Globo warmers and the failure of prophesy

Michael Barone:

Events have failed to fulfill the prophecy. Preachers have suddenly been struck dumb by uncertainty. Believers are understandably nervous and some, under their breath, are abandoning the dogma.

These sentences could have been written at the end the day on Oct. 22, 1844, about the Millerites, a religious sect started in upstate New York. Preachers had told their followers that Jesus would return to earth that day. He failed to show.

But the subject here is not Millerism but another kind of religious faith: the faith of the global warming alarmists. And while it’s not likely to have the impact of the Millerites’ Great Disappointment, we could be seeing the beginning of something similar on September 27, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues its fifth assessment report in Stockholm.

A preview is provided by science writer Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal, who has “had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document.”

“The big news,” Ridley writes, “is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007.”

Ridley admits that the change is small. And he does not deny that increased carbon emissions could increase global temperatures by some significant amount. They would certainly do so if carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate.

But there may be other things. Like variations in sun activity. “The most plausible explanation of the pause,” Ridley writes, “is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback.”
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Alarmists like to say the science is settled — which is nonsense, since science is a series of theories that can be tested by observations. When Einstein presented his theory of relativity he showed how it could be tested during astronomical events in the next decade. The theory passed.

Saying the science is settled is demanding what religions demand, that you have faith.

Religion has ritual. Global warming alarmism has recycling and Earth Day celebrations.

Some religions persecute heretics. Some global warming alarmists identify “denialists” and liken them to Holocaust deniers.
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This is a good explanation for the failure of the global warming theology.  I have argued for sometime that the problem has been invalid assumptions in the models used to project the theory.  That is what is meant by "... faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback."  Projections of future events are always based on assumptions and when they are not met it is always bnecause the assumptions were wrong.