Global Warming Tales and Tails

[Geee]

American Spectator:

One of the beautiful things about "global warming" -- now called "climate change" since the planet didn’t warm for a decade starting in 1998 -- is, at least from the point of view of the climate change industry, that they can say almost anything and get away with it. Whatever is most likely to scare people into writing checks to this or that environmental defense fund is fair game not just for the organizations but also for many scientists clinging to the teat of private and federal grant money.

In 2009, hardly ancient history, Peter Ward published a peer-reviewed paper entitled " Sulfur dioxide initiates global climate change in four ways." In short, Ward argues that primarily by changing the way gases react with each other in the atmosphere, sulfur dioxide emissions cause global warming.
Many of you will remember the aggressive moves to combat acid rain, caused primarily by sulfur dioxide emissions, during most of the 1980s. The results have been impressive, with 2009 data showing the effort, including the federal government’s Acid Rain Program, "hav(ing) reduced annual SO2 (sulfur dioxide) emissions by 67 percent compared with 1980 levels and 64 percent compared with 1990 levels." To be fair, 2009 was a year of substantial economic downturn, so SO2 emissions were probably artificially low. But even in 2007, those emissions had declined 43 percent since 1990.

Dr. Ward saw the dark cloud rather than the silver lining: "By reducing acid rain, we accidentally reduced global warming."