Global warming is real.

There. I’ve said it, and I hope you’re happy, my panicky environmentalist friends. If you are happy, please don’t read any further, because the rest of the column will ruin your week and you will waste a great deal of time trying in vain to ruin mine.

Believe me, your time would be far more profitably spent stuffing potatoes in SUV tailpipes. (The neighbors’ SUVs, of course, not your own.)

Don’t get caught, though: As much as you fear Mother Nature’s eventual wrath, it pales in comparison to the immediate threat of a soccer mom late for play group and wielding a tire iron.

I rise once again in the cause of skepticism – and in violation of my personal standard of not more than one column per year about global warming hysteria – because of a story to which the Drudge Report linked last week. It came from “GMTV,” which appears to be a typical half-newsy, half-chatty morning show, aired in Britain.

The story said a survey – of unnamed origin – found that “half of young children are anxious about the effects of global warming, often losing sleep because of their concern.”

I’m writing this for the children. (Cue the violins.) They are our future, and if they are frightened that this planet – the only home they have (swell the violins) – is threatened with destruction by rampant industrialization and an unsustainable Western lifestyle, then (cut the violins) …

… it’s because their little heads have been filled with overblown fears by people who ought to know better – and, in some cases, do.

Yes, kids: Global warming is real.

If there were nothing to it, folks in Cleveland, Chicago, Rochester, Milwaukee and Duluth would still have a glacier on their doorstep, rather than one Great Lake or another.

So the argument – when argument is permitted at all – is really about whether today’s global warming is caused by things people (and cows) do. All sorts of machines (and cows) spew nasty gases into the atmosphere, turning the Earth into a sort of greenhouse that traps heat and …

But you’ve heard all of that. It’s the scary story that the media never tire of telling, and that scientists in search of research grants never tire of milking. It’s inescapable.

Just the other day, Al Gore got an Oscar for telling us to polish our backstroke because the polar ice caps are melting and it’s going to be a long swim to the island of Kansas. In a world awash in global-warming hype – actually, they’re shifting to “climate change” now, because that allows the alarmists to be right even if they’re wrong – an Oscar counts as peer review.

But the inconvenient truth is that Gore was reading from an old script. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just revised its expectations from 2001’s prediction of a 20- to 30-foot rise in sea levels down to … uh … 17 inches.

And it lowered its temperature-increase expectations. And it cut its estimate of human impact on global warming by one-third. And it confessed to a lack of understanding of six of the nine factors believed likely to nudge the planet’s temperature up or down. And it admitted little progress in improving its predictive models.

From all of that, two possible conclusions present themselves: A lot has changed, climatologically, in just five years. Or, in keeping with longstanding U.N. tradition, the people writing the reports don’t know what they’re doing.

There’s no shame if the latter conclusion is true. Even the best computer model can prove nothing.

The shame is that our leaders would even consider significant changes in economic and political policy based on models that aren’t, by their users’ own admission, very good. Why not decide policy by having Dick Goddard sacrifice a woollybear and read the entrails?

But, the true believers say, even big, bad corporations have seen the light and are going “greener.”

Wrong. They see a line forming for climate-scare-driven corporate welfare, and they want to be at the head of it. Smart business reacts to dumb politics.

Human activity heats rhetoric. Beyond that, it’s mostly guesswork. And no one should lose any sleep over that.

Kevin O’Brien is deputy editorial director of The Plain Dealer of Cleveland. He can be contacted at kobrien@plaind.com.
Global warming is the scary story that the media never tire of telling, and that scientists in search of research grants never tire of milking. It’s inescapable.

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