All is Well, There's No Need to Panic

It was 60 degrees today in New York City. On January 27th. I guess we should all freak out about global warming now. Not so say 16 scientists who co-signed an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal.

"In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the "pollutant" carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, [aren't so sure]. And the number of scientific "heretics" is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.
Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now."
The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2. The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant."

"Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."
Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet."

"Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.

Every candidate should support rational measures to protect and improve our environment, but it makes no sense at all to back expensive programs that divert resources from real needs and are based on alarming but untenable claims of "incontrovertible" evidence."


This pretty much sums up the stance that I and other rational people (without any scientific knowledge) have been saying for years. Yes global warming is real. But the extent of mankind's role in it was vastly overstated. And the alarming speed of global warming was really just a temporary acceleration when compared to one of the coldest periods in history, the 1970s.
The global warming alarmists are moral narcissists who have some weird kind of Munchausen's Syndrome. They want the world to be sick, so they can be the one to make it get better.
Maybe at the beginning of the movement scientists did have reason to believe their most dire predictions, and they sold Al Gore a bill of goods. But the evidence has changed. Only at this point it's too late. In for a penny, in for a pound. So we continue to waste money on green energy companies, grants to fund falsified research and promote a job-killing anti-business agenda to try to solve a problem that may not exist 50 or 100 years, if it exists at all.