The United States took a big step closer to implementing global warming legislation late last month when the House passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, better known as Waxman-Markey. The bill aims to drastically cut American carbon emissions in order to slow or stop global warming. Critics like the Wall Street Journal and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have focused on the damage the bill will do the economy, with the latter calling it the “largest tax hike in world history.”
If global warming indisputably existed and if it were as destructive as Al Gore claims, the damage to the economy might be worth it. Unfortunately, this is not the case. In a cruel twist of fate, the weeks since the bill’s passage have been filled with announcements and news stories that have weakened the already shaky theory of anthropogenic global warming. Some of them are inconsequential, anecdotal events, like the amazingly cold summer that North Dakota is having. Others, though, question the very foundations of anthropogenic global warming theory. USA Today’s Science Fair blog reports on the findings of a study published in Nature Geoscience. The author of the study examined a natural warming period that occurred 55 million years ago, when the earth warmed by about 13 degrees over the course of 10,000 years, and concluded that carbon dioxide levels can only account for about half of that warming. The implications of this are obvious. First, the world experienced rapid warming long before the appearance of humans. Second, that warming must have taken place through some mechanism that current models do not account for.
If a model can’t even explain past data, we can hardly expect it to predict the future. It comes as no surprise, then, that the most recent satellite data shows that the Earth has cooled over the last few years. In defiance of every significant climate model, the Earth is now no warmer than it was at the beginning of Bush’s first term. Global warming has stopped dead in its tracks even as carbon emissions have grown. No wonder Al Gore thinks it’s so important to act now! If we wait too long, the theory of anthropogenic global warming might be entirely discredited.
Of course, that’s not quite true. No matter how many pieces of inconvenient evidence surface, the true believers will march onwards. The theory of global warming moved on from being scientific a long time ago. A scientific theory must have some sort of predictive power. For example, the Theory of Relativity states that an observer traveling near the speed of light will observe the universe in a particular way. The flip side of this is that if an observer were to observe the universe in some different way, then the theory would have to be adjusted to take account of those conditions. By contrast, contemporary global warming theory has no predictive power whatsoever. It makes no specific predictions, and consequently can not be disproven.
The most powerful anecdotal evidence of this is the January 2004 speech about global warming that Al Gore gave in New York on the coldest day in years. When his advisers pointed out that this might not be well received, Gore explained, “The extreme conditions are actually the end result of the planet warming. The Bush policies are leading to weather extremes.” While it may be true that global warming would cause the occasional exceptionally cold day, this “heads I win, tails you lose” mentality seems to be the signature of the global warming movement. Everything from heat waves and hurricanes to cold snaps and blizzards is evidence of “climate change.” Even the lack of change in temperature over the last decade has now been retroactively predicted by the newest models. Consequently, climate change theory replaces genuine predictive power with a truism: the weather will occasionally do weird things. If you think this sells the theory short, conduct a thought experiment. Can you imagine any weather pattern over the next decade that would shake Al Gore and James Hansen’s beliefs in anthropogenic global warming?
At some point during the next few months, the Senate will consider cap-and-trade legislation. Let’s hope that the senators recognize that the rationale for this incredibly destructive regulation has more in common with superstition than with science.
Max Rosett is a weekly contributor to The DC Writeup and the author of the blog Ivy Sneakers.
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July 22nd, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Good work Max. Have you read the Skeptical Environmentalist? I had fun with that book in college… Also, you might like the works of Steve Hayward.
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