The More Things Change...

Climate change is all the rage this week at the G-8 Summit in Europe. So let me throw some fuel on the fire and heat things up a little.

In about ten years or so, people will be reminiscing with wonderment about the massive wave of hysteria that swept through the years 1990 to 2010 concerning global warming. For soon we are to arrive at the point where every change that occurs in the world will be attributable to global warming. Here is a list of well over 400 things that are trumpeted as being caused by the evil of global warming which in turn is claimed to be caused by man. Each item is a link to the original claim source.

Yes, there is some warming of the planet over the last 100 years (most of which was prior to 1950). No, it is not primarily the result of human activity. Yes, the temperature increase is within the norm of historical cycles. No, consensus does not equate infallibility. One need only go back to the 1970's to understand. George Will does just that in this excerpt of his:

Back in the 1970s we were being… “told to be worried, very worried, about global cooling. Science magazine (Dec. 10, 1976) warned of "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation." Science Digest (February 1973) reported that "the world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age." The Christian Science Monitor ("Warning: Earth's Climate is Changing Faster Than Even Experts Expect," Aug. 27, 1974) reported that glaciers "have begun to advance," "growing seasons in England and Scandinavia are getting shorter" and "the North Atlantic is cooling down about as fast as an ocean can cool." Newsweek agreed ("The Cooling World," April 28, 1975) that meteorologists "are almost unanimous" that catastrophic famines might result from the global cooling that the New York Times (Sept. 14, 1975) said "may mark the return to another ice age." The Times (May 21, 1975) also said "a major cooling of the climate is widely considered inevitable" now that it is "well established" that the Northern Hemisphere's climate "has been getting cooler since about 1950."
In fact, the Earth is always experiencing either warming or cooling. But suppose the scientists and their journalistic conduits, who today say they were so spectacularly wrong so recently, are now correct. Suppose the Earth is warming and suppose the warming is caused by human activity. Are we sure there will be proportionate benefits from whatever climate change can be purchased at the cost of slowing economic growth and spending trillions? Are we sure the consequences of climate change -- remember, a thick sheet of ice once covered the Midwest -- must be bad? Or has the science-journalism complex decided that debate about these questions, too, is "over"?” - George Will


It's all part of what I've been calling the west's corporate guilt/messiah complex coupled with the dilemma of ego-centric man believing he is the master of his own destiny, but having an inward dread that he is not. I know... for another day.