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Opening Arguments

The pause that refreshes

I realize it's mostly pointless to argue about "climate change," because it truly has become like a religion; you either believe in it or you do not, and logic and facts are not of much use when it comes to matters of faith. But, what the hell, an editorial writer frequently finds himself in "beating a dead horse" territory, so here are things "the mainstream media won't tell you about global warming," including the most obvious one:

1) Through Halloween of 2014- The Global Warming Pause has lasted 18 years and one month. Heartland Institute analyst, Peter Ferrara, notes“If you look at the record of global temperature data, you will find that the late 20th Century period of global warming actually lasted about 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Before that, the globe was dominated by about 30 years of global cooling, giving rise in the 1970s to media discussions of the return of the Little Ice Age (circa 1450 to 1850), or worse.” So there was thirty years of cooling followed by 20 years of warming and almost 18 years of cooling…and that’s what the global warming scare is all about.

Should we still be calling it a "pause" when it's clearly part of a larger pattern of heating and cooling?

A general thrust of the arrticle is that there are too many questions for us to be all that certain about "man-made global warming." I think that's sort of beside the point, though. Certainly there is climate change -- all the time, it would be scary if there weren't -- and obviously humankind contributes something to it. The focus of the argument is whether the change is dangerous (I think not) or whether humans can adapt to it, as they always have (they certainly can). The drastic "the sky is falling so we must do something right now!" admonition is just the usual progressive scare-mongering as a prelude to the usual remedy: more control over us by stronger government action.

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