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By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service
All over the planet recently, people turned off electric lights to illustrate alarm about human-caused global warming, and the symbolism, it seems to me, is dead-on right about the possible consequences not of warming itself, but of hype about warming.
Progress could become regress, and figuratively speaking, the world could go dark.
The fear mongering knows no surcease. Every possible evil is blamed on climate change, from water shortages to flooding to the disappearance of certain frogs.
Supposedly, there's a scientific consensus of coming catastrophe of almost unspeakable horror, and millions have been swayed to this point of view, as the ``Earth Hour" light-dimming showed.
The politicians are at this moment devising policies meant to be preventive but that could be perilous or pointless or both.
You begin to edge toward balance in a survey in which more than 500 climate scientists were asked if we knew enough to formulate such policies.
A majority said we did not. A think-tank fellow reaffirms in an op-ed piece that the United Nations employed clearly faulty methods in making dire projections about the warming to come and that there's no sound basis for insisting that today's warming is the highest ever known in Earth's history.
Now comes news that the upper waters of the ocean have been cooling for the past four years, that average Earth temperatures have been slowly cooling since 1998, that the melting Arctic has been freezing again and that this past winter has been one of the coldest in the Northern Hemisphere on record.
None of this information means that human-caused climate change does not exist. It is pointed out that no one has ever said that warming means an elimination in the near future of very cold winters.
The cooling since 1998 could be temporary, and even these cooler years are still hotter than virtually all recorded years prior to 1998. The ice in the Arctic is at least to date thinner than the ice used to be, scientists have said.
But read what various informed skeptics argue about some of these developments, and you discover that the case has been made stronger either that warming has been caused primarily by cyclical sunspot activity or that there are natural variables that are turning down the ``thermostat" that greenhouse gases turned up.
It appears less clear than ever that warming is our future. There seems to be at least a possibility that we are faced with the opposite, an era of cooling.
In other words, despite all the talk that the debate is over about catastrophic warming, it is not. And it would therefore be wholly irrational to undertake drastic, economy-destroying, life-altering steps to combat something that either does not exist or that would be impervious to our efforts.
Although the politicians keep telling us that we can significantly reduce greenhouse gas warming with mild measures, they are flat-out wrong; reducing fossil-fuel energy consumption sufficiently to achieve what we are incessantly told we will have to achieve within a relatively few years would turn our modern industrial society upside down.
Lesser measures would be all pain and no gain, mere ritual signifying nothing but angst.
We can certainly do as some scientists, economists and others advise ― figure on adjusting to any warming as it occurs and investing in alternative-energy research that could prove useful even if there is no warming.
We must also, of course, keep gathering data and analyzing what we find.
Some research on warming consequences is already casting doubt on previous concerns.
A New York Times story tells us as one example that some biologists now think there is a non-warming reason for the harlequin frogs disappearing, even though warming was once given as the sure-enough cause. One small piece of hype bites the dust.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.
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