Global warming--sorry, "climate change" summarized

"Global warming"--now renamed as "climate change"--isn't the first time politically-biased scientists have predicted disaster.

The first unavoidable climate disaster they predicted was in the 1970s, and instead of global warming it was “Global Cooling” that they predicted would end life on earth as we knew it.  Based on a few years of cooling, they warned, that the Earth was about to enter a new ice age.  Time Magazine featured a picture of Earth as a snowball.

As you may have noticed, the threatened the ice age did not occur.  But the folks who predicted the coming Ice Age realized that the public ate up this stuff.  They realized they could make a career out of disaster prophecy. Thus, based on a few years of warming, they realized the scientifically illiterate public would buy a new catastrophe: “Global Warming.”

As you may have noticed, the media loved to wail about global warming, as they love any calamity that sells more papers. It became an instant hit. The headlines wrote themselves: The poles will melt! The oceans will rise!  Lakes and rivers will dry up!  Farmland will turn into desert!

And most gripping: Millions will starve to death!

This was big. Really big.  And could only be solved by government taxation.

"Oooh," squealed leftist politicians.  "Did someone say the magic word?"  It was a match made in heaven.  Or someplace, anyway.

Unfortunately for the warmies and their government grubers, the few years of warming stopped.  But never fear: with the help of data falsifiers at NASA and NOAA--who literally changed historical temperature readings from decades earlier to cool the past--the warmies were able to keep this story from reaching the wider public.

But then a series of three record-cold winters in the U.S. got Americans to thinking maybe someone was lying to 'em.  How could winters be getting colder if the planet was supposed to be getting hotter?

It was a good question.  (And yes, Dan, I know the defense was that temperatures could be colder in one part of the planet even as the entire globe got warmer.  That turned out to be a brilliant smokescreen.

In any case, with more of the public becoming skeptical, in the late 90's the disaster-wailers suddenly stopped pushing "global warming" and switched to “global climate change”

This was a stroke of marketing genius: claims of global warming ran the risk of triggering a backlash from people freezing, but "climate change" could be blamed for everything.

Having a drought?   Climate change, baby!

Warmer winters would prove climate change, but so would colder winters. “Climate Change” was disaster gold--with the added, huge benefit that a) the climate would always vary; and 2) there was no way in hell to prove what was causing it!

Climate change alarmists have made lots of predictions.  But amazingly, not one of their predictions whose expiration date has passed has proven correct. Here’s a sampling, courtesy of Anthony Watts at wattsupwiththat.com:

• In 1988 a major warmie pusher, James Hansen, was asked how "global warming" (as it was called way back then) was likely to affect the neighborhood near Hansen’s office in NYC.  Hanssen answered that in the next 20 years “The West Side Highway will be underwater. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. 

• 1990, Michael Oppenheimer, of the Environmental Defense Fund: “By 1996, the Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers… The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.”
• October 15, 1990, Carl Sagan: “The planet could face an ecological and agricultural catastrophe by the next decade if global warming trends continue.”
• 1990, Actress Meryl Streep: “By the year 2000 – less than ten years away — earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years. If we don’t do something, there’ll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”
• July 26, 1999, The Birmingham Post: “Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”
• April 1, 2000, Der Spiegel: “Good bye winter. Never again snow?”
• March 29, 2001, CNN: “In ten years’ time, most of the low-lying atolls surrounding Tuvalu’s nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean will be submerged under water as global warming rises sea levels.”  [Update:  hasn't happened.]
• Oct 20, 2009, Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister (referring to the Copenhagen climate conference): “World leaders have just 50 days to save the Earth from irreversible global warming.”  [Update: We're now nine years past that, and warming is still paused (i.e. no change within the margin of error in the estimate)]

Pushers of "climate change" wail that "the science is settled," and "it's no longer debatable."  In one sense they're right:  Pushers have never been willing to debate.   Many skeptics have said they'd welcome an open, public debate on the topic.  In particular, Chris Monckton has repeatedly challenged Al Gore to debate. That Al Gore has never replied to these requests is difficult to reconcile with his comments on the CBS “Early Show” (May 31, 2006):

“…the debate among the scientists is over. There is no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. There is no more scientific debate among serious people who’ve looked at the science… Well, I guess in some quarters, there’s still a debate over whether the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, or whether the Earth is flat instead of round.”

These are not the words of a person who understands science. They are the tactics of a person who realizes he doesn’t have a scientific leg to stand on.

Could there be another reason why the “climate change” pushers have been so adamant about getting everyone to accept their agenda?  One clue might be the billions of dollars that proponents have demanded to "solve" this “problem.”