Throughout human history there are have arisen various groups who for one reason or another believe that the end of the world is near. (c.f., Longing for the End: A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization). In modern Christianity, this belief is known as millennialism, from the notion that the end of the world will usher in a 1000 year reign of Christ on Earth. For the purposes of this post, the most significant feature of millennialism is the persistence of the belief no matter how often they are proven wrong! From the Heaven's Gate group who believed the Hale-Bopp comet signified the end of the Earth to the nut on the street corner with the sign that "Jesus is Coming", no matter how often their prophecies fail to come to pass, these believers simply pick a new date, and begin again to wait for the end.
The belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming has now achieved the status of a millennial cult. Observations confirm that the earth is in a cooling phase (Warming Might Be On Hold, Study Finds):.
Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat. ... [Study authors] think a series of climate processes have aligned, conspiring to chill the climate. [T]he overall trend is flat, even though temperatures should have gone up by 0.2 degrees Centigrade (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) during that time.
This study confirms the effects last year's observation of a change in global ocean circulation (Ocean Cooling to Briefly Halt Global Warming, Researchers Say):
Parts of North America and Europe may cool naturally over the next decade, as shifting ocean currents temporarily blunt the global-warming effect caused by mankind ... Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next 10 years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period.
The remarkable thing is that both announcements go on to caution readers not to believe the empirical evidence:
[I]t's just a hiccup, and ... humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us. ... "When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming. Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."
... and ...
Without knowing that [natural climate variations could be stronger than the global-warming trend over the next 10-year period], you might erroneously think there's no global warming going on.
If we don't experience warming over the next 10 years, it doesn't mean that greenhouse-gas warming is not with us.
So observations and empirical evidence that the earth's climate is being controlled by natural cycles, which may or may not be part of an overall gradual warming trend, are to be discounted because of a belief in anthropogenic global warming, whose central premise of CO2 based climate forcing depends on a positive feedback loop that has been invalidated at every occurrence. When the warming predicted by the AGW models fails to occur, and fails not only in magnitude but even so far that cooling occurs instead, the adherents of AGW have the audacity to tell us that their premise is still operative, and that warming will still occur, later, and with larger effect. (The only similar phenomena known to man is President Obama's insistence that the trillion dollar deficits he proposes in the near years will result in a smaller deficit at the end of four years.)
When people believe in a thing that cannot be proven by science, and must be taken as an article of faith, we call that thing a religion. And when that religion makes predictions of doom which serially fail to occur, we call that religion a millennial cult. The belief in Anthropogenic Global Warming has now reached that status. Remember this when energy costs double because of President Obama's carbon-cap-and-trade scheme. When gas returns to $4 a gallon because of President Obama's restrictions on oil exploration and attacks on the oil companies. When the American and global economies continue their downward spiral because abundant wealth requires abundant energy, and President Obama's policies intend to deliver neither.
Update: Mario Lewis, writing in National Review Online, describes new reticence among AGW fanatics that he attributes to the fear of invoking a Political Backlash if their CO2 cap-and-trade policies cause further destruction in the economy. Another, perhaps simpler, explanation, is that the leaders of the AGW movement knew all along that their predictions were overwrought and their prescriptions infeasible, and that having successfully employed their eco-propaganda solely for the purpose of bashing business and the Bush administration, they are now hypocritically prepared to tone down their rhetoric to give political cover to their Simian Messiah.
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