Cold Weather Caused The Economy To Collapse, Whither The Global Warming Now?

According to our friends on the left, the world is on a dangerous warming trend that will end in catastrophe. They tell us that a “scientific consensus” has reached this conclusion, and anyone disagreeing is a “denier” worth of scorn and derision.

Just last year National Geographic had on its cover an image of the Statue of Liberty inundated by rising seas. Earlier this month, President Obama delivered a commencement address to the University of California Irvine in which he referred to skeptics of anthropogenic global warming as “deniers.”

“The climate change deniers suggest there’s still a debate over the science,” The President told the students. “There is not.”

But today comes news that the economy “collapsed” in the first quarter of 2009, contracting at a 2.9 percent rate. It’s now expected to be a “struggle” for the national economy to hit even a 2 percent economic growth rate for the year.

What’s getting the blame for the contraction? Some of it has to do with scaled back government policies like unemployment benefits and food stamps (critics such as myself have long argued that the economy would contract after policies like expanded unemployment benefits and stimulus spending were ended), but what seems to be getting the bulk of the blame is the weather:

Now that’s the third revision to gross domestic product is in, we can make a back-of-the-envelope calculation of just how much the unusually cold winter cost the U.S. economy.

A very rough way is just to subtract the gross domestic product of the first quarter from the previous one, and divide by four (since GDP numbers are annualized). That’s a very rough way, to be sure — it assumes there were no other influences, whatsoever. Anyway, that number is $29.5 billion.

But obviously, the contraction wasn’t all weather. So, how much?

MarketWatch put that question to Gus Faucher, senior economist at PNC.

“My sense is that, in terms of contraction, more than half was due to the weather. I don’t think it had much of an impact on trade, didn’t have much to do with government, but I do think [the weather impacted] the weaker consumer spending, the drag from inventories, and a lot of what we saw in construction activity,” he said. “I would say more than $15 billion.”

That’s ironic, don’t you think?

At a time when any criticism of the hyperbolic climate change narrative that has humans warming the globe to the point of an extinction event is deemed as something on par with Holocaust denial and 9/11 trutherism, we’re now being told that our economy saw an ugly contraction because of a long and miserably cold winter.

In fact, may of the people who are the most outspoken about the devastating potential of global warming are now telling us that the economy contracted because of, uh, global cooling.

When you couple that cognitive dissonance with the fact that 95 percent of climate models projecting serious global warming are wildly inaccurate, you begin to wonder who the crazies are. The skeptics, or the people who take anthropogenic global warming as an article of faith regardless of what they see with their lying eyes.

On a somewhat related note: “EPA Employees Told to Stop Pooping in the Hallway”

The nation is in the very best of hands.