Poverty and Human Health
Calvin Beisner, an expert in environmental ethics and the founder and national spokesperson for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, agrees that nature, not humans, causes most climate change. He said that the push to decrease CO2 by transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable energy is trapping people in extreme poverty worldwide.
“I have testified to committees of Congress that the amount of global warming that is attributable to human activity is so slight as to have little impact on human well-being,” Mr. Beisner, who testified before committees of the U.S. Senate and House, told The Epoch Times.
“But the attempt to reduce that warming by forcing a rapid transition from coal, oil, and natural gas to wind, solar, and other so-called renewable energy sources would slow, stop, or reverse the time out of poverty for people worldwide. And poverty is a far greater risk to human health and life than anything related to climate.”
Mr. Beisner explained that when people have wealth, they can thrive in “any climate from the Arctic Circle to the Sahara Desert to the Brazilian rainforest.” But when people try to survive on a few dollars daily, they can’t thrive in “even the best tropical paradise.”
He said that economic development, owing partly to cheap fossil fuels, has allowed the populace to thrive in countries such as the United States as well as in Europe. But now, with the United Nations’ push to net-zero CO2 by 2050, developed countries are telling countries in Sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia and Latin America “to forego the use of abundant, affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels that lifted the West out of poverty and restrict themselves to the use of diffuse, expensive, unreliable, wind and solar, and thus, slowing their rise out of poverty.”
“This is the West forcing its ideology on the rest,” Mr. Beisner said. “And it is ethically unconscionable. It’s ironic that so many environmentalists who embrace progressive or woke ideologies, and therefore tend to condemn colonialism of the past, now embrace this Neo-colonial movement.”
Like Mr. Alexander, Mr. Beisner pointed back to Mr. Christy’s data on the Earth’s global temperature and said: “We’ve come out of an ice age, or we are coming out of a little ice age that ran roughly 1350 to 1850.
“I agree with what their satellite data shows, which is that the rate of increase in global average temperature has been about 0.13 degrees Celsius per decade since the satellite records began in 1979. That would be about 1.3 degrees per century. Certainly, nothing that is going to cause a disaster for mankind.”
He said that there’s a push to declare a climate emergency because “politicians with poorly formed consciences find it easy to justify the growth of government power by appealing to fear of crisis or emergency, and the leading politicians in America today are far more hungry for power than they are committed to the good of the populace.”
Weather and Alarmist Rhetoric
Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology and the Alfred P. Sloan professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told The Epoch Times that the argument that there’s an “existential threat” to the earth from increasing temperatures is a “purely political statement” since even the IPCC doesn’t claim there’s an existential threat.
Instead, the IPCC references scientists and climate activists who claim there’s an existential threat but has never made this claim itself, Mr. Lindzen said.
“The [climate] models haven’t even suggested it,” he said. “And it arises from the fact that this was originally a political issue. And the politicians involved in it worry that their hysteria isn’t catching the best. They keep shifting from the global mean temperature to extreme weather. And you know, they keep saying, ‘Get worried, get worried! Panic!’ But science never suggested that [there’s a climate emergency].”
Mr. Lindzen said that even if those in power believed that there was an existential threat to the climate, the policies they’ve adopted to mitigate such a threat don’t make sense.
“If you believe CO2 is the villain and that we’re facing an existential threat, net zero is the wrong policy. All the things done—electric cars are ridiculous. Look at how CO2 is behaving. We’ve spent trillions so far, and it hasn’t changed a bit. It’s continuing to go up at the same rate,” he said.
Mr. Lindzen said it’s important to remember that the Earth is spherical, and the major climate change during the Last Glacial Maximum, about 20,000 years ago, didn’t come from the greenhouse effect (meaning heat trapped close to the Earth’s surface). Instead, it occurred due to the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles.
He explained that the wave-like motions traveling from west to east on weather maps are convective motions that carry heat from the tropics to the poles.
“[Convective motions] try to establish a certain temperature distribution before they stop pumping,” he said, explaining that the process is similar to heating a pot of water. The motion of the boiling water is the temperature trying to eliminate the temperature difference between the heating at the bottom of the pot and the water on top.
Similarly, when the sun hits the Earth’s surface, it hits it head-on at the equator but barely skims the surface at the poles. Thus, the Earth undertakes a similar action to the temperature in the pot of water and, essentially, tries to equalize the heat between the equator and the poles by distributing the temperature in waves. And that’s what we understand as weather.
“If you have no ice, the surface will bring you to 20 degrees different centigrade [68 degrees F], which you had 50 [million] years ago. If you have a glacial maximum, it’ll bring you to a temperature difference that’s 20 degrees greater than today. But these have nothing to do with the greenhouse process,” Mr. Lindzen said.
“No evidence exists that the tropics and pole temperature differences are changing. And that’s what caused major climate change [in the past]. Whatever change we’ve seen is minimal and is due largely to what the tropics are doing.”
Mr. Lindzen, like the others, said the push to declare a “climate emergency” isn’t about science but money and power.
“You have to wonder about politicians, whether it’s a form of psychosis,” he said. “Maybe it’s neuroses, sometimes. But I think the attraction of political power is not something normal people find irresistible.”
Joe Bastardi, co-chief meteorologist at WeatherBell, a weather forecasting service, says the weather constantly searches for balance, or “dynamic equilibrium.” But unlike Mr. Lindzen, Mr. Bastardi argues that we’ve seen a slight increase in temperature due to geothermal increases.
“In the geological timescale, we’re in what you would refer to as a climate optimum, not a climate emergency,” Mr. Bastardi told The Epoch Times. “There were several times when we saw this kind of warming in the past, and life thrived on the planet. I suspect the reason that past warming occurred is likely because the ocean warmed. And the oceans warmed, I think, because of increasing underwater volcanic activity.”
