While our new President-elect Obama is gettin’ his chill on in a posh resort on Oahu, no doubt dreaming of big tax revenues from his Cap & Trade Global-Warming-fighting fantasies, across the pond Christopher Booker is writing in the Telegraph.co.uk that “2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved.” Booker takes a look back at his year ‘08 columns and finds that one of his major themes is neatly defined by two recent items in The Daily Telegraph. Uh, hello Barack — anyone on this side payin’ any attention to this?

The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”.

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.

Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the “hottest in history” and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.

Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to “natural factors” such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely “masking the underlying warming trend”, and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).

It strains credulity when the Warmies insist that temps getting colder is definite proof that Global Warming is continuing apace. You have to be of the mind to parse the meaning of “is”, or “marriage” for that matter, to buy into that one. But, the Climate Change fanatics continue nonetheless, lead by their fearful leader ol’ Big Al Gore, high priest of the church of the Holy Order of Anthropogenic Climate Change and his “consensus” of scientific opinion. Uh, Booker has a few comments on that there ol’ “consensus”.

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence (sic) that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artefact, (sic) based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.

As well as to produce ever more reasons to promote higher and higher taxation to fight the global catastrophes headed our way. We noted here earlier in the month that at least 650 scientists that had previously bought into the U.N.’s official position on man-caused Climate Change have changed their mind. “The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.” Funny thing, these scientists were retreating from their previous pro-warming positions even before this fall’s economic declines. Now that money is disappearing almost everywhere at an alarming rate, even the politicians are asking themselves if they can justify promoting spending trillions of dollars on a problem that John Q. Public is seeing as not all that relevant, especially in comparison to being evicted from a foreclosed-mortgaged home or not being able to afford to eat properly. Hmmm, financial distress tends to focus the mind a bit, especially when what one can perceive is diametrically opposed to what the Warmies keep braying about.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.

Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for “emissions trading”, “carbon capture”, building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to “biofuels”, are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.

Booker ends this part of his column with a warning to the people of Great Britain that what they had better do is to immediately begin building more power generating sources or else “within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy will judder to a halt.”

We on this side of the pond need to face up to the same reality. Al Gore’s, and presumably also the President-elect’s fantasies of vast wind farms, acres of solar panels and switchgrass to bio-diesel refineries aren’t gonna generate the ever-increasing electricity needs of the good ol’ U.S. of A, let alone power our transportation needs. Not in my lifetime. Especially if more and more restrictions are placed on coal and oil production and processing.

How are the groveling masses supposed to properly admire Obama’s pectoral definition on their wide-screen HD TV’s if they can’t afford to pay their electric bills?

Hey Barack, you better be thinkin’ long and hard “carefully” about that one.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 12:17 pm and is filed under Global Warming B.S., POTUS Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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