2010 was “The Year ‘Global Warming’ Died,” according to Stacy McCain. I hope he’s right, but if he is, I’d say November of of 2009 certainly accelerated the long overdue enviro-euthanasia process.
As Stacy notes:
Even the New York Times is forced to admit that the alarmists are fighting a losing battle:
The Obama administration, which came into office pledging to limit emissions in the United States, scaled back its ambitions after climate and energy legislation died in the Senate this year.
Challengers have mounted a vigorous assault on the science of climate change. Polls indicate that the public has grown more doubtful about that science.
Science! Science! And if you disagree, you’re anti-Science!
We posted a couple of lengthy items earlier this week exploring how circular the enviro-left’s arguments have become, but Ann Althouse sums them up in a single sentence:
When everything is evidence of the thing you want to believe, it might be time to stop pretending you’re all about science.
And everything really is evidence of what they want to believe.
At the Belmont Club, Richard Fernandez reviews “Ice Age 6” and gives it two frost-bitten thumbs up:
Unseasonably cold weather in the UK has spurred speculation the earth may be entering a new Ice Age. This flies completely in the face of last decade’s strident warnings about Global Warming. “Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue. Is he barmy?”
Piers Corbyn is about as “barmy” as Time Magazine when it predicted in 1974 that another Ice Age was right around the corner.
Telltale signs are everywhere —from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest.Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7° F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.
The same tone of impending doom; the same portentous omens; the same catastrophic language was used not long ago — but to warn about a new Ice Age. Today the same tenor is being used to caution against Global Warming. How did the “science” turn 180 degrees around in that time? How could the data have suddenly done an about-face? Who knows?
What is common across the decades was the assertion that weather is generating a political crisis which forces governments to act.
We reviewed a number of those headlines then and now, in our “Hide the Decline” edition of Silicon Graffiti last year. Tune in here if you missed it.
And speaking of movies, as I mentioned back in March, a lot of Hollywood’s recent global warming doomfests are going to be remembered as updated versions of Reefer Madness to the next generation of movie fans. Today’s global warming fear-mongering is tomorrow’s late-night camp TV.
Related: “In 2010, more and more of the supposedly great and good signed up for the misery-fest that is neo-Malthusianism.”
Or as I mentioned last week, if I only have one life to live…
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