Barrel Strength

A fine article in the Daily Telegraph “Watch the Web for Climate Change Truths” reminds us how disconcerting it is to the Left Establishment that we are not plunging into Venusian levels of man-created global warming.

The article covers several sources of data whose cumulative testimony is highly equivocal, with some places heating and many cooling. None of this would be the least concern save for the fact that global warming is a politically charged TRUTH whose existence may not be denied on pain of accusations of heresy, abdication of the scientific method, and evil intentions.

“The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory that an immense slow-cycling movement of water in the Pacific, known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), had unexpectedly shifted into its cool phase, something which only happens every 30 years or so, ultimately affecting climate all over the globe.

“Discussion of this on the invaluable Watts Up With That website, run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts, shows how the alternations of the PDO between warm and cool coincided with each of the major temperature shifts of the 20th century – warming after 1905, cooling after 1946, warming again after 1977 – and how the new shift to a cool phase could have repercussions for decades to come.”

And so forth. Windmills, anyone?