It’s been a rough year for those who make their living alarming the public about the threat of man-made global warming. And the new year doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better. It’s freezing across much of the globe and the record breaking cold is creating problems for the types of “indigenous” communities that we are supposed to worry about with warming.
I know, of course, that one cold snap doesn’t mean anything about whether the world, which has been around millions of years after all, is warming or not (although warming alarmists seem perfectly happy to cease on any hurricane as evidence of man-made warming). The public should rightfully be skeptical of the claims of climate scientists after “climategate” emails revealed some of the most “prestigious” scientists cooking the numbers to make the case that the Earth is warming in an unprecedented way and have tried to game the peer-review process so that only pro-warming articles are allowed into the public sphere.
But there are scientists out there who are still trying to make sense of how many factors interact with the climate. One eye-opening article reports new findings that suggest that the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is no higher today than it was 150 years ago. Here’s how the examiner.com sums up the report:
New studies have found that most of the CO2 emitted by man does not stay in the atmosphere as previously believed. Instead, it is absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems and the oceans.
Some studies have suggested that this absorbing ability has been decreasing and that the airborne fraction has started to increase. Hence, with such contradicting findings, it is imperative that an accurate outlook is achieved to be able to predict climate change more efficiently.
Does this disprove the idea that we are causing temperatures to rise by releasing green house gases? Of course not, but it does suggest that there is an awful lot we don’t know about how the climate works. It might be a good New Year’s resolution for politicians to promise not to enact any economy-crushing laws or new regulations based on dubious scientific theories, and the media should resolve to stop reporting about a consensus among scientists that clearly doesn’t exist.