They Think We Control The Weather By Using Less Electricity

Meteorologist Art Horn, writing at ICECAP, has a collection of quotes from political leaders who have somehow convinced themselves that we can control the weather by using less electricity or driving less or otherwise restricting our lives.

President Obama (at the 2012 Democratic convention):

More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. They’re a threat to our children’s future. And in this election you can do something about it.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations: on November 12, 2012:

Finally, let me say we all know the difficulties in attributing any single storm to climate change. But we also know this: extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal. This may be an uncomfortable truth, but it is one we ignore at our peril.

Even Mayor Bloomberg of New York (on November 1):

Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be, given this weeks devastation, should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.

Here's the key paragraph of Horn's article at ICECAP:

In all of the above statements the implied or stated method for controlling the weather is to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide. The thinking, if you want to call it that, is this. Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in the air from 0.04% of the atmosphere to some arbitrary amount, say 0.03% or the level at the beginning of the industrial revolution in 1850, will somehow bring the weather back to “normal”. This reduction would be a whopping 0.01%. They have no idea how this reduction will actually change the weather back to how it should behave but they are sure it will work. They are so sure that they believe we should dismantle everything that has provided us with reliable, affordable energy up to this point and try something new. The EPA is already working hard to close the coal companies

Well, it's not just Obama, Ban and Bloomberg.  The list of those in power who believe that we can control the weather by restricting human activity would appear to include almost all European heads of state (Vaclav Klaus of the Czech Republic has been an exception), and in the U.S., not only the EPA, but also the Supreme Court (see Massachusetts v. EPA).

How's the evidence for that going?  From wattsupwiththat today:

A problem: nearly one third of CO2 emissions occurred since 1998, and it hasn’t warmed

Here's the chart of temperatures since 1979 (from satellites, as compiled by Remote Sensing Systems available at climate4you):

Anybody can see that the peak was in 1998 and that it's downhill from there.  I thought in science you make a hypothesis, and then if the evidence contradicts the hypothesis you must abandon it.  At what point must we declare this hypothesis disproved?  Anyway, our politicians don't seem to think that evidence has anything to do with the question.

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