A bit of inconvenient truth is starting to leak out into the public domain from the UN's climate data vaults, despite the best efforts of the gatekeepers in the media to keep a lid on it. The world is getting cooler. Not more hip, cooler. It seems, most inconveniently, that the planet has not been getting any hotter for the last 15 or so years, even though global atmospheric carbon concentration continues to rise through 400 parts per million. And all this whilst our opinion making elites have been incessantly telling us for decades that we must change our lives drastically to a non-carbon energy base or it it will all get catastrophically hotter.
This cooling is not cool for today's urban hipsters who have so much invested in rising heat. What are we to do with our carbon taxes and trading schemes, our Priuses, our bicycles, our food miles, our righteous indignation, and our smug sense of superiority about our special insight into our planet's climatic doom?
Watch now for the imminent unsignalled posture pivot to a transgressive new "cool": Global winter.
The scramble that is likely to ensue in the coming decade to claim a piece of this emerging new contradictory paradigm in art, music, film, literature and popular culture, should be well worth the price of the ticket for those who like to watch.
At least one wise old head wasn't suckered into the prevailing narrative to date. Have you read this fascinating article from the New York Times in 2009 about Freeman Dyson, reputably one of the smartest people currently sharing this planet with the rest of us? Do. It seems he has remained properly scientifically sceptical about global warming, whilst all the climate hysterics have been screaming at us all about the sky falling.
Christopher Booker has set us all a challenge in his article in UK Sunday Telegraph on 27 April 2013 with a searching question:
What about Neville Chamberlain's "Peace in our Time" proclamation Christopher? I admit that this became pervious to rational discussion when Poland was subsequently invaded. Or Mao Tse Tung's Cultural Revolution in China? I guess starving 300 million peasants to death did eventually change the People's Republic's agricultural practices. What about Stalin's communist utopia in Soviet Russia? Yes I suppose it did eventually morph into Putin's oligarchic state after 70 odd years.
Maybe a better comparable "almighty disconnect" is between the pre-Copernican Earth-centred cosmology and the subsequent heliocentric view. It took centuries for the sun-centred model of the universe to supplant the Medieval Earth-centred universe, even after Nicholas Copernicus demonstrated the reality of our planet's place in the solar system. It only took the climate hysterics of the late 20th century about 20 years to flip our world view back to an Earth-centred one yet again on climate. It is a curious irony that it is the failure of the alarmists' Climate models to have adequate regard to the influence of the Sun on the Earth's climate that seems to be one of the principle reasons their climate models have been so poor in predicting global temperatures. Their immensely complex models dealing with carbon "forcings", cloud formation and ocean currents, somehow blinded them to the obvious: that less heat from the Sun would mean a cooler Earth. This notion didn't fit their anthropogenic hypothesis, so it was not adequately taken into account. And we now appear to be on the cusp of a little ice age, apparently due to reduced solar radiation and sun-spot activity. All this whilst we were have been told definitively and continuously by the good and the great in science and politics that our global ice caps were in irretrievable retreat, that we were facing inundation from rising sea levels and inevitable doom in our overheated planet due to the greenhouse effects from the buildup in atmospheric CO2. Isn't hubris an amazing phenomenon?
Christopher Booker's point remains good though. The disconnect we are observing between climate policy today and the observable world we live in and experience, seems truly to be on the same monumental scale as these previous historical misconceptions. Maybe we live in interesting times after all?
It could take at least one, probably two, full generations from now before the systematic embedding of the global warming fallacy in our children, becomes sufficiently diluted by time so that the hysterical over-reaction to carbon consumption no longer materially affects our political discourse. It could be tiresome, uneven and unsettling for many of us for the rest of our lives, as we adjust to the different paces at which the millions of true believers climb down from their sense of certainty about humanity's catastrophic climate doom from over consumption of and dependence on fossil fuels.
This cooling is not cool for today's urban hipsters who have so much invested in rising heat. What are we to do with our carbon taxes and trading schemes, our Priuses, our bicycles, our food miles, our righteous indignation, and our smug sense of superiority about our special insight into our planet's climatic doom?
Watch now for the imminent unsignalled posture pivot to a transgressive new "cool": Global winter.
The scramble that is likely to ensue in the coming decade to claim a piece of this emerging new contradictory paradigm in art, music, film, literature and popular culture, should be well worth the price of the ticket for those who like to watch.
At least one wise old head wasn't suckered into the prevailing narrative to date. Have you read this fascinating article from the New York Times in 2009 about Freeman Dyson, reputably one of the smartest people currently sharing this planet with the rest of us? Do. It seems he has remained properly scientifically sceptical about global warming, whilst all the climate hysterics have been screaming at us all about the sky falling.
Christopher Booker has set us all a challenge in his article in UK Sunday Telegraph on 27 April 2013 with a searching question:
"... Has there ever in history been such an almighty disconnect between observable reality and the delusions of a political class that is quite impervious to any rational discussion ?. ..'
What about Neville Chamberlain's "Peace in our Time" proclamation Christopher? I admit that this became pervious to rational discussion when Poland was subsequently invaded. Or Mao Tse Tung's Cultural Revolution in China? I guess starving 300 million peasants to death did eventually change the People's Republic's agricultural practices. What about Stalin's communist utopia in Soviet Russia? Yes I suppose it did eventually morph into Putin's oligarchic state after 70 odd years.
Maybe a better comparable "almighty disconnect" is between the pre-Copernican Earth-centred cosmology and the subsequent heliocentric view. It took centuries for the sun-centred model of the universe to supplant the Medieval Earth-centred universe, even after Nicholas Copernicus demonstrated the reality of our planet's place in the solar system. It only took the climate hysterics of the late 20th century about 20 years to flip our world view back to an Earth-centred one yet again on climate. It is a curious irony that it is the failure of the alarmists' Climate models to have adequate regard to the influence of the Sun on the Earth's climate that seems to be one of the principle reasons their climate models have been so poor in predicting global temperatures. Their immensely complex models dealing with carbon "forcings", cloud formation and ocean currents, somehow blinded them to the obvious: that less heat from the Sun would mean a cooler Earth. This notion didn't fit their anthropogenic hypothesis, so it was not adequately taken into account. And we now appear to be on the cusp of a little ice age, apparently due to reduced solar radiation and sun-spot activity. All this whilst we were have been told definitively and continuously by the good and the great in science and politics that our global ice caps were in irretrievable retreat, that we were facing inundation from rising sea levels and inevitable doom in our overheated planet due to the greenhouse effects from the buildup in atmospheric CO2. Isn't hubris an amazing phenomenon?
Christopher Booker's point remains good though. The disconnect we are observing between climate policy today and the observable world we live in and experience, seems truly to be on the same monumental scale as these previous historical misconceptions. Maybe we live in interesting times after all?
It could take at least one, probably two, full generations from now before the systematic embedding of the global warming fallacy in our children, becomes sufficiently diluted by time so that the hysterical over-reaction to carbon consumption no longer materially affects our political discourse. It could be tiresome, uneven and unsettling for many of us for the rest of our lives, as we adjust to the different paces at which the millions of true believers climb down from their sense of certainty about humanity's catastrophic climate doom from over consumption of and dependence on fossil fuels.
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