The Heat Is ON

By Bill Maher

Last Tuesday President Obama announced his plan to use the EPA to regulate greenhouses gases at existing power plants.

Are you ready for what the Republicans are going to say about global warming now? Because here it is: global warming has stopped over the last 15 years, so why are we going spend all of this money and make all of these new regulations if scientists can't even get their projections right? Oh, yes. You're going to hear this. The anti-global warming talking point du jour has been dispensed.

Now, there is some truth to it. Warming in recent years is on the lower end of the projections, causing scientists to fine tune their modeling. But this hasn't caused any sort of wholesale rejection in the scientific community. And weeks ago, Kevin Drum at Mother Jones showed how this flim-flammery works -- or doesn't work -- in the form of a graph.

Here's the claim that global warming has stopped in the last 15 years, shown graphically:

Source: Kevin Drum, Mother Jones

Looks like they're right! But you can see what's coming.

Here's global warming when you don't cherry pick the starting point at 1998, which was an abnormally hot year:

Source: Kevin Drum, Mother Jones