Since Global Warming's the New Lefty Religion, They Have to Punish Heretics

There's a probem with global warming's sacred scripture:

What's bugging the mob isn't "denial" at all -- that's just a catchy label designed for maximum smear impact -- it's the implications of what has been observed.

It's easy to show that the warming of the last three decades presages a very modest warming for the technologically foreseeable future, and that no policy will do anything to alter the warming trajectory we are on enough to measure its effect in a lifetime.

Billions of taxpayer dollars have been spent developing a host of computer models to study how climate changes as carbon dioxide concentrations increase. The problem is, not surprisingly, that different models produce different rates of warming. But, in ensemble, the models have an interesting behavior: they indicate that once human warming is established by increasing greenhouse gases, the warming tends to take place at a constant rate.

As there is a "wisdom of crowds," there is also a "wisdom of models." It's been known for years that a collection of weather forecasting models tends to do better over time than any individual model. The same should apply to climate models, and to their collective behavior, which is a constant-rate warming.

So all one has to do is establish a greenhouse warming, and then demonstrate that indeed it has been constant since it started in the mid-1970s (which it has been, at 0.18 degrees Centigrade per decade), and you know the rate of future warming. Unless, of course, all that modeling work is just dead wrong. And that's the truth that has people so exercised.

Of course, there's plenty of time to get all amped up about the impending ice age.