Climate change: A crumbling consensus

The “wheels are coming off the climate-change bus,” said Lorne Gunter in The Providence Journal-Bulletin. The “Climategate” hacked–e-mail scandal of a few months ago revealed how much of the science behind global warming was, in fact, massaged data and “propaganda.” But that scandal was just the beginning. The U.N.’s once-prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been forced to admit that its claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear in 25 years was based on a guess—not supported by data—by a single Indian scientist. Other claims in its reports, the IPCC concedes, were based on flimsy evidence—so flimsy that even fellow climate-change believers are suggesting that the organization’s leaders step down. But the deathblow to Al Gore and friends may have come last week, said Steve Janke in the Toronto National Post. A new study in the journal Science concludes that the rise in global temperatures in the ’80s and ’90s may have been largely caused by a rise in water vapor in the upper atmosphere, which reflects heat back down to Earth. Yep, even climatologists are now backing away from “global-warming orthodoxy.” Will the media be next?

The basic facts remain the same, said the Los Angeles Times in an editorial. Carbon dioxide traps heat, and the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are rising steadily because of mankind’s use of fossil fuels. “Thousands of climate researchers around the world” have concluded that climate change is real, primarily caused by humans, and a threat to our future on this planet. As for atmospheric water vapor, said Doyle Rice in USA Today, its concentration is now decreasing, which may explain why temperatures have appeared to level off since 1998. The decrease in water vapor, put another way, may be masking the upward trend in global temperatures, meaning that at some point in the not-too-distant future, it may get much hotter, very quickly.

If that happens, said Walter Mead in The American Interest Online, scientists and environmentalists will have only themselves to blame. They undoubtedly had good motives when they hyped and exaggerated the “serious, troubling” evidence of man-caused climate change. But their scientific and strategic errors gave their opponents all the ammunition they needed. With skepticism about global warming growing, you can forget cap-and-trade limits in the U.S., and any major, binding emissions cutbacks in most of the world. “The global-warming movement as we have known it is dead.”

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