The Great Global-Warming Disappointment

[Geee]

National Review:

Events have failed to fulfill the prophecy. Preachers have suddenly been struck dumb by uncertainty. Believers are understandably nervous and some, under their breath, are abandoning the dogma.

 

These sentences could have been written at the end of the day on October 22, 1844, about the Millerites, a religious sect started in upstate New York. Preachers had told their followers that Jesus would return to earth that day. He failed to show.

 

 

But the subject here is not Millerism, but another kind of religious faith: the faith of the global-warming alarmists. And while it’s not likely to have the impact of the Millerites’ Great Disappointment, we could be seeing the beginning of something similar on September 27, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issues its fifth assessment report in Stockholm.

A preview is provided by science writer Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal, who has “had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document.”

“The big news,” Ridley writes, “is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPCC thought in 2007.”