, is one of the conclusions dominant at the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change. We are constantly told by the mainstream media that no legitimate scientist doubts the global warming gospel, but in early March 500 delegates, including 200 experts in relevant fields, showed up in New York to commit heresy. The consensus that drew them to this venue was that the global warming gospel that Gore preaches and that world governments have embraced is, at best, hysterical.
This does not mean that the delegates to the ICCC all think that global warming isn't happening, or that it isn't related to human activity. Some question either the one or the other, but I don't think that was the dominant view. My friend Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason Magazine, was there. Ron summarizes the words of the keynote speaker, University of Virginia Climatologist Patrick Michaels.
Michaels pointed out that the surface records show average global temperatures increasing at a steady rate of +0.17 degrees centigrade per decade since 1977. He also hastened to put the kibosh on recent assertions that "global warming stopped in 1998." While global average temperatures have been essentially flat since 1998, Michaels argued that natural variations in the climate mask any increases due to greenhouse gases. In particular, cooler waters in the Pacific ("La Nina") and lower solar activity have conspired to drop average global temperatures. When these trends reverse, average global temperatures will rapidly rise to reveal the established long term man-made warming trend of +0.17 degrees centigrade per decade.
So, global warming looks real to this climatologist, and he thinks we can expect it to continue. So how does this differ from the global warming gospel? The gospel tells us that we are headed for an environmental apocalypse, and that only if we (meaning we in the United States) confess our sins and correct them can we avoid that apocalypse. The ICCC sins against the gospel by stating things that are obviously true.
One is that the pace of global warming is in fact similar to the natural course of things to which human beings and other creatures have been adjusting for the whole of our mutual histories. It has been a lot warming in the recent past than it is now, and all the species that currently exists weathered those warmer periods. The 0.17 degree increase per decade means about two degrees centigrade warming over the next century. That will have consequences, but there is no reason to suppose that they will not be manageable.
Two other obvious truths are that there is nothing we can do to stop global warming, and that anything we might try would be bad. We just aren't going to reduce greenhouse emissions over the foreseeable future. The U.S. is not going to cut its own throat, economically speaking, to save the planet. Much less are China and India going to strangle their own economic growth. Meanwhile, virtually all the proposals for curbing global warming would be useless and would have very bad consequences.
Michaels worries that regulatory responses that aim to drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions now will slow economic growth and technological progress, making future generations poorer and less able to address the challenges of man-made climate change.
The only way out of the problems created by modern civilization is further technological and economic advance. One day we will bring these forces under control. In the meantime we can use new technologies to adjust to climate change. But it will go this way only if we don't kill the progressive goose that lays the golden eggs.
You can find the rest of Bailey's dispatches here and here.
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