The climate change "truth" is out there

I was wrong. Indeed, it would seem I've been laboring under a misapprehension for the last couple of decades. Anthropogenic global warming is, after all, a fraud, a colossal scheme designed to subvert the very foundations of modern civilization in a favor of a socialist world government that controls every aspect of our lives down to the air fresheners in our bathrooms.

How have I come to this conclusion, one that I will admit is in direction contradiction to just about everything I have written on the subject since the late 1980s? It wasn't any one piece of evidence. Rather, it's more like I finally allowed several disparate streams of thought to coalesce into a coherent picture, one that makes so much sense it's hard to believe I haven't always known, deep within my psyche, that it was true. Here a few of those threads.

1. The notion that humans could really be responsible for initiating a global climate regime shift is just so much hubris. There are so much more powerful forces of nature involved. The sun is the most obvious suspect. Every second it pours out millions of times more heat energy than would be released if we detonated every hydrogen bomb ever made. How can we seriously believe that the mere internal combustion of fossil fuels could overwhelm its influence on the planet? Oh, the arrogance of it all.

2. The so-called greenhouse effect relies on the assumption that increasing the concentration of just a handful for gases, measured in parts per million or ever smaller fractions, could lead to a warmer planet. In reality, water vapor is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So shouldn't we be more worried about steam than the carbon dioxide emissions from coal, oil and gas emissions? Besides, everyone knows that the paleoclimatic data shows that carbon dioxide levels begin to rise AFTER the planet starts warming.

3. Al Gore is getting fat from promoting AGW. By that I mean he's profiting from his propaganda. OK, I know he wasn't exactly born into poverty. But compare his relatively modest lifestyle of the 1980s, when he was toting his celluloid slides around to church basements, to the hundreds of millions of dollars he somehow managed to earn over the last few years. Not to mention a Nobel "peace" prize (not one of the real Nobels) and an Oscar(which actually went to Davis Guggenheim, not Gore, even though Gore took to the stage to accept it).

4. The entire mainstream media can't be wrong about something as important as the fate of civilization. Sure, one or two biased sources can make an honest mistake. But just look at how many respectable journalists refuse to accept the AGW "consensus." I've been a journalist for more than 20 years and I just don't see these people falling for a lie.

5. When scientists with the stature of Freeman Dyson and the environmental credentials of David Bellamy dare to challenge the dogma of AGW, you have to sit up and take notice. And what about Joseph D'Aleo? He founded The Weather Channel, for Pete's sake! I know there were 2500 climatologists involved in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but there are thousands more out there who disagree with the IPCC's conclusions, for a wide variety of reasons. And isn't a healthy diversity of opinion more of a hallmark of sound science than marching in lock-step?

6. This past winter. While I can accept the argument that you can't base a climate forecast on isolated events, it seems to me that no matter how cold it gets and how long the current cooling trend lasts, nothing can dissuade the "true believers" from their conviction that their climate models have predicted it all. Reminds of me that line from Battlestar Galactica: "All this has happened before and will happen again." At some point you have to admit that maybe the notion of global warming just isn't the best way to describe what's going on.

7. The other day I was driving home from my weekly shopping trip and I happened to glance up at the marquee of one of the local Baptist Church. It said: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not in your own understanding." I think it's from Kings. Now, I've never been a religious man, but if it's a choice between that kind of humility and the silliness of the Fox Mulderesque "I want to believe" faith that seems to dominate the posts of realclimate.org, I'll take the former any day of the week. See my first point.

8. Is it a coincidence that the most ardent and shrill of the climate doomsayers are all left-wing political agitators? They all want to dismantle the centralized power-generating systems that have kept the lights on so reliably for a hundred and replace them with weak and irregular distributed "renewable" sources of electricity. They want to hike taxes, take cars off the road, and outlaw a lot of other technology on which we've come to rely and that forms the core of the American way of life. Sounds more like Stalinism to me.

Put all of this together and you just can't deny that there's something very wrong with the current state of climatology. I know I'm feeling a lot more confident and optimistic since I woke up and smelled the bacon. Join me.