Cal Thomas: 30 years of global warming panic

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Thursday, June 28th. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from member-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Mary Reichard.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

CAL THOMAS, COMMENTATOR: This week marks an important milestone: It’s the 30th anniversary of the beginning of the so-called global warming panic.

EICHER: Commentary now from WORLD Radio’s Cal Thomas.

THOMAS: It was June 23rd, 1988, when NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the Senate Committee. Hansen asserted a “high degree of confidence” in “a cause-and-effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming.”

Back then, Hansen offered three possible scenarios.

One would see the earth’s temperature rising 1 degree Celsius by that year.

The second would see a 0.7 percent temperature increase.

And the final one would see a smaller increase that would flatten out by the year 2000.

Turns out, the third scenario was the most accurate.

The Wall Street Journal editorialized, quoting now:

“It’s time to acknowledge that the rapid warming [Hansen] predicted isn’t happening. Climate researchers and policymakers should adopt the more modest forecasts that are consistent with observed temperatures.” End quote.

That’d be nice, but count me skeptical. Politicians tend to prefer issues to solutions.

And the major news media deserve plenty of blame for spreading global warming propaganda. Look no further than the George Mason and Climate Central effort to promote climate change fears on your nightly weather forecast.

As far back as 2015, the UK Daily Telegraph reported that the European Space Agency noted that in 2013 and 2014, after years when the volume of Arctic ice had been diminishing, it increased again by as much as 33 percent.

The paper also reported a story of Canadian scientists studying the effect of climate change on Arctic ice had to suspend their research, when their icebreaker vessel was called to the aid of other ships trapped in the thickest summer ice seen in Hudson Bay for 20 years.

Numerous apocalyptic predictions of an imminent end of the world because of climate change have proved wrong. Their objective of big government robbing us of more of our freedoms and spending trillions of dollars on a made-up problem has been exposed.

I believe in recycling and we should be careful about polluting the atmosphere, water, or land. But not in the service of climate-change mythology.

For WORLD Radio, I’m Cal Thomas.

(NOAA/Bernardo Vargas-Angel via AP, File) This May 2016 photo provided by NOAA shows bleaching and some dead coral around Jarvis Island, which is part of the U.S. Pacific Remote Marine National Monument. 

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