“Another” climate change analysis has been released. They do one each year. With its release come the questions again: can we believe what’s in the report? Is climate change real? And as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez maintains, is the World over in 12 years because of climate change IF we don’t do something?
Activists tend to exaggerate the impacts of climate change while underestimating the costs of tackling it. The reception to the new climate assessment was instructive. The report largely attempts to remain soberly scientific and follows the even more careful global report by the United Nations’ climate science panel, known as the IPCC.
Sadly, accurate science doesn’t make for good television; predicting the end of times does. Among many others, widely quoted climate scientist Michael Mann talked up the report to NPR and CNN, saying its predictions are already borne out in today’s “unprecedented weather extremes.”
Actually, the assessment and science tell a different story:
- “Drought statistics over the entire contiguous US have declined,” the report finds, reminding us that “the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s remains the benchmark drought and extreme heat event.”
- On flooding, the assessment accepts the IPCC’s finding, which “did not attribute changes in flooding to human influence nor report detectable changes in flooding magnitude, duration or frequency.”
- Even more dramatic was CNN’s headline, screaming that “climate change will shrink [US] economy” by 10 percent, a figure also repeated on The New York Times front page.
- Actually, the UN’s climate scenarios envision US GDP per capita will more than triple by the end of this century, so this 10 percent reduction would come from an economy 300 percent larger than it is today. A slightly smaller bonanza, in other words. But the 10 percent figure is itself dodgy. It assumes that temperatures will increase about 14 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. This is unlikely. The US climate assessment itself estimates that, with no significant climate action, American temperatures will increase by between 5 and 8.7 degrees. Using the high estimate of 8.7 degrees, the damage would be only half as big, at 5 percent. But even the 8.7-degree warming estimate is unrealistically pessimistic. This stems from an extreme high-emission scenario that expects almost the entire world to revert to using massive amounts of coal: a five-fold increase from today. That, in turn, assumes a much higher amount of fossil fuels than are realistically available for use, according to one study. Another study likewise found the scenario “exceptionally unlikely.” So, even a 5 percent reduction in the size of the American economy only follows from picking unlikely worst-case scenarios.
- Two-thirds of the purported 10 percent damage to the economy comes from just one category: heat deaths. While it is true that more people die when it is unusually hot, it is not true that lives are shorter in hotter places. That’s because people adapt. And studies of migrants show people do so very quickly, within weeks. Forecasting that the temperature-mortality relationship in the US would remain constant over a century is ludicrous. This assumes that even if temperatures were to increase by 14 degrees, people would die in masses, ignoring the fact that people have been shown to adjust over time to temperature changes. Then, too, over the 80 years until 2100, people can make many additional changes that reduce this risk, from getting air conditioners to changing how they build structures. So, the well-reported idea that warming will shrink the economy by 10 percent disregards huge economic growth, assumes twice the damages of the worst-case temperatures the report itself expects and even then only finds such high costs stemming almost exclusively from easily preventable heat deaths.
The Cost?
While activists overstate the costs of climate change, they suggest its reversal is simply a matter of political will. In fact, there are significant costs to climate action: It often involves replacing relatively cheap, efficient fossil fuels with still-uncompetitive green-energy sources. Climate economist William Nordhaus has shown that a globally coordinated and gradually increasing carbon tax could cut temperature rises to 6.3 degrees from 7.4 at a cost of $20 trillion in lost productivity, but more than pay for itself by lowering climate costs. But his requires a very well-designed, coordinated global policy. In the real world, climate policies are typically less effective and much costlier.
Nordhaus shows that more ambitious policies like the Paris Agreement target of 3.6 degrees would cost some $134 trillion, much more than the associated climate benefits. Such prescriptions for climate change are worse than the disease.Yes, we need to speed up the transition from fossil fuels by investing in green R&D. Even so, reporting on climate change needs to be grounded in reality. Exaggeration is understandable but dangerous, because it risks wasting resources on the wrong policy answers, and gives proponents of climate change a political football to throw into conversations and studies which seems to muddy the waters of actualities.
“Experts” Say…
It seems like “experts” on climate weigh-in left and right on the topic. Have you notice their doing so is cyclical? It is almost as if nothing in climate actually happens unless and until an expert makes a new blockbuster prediction. Al Gore started it, but it hasn’t happened yet and other “experts” don’t think it ever will. (More from Al Gore later)
Co-founder of environmental organization Greenpeace Patrick Moore said recently that the climate change crisis driving much of liberal politics today “is not only fake news. It’s fake science.”
Moore also wonders why people would be worried about global warming: “A little bit of warming would not be a bad thing, for myself being Canadian.”
Moore bounced back into the climate change debate in an online feud with New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez after he blasted her Green New Deal for being not ambitious but ridiculous.
“Well, it’s a silly plan; that’s why I suggested she was a pompous little twit, twit meaning silly in the British lexicon,” Moore said, adding, “She really rubbed me the wrong way when she said she’s ‘the boss’ because she can make up a proposal that’s completely ridiculous, and nobody else did.”
Moore, who now sits as a director on the CO2 Coalition, a group of American and Canadian scientists who refute man-made climate change, says carbon dioxide is “the main building block of all life” and that it is good for the environment. “There is nothing to be afraid of.”
He doesn’t deny climate change. “Of course climate change is real: it’s been happening since the beginning of time but it’s not dangerous and it’s not created by people … a completely natural phenomenon.”
Moore questioned why so many scientists who promote a climate change crisis receive “perpetual government grants,” insist “the science is settled and say people like myself should just shut up. On the other hand, they keep studying it forever as if there’s something new to find out.” The former Greenpeace director says the organization has been “hijacked by the extreme left.”
Getting back to the Green New Deal, Moore insisted the plan is a recipe for catastrophe: “You cannot do agriculture for 8 billion people, produce the food for 8 billion people without fossil fuels.”
Global Warming Predicitons that Failed
There have been global warming and climate change predicitons made by purported experts and scientists for years. Dozens and dozens of them have never occurred, but their failure to materialize has been lost on members of the media who initially preached those to us but never mentioned the reasons for their failure to predict accurately.
Chief of among the global warming warners was former Vice President and presidential candidate Al Gore. I’m not certain how he became a climate expert, and climate financial guru, or even a soothsayer or where he got his license. But coming from the guy who once claimed to be responsible for inventing the internet, his doing so is not too surprising. He has even released a couple of climate change movies which leftists ate up with their support. After all, he’s a Democrat. And left-leaning entertainment experts love Al Gore. Al Gore was certainly in the faces of all Americans with his earth-ending predictions. And he literally warned us against allowing our personal climate-changing habits to end the World. But things didn’t work out for Al. But so far, they’ve worked out pretty well for Mother Nature.
12 years after Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” guilt/fear producing predictions, let’s close by examining just how accurate his “science” proved to be on his way to the bank.
1. Rising Sea Levels – inaccurate and misleading. Al was even discovered
purchasