Questões

A cooling consensus

Global warming has slowed. The rate of warming
over the past 15 years has been lower than that of
the preceding 20 years. There is no serious doubt
that our planet continues to heat, but it has heated
less than most climate scientists had predicted. Nate
Cohn of the New Republic reports: "Since 1998, the
warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures
have not kept up with computer models that seemed
to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to
falling beneath even the lowest projections".
Mr Cohn does his best to af? rm that the urgent
necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated,
as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as
does this newspaper. But there's no way around
the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news
for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes
and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by
moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The
reality is that the already meagre prospects of these
policies, in America at least, will be devastated if
temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of
the projections that environmentalists have used to
create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether
or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain
advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible,
to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably,
that the scienti? c and media establishment has cried
wolf.
(Source: The Economist, June 20th, 2013)