The Slow Death of a Hoax

The bogus hypothesis of Catastrophic Anthropogenic (Man-Made) Global Warming is a terminal case, and now it's just a question of much longer we'll have to endure this nonsense. A good sign has come from the Economist, who has been on board the CAGW ship for some time, but is now having second thoughts over the fact that global temperatures have been flat for almost two decades. When a well respected,  international publication starts looking for the exits, you know the end has moved a lot closer:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750...Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise... If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

That doesn't mean they've completely thrown in the towel. When you've banked a lot of your credibility on a fraud, it's natural to slowly back out of the room:

  It does not mean global warming is a delusion... But the puzzle does need explaining. 

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

Or it likely means the alarmists don't know what the hell they're talking about and never did. There's always been a lot of holes in the CAGW argument, that have been met with ridicule, threats, hysteria and logical fallacies. But the biggest ones are also the most basic: How is it that climate scientists can predict the future behavior of an enormous, non-linear system with thousands of variables to any acceptable degree of accuracy?   How can they even measure current worldwide temperature averages to 1/100 of a degree with any confidence? It's just not believable, especially when you consider that all the historic measurements beyond thirty years are just speculative reconstructions of unreliable data. And how is it that alarmist climate scientists are immune from confirmation bias in the face of all the money, power and prestige at stake in this debate?

The Church of Global Warming is also facing an ironic dilemma in its quest to eliminate fossils fuels and dismantle modern civilization:

 But the real capper is that the United States actually achieved its (unratified) Kyoto Protocol target without the help of environmentalists.  In fact, we hit the Kyoto target in spite of environmentalists—it’s entirely the result of the fracking natural gas boom that environmentalists wished had never happened and are retrospectively trying to roll back.  Coal-fired power is being rapidly supplanted by cheap gas-fired power, which has half the CO₂ emissions as coal per BTU of energy.  If environmentalists had their way, CO₂ emissions might actually go back up, because we’d switch back to coal.

That's not good news for CAGW high-priests like Bill Mckibben, who now finds himself simultaneously screaming for reduced carbon emissions while opposing the free market phenomenon of hydraulic fracturing that is largely responsible for reducing those emissions.    

The well-deserved death of this biggest fraud in human history is coming but it wont be easy or pretty. The amount of money, power, careers and infrastructure that depends on the CAGW myth is huge and has weaved itself into much public policy. These parasites will not go quietly and can always be expected to dream up novel arguments and new scares. That's what they do, because it's not about the environment and never has been.