The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is 95% sure that human activity — the burning of fossil fuel for energy — is causing our planet to warm.
So on what, we wonder, will the IPCC blame the coming cooling period?
Because one is coming. At least that’s what the IPCC itself reportedly is saying.
The London Telegraph wrote Sunday that a leaked IPCC report “has led some scientists to claim that the world is heading for a period of cooling that will not end until the middle of this century.”
And why not? As the Telegraph has noted, “There has been a 60% increase in the amount of ocean covered with ice compared to this time last year, the equivalent of almost a million square miles.”
Yes, that’s right. The dire predictions of an iceless Arctic made in 2007 were wrong, just as the fearful projections of an increase in global-warming-caused disastrous storms have also been off the mark in a missed-by-the-width-of-the-universe sort of way.
Whether Earth cools or not is a question that won’t be answered until a few more years or decades pass.
But this we do know: Earth has not warmed in at least 16 years, maybe more. Data from Britain’s Met Office, that nation’s arbiter of all things climate, shows global temperatures have been flat since the late 1990s.
If Earth indeed cools in the coming decades, how will the IPCC react?
Will it carry on as if nothing has changed, spreading alarm where there should be none?
Or will it admit there is cooling — and then blame that, too, on man’s fossil-fuel burning ways?
What we do know for sure is that the IPCC won’t just go away, even though it will have no purpose and in fact has yet to actually have one anyway.
The bureaucrats who run it will find some way to keep it going, though it’s of no use. It will happen in much the same way the International Monetary Fund has been able to perpetuate its existence long after it should have been shut down.
In other words, the IPCC will deal with the reality as it always has, which is to say it will continue denying it.
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This op-ed article was written by the editorial board of the Investors Business Daily.