So if it’s not global warming . . . ? [updated]

I missed something important in Al Gore’s op-ed yesterday.

I’ll tell you what I missed in a second, but first, let ‘s set the scene.

The “science” of the warmist team is collapsing, and the “scientists” running the warmist mantra are being found out.  The UK’s parliamentary inquiry into the university at the centre of the climate change row over stolen e-mails is now front and centre in exposing the transparent legerdemain.  [UPDATE: And climate scientist Roy Spencer suggested over the weekend that world surface station temp data has been so munged as to be worthless.]

And the carbon-trading circle jerk that was supposed to grow up on the back of the warmist “science” is now exposed as a bust. The news that the UN’s climate chief Yvo de Boer is stepping down with no replacement being announced (“casting doubt on the effort to establish a worldwide market aimed at reducing the emissions blamed for global warming) can be added to worldwide news of the collapse of carbon trading markets, and the announcement by New Zealand’s sharemarket operator NZX that they’ll be taking “a $19.9m hit to its balance sheet from a carbon trading business it has sold, blaming a lower priority given to carbon trading and ‘lack of a global political agenda around carbon’.”

Poor lambs.  “Macro conditions have moved against carbon trading compared with where the world was when the registry business was sold," said the failed rent-seeking bastards at NZX.  A more honest assessment would be to say that on careful analysis, businesses are finally realising that paying an indulgence for the “sin” of production is as absurd as it is destructive.

In  other words, they’re no longer buying the scam.

That John Key’s Labour-Lite government has yet to read the writing on the wall and cancel their “world-leading” (and New Zealand-strangling) emissions tax scam is a tribute only to their inability to read, and their disinterest in who they damage.

But Al Gore knows how to read.  He sure as hell knows what time it is. He knows it’s time to cash out (and to talk up his position before it collapses), and time to cut the science adrift – and on that last at least the warmist world is going with him.

The first clue was Al Gore's merger of environmentalism and religion –– his admission  last December that for him the “spiritual dimension of climate change” trumps the scientific.  He continued that theme yesterday, blathering that “From the standpoint of governance, what is at stake is our ability to use the rule of law as an instrument of human redemption.”  (Or as Charles Anderson translates, “Yes, of course, we cannot allow the People to make their own choices in the free market, because we must use the force of government to redeem these sorry sinners.  We, the elitist Progressives, must use the force of government to enforce myriad laws to make the People do what they will not choose to do . . . Government is the Messiah [and] the elitists who manipulate its levers are the Messiahs.”)

And the second clue appeared in Gore’s op-ed yesterday, and in recent ads from Gore’s Climate Advocacy Group.   It was there, but I missed it.  There I was answering Al Gore’s “science,” when what I was really doing was wasting my time.  Because as Intellectual Activist editor Robert Tracinski was astute enough to notice, Big Al has noticed the way warmist science is going, and he’s now saying to that science, “Get thee behind me.”

In his column What’s It All About, Al Gore, Tracinski quotes a recent Washington Post column  by Dana Milbank on Washington’s big snowstorm “being used by both sides in the global warming debate. Milbank acknowledges that this ‘argument-by-anecdote’ is invalid, briefly refers to Climategate, and then offers this remarkable shift”:

    For those concerned about warming, it's time for a shift in emphasis. Fortunately, one has already been provided to them by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who has done more than any Democrat to keep climate legislation alive this year. His solution: skip the hurricanes and Himalayan glaciers and keep the argument on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent annually on foreign oil, some of that going to terrorists rather than to domestic job creation.
    “Al Gore, for one, seems to realize it's time for a new tactic. New TV ads released during last week's blizzards by Gore's climate advocacy group say nothing about climate science. They show workers asking their senators for more jobs from clean energy.
    “That's a good sign. If the Washington snows persuade the greens to put away the slides of polar bears and pine beetles and to keep the focus on national security and jobs, it will have been worth the shoveling.”

And that’s precisely what Al was pushing in yesterday’s New York Times apologia.  And “this,” says Tracinski, “is the new party line.”

    If the science can no longer be invoked to support massive government controls on the economy, then drop the science. You can drop it, because none of this was ever really about science. It was about power. It was about control. It was about central planning of our lives by the usual gang in Washington.”

Or Wellington.

I urge you to read Tracinski’s full column, which you can find online here at the NZ Climate Realists site. (I’ve reproduced the first three paragraphs since it’s somewhat munted on their site.)

What's Left Without Global Warming?
by Robert Tracinski

    With apologies to Dionne Warwick—and to Michael Caine, for that matter—I have to ask: What's it all about, Al Gore?
    I mean all of this stuff about how we have to restructure our entire society to avoid man-made global warming—what was it all really about? Was it ever really about global warming? Or was it really about restructuring our society, for which global warming was just an excuse?
    That's what we have to start asking in the wake of Climategate.
    It is not just that Climategate—the e-mails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit at Britain's University of East Anglia, and the subsequent investigations they unleashed—has revealed that the "settled science" of global warming was riddled with errors, based on questionable data and false assumptions, and distorted by conformity, bullying, and groupthink.
    It is not just that some of the main Climategate conspirators, such as the CRU's Phil Jones, are now admitting that the science isn't settled and that global temperatures may well have been warmer than today one thousand years ago, long before automobiles and industrial smokestacks.
    No, what really ought to give us pause is that so far none of these revelations has actually stopped the political agenda on global warming. Virtually everyone who advocated massive new controls on our economic life in the name of stopping global warming still advocates it. And it's not just because they're in denial and they still think science is on their side. The most frightening new trend—frightening because of what it reveals—is that many of these people are advocating these controls even if the globe is not warming.
    It started with President Obama's State of the Union address, when he referred to "the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change"—eliciting laughter in the chamber—and then went on to say: "But even if you doubt the evidence, providing incentives for energy efficiency and clean energy are the right thing to do for our future—because the nation that leads the clean energy economy will be the nation that leads the global economy." What is notable there is the development of a fallback position in case the public doubts the science. But of course, the fallback position makes no sense. If carbon dioxide is not frying the globe, then windmills and solar cells aren't "clean energy." They're just inefficient energy.
    Similarly, Lindsey Graham—one of a handful of Senate Republicans who really drank the Kool-Aid on global warming—has switched to advocating all the same controls as a way to reduce our "dependency" on foreign oil. But of course, the far easier way would be to lift restrictions on offshore drilling and on oil exploration on federal lands.
    When this trend finally struck me was in a column by the Washington Post's Dana Milbank that discussed how Washington's big snowstorm was being used by both sides in the global warming debate . . .

Which is about where we came in. Read on here for the real good oil: how this could lead to the second spectacular collapse of the left in two decades.