He said a perfect example of his theory is the 2022 eruption of the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga, which sent the equivalent of 58,000 swimming pools worth of water vapor into the stratosphere and accounts for warmer-than-average weather in some areas during 2023.
“Increases in the geothermal activity precede the increase in sea surface temperatures,” he said. “Water vapor is the number one greenhouse gas. So if the oceans warm, you put more water vapor into the air. Consequently, you get the warming, and most of the warming is occurring away from the equator. And that’s another clue because it’s occurring where it’s coldest and driest, and that’s where water vapor has the greatest influence on temperature.”
Returning to the idea of dynamic equilibrium, Mr. Bastardi explained that the atmosphere “fights back” when temperature changes occur.
“I mean, the biggest dirty little secret—and only a meteorologist who follows hurricanes would understand this—is that the trapping hotspots that [climate activists] were pushing in the 1990s never showed up over the tropics. They’re over the Arctic, which is a very different response. That means that the atmosphere is fighting back,” he said.
Mr. Bastardi forecasts that it’ll be “very, very cold and very, very stormy this winter.”
“If you do get warming in the Arctic, [cooling] is a natural response to the warming. These big El Niños have to go off when you build up the ocean heat. When they go off, I mean it’s beautiful. You can see the rise in the temperatures as a step-up function directly correlated to the big El Niños,” he said.
He said if the temperature rises due to geothermal activity, the increase is not man-made, and the push for net-zero CO2 by 2050 is pointless.
“My judgment is that these people are pushing [a climate emergency] for a completely different reason than climate and weather,” he said.
Questioning the Narrative
“Climate is a composition of a whole lot of stuff that affects climate,” Larry Bell, an architect known for designing and crafting inhabitable buildings for space and an endowed professor at the University of Houston, told The Epoch Times. “It’s tough to model because we don’t know all the proportions of different variables influencing [climate].
“Some variables operate over hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of years, and have to do with our planet’s position in the solar system or position in the galaxy, and ocean changes that have nothing to do with the atmosphere — El Niño and La Niña, the effect of solar changes (which are magnetic changes that affect astrophysics) — so it’s really complex, and a lot of what we call climate science is very specialized. People study one thing or another, but the studies aren’t connected.”
He said geologists, for example, look at long-term trends that reflect on rocks and geological formations, while mathematicians and astrophysicists look at climate differently. And none of the different disciplines can say they have it ultimately figured out because it’s “devilishly complicated.”
He said there were four decades of cooling following World War II, even though war-time efforts resulted in additional CO2 in the atmosphere.
“So, the notion that there’s some simple correlation between carbon dioxide and climate change is a convenient contrivance,” he said.
Mr. Bell said he first got interested in climate change when Fred Singer, the founder of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, visited him at his office in early 1979 and showed him that satellite weather data wasn’t working as some had predicted.
“He said weather satellites weren’t showing the ‘hotspot it’d predicted over the tropical troposphere,'” Mr. Bell said.
“The climate models were predicting that the atmosphere warms first and then the surface, and they predicted because of that a hotspot would be detectable over the equator, and they weren’t finding it.”
Mr. Bell said he didn’t overthink climate change at the time, but as the years passed and he heard more about it, he started questioning the constantly changing narrative.
At first, there was concern that “the glaciers are coming” and global cooling would be a problem, but then 10 years later, the fears had flipped to “global warming,” he said.
“Timothy Wirth, who helped organize a Senate hearing on global warming in Washington, famously told a magazine that they scheduled the meeting for what was typically the hottest day of the year, and the night before the meeting, they went in and opened all the windows and turned off the air conditioning,” he said.
Mr. Bell said the claim that 97 percent of scientists agree that humans are causing global warming isn’t truthful.
He said scientists agree that the climate is changing, but “there’s no such emergency whatsoever.”
“The climate has been warming in fits and starts since the last little ice age. And it may continue. But if you look at images of New York, at the shoreline there of the Statue of Liberty, the water hasn’t risen. The sea level is not appreciably different than it was years ago. So that’s anecdotal, but it’s real. Your eyes can see it,” he said.
Mr. Bell said another narrative pushed by climate alarmists is that the weather is getting more violent in the form of hurricanes and other weather-related disasters.
“All they have to do is look at the records. No, it’s not worse! Hurricane seasons were much worse in the ’30s. But they look in terms of fatalities or damage, and more people live on the coast now than there were then,” he said.
Mr. Bastardi confirmed Mr. Bell’s take: “The kinetic energy of hurricanes has been decreasing, and you can see that with the ACE [Accumulated Cyclone Energy] index — it’s been lowering.
“What [climate alarmists] do is they’re sort of predators in that they realize the average person doesn’t have time to think and examine every little detail, especially in this day and age where people live paycheck to paycheck and are worried about their jobs.
“The everyday person isn’t looking at the fact that there’s 100 times more property value in the way, and inflation has gone through the roof so that when a hurricane now is a place like Fort Myers or hits a place like Myrtle Beach, it’s going to do much, much more damage than it did before.”
When asked what concerns him most about the current narratives being pushed by climate alarmists, Mr. Bell answered: “I care about how climate hysteria, and how misinformation, drives policy. And these policies are driving our foundational bedrock policies that determine our economic well-being. They determine our national defense mastery — we won’t run a Navy on ethanol. We’re not going to run an Air Force on extension cords. It’s just absolutely insane. People think of climate as science. No, it’s not. It’s the big lever of government. It’s big globalism. And it ain’t favoring the U.S.
“There’s absolutely nothing more impacting, nothing more effective, I think, than leveraging the climate scare.”
