Warmists Edge To Exits

The Warmist Decline and Fall proceeds apace – the “scientific consensus” is now quite exploded, and the EU is retreating with its continental members’ traditional alacrity.

The vanished consensus:

Fear of anthropogenic “global warming” can adversely affect patients’ well-being.

Accordingly, the state of the scientific consensus about climate change was studied by a review of the 539 papers on “global climate change” found on the Web of Science database from January 2004 to mid-February 2007, updating research by Oreskes (2004), who had reported that between 1993 and 2003 none of 928 scientific papers on “global climate change” had rejected the consensus that more than half of the warming of the past 50 years was likely to have been anthropogenic.

In the present review, 31 papers (6% of the sample) explicitly or implicitly reject the consensus.

Though Oreskes said that 75% of the papers in her sample endorsed the consensus, fewer than half now endorse it. Only 6% do so explicitly.

Only one paper refers to “catastrophic” climate change, but without offering evidence.

There appears to be little evidence in the learned journals to justify the climate-change alarm that now harms patients.

Hopefully, Warmists now face billion dollar law suits from the people they made ill.

Meanwhile, back in Brussels:

A year ago they were brimming with selfless idealism. They agreed to make deep cuts in carbon emissions (by a fifth from 1990 levels by 2020), even if other rich countries did not follow.

The signal was clear: Europe will start saving the planet now, even if the selfish Americans (not to mention the Chinese and Indians) are not ready. Bigger cuts were promised if other countries joined in, prompting much self-congratulatory talk about the EU’s “leading role”.

That was then. A year on, with the world economy looking wobblier, the March summit was a less uplifting affair. Leaders from countries with powerful heavy-industry lobbies called for explicit measures to “protect” European firms in case talks on a global climate-change deal failed (and left the Europeans pushing ahead with tough curbs on their own).

In a move that would make an American divorce lawyer proud, Germany, France, Austria, Italy and the Czech Republic all asked the EU to plan for failure, insisting that defensive measures must be agreed before climate-change talks in Copenhagen at the end of 2009.

The Brit government in particular has been busily taxing cars based on their CO2 emissions. Since the last 8 tears of rising CO2 and flat temperatures prove CO2 is not causing warming, that leaves it in a tricky position.

It’ll be fun to watch the end game.