At Townhall, Jonah Goldberg analyzes the recent “Cooling on Global Warming”:
Why has climate change lost its oomph? Plumer lays out some of the reasons, though he minimizes the damage greens have inflicted on their own credibility thanks to the 2009 Climategate email scandal and wildly overstated predictions. For instance, the United Nations predicted there would be 50 million “climate refugees” by 2010. Notably, the islands of the Caribbean would see massive population losses as denizens fled for their lives. Never happened. (Meanwhile, the UN Environment Program has removed the map of predicted devastation from its website.)
Note: Climate change is not, in principle, UD’s “thang” exactly – after all, in a designed universe, humans could indeed futz up the climate – but the key question is, have we? In the long history of Earth and its life forms, do we make that much difference in a few decades? What the fanatical Climategate scientists did was subvert a complex and difficult discussion of the issues around that question into broomstickery, and they too are now, it seems, feeling the fallout. Lesson for all.