Global Warming Alarmists Scrambling To Claim That They Predicted Global Cooling All Along
As Ace says, each iteration of global warming alarmism is like Windows: Backwards compatible with all previous iterations, even if that compatibility is strained and sort of buggy.
The Earth has been cooling for a decade. While it may be true (or not, depending on whose figures one uses) that 1998 was the second-warmest year on record, and that seven or eight of the years since were in the top 10, no year since has been warmer than 1998 and nearly every one has been cooler than the one before it.
The trend is decidedly downward. Indeed, the drop in temperatures since late-2007 has been so precipitous—nearly a full degree Celsius—that almost all of the global warming that has occurred since the late-1970s has disappeared. . . .When I wrote last year that this 20-year intermission in upward temperature trends bruised the credibility of global warming scientists and alarmist environmentalists, several of them wrote me to say they had never predicted steadily rising temperatures. No, no, they insisted, all along they had expected periods—even some long ones—in which temperatures would retreat before surging ahead again. So the currently cooling fit right in with what they had been predicting all along.
This, of course, was revisionist hogwash—if only because the 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claimed there was no doubt that disastrous manmade warming was already upon us. The IPCC further predicted temperatures this decade would rise 0.3C and by similar amounts every decade through 2100.
The global warming movement stopped being about the environment long ago and started being a go-to excuse to justify every sort of government tax, regulation and intervention imaginable.
