BBC: What Happened to Global Warming?

Even-handed he-said-she-said recap of the global warming debate.

The global warming alarmists get their spin in, but it's hard to overcome the central fact reported in the article's open:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

The global warming alarmists have a problem: They've claimed for 15 years that there is simply no natural mechanism that could possibly explain a one degree change in global temperatures, so all warming must be man-made.

Now that we have a period of cooling, they're claiming there is a natural mechanism big enough to both cool the earth from its 1998 high and also wipe out the "expected" additional warming that should have occurred since then. (The big cooling year of 2007 wiped out over a degree Farenheit of global warming -- in fact, it erased most of the warming that occurred this whole century.)

So -- um, what? There is no natural mechanism to explain a degree of warming, but there's a big-ass natural mechanism you now concede to conveniently explain away the cooling? Couldn't the 1975-1998 "warming" be explained as simply as the diminishment of the 1940-1975 cooling phase? If a cooling force abates, does not the earth warm?

Oh: And Charlie "ACORN whatsit?" Gibson wants you to know -- the key to defeating the Taliban is stopping global warming.

'Cuz it's causing droughts or something and that helps the Taliban.

So, like, after a 100 year program of de-industrialization of the West, we'll be all ready to finally take the fight to the Taliban who, by the way, Obama now thinks are our buds.

posted by Ace at 03:30 PM

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