Posted by
Always To The Right on Tuesday, December 01, 2009 6:08:38 PM
|
The science isn’t settled
Is there a reason to be alarmed by the prospect of global warming?
Consider that the measurement used, the globally averaged temperature
anomaly (GATA), is always changing. Sometimes it goes up, sometimes
down, and occasionally—such as for the last dozen years or so—it does
little that can be discerned.
Claims that climate change is
accelerating are bizarre. There is general support for the assertion
that GATA has increased about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle
of the 19th century. The quality of the data is poor, though, and
because the changes are small, it is easy to nudge such data a few
tenths of a degree in any direction. Several of the emails from the
University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (CRU) that have
caused such a public ruckus dealt with how to do this so as to maximize
apparent changes.
We’ve certainly seen our share of bubbles created by government
interventions. The housing-market collapse triggered the worst
financial meltdown in decades, and we’re still feeding that bubble in
hopes of containing the damage. The Obama administration created a
short-lived auto bubble with its Cash for Clunkers program that ended
up targeting vehicles already on the lots from last year and eroding
demand for new production. Now Bret Stephens writes at the Wall Street Journal that the scandal known as Climategate may pop bubbles in both Academia and the artificially-created “green economy”
|