Global Warming Alarmists: Time Out

In a recent column entitled Live with Climate Change published in USA Today, Patrick Michaels has urged those getting overwhelmed by the flood of media attention being given to the new IPCC report on Climate Change to take a time out. Michaels’ has taken on the global warming alarmists with a welcome degree of civility and most importantly: logic. Not only is the dire “10 years until the end fo the world” claim being repeated the world over (actually, by Al Gore’s clock, we’re down to less than 9 years left…) a weak attention-grabbing stunt by the alarmists, it simply is not supported by research, as Michaels notes:

Fortunately, we have more time than the alarmists suggest. The warming path of the planet falls at the lowest end of today’s U.N. projections. In aggregate, our computer models tell us that once warming is established, it tends to take place at a constant, not an increasing, rate. Reassuringly, the rate has been remarkably constant, at 0.324 degrees F per decade, since warming began around 1975. The notion that we must do “something in 10 years,” repeated by a small but vocal band of extremists, enjoys virtually no support in the truly peer reviewed scientific literature.

And as much as Time magazine and other mainstream media outlets are pushing it, the debate is not over - this issue is not “case closed.” Attention is at least shifting away from the disaster of the Kyoto Protocol though: Michaels’ analysis supports earlier claims that the Kyoto Protocol is nothing but an economic disaster:

However, actually “doing something” about warming is a daunting endeavor. The journal Geophysical Research Letters estimated in 1997 that if every nation on Earth lived up to the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol on global warming, it would prevent no more than 0.126 degrees F of warming every 50 years. Global temperature varies by more than that from year to year, so that’s not even enough to measure. Climatically, Kyoto would do nothing.

A main reason I support and respect Michaels’ views on climate change is because they are so realistic. Alarmists like to label Michaels and others as “global warming skeptics” when many are nothing of the sort. Michaels (and myself) are in no way claiming that global warming does not exist (the Earth is likely warming slightly, at least in the near term)…the dispute comes in the manufactured, unsupported, falsely-quantified claims painting a causation between global warming and human activities. Michaels closes with what must be the most concise, logical, and practical analysis of climate change that I’ve read in quite some time:

Rather than burning our capital now for no environmental gain (did someone say “ethanol?”), let’s encourage economic development so people can invest and profit in our more efficient future. People who invested in automobile companies that developed hybrid technology have been rewarded handsomely in the past few years, and there’s no reason to think environmental speculators won’t be rewarded in the future, too.

Read more about Michaels’ work from the Cato Institute. I’m eager to read a follow-up to his great analysis of the mainstream media’s handling of global warming entitled Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.