Summary
Ben Lieberman is correct to draw parallels between the environmentalist establishment falsely taking credit for predicted disaster not coming true in the context of ozone depletion, and now with "global warming" ("Ozone: the hole truth," Commentary, Wednesday). Consider, for example, the great champion of these schemes for supranational governance, the European Union. The EU is failing in its unilateral insistence on the rationing scheme demanded under the Kyoto Protocol, by actually increasing their emissions since Kyoto was agreed and faster than the United States, by the way. Recently, the EU suddenly shifted its boastful if unsupportable rhetoric, from consistently vowing how it had promised to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations to some level that would "avoid dangerous anthropogenic [human] interference with the climate system," (what they promised under Kyoto), to claiming that Europe had promised to keep global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius from where they were at the end of the "Little Ice Age" (or approximately the beginning of the Industrial Revolution).
This abrupt, unannounced change was possibly due to Europe's failure at reducing emissions, or possibly because they looked out the window. You see, three decades of careful observation - which short period is all that lies behind many lurid stories about, e.g., "record" Arctic ice melt (while Antarctic ice mass grows, to no such media fanfare) - reveal a warming trend of about 0.17 degrees Celsius, or 1.7 degrees over a century. Further, the warming stopped in 1998. I hereby confidently predict that although Europe's data expose how they will not reduce their GHG emissions they will soon claim that Europe, alone having had the courage to act, kept temperatures below some arbitrary point above which it became clear they were not going to rise during the current warming, anyway.See the full content of this document
Extract
Warming Observations
CHRIS...
See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
