Hoping for the crazy
<p>The biggest non-story that should be in the news right now, but isn&#8217;t, is the collapse of anthropogenic-global-warming &#8220;science&#8221; into rubble.  Global average temperature has been flat for between 15 and 17 years, depending on how you interpret the 1997-1998 El Nino event.  Recently GAT, perking along its merry level way, has fallen out of the bottom of the range of predictions made by the climate modelers at the IPCC. By the normal 95%-confidence standards of scientific confirmation, the IPCC&#8217;s disaster scenarios &#8211; the basis for, among other things, carbon taxes and the EPA&#8217;s coming shutdown-by-impossible-regulation of U.S. coal power &#8211; are now busted.</p>
<p>AGW alarmists have responded by actually <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/20/upshot/how-el-nino-might-alter-the-political-climate.html?_r=0">hoping in public view</a> that a strong El Ni&ntilde;o event later this year will shove GAT back up into consistency with the IPCC models, rescuing their narrative.</p>
<p>This&#8230;this is hoping for the crazy. Let me count the ways:</p>
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<p>First, the IPCC models, which are all about CO2/H20 greenhousing in the atmosphere, do not include or predict the long-period oceanic oscillations that produce El Ni&ntilde;o.  So if the El Ni&ntilde;o does push up GAT (as it did in 1997-1998) it won&#8217;t actually confirm the IPCC models; the alarmists are going to have to <em>lie</em> to claim that it does, and it&#8217;s a lie easily checked and debunked.</p>
<p>Second, El Ni&ntilde;o has a sister; it is normally followed by an  &#8220;La Ni&ntilde;a&#8221; event, the flip side of the oscillation, that pulls GAT down as strongly as El Ni&ntilde;o pulls it up.  So if the alarmists run around crowing that El Ni&ntilde;o has rescued the model fit, they&#8217;ll be setting themselves up for a bad scientific and political fall when La Ni&ntilde;a comes around and yanks GAT back out of range.</p>
<p>Third, Santayana&#8217;s definition of a fanatic is relevant here.  If you believe, as alarmists claim to, that more global warming would be a civilization- and biosphere-wrecking catastrophe, why in the holy fuck would you <em>object</em> to the IPCC models that predicted it being busted?  </p>
<p>The sane reaction would be &#8220;OK, great, there was no climate-change bullet coming, now we can put energy into fixing real threats like biodiversity loss and the Great Pacific Garbage Vortex&#8221;.  Mightily wishing that catastrophic AGW is real after all, or that the El Ni&ntilde;o bump can be misrepresented to make it look real, is <em>insane</em>, even in the environmentalists&#8217; own terms.</p>
<p>That is, unless the right-wing paranoids were on the money about the whole AGW thing being a political shuck after all &#8211; or anyway, more on the money than <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1631">I allowed myself to believe</a>. I hate it when that happens&#8230;</p>
