What, There Is a Western Country With Climate Sanity?

Thanks to the folks at PowerLine, who brought this to my attention. (PL Post)  Norway has issued a report saying it isn’t clear how much, if any, of a temperature increase is attributable to CO2 emissions. (Climate hysterics will say Norway makes a lot of money off of fossil fuels, but you can’t change truth by ad hominems.)   I would go a little further and say it isn’t clear that there is a temperature increase outside the range of normal variation when you stop screwing with the data and when you acknowledge the urbanization effect.  In any event the report just summarizes what is available to anyone who is interested in finding facts about climate.  Such as climate models being wildly inaccurate, but getting all the headlines for their sensational claims about the world being on fire.  Such as the historical climate record showing wide and sudden temperature variations that clearly have nothing to do with CO2 levels.

The authors test statistically whether there is anything unusual about temperature trends over the last couple of centuries, when CO2 emissions supposedly began rising.  Here is the conclusion sentence that will drive the hysterics out of their minds:  “the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations in the last 200 years.”  As the Powerline post suggests this should be another nail in the hysteric’s case, but it won’t be because no one will read about it in the traditional newspapers or see it on TV or hear it on the radio.

Absent absolute proof that CO2 emissions are indeed causing higher temperatures outside normal variation, you would think the prudent approach would be further research and not taking expensive and likely unwarranted steps to ameliorate a non-existent problem.  But no, especially because it may benefit rich people, we are spending trillions and trillions of dollars, while making energy less reliable and far more expensive.  But look, some countries aren’t buying the climate hysteria–China and India are building even more coal plants.  As usual, progressive nuts are making us look like idiots, damaging our economy and lessening our quality of life.

Please read the paper in its entirety if you want a good background on various temperature series, causes of temperature variation and general climate issues.  Note that our current interglacial period is actually cooler than prior ones and that during the 11,000 or so years of this interglacial there have been temperature variations consistent with or larger than we have experienced in the last 200 years.  Fortunately the cost of the hysteria is beginning to wake people up and make them receptive to hearing what the science actually says, but a lot of harm has already been done by the hysterics.  (Norway Report)