The New Republic is now the latest full-bore warm-monger to acknowledge that the science has gotten all unsettled: Even as scientists asserted an incontrovertible consensus on climate change, a funny thing has happened over the last 15 years: Global warming has slowed down. Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections. Some people are playing the hiatus as good news: “Apocalypse perhaps a little later,” the Economist put it. But in a political environment where vast swathes of the American right reject even the premise of global warming—and where prominent right-wing pols suggest it’s an enormous fraud—this inconvenient news could easily lead to still more acrimony over the subject. Especially since scientists themselves aren’t entirely sure what the evidence means. If scientific models can’t project the last 15 years, what does that mean for their projections of the next 100?
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 19:05:01 +0000
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