carbon dioxide

After insisting for more than three decades that human activity was driving the earth’s temperatures to dangerous levels, climate scientists and activists now contend that same activity is keeping us artificially cool and that cleaning up our atmosphere will leave us feeling the heat.

On January 22, an online article for Scientific American makes the claim that certain parts of the pollution created by human behavior are actually preventing us from feeling the impact of the other emissions we spew into the air.

“Pollution in the atmosphere is having an unexpected consequence, scientists say—it’s helping to cool the climate, masking some of the global warming that’s occurred so far.  That means efforts worldwide to clean up the air may cause an increase in warming, as well as other climate effects, as this pollution disappears,” wrote Chelsea Harvey for the Scientific American story.

“New research is helping to quantify just how big that effect might be. A study published this month in the journal “Geophysical Research Letters” suggests that eliminating the human emission of aerosols—tiny, air-polluting particles often released by industrial activities—could result in additional global warming of anywhere from half a degree to 1 degree Celsius,” added Harvey.

So after years of telling people their activity is responsible for the climate we experience, climate activists are now claiming our behavior is responsible for not feeling what we’ve supposedly caused?  Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Christopher C. Horner is not buying it.

“To put it gently, it is a more recent, if recycled, way of trying to explain how their lurid climate projections have not come to pass,” said Horner, who also served on President-Elect Trump’s landing team at the Environmental Protection Agency during the transition.

“They’re now saying, ‘My models, which I said were OK, on which we were supposed to base economic policy…were actually wrong.’  That’s what they’re saying here.  They’re just saying, ‘My models are wrong and this is my excuse,'” said Horner.

He says the climate change movement is scrambling to explain dire predictions that simply have not materialized.

“All of the claimed warming has failed to arrive.  There seems to have been a several-decade plateau, Yes, we have El Niño and La Niña Years, but the projected warming hasn’t occurred,” said Horner.

Horner says these supposed experts are flailing and now claim any weather event is directly related to human activity throwing the planet’s climate off course.

“In just 2014, the New York Times wrote ‘The End of Snow.’  They do this every mild winter.  Then severe winter returns with a vengeance and a great sense of humor and they write ‘More Snow in A Warming World, the Science is Clear.’  That’s an actual headline, just a year after writing ‘No Snow in A Warming World, the Science is Settled,'” said Horner.

And he says it’s not just an issue when winters vary in severity, noting the same response happens with natural disasters.  Horner says former Vice President Al Gore responded to the devastating hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005 by proclaiming that the climate problems he warned us about had arrived and the destruction we saw was the new normal.

For more than a decade after that, no major hurricanes made landfall in the U.S..

“So the lack of hurricanes was somehow attributable to catastrophic man-made global warming.  ‘Which time are you lying?’ I suppose is the question.  The increase in storms, the absence of storms, is it everything?  Even when it’s just right, Goldilocks, is that because of your faith in catastrophic man-made global warming?” asked Horner.

And he says faith is exactly the right term to use for the climate change movement insisting every climate shift and weather event proves their point when none of their projections come true.

“It’s a non-disprovable hypothesis, which means it’s a faith.  Their religion requires them to reach for whatever happens outside the window,” said Horner.

“Nothing they’ve ever proposed would detectably impact the climate.  This is something I come back to every time because the rest is just this increasingly bizarre sideshow,” said Horner.

Horner says environmental activists and academics routinely tie themselves in knots on these issues, including President Obama’s last EPA Administrator, Gina McCarthy.

“(She) testified that there would be no impact on the world’s temperatures from her rules.  Then after Boston’s most severe winter two years ago, she said, ‘This most severe winter is because of carbon dioxide.  If you let these EPA rules stand we won’t have these storms anymore,'” said Horner.

He says the polar bear scare turned out to be another dud.

“As a famous EPA memo I found said, ‘Make it about children struggling to breathe.  That’s what people care about because the polar bear stories aren’t persuading people,'” said Horner.

“As you know, polar bear populations plummeted from somewhere below 5,000 to nearly 30,000, so that one had to go,” laughed Horner.

But what about this new claim that human activity is creating greater aerosol levels that mask the true damage to our climate?

“What we’re now hearing is, ‘The reason it’s not as warm as we promised is because of aerosol pollution.’  It’s something of a paradox for them because which is it that you want to address?” said Horner, who believes this is yet another effort to control the narrative and advance political goals.

“Do you want cleaner air?  That’s not what global warming is about by the way.  Global warming is about controlling the reliable, affordable, abundant energy sources,” said Horner, noting that the certainty of the scientists masks just how much they want to change our lives.

“You cannot impact the world’s temperature.  Their models agree on that.  You’re talking about 1900 levels (in the amount of emissions prescribed).  The old PBS show about the house on the prairie, not ‘Little House on the Prairie’ but ‘Prairie Living,’ that’s what you’re talking about.  You know, the good old days of drudgery, disease, and infant mortality.  What a throwback,” said Horner.