CCN-USA–Former Vice President Al Gore has become a media celebrity, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, and even an Academy Award winner – all for promoting the scariest scenarios available for the consequences of man-made global warming.

   Although sober re-assessments of media-hyped crises rarely make the headlines, you might be interested in knowing that since its original reports, which were admittedly designed to shock the world into action, the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change has consistently and significantly scaled back their earlier, scarier predictions. And, earlier this year, all four major climate monitoring organizations -- including the Hadley Center for Climate Prediction and NASA -- found that the Earth’s climate had actually cooled over the last year, wiping out a century of warming. Ocean currents are now credited by some climatologists for “delaying” warming for another decade. Since the climate did not warm for the last ten years, and is not expected to warm for another ten years, this would amount to a 20-year period of stable temperatures during the heaviest-ever output of human-generated carbon dioxide.

   For most of us, this is good news. But for those seeking to shock us into enacting a sweeping new regime of energy regulation, good news is the last thing they want us to hear.

   So, the Al Gore crowds’ predictions are as cataclysmic as ever. Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, assesses the situation this way:

   "Much of the global warming debate is perhaps best described as a constant outbidding by frantic campaigners, producing a barrage of ever-more scary scenarios in an attempt to get the public to accept their civilization-changing proposals. Unfortunately, the general public – while concerned about the environment – is distinctly unwilling to support questionable solutions with costs running into tens of trillions of [dollars]. Predictably, this makes the campaigners reach for even more outlandish scares.

   In other words, if you are in the business of shocking people, you have to keep raising the shock value of what you say. If you keep that up long enough, you begin to lose credibility."

   We’ve seen some warming over the past 100 years, but since we aren’t sure how significant man’s activities might be in causing any of that, we can’t be sure how significant man’s activities can be in changing it. Additionally, we need to weigh the tradeoffs in any major public policy initiative.

   The granddaddy of all climate change policies is a “cap-and-trade” system for carbon dioxide. This idea is meant to put a direct, quantifiable dollar cost on emitting carbon, so that businesses would be encouraged to emit less of that carbon, and thereby save their business the dollar costs of those emissions. This system worked well in removing poisonous emissions such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide from industrial combustion. But carbon dioxide and water vapor are the necessary result of ALL combustion, and they are not poisons. This means that the goal of cap and trade regulations for carbon dioxide is nothing short of the reduction of ALL combustion, which means a reduction in energy use.

   And Cap-and-trade regulations would increase the cost of energy even more, not only hurting our pocketbooks, but also shrink our economy at a time when many of us already worry about the future.

   Ohio stands to lose up to 66,000 jobs by 2020 and a reduction in gross state product of up to $7.7 billion per year, in the same period. Additionally, gas prices would soar an additional 20 percent and electricity prices would go up another 31 percent, according to a study by the American Council on Capital Formation.

   Many of us forget that Ohio is an energy state. We produce large amounts of coal and an impressive amount of natural gas. So, cap and trade would also hurt some of our most competitive industries directly by increasing the cost of the energy we produce and sell.

   Meanwhile, our economic rivals such as China have no intention of enacting a cap-and-trade system. Sadly, that means America would be placing itself at an even greater disadvantage when it comes to competing with Chinese and other foreign manufacturers.

   The costs of cap-and-trade regulations are pretty clear. They would hurt our pocketbooks, hurt our economy, and place us at an even greater competitive disadvantage with foreign manufacturers. The benefits are far less clear. Those like Al Gore would have us believe that we must make these great economic sacrifices to “save the planet.” But as more sober predictions come in, the sacrifices being demanded of us seem less and less meaningful, and less and less urgent.