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The first, on May 21, headed "Climate
change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire
Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt
for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The
Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that
this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New
Year's Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence
suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a
turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming.
Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most
costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this
supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly
unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main
drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of
the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with
the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even
worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped
sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists,
cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10
years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole
would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those
polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are
seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly
failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit
that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents,
temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively
assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying
warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than
ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific
consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long
last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper
scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have
been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a
politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated
data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient
fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst
recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those
self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every
politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan
conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists"
gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen,
panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer
afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change"
with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable
times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions
of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions
of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions
trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more
useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food
to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously
damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.
As 2009 dawns, it is time we in Britain faced up to the genuine crisis now
fast approaching from the fact that – unless we get on very soon with
building enough proper power stations to fill our looming "energy gap"
- within a few years our lights will go out and what remains of our economy
will judder to a halt. After years of infantile displacement activity, it is
high time our politicians – along with those of the EU and President Obama's
US – were brought back with a mighty jolt into contact with the real world.
Original Story: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/3982101/2008-was-the-year-man-made-global-warming-was-disproved.html
