It’s become both an article of faith and a litmus test for conservatives to claim that global warming is a “hoax,” presumably staged by evil scientists bent on world domination. This incredibly dangerous ostrich-like thinking is nearly universal on the right wing and in the Republican Party, and yesterday we saw another example at far right blog Hot Air, as Ed Morrissey cited an article by climate change denier James Taylor at Forbes, pushing the long-discredited, utterly false claim that global warming has “stopped” in the last 10 years: Where’s the warming?

Carbon emissions over the past decade actually exceeded predictions by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), no thanks to the global economic recession. According to their anthropogenic global-warming theories, global temperatures should have risen significantly as a result. James Taylor at Forbes wonders what happened:

Global greenhouse gas emissions have risen even faster during the past decade than predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other international agencies. According to alarmist groups, this proves global warming is much worse than previously feared. The increase in emissions “should shock even the most jaded negotiators” at international climate talks currently taking place in Bonn, Germany, the UK Guardian reports. But there’s only one problem with this storyline; global temperatures have not increased at all during the past decade.

Morrissey is greatly impressed by the charts included by Taylor, but apparently can’t be bothered to investigate the truth; he’s more interested in continuing to spread falsehoods to the determinedly ignorant.

These zombie memes are endlessly recycled on the right, and this one has been debunked repeatedly, by many sources, yet it just keeps popping up again as a right wing article of faith, impervious to logic or evidence.

One of the best sites for actual scientific facts (instead of denialist spin funded by energy companies) is Skeptical Science, and a quick search reveals many articles showing how incredibly false this claim is. Just a few examples:

Did global warming stop in 1998?
2010: A Year of Record Warmth and Weird Weather
2009 - 2nd hottest year on record while sun is coolest in a century
Phil Jones - Warming Since 1995 is now Statistically Significant

And here’s an excellent video that examines this bogus claim in detail, showing that it’s based on a deliberate misinterpretation of temperature data.

But none of this matters to the pig-ignorant base, and people like Morrissey know it. These are the kinds of people they’re appealing to; a Hot Air commenter lays it out:

It doesn’t matter what the science shows (or fails to show), AGW alarmists are marxists who have always known that AGW was b.s., but don’t care. They want to use this to destroy western economies in an effort to bring about the global revolution.

the religion isn’t AGW, it is world-wide socialism. They will use whatever they think will work to try and get there.

People like Bayam never cared about science and never will. There has never been any science associated with AGW. It’s always been a sham and it’s always had the same goal – bigger gov’t, less prosperity.

Monkeytoe on June 13, 2011 at 8:24 AM

It’s easy to mock this kind of idiocy, but it’s incredibly disturbing that people like this are preventing the US from taking action on the most significant threat to human existence. And this is just one comment, out of dozens just as bad.

Ed Morrissey and Hot Air (and the entire right wing for that matter) are going to have a lot to answer for in the coming decades, when denial will no longer be possible and the disastrous effects of their obfuscation are clear to the entire world.