Three years have passed since Dr. Richard Grossman and I lodged our “gentlemen’s bet” (we each donated $5,000 to support Durango Nature Studies) on the course of world climate over a 10-year period. So it seems timely to give a brief update on what the Earth has been doing.
The Earth has cooled slightly during the last three years, compared to the previous three years (the betting base). This reflects the temperature flatline over the last 15 years or so, as Mother Nature refuses to adhere to the alarmist global warming script. Indeed, it appears that we may be in an extended slow-cooling period.
This was not supposed to happen, but alarmists just don’t have the science right. Human influence on climate exists but is small; natural variations dominate the climate.
This is not the first time that bad science has run amok and created great mischief. The famous 19th-century German biologist Ernst Haeckel developed an elaborate theory of human races, including the superiority of the “Caucasian race.” His views, which enjoyed considerable support from the European scientific establishment, reinforced and expanded European “scientific racism” well into the 20th century, with catastrophic results. Not just Europe: Early 20th-century America was first to practice eugenics with compulsory sterilization programs.
Ask a former Soviet citizen about the impact of Lysenkoism on that society. After decades of failed pseudoscience, Lysenko’s politically driven agricultural practices were finally abandoned because they did not agree with nature. Indeed, climate hysteria is our modern Lysenkoism, the result of aberrant social and political theories masquerading as science.
But delusions persist among the deluded. Now, the La Plata Climate and Energy Action Plan tells us that our county can help control the Earth’s climate and improve our economy via increased energy costs, higher taxes, enforced life-style regulation and by generally making our region less competitive than regions and countries without such fetishes.
This defies common sense and experience. Enacting it will do the opposite of everything it claims. But like Scrooge’s Ghost, this future does not have to be. We can choose otherwise.
Roger W. Cohen, Durango
