The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Losing Faith?
“Global warming appears to have stalled,” reports Der Spiegel. “Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years”:
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year. . . .
Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.
“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”
Why in the world should one take seriously the claim that “the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend”? That is presumably no more than a prediction made by the same people whose predictions are currently not panning out. This quote is telling:
The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
If global warming is really the horror it has been made out to be, its absence ought to be a gift to be celebrated, not a “fact” that “we have to face.” But global warmism isn’t a scientific theory anymore; it is an ideology in which many people, including those who are supposed to be doing science, have invested their prestige and money.
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