Well, you can regard a colossal section of Eastern Canada and the US northeast as “local” if you want to, but it’s a pretty large chunk of North American real estate, and a significant fraction of world land surface, that has had bitter cold winters and mild summers for the past two years! And it’s not just the past two years, either: I can attest to cooler summers for about 5 of the past 7 years in this region. But we were told, in no uncertain terms, by global warming know-it-alls and “experts” on the internet that, though the global warming had virtually stopped by about 2005-2010, it would resume in 2011. At least in a large portion of North America, that has not been true. Maybe it’s true elsewhere.
It is interesting that you choose to compare the temperature today with that of the 1970s, rather than with the 1990s or the early 2000s. I wonder how much the average global temperature has gone up in the past 20 years specifically? Half a degree? Quarter of a degree? According to the doomsday predictions (all the world’s coastlines were going to be under nine feet of water by 2060), we were going to see more obvious upticks in temperature and coastal destruction already, even since the celebrated report with its “hockey stick” graph. Has that been the case? Why hasn’t the situation got markedly worse since the report was issued?
In any case, the issue for me is not whether or not the earth is warming. I’m quite happy to grant that the world has warmed a degree or two in the past 150 years. Maybe it’s even warmed a whole degree in the past 50 years, as a global average. As far as policy goes, it is useless information to know whether or not the earth is warming unless one can do something about it. Suppose that Eric the Red had been told that one day Greenland would no longer be inhabitable, but would be covered in ice? What could he have done about it? Nothing. (And both the warming of Greenland to the point where farmers could live there, and the subsequent cooling of Greenland to where they couldn’t, had nothing to do with human CO2 emissions. Nor did any of the 4 ice ages, in which there was a massive alternation between warming and cooling which makes our current warming look like chicken feed by comparison.)
So the question is, what proportion of the earth’s warming is caused by controllable human activities? That is vigorously debated by the experts – and would be more vigorously debated by them, if there were not a pall of political correctness thrown over the discussions. Greenhouse gases are involved, yes, everyone agrees on that – but CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. Water vapor is supposedly a bigger factor than CO2 in warming the earth. But that is ignored, because you can’t politicize water vapor the way you can politicize CO2. With CO2 the Left (which hates America, hates Europe to a lesser degree, and hates the West which includes both) can blame America, blame Europe, blame the West, and advocate draconian policies to cripple Western industry (while inconsistently allowing China, India, etc. to emit all the CO2 they want – an insane policy if we are – as alleged by the apocalyptic alarmists – in danger of having the world’s coastlines flooded by a nine-foot rise in water by 2060). Too much of the discussion is politics-driven.
Even the facts are frequently disputed. They tell us the Arctic ice will soon be gone, and then we hear about a year where the Arctic ice is almost back to where it was. They tell the polar bears are all dying off – based largely on anecdotes, it seems – and then a couple of years later someone does a count and says that there are as many polar bears as ever. They tell us the Antarctic icecap is melting and will soon be entirely gone – and then the evidence shows that at least in half of Antarctica the icecap is actually increasing. They tell us that the Himalayas will soon be entirely snow-free, and then they have to retract that claim with embarrassment. The average citizen gets weary of facts which contradict each other. We would not be in this situation if the Left had not politicized the issue of climate change. Now nobody trusts any “facts” except those from partisan sources that they agree with – which is a disaster.
The whole value of modern science rests on public trust. The public has long believed that scientists are a-political and will tell the truth – never lie and never even exaggerate, and never even “frame” the facts for particular policy purposes. The public has long believed that a scientist who is a Democrat will not tell them anything different from a scientist who is a Republican, that a scientist from Scandinavia will not tell them anything different from a scientist in a think tank in New York. We need scientists like that. But now the scientists – not all of them, maybe not even the majority, but a significant number of them – have become political animals themselves, blogging, browbeating opponents angrily, trying to stop dissident journals from publishing results, concealing data where it doesn’t fit with their agenda, etc. We now know that a Scandinavian scientist, other things being equal, will be much more leftist in his general social and political views, and particularly on AGW, than an American scientist. This tells us that there are non-scientific factors at work in the public face of science.
If the public still believed that all scientists were kindly, wise Dr. Einsteins or Dr. Schweitzers, and if scientists calmly, gently, without polemics, told us that human CO2 emissions are the overwhelmingly major cause of global warming and that we needed to reduce CO2 emissions, and if those scientists advocated policies where everyone – including India and China, the biggest global offenders – had to reduce CO2 emissions – there would be general support for such a view and such policies. But the public has seen the hacked emails, and the public sees the ugly, odious spectacle of alleged experts in climate science acting like political thugs in web debates, trying to bully and shout down dissenters, etc.
The scientists, through their own arrogance and unwillingness to tolerate dissident or minority views on global warming, have alienated large sections of the public – especially in North America, where the public – unlike in Europe, where both intellectuals and masses tend to have a herd mentality, especially since the founding of the EU – does not kiss the feet of “experts” but feels free to question their judgments, especially when it is obvious they are partisan in their tone and political commitments.
I don’t like being told what I ought to conclude regarding global warming, or Darwinian evolution, or anything else. I want to see evidence presented, without anger, without bullying, without threats (direct or implied) that scholars and scientists will lose their jobs and their careers if they don’t toe the line. Healthy academic life contains lots of dissent, and healthy societies tolerate a fair bit of dissent as well. But what we are hearing now is “the experts have spoken, so everyone else has to shut up and do what they’re told.” That’s not only a recipe for totalitarianism (a society run by like-thinking Ph.D.s), it’s not even good policy. The public needs to be educated by people who don’t have an axe to grind, not by partisans. In fact, the only people called “experts” by the AGW lobby are those who agree with them. Any qualified scientist who disagrees with AGW, or thinks it is less serious than some make out, is demonized as either unqualified (“not a climatologist” – which is a mindless and mechanical exclusionary procedure, as if physicists, geographers, astronomers etc. don’t have relevant input on global warming issues) or as "being in the pocket of the big polluting corporations – as if no pro-AGW scientists are “in the pocket of big goverment” or “in the pocket of left-wing political movements”. I have recently read columns by serious, sober climate scientists who, even though they incline to AGW, are very upset at the politicization of the issue, not merely in the popular press and at the government level, but even at the level of scientific work. These scientists do not like the conclusions of science being dictated by political pressure – even if that political pressure comes from within the scientific community itself.
Overpopulation is another matter entirely. I agree that it is a serious problem. I do not think that the Catholic Church has handled the population question well. I understand why the Church does not like birth control and to some extent I am sympathetic with the view of human life that underlies its position. On the other hand, one cannot deny facts. Overpopulation is a serious problem. It strains the world’s resources – all the more so in a modern society where individuals use vastly more energy, metal, fresh water, etc. than they did in eons past. I don’t tell the Catholic Church how it should handle the overpopulation question in terms of birth control policy, but it is misleading the world if it says that overpopulation is not an ecological problem. The world can easily sustain a billion or even a few billion people in an ecologically responsible society. It can’t sustain 8, 9, or 10 billion, and that’s where we are headed.