Yesterday Anthony Watts posted on his Climate Change blog Watts Up With That? an article by Christopher Moncton.
Times are not easy for true-believers just now. The RSS satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomaly for March, just in, shows no global warming at all for 17 years 8 months. This remarkable 212-month period, enduring from August 1996 to March 2014, represents half of the entire 423-month satellite record since it began in January 1979
Figure 1. The remarkable 212-month absence of global warming, notwithstanding a record rate of increase in CO2 concentration. The Pause – the least-squares trend on the data for the past 17 years 8 months – now extends to just over half the entire 423-month Remote Sensing Systems satellite record since January 1979.
That's quite remarkable — 17 years and 8 months with no warming. Signs of desperation are appearing as the global warmists rejoin the attack with a renewed ferocity, threatening ever more dire consequences should we ignore their warnings of climate catastrophe. Just because it isn't getting warmer doesn't mean it isn't getting warmer! Or something.
But it hasn't been getting warmer for almost two decades, and though warmists have been at a loss to explain it, they've acknowledged the truth of it. Realizing that rising temperatures have not been rising for quite some time, the warmists traded in their "Global Warming" title for the more versatile, "Global Climate Change." Not sure if it's going to be hotter or colder? Global Climate Change! That's the ticket. No matter which way the satellite data goes, we've still got a crisis!
And it's a crisis that has not gone to waste.
According to the GAO, annual federal climate spending has increased from $4.6 billion in 2003 to $8.8 billion in 2010, amounting to $106.7 billion over that period. The money was spent in four general categories: technology to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, science to understand climate changes, international assistance for developing countries, and wildlife adaptation to respond to actual or expected changes. Technology spending, the largest category, grew from $2.56 billion to $5.5 billion over this period, increasingly advancing over others in total share. Data compiled by Joanne Nova at the Science and Policy Institute indicates that the U.S. Government spent more than $32.5 billion on climate studies between 1989 and 2009. This doesn’t count about $79 billion more spent for climate change technology research, foreign aid and tax breaks for “green energy.”
The excerpt above is from an August, 2011 article in Forbes. I'm not going to add up the billions, but a lot of spending has gone on and is still going. It doesn't get the mention that it should. What you'll hear instead is from the parties cashing in on the government funding binge. Deniers are in the pay of the oil industry! So the hysteria continues.
And Obama has no plan to curtail it or cut spending of any kind. Well, that's not true. He will cut defense spending, but certainly not climate change spending, even if it's stopped getting warmer. We had more snow in New Hampshire this winter than a lot of people have seen in years — or ever. No matter. There has to be a crisis, so global warming will get a lot of government cash.
But the real crisis is political. Democrats expect to be in for a bad election year, so Obama's spending, global warming included, is the kind that's intended to win votes and campaign contributions for the Democratic party. It doesn't matter what the satellite data says.
Update: The Wall Street Journal notes the U.N. IPCC's "Fifth Assessment Report" on cimate which is somewhat less alarmists than reports past, but not by much.
The IPCC also turns out to have an agenda that's less about climate change than income inequality and redistribution. What else given the liberal fashions of the day? "Recognizing how inequality and marginalization perpetuate poverty is a prerequisite for climate-resilient development pathways," the IPCC insists, before suggesting that the costs for "global adaptation" should run between $70 billion and $100 billion a year from now until 2050.
Then we come to a bit of WSJ naivete.
[I]f you believe that the risks of climate change are sufficiently plausible that we should at least be considering an insurance policy of sorts, then the IPCC's policy recommendations could hardly be worse. The best environmental policy is economic growth. The richer you are, the more insurance you have. Wealth is what pays for robust safety standards and prevents sensible environmental regulations from being ignored or corrupted.
Yet the IPCC supports the very regulation, income redistribution and politically favored misallocation of resources that will make the world poorer—and less able to adapt if the climate threat proves to be as real as the U.N.'s computer models claim.
Income redistribution is the whole point of the global warming hysteria.
Another update: The report also says this:
"Existing gender inequalities are increased or heightened by climate-related hazards," says the report, while dilating on the deleterious effects global warming has on "discrimination based on gender, age, race, class, caste, indigeneity, and (dis)ability."
I wonder if that's "settled science" as well.
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