June 24, 2013
President Obama’s White House website recently unveiled a one-and-a-half-minute video, “Addressing the threat of Climate Change,” (see video below) in which he underscores his commitment to enact energy policies that he says will help stem the damage to the planet that, supposedly, is being caused by man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other green house gases (GHGs).
A big problem for the president and others in the global warming choir is that even many of the most faithful voices in that choir are dropping out and starting to sing another tune. The British journal The Economist, one of the most revered opinion bellwethers of the chattering classes, has for years been a leading purveyor of the Al Gore-IPCC end-of-the-world fright peddling, when it comes to global warming. However, in a major about-face on June 20, “Climate change: A cooling consensus,” The Economist takes writers at the New Republic and theWashington Post to task for admitting that the global warming projections predicted by the computer models have failed, while at the same time trying to spin the results in such as way as to maintain the urgency for enacting drastic (and very costly) climate policies.
“… the public has been systematically deceived.” — The Economist
The Economist criticizes Nate Cohn at The New Republic and Brad Plumer at the Washington Post for clinging to support for policies that promise plenty of pain while offering no gain, especially since they acknowledge that time and reality have proven the predicted warming scenarios to have been false. The Economist piece notes:
“… the public has been systematically deceived.” — The Economist
The Economist criticizes Nate Cohn at The New Republic and Brad Plumer at the Washington Post for clinging to support for policies that promise plenty of pain while offering no gain, especially since they acknowledge that time and reality have proven the predicted warming scenarios to have been false. The Economist piece notes:
Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meager prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.
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