Posted by
Andrews on Monday, October 12, 2009 5:34:29 PM
I saw an interesting article on
Best of the Web:
Has Global Warming Stopped Being Cool?
"What Happened to Global Warming?" asks a headline on the Web site of (of all sources) the BBC:
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.
So what on Earth is going on?
The answer is that no one knows:
What can we expect in the next few years?
Both sides have very different forecasts. The Met Office
[Britain's equivalent of the National Weather Service] says that
warming is set to resume quickly and strongly.
It predicts that from 2010 to 2015 at least half the years will be hotter than the current hottest year on record (1998).
Sceptics disagree. They insist it is unlikely that
temperatures will reach the dizzy heights of 1998 until 2030 at the
earliest. It is possible, they say, that because of ocean and solar
cycles a period of global cooling is more likely.
One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is
causing global warming is far from over. Indeed some would say it is
hotting up.
Can we all agree that the time for declaring that the time for debate is over is over?
What makes this interesting is that not only are the AGW proponents wrong, but so are the anti-AGW "experts" who postulated solar cycles to explain observed warming. If the AGW folks were wrong to see warming trends, then so were those who postulated non-anthropogenic mechanisms. If the current numbers hold, the truth is, there
IS NO warming trend, and we took a short term trend, along with the jiggered numbers creating the "hockey stick" graph ("
Interesting Evidence", "
Very Quick and Simple Logic", "
Some Global Warming Links", "
Fire Up the SUV", "
More About the Hockey Stick Graph", "
Yet Again"), and imagined a trend that wasn't there.
This is interesting, provided the lack of trend holds, because it points out a way the right shoots itself in the foot. When the left starts to cry that the sky is falling, and produces some slightly plausible numbers, rather than dismiss their panic, we decide "the public" will buy into the panic, and start trying to explain it away. So, when the panic proves false, we look just as foolish as the left and gain no ground. We would be much better, in terms of AGW, or silly environmental pseudo-scares, or our current health care non-crisis, to simply explain that there is no crisis, that there are isolated issues but no overall crisis, and stick with our position. Then when the crisis blows up we can say "look, they panicked for nothing."
But we lack courage on the right. We have let decades of left-wing media control convince us that the public is just the way the left sees them, prone to panic, demanding government solutions, and resistant to reason. And so, rather than stand our ground, we try to hide our small government policies, come up with "Democrat Lite" solutions, and accept every panic the left sells.(See "
"Doing Something" Revisited" and "
The Difficulty of Principle")
And we wonder why there is no enthusiasm for right wing politicians? Perhaps just a hint of character and consistency would help. But as long as we follow the left we will not see that.
POSTSCRIPT
And before anyone jumps on this article to say I contradicted my argument in "
The Need for Discretion", this is nothing of the kind. This argument is that we should stand by our beliefs, that one is about how one presents an argument.
For example, let us suppose Obama proposes some sort of confiscatory tax. The reasoning of this post is that we should oppose it, no matter how popular the media claims it is. The point of my previous post is quite different. There I am arguing saying "Obama is a communist" is self defeating, while saying "this plan involves a communist-like redistribution of wealth" is not.
You see, int he first case, the media will first portray you as a kook who thinks Obama is a secret plant from the CP-USA, and will then turn the argument around by pointing out several nominally "market based" proposals, distracting us from this specific plan and focusing us on areas in which they think he is strong, all the while doing their utmost to portray the right as prone to conspiratorial beliefs. If we phrase it the second way, we deny them the ability to protray us as conspiracy prone, and keep the argument focused on a single issue. And that was my point about choosing how we phrase our arguments (as well as choosing carefully which points to argue).