Yet again, the society of climate alarmists tell us we have little time left to address global warming. It’s a sign of desperation. What else can the merchants of madness do when we’re now closing in on nine years of a warming pause?
Last month the New York Times published an article that we swear we have read before.
“Earth is likely to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade, and nations will need to make an immediate and drastic shift away from fossil fuels to prevent the planet from overheating dangerously beyond that level,” the Times’ climate scribe wrote, citing a “major new report” issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The IPCC paper reveals that “there is still one last chance to shift course.” But it will – naturally – “require industrialized nations to join together immediately to slash greenhouse gases roughly in half by 2030 and then stop adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere altogether by the early 2050s.”
How many other times have we heard that we were either approaching our last chance to save ourselves from global warming, or that our opportunity to do what is “right” had already passed us by? So many deadlines, so many “now or nevers,” have come and gone that it’s almost impossible to track them all.
The climate cranks are like the doomsday cultists who have the end of the world marked on their calendars and when it doesn’t arrive they say, “whoops, my math was bad. Let me recalculate and I’ll get back to you with new date.”
While the international hotheads are screeching about an impending doom, levelheaded observers point to data that clearly show a pause in warming, which has been mild and as likely natural as it is human-caused, has now reached eight years and nine months. There has been no rise in global temperatures from July 2015 to March 2023.
This fact-based claim draws on satellite readings from the University of Alabama in Huntsville that measure temperatures in the troposphere, a much more accurate method of keeping score than the shoddy record produced by ground-based weather stations.
“The start and end dates of the New Pause are not cherry-picked,” writes Christopher Monckton, an adviser for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher who now consults with the Heartland Institute on climate policy. “The end date is the present; the start date is the farthest back one can reach and still find a zero trend. It is what it is.”
But why not go back further, maybe to the beginning of the satellite measurements? What do the data say then?
Not much, at least not anything to be alarmed by.
“The entire dataset for 44 years four months since December 1978,” says Monckton, “shows a less than terrifying long-run warming rate equivalent to 1.3 degrees/century, of which 0.3” degrees has already occurred, leaving a single degree “to go (on the current trend) until 2100.”
Of course the warming racket will either ignore the pause, or attack the messenger. Fact-checkers will skip the truth whenever possible and bend it when they can’t. And the cycle of fearmongering will roll on. The benefits that accrue to the political left – an explosion of progressive policies, greater opportunities for graft, a constant upgrade in social status, more control over the masses – are just too juicy to give up.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
