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Friday, January 16, 2009
David Harsanyi :: Townhall.com Columnist
Debate Over; It's Freezing
by David Harsanyi
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What was the biggest suprise of Election Day?



The carbon footprint of Barack Obama's inauguration could exceed 575 million pounds of CO2. According to the Institute for Liberty, it would take the average U.S. household nearly 60,000 years of naughty ecological behavior to produce a carbon footprint equal to the largest self-congratulatory event in the history of humankind.

The same congressfolk who now are handing out thousands of tickets to this ecological disaster mandated only recently the phased elimination of the incandescent light bulb -- a mere carbon tiptoe, if you will. The whole thing seems a bit unfair.

And on the day millions of Americans were freezing their collective backside off, the new Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, Henry Waxman, announced that Congress would fast-track climate change legislation. Waxman claimed, as The Associated Press put it, "Inaction on the climate issue is causing uncertainties that make it more difficult to emerge from the recession."

Waxman's methane emission merely would reek if it weren't so catastrophically sad. I learned long ago that any dissent on climate alarmism will be met with unflinching fury, but is there anyone who can argue genuinely that inaction on "climate issues" (formerly known as global warming) has had a fundamental impact on the economic downturn?

Our plight, in actuality, likely will be exacerbated if Waxman gets his way. Playing on the public's fear of climate change, we almost certainly are about to see a nationalized energy policy and price controls through cap and trade.

The late economist and journalist Henry Hazlitt once wrote that those who attempt "to lift the prices of particular commodities permanently above their natural market levels have failed so often, so disastrously and so notoriously" that no one admits to wanting to try it. Then again, in those heady days, the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman's job was actually of assisting Americans with their energy needs, not making it more expensive.

I've been informed, quite forcefully, that "climate change" can induce weather to warm, make it colder and, miraculously, produce whatever climate condition we happen to be experiencing at that very moment. So I wholeheartedly concur with my environmentalist friends: Climate does indeed make weather fluctuate. Continued...

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Models, cont.
I'm sure nothing any of us here say is going to halt the development of computer climate modeling, and it shouldn't. My objection is not to pursuing science, but to making economic and political decisions with potentially hazardous outcomes without enough solid evidence to do so. To make science political. I think that's dangerous. And that's what I see happening with global warming (or climate change) alarmism. I think the general public hears "computer" and thinks "well, it MUST be right, then--computers are smart!" But god knows how many different things affect the climate. Sure, we know some...but we disagree about others. We may have missed a couple. Or over or underestimated the influence of others. Should we be using ground-based temps, or satellite ones (which seem to indicate cooling, not warming)? Read that history of GCMs that you linked to...they're all over the place with those models. They often can't even agree among themselves.

Re: models
No, Mark, I'm not saying they are the EXACT same models. In fact, I've said twice now that they are being revised. The problem in my mind is there just isn't enough certainty to make a decent model. In addition, a "more advanced" model made today that predicts the state of affairs in thirty years can't be truly validated for thirty years. How much more will we know between now and then that may require yet another "revision" of the models. And so they never really get tested with real world values. That test is always just around the corner. The end of the world is always coming, just around the corner, be it a cold or warm end.

And as for the clouds, I didn't say the models weren't trying to include that information, just that they don't really know how to include it. I stand by the quote I used. And these are from the link that you yourself included in your post:

"both theory and observation of the absorption of solar radiation in clouds are still fraught with uncertainties."

"Struggling with a swarm of such technical uncertainties, experts could not even say whether more tropical clouds would tend to hold back global warming, or hasten it by trapping radiation rising from below."

Which I think is pretty much what I said.

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