Anyone who has paid any attention to the actual science of climate change – not the dire predictions blown out of proportion by the media and by the likes of Al Gore, but the ACTUAL, REAL SCIENCE – has known for a long time that there is a vast disparity between the hype and the reality. But to put a fine point on that disparity, the Wall Street Journal has climatologists Patrick Michaels and Ryan Maue compare predictions made thirty years ago to the reality of today’s climate. What they found ought to put the final nail in the coffin of this hoax.
Not that it will.
In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen told the U.S. Senate that he had discovered a “high degree of confidence” in the relationship between human-produced CO2 and the “greenhouse effect and observed warming” of the atmosphere. It was on that summer day that the modern climate change movement is said to have begun, only to become a mainstream, hysteria-induced frenzy when Gore came out with his apocalyptic documentary in the early 2000s. Today, it is big business, this “science” of global warming, and the predictions are as dire for our future as they have ever been. But should we take them seriously?
Well, to find out, we should at least glance at this so-called “godfather” of climate change and see how HIS predictions, made thirty years ago, have held up. And that’s what Michaels and Maue set out to do:
Thirty years of data have been collected since Mr. Hansen outlined his scenarios—enough to determine which was closest to reality. And the winner is Scenario C. Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000, discounting the larger-than-usual El Niño of 2015-16. Assessed by Mr. Hansen’s model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we had capped 18 years ago the carbon-dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect. But we didn’t. And it isn’t just Mr. Hansen who got it wrong. Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have, on average, predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago.
The scientists said that the overall warming of the Earth was not the only one of Hansen’s predictions that failed to materialize in the way that he assumed. He also predicted that hurricanes and tornadoes would grow much stronger with the addition of warmer air into the mix. As Michaels and Maue put it, not only has this prediction failed to come to pass, “the opposite may be true.”
“The list of what didn’t happen,” they write, “is long and tedious.”
Ah, much like An Inconvenient Truth.
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