While I have not seen one in a very many years, back in the days when New York's Times Square was a den of iniquity, it was not uncommon to see religiously inspired people pacing the sidewalks wearing sandwich boards proclaiming, "The End is Near." Some Apocalyptic groups went so far as to find specific dates by which the world would end. The New Yorker magazine would have great fun with such types, occasionally printing a cartoon in which a character is seen crossing out a date that just passed and replacing it with a date set off in the near future. The humor was in the recognition that once the date of a catastrophe passed without the catastrophe occurring, the proponents became discredited and subject to ridicule.
The "Global Warming" catastrophe has not yet occurred (safely established as >40 years in the future) but the first signs of the Apocalypse are scheduled for the next several years, when the danger will supposedly become irreversible. We are much too sophisticated to prematurely ridicule the alarmists* but it is safe to say that the "Global Warming" crisis as a poltical issue has already passed its peak; its political utility will end with the 2008 Presidential elections and it remains yet to be seen how influential it will be as an election issue.
[*The ridicule that Al Gore, John Edwards, and other energy profligate AGW alarmists have been subject to has been achieved the old fashioned way: They earned it.]
There are several signs that we have passed the peak of the "Global Warming" inspired hysteria and unmistakable evidence that as a serious political issue, it will have diminishing effects as time goes on.
The first sign that Anthropogenic Global Warming is over as an issue is the simple fact that the meme has been adjusted in the face of the accrual of evidence. It is no coincidence that Global Warming is rarely discussed anymore; now we are to be alarmed by the new, more modest meme of "Climate Change." Climate Change, of course, is a bit of a redundancy, since climate has been forever changing. Nonetheless, the fact that even environmental groups speak primarily about the terrible dangers of Climate Change rather than Global Warming is a giveaway that they have little faith in their computer models to accurately predict the future.
However, the most significant reason for believing that Climate Change has reached the end of its political utility comes from the recent G-8 summit.
G8 backs climate-change science, sets no hard goals
Leaders from the world's eight major industrialized nations "accepted the latest scientific evidence" of the dangers of global warming Thursday but set no targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
President Bush arrived at the Group of Eight (G8) conference Wednesday with a proposal that is similar to what the representatives embraced, despite a desire by German Chancellor Angela Merkel for hard targets.
He proposed last week that the United States establish a new framework on global gas emissions to counter the effects of global warming.
"My proposal is this: By the end of next year, America and other nations will set a long-term global goal for reducing greenhouse gases," Bush said at that time.
According to the communique agreed on Thursday, nations will stabilize, then reduce, greenhouse gas emissions and will "seriously consider" plans by the European Union, Canada and Japan for halving emissions by 2050.
There are two important points in this that recognize the triumph of reality over apocalyptic hysteria. The first is that the Kyoto protocols were a disaster for those nations which pledged to adhere to them. Furthermore, the rapid industrialization of China and India (not to mention Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa) rendered any framework that excluded them essentially meaningless.
Second, the key point that emerged from the G-8 meeting was that President Bush admitted that Climate Change needs to be addressed:
The G8 nations agreed Thursday to work through the United Nations for a successor to the protocol.
"Since we met in Gleneagles, [Scotland], science has more clearly demonstrated that climate change is a long-term challenge that has the potential to seriously damage our natural environment and the global economy," the G8 said in its report.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose country has the rotating G8 presidency for 2007, had pressed for firm targets, but claimed she was "very satisfied" with Thursday's outcome.
The leaders, she said, accepted the latest scientific evidence of the danger of inaction.
Bush has convinced some officials that he is now taking global warming seriously, and he offered to be a liaison between Europeans, eager to see tough limits on carbon emissions, and nations with growing economies, who fear a slowdown if they agree. [Emphasis mine-SW]
For the international community, getting Bush to admit AGW is serious is a triumph without meaning. It makes them feel better and allows them to table the issue.
When politicians think that a problem is too complex, too conflictual, or too foolish to address, they set up special committees to investigate the problem, explore solutions, and make recommendations. In almost every case, by the time the final report comes out the commission reports are distributed, read by almost no one and placed in appropriate file cabinets for future neglect. The UN specializes in committees that write impressive reports that no politicians ever pay any attention to. Any UN Climate Change report is likely to follow that time honored trajectory.
The new consensus on Climate Change is due to be produced in 2009 for action by the next President. By the time our next President has begun to address the issue, China will have surpassed the United States in CO2 emissions, which will shift the argument considerably. While the UN and the Europeans have some limited sway over American politics by virtue of their ability to leverage the MSM and public opinion, no one believes that the government of China, in a race to bring prosperity to its people more rapidly than their restiveness increases, will care one iota for the sentiments of wealthy Western environmentalists.
In addition, by the middle of the next President's term, with almost 4 more years of data, a truer picture of the extent and complexity of climate change will be coming into focus. If the near term data follow the model of the present data, it will become quite clear whether or not the most dire predictions are coming to fruition; the most likely outcome of three or four more years of data will be that climate is inherently extraordinarily complex, that all the factors involved in climate have not yet been identified and quantified, and that climate, above all, is not a static system. As important, even if the data show unequivocally that increases in greenhouse gases are causing dangerous oscillations in climate, it will also be clear that only technological advances have the potential to change the data in any significant ways. Putting money into energy research will pay off long before, and after, money is paid in offsets and taxes.
Most importantly, our next President will be much more concerned with his or her future electoral prospects that the distant threat of too much man-made CO2 in the air in 2050. While there are all sorts of excellent reasons to encourage energy conservation, decrease our dependency on fossil fuels, and reduce our emissions, no President will risk a recession in order to drastically slash greenhouse gases before replacement technologies are ready to replace our current energy production industries; neither will any President, Democrat or Republican (not to mention any elected official who plans on a future in politics) risk their political life by doing the one thing that can be done short term to decrease greenhouse gas emissions, ie raise the price of gasoline by adding a significant tax.
For all these reasons, 2008 will, thankfully, be the last election where Climate Change and AGW are discussed as real issues which require draconian solutions.
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