It appears that the new scientific consensus is also unraveling.

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With tornadoes in the news lately, here’s a timely gem from the climate change hysteria vault. 

On April 28, 1975, Newsweek ran an article entitled “The Cooling World” that blamed global cooling for “the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded.”  It’s worth quoting at length, to note the conspicuous rhetorical parallels with today’s alarmism: 

“To scientists, these seemingly-disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather.  The central fact is that after three-quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.  Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions.  But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century.  If the climatic change is as profound as some pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic.  ‘A major climate change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,’ warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, ‘because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.’ 

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968.  According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72.” 

Today, of course, global warming is the scapegoat for tornadoes and every other imaginable weather occurrence.  Ignore the old “almost unanimous” scientific consensus.  All hail the new scientific consensus. 

Actually, strike that.  It appears that the new scientific consensus is also unraveling. 

This week, The New York Times ran its own article entitled “What to Make of a Warming Plateau.”  “As unlikely as this may sound,” it began, “we may have lucked out in recent years when it comes to global warming.” 

Well, it wasn’t “unlikely” to anyone living outside the global warming echo chamber.  And “lucked out” is apparently its euphemism for “been completely, embarrassingly wrong.” 

Regardless, this amounts to a milestone mea culpa from one of global warming orthodoxy’s loudest trumpets: 

“The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the past 15 years than in the 20 years before that.  And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.  The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists…  [G]iven how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on.  They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested.  The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.” 

The Times subsequently offers unintentional humor in its search for an explanation: 

“A lot of evidence suggests that sunlight-blocking pollution from dirty factories may have played a role, as did natural variability in ocean circulation.  The pollution was ultimately reduced by stronger clean-air laws in the West.  Today, factory pollution from China and other developing countries could be playing a similar role in blocking some sunlight.  We will not know for sure until we send up satellites that can make better measurements of particles in the air.” 

So let us get this straight.  Flat temperatures over the past twenty years suddenly trigger calls for caution and lamentation that current technology doesn’t allow for definitive answers.  Yet the Times and others were perfectly comfortable sounding the global warming alarm starting two decades ago, even though technology was less advanced throughout that period?  And despite the fact that several decades of global cooling preceded the brief warming period that triggered such hysteria?  And now we don’t know whether “pollution from dirty factories” causes global warming or inhibits it? 

Undeterred, the same Times article assures us that carbon emissions cause a greenhouse effect: 

“We certainly cannot conclude, as some people want to, that carbon dioxide is not actually a greenhouse gas.  More than a century of research thoroughly disproves that claim.” 

Presumably, the century of research disproving that claim is totally separate from the research that previously assured them of impending global warming cataclysm.  “Rising temperatures,” it wrote on June 16, 2002, “are not a topic of debate or distraction.” 

Meanwhile, this week the International Energy Agency announced that global carbon dioxide emissions increased 1.4% in 2012 to a record 31.6 gigatons.  Accordingly, carbon emissions have continuously increased to record highs, yet temperatures over the past two decades have flattened. 

Perhaps the prevailing climate orthodoxy at the Times will finally move from the front page to its more rightful place in the obituaries.