Hot and Cold

Proponents of the hypothesis that the earth is getting warmer have been insisting that the warming is occuring because we're polluting the atmosphere with CO2 and that the mean global temperature is spiking. It has turned out, however, that the earth is not warming, and that the prognostications of impending disaster have been wrong. Why?

Evidently climatologists overlooked another factor. Developing nations like India and China are pumping tons of sulfur into the atmosphere by burning coal. Atmospheric sulfur cools the earth and offsets the effects of CO2, but if we remove the sulfur, we're told, the earth will warm very fast.

So how do we know that the climatologists know that? Well, we have to take their word on it. We have to trust them and place our faith in their competence.

They tell us it's science, but it sounds a lot like religion. Here's an excerpt from the Reuters article linked above:

Smoke belching from Asia's rapidly growing economies is largely responsible for a halt in global warming in the decade after 1998 because of sulphur's cooling effect, even though greenhouse gas emissions soared, a U.S. study said on Monday.

The paper raised the prospect of more rapid, pent-up climate change when emerging economies eventually crack down on pollution.

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.

The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland's University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

In other words, there is no global warming. What there is is an increase in both CO2 and sulfur emissions. The above article notes that warming will be unimpeded when third world countries crack down on sulfur pollution, a prospect that the article implausibly implies is inevitable and imminent.

Reading this, one wonders why climatologists aren't alarmed by the global cooling that will occur if developed countries limit their CO2 output while the third world continues to churn out sulfur. Isn't this really the most likely scenario?

One reason for their reticence, I'll bet, is that the climatological community knows that if they now start expressing alarm over imminent global cooling after all the panic over "hockey stick" increases in global temperatures they'll become a laughingstock and no one would ever believe another word they said.