At Watts Up With That, Christopher Monckton highlights the astonishingly partisan dimension, in the U.S., of the global warming controversy:
One of the most interesting statistics from the recent mid-terms was the New York Times’ exit poll, showing that more than two-thirds of “Democrat” voters thought climate change was a serious problem. Five-sixths of Republicans didn’t.
That’s really stark. I wonder whether any other issue would fall along equally partisan lines:
Why is global warming such a partisan issue? I think because there is hardly any evidence to support the alarmists’ case, so the whole thing is a matter of faith and politics, not science. If you have no particular reason to drink the big government kool-aid, either political or economic, you probably don’t. Monckton points out some of the fundamental evidence that indicates the climate realists are correct:
Since October 1996 there has been no global warming at all.
This fact is a severe embarrassment to the warmists, who admit that they have no explanation for it. Monckton notes some additional salient facts:
* The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.* The fastest measured warming trend lasting ten years or more occurred over the 40 years from 1694-1733 in Central England. It was equivalent to 4.3 Cº per century.* Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to below 1.2 Cº per century.* In 1990, the IPCC’s mid-range prediction of near-term warming was equivalent to 2.8 Cº per century, higher by two-thirds than its current prediction of 1.7 Cº/century.* The global warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to below 1.4 Cº per century – half of what the IPCC had then predicted.* The IPCC’s predicted 4.8 Cº warming by 2100 is well over twice the greatest rate of warming lasting more than ten years that has been measured since 1950.
So, as Monckton concludes, science is on the realists’ side.
Of course, the average voter has no idea what temperatures were in central England in the early 18th century. Apart from the science, there is another reason why global warming alarmism has flopped: the weather hasn’t cooperated. Back in the 1970s, when temperatures were falling, the left-wing climate alarmists told us that another Ice Age was coming. Their claims seemed plausible because most Americans felt the cold. When alarmists switched to global warming, because temperatures happened to rise a bit starting in the 1980s, their claims similarly seemed plausible. But current claims of catastrophic warming are belied by common experience.
Like ours. Here in Minnesota, we have had a cooler than average Autumn. But that is nothing: the forecast for Minneapolis and its surrounding suburbs is for six to ten inches of snow between now and Tuesday, followed by a cold snap that will drop temperatures into single digits.
Is this an unusually early start to Winter even here in Minnesota? Yes. Minnesotans pride themselves on being prepared for anything, and no doubt will handle ten inches of snow in mid-November with aplomb. But it makes it a little hard to argue that the climate is shifting dramatically toward unprecedented (in recent times) warmth.
I took this photo off my deck on November 13,2010. It looks like the view this year will be similar. Global warming? We should be so lucky!
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