A Sunny Day Has Become Our Enemy

Emily Yoffe writes today in the Washington Post about the constant gloom and doom coming from the environmental left, and she isn't buying it. Here's an excerpt:

All this is not to say that it's not getting warmer and that curbing our profligate environmental ways is not a commendable and necessary goal. But perhaps this movement is sowing the seeds of its own destruction -- even as it believes the human species has sown its own. There must be a limit to how many calamitous films, books and television shows we, and our children, can absorb.

It doesn't seem sustainable to expect people to remain terrified by such a disinterested, often benign -- it was so nice eating out on the patio! -- and even unpredictable enemy. (I understand we're the enemy, but the executioner is the weather.) Recall that the experts told us last year would be a record-setting hurricane season, but the series of Katrinas never materialized.
Since I hate the heat, even I was alarmed by the recent headline: "NASA Warns of 110-Degrees for Atlanta, Chicago, DC in Summer." But I regained my cool when I realized the forecast was for close to the end of the century. Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when no one can offer me one for August 2008 (or 2007 for that matter).

There is so much hubris in the certainty about the models of the future that I'm oddly reassured. We've seen how hubristic predictions about complicated, unpredictable events have a way of bringing the predictors low.

I subscribe to a long range weather forecasting service that publishes their forecasts up to 18 months in advance of a particular date, based on weather patterns and how they've operated in the past (www.weatherplanner.com). Sometimes they are startlingly accurate, such as the year they forecast a stormy day in Sacramento over a year in advance and were absolutely accurate (we had rain and thunderstorms all day).

However, they are often wrong as well, missing the forecast highs and storm conditions by quite a bit. It's an inexact science, to say the least, and for anybody to predict the summer temperatures in 2090 and claim they're going to be accurate is nonsense. Yet that is exactly what the global warming alarmists are doing, and generally are doing so without challenge from the press.