Children of the Global Warming Scare: coming of age with no global warming over their lifetimes

Cartoons by Josh

Children born 18 years ago have lived their lives without any of the 'global warming' with which some people have been intent on scaring them witless.

At school, they would have seen those graphs of relentless rising CO2 levels and rising temperatures in the last decades of the 20th century.  They might well have seen propagandists such as Al Gore up a stepladder declaiming how one caused the other.  They might have heard of a Dr Hansen who on a hot day in 1988 warned the world of those relentless rises.

They could well have seen the MBH hockey stick plot of temperatures published in 1998,  and widely promoted by campaigners including the IPCC for some years.  It was a contrivance of no scientific merit other than serving the PR needs of those intent on scaring politicians, as well as children, about how rising CO2 was dominating our climate.

Well, the CO2 has continued to rise - at rates well above some of the projections used by such as the aforementioned Dr Hansen.  But here's the thing, the global mean temperature, once so widely display in reports, textbooks, press conferences, leaflets, presentations and videos, has not risen along with it.

WUWT

The temperature rise turned out to be not so relentless after all.    A cause of much rejoicing you might suppose?  Far from it.  Catastrophe-talk has been so advantageous for so many people jumping on the global warming bandwagon, that they will not give up on it so easily,  Merely being contradicted by the data is only something that decent scientists would be troubled by.  As Feynman for example has pointed out, when your theory is contradicted by the data, your theory is wrong.  But decent scientists are few, and self-serving followers of the climate catastrophe cult are many, and they don't really care about the science. Here are some illustrations of that:

'We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.' - Timothy Wirth, former US senator

'No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits . . . Climate change provides the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world.'  - Christine Stewart, former environment minister in Canada

Another key insight for eco-activists is this related one:
'It doesn't matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.'  - Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace 

John Christy, one of the world's decent climate scientists has noted this disgraceful and unscientific view out there:  'there is still a strong belief system that greenhouse gases control the climate, and so if that is your belief system, then it doesn’t really matter what the evidence shows.'

It encourages this sort of thing:
'The Communist Party USA’s environmental program “presents a viable plan to carry out on the long march to socialism.”'  - Havel Wolf, Seattle Audubon Society

And this sort of thing:
'Are you interested in reducing your carbon footprint?  How about playing a part in the survival of a virgin rain forest and the numerous species found within? Are you interested in making extra income and helping OURF raise funds in the process? If so, you can get involved in the worldwide effort to combat global warming by participating in the global carbon credit market.'  -  Oppor Tunistic, a fundraiser typical of many.

And even this sort of thing:

Grist

I wonder what she will be angry about eight years from now?  Her parents?  Her lost childhood?  The harm and suffering caused by renewables?  The frequent powercuts?  Rotten teaching?  The nightmares she had about global warming? 










Meanwhile, alarmers are busy promoting more satisfactory totems for their purposes now that global mean air temperature near the surface has so badly let them down.  Lubos looks more deeply into fatuous temperature targets. They are stupid targets but my goodness they served the alarmists well for decades by giving the impression we could decide on planetary temperatures merely by destroying our civilisation.  'Stupid' is too good a word for such people.  Children of the Warming Scare will have been harmed by them.  Perhaps as adults, they will be able to think more for themselves, and begin to develop a calmer, more rational, and more optimistic view of their future.

(Hat-tip for the Josh cartoon: Bishop-Hill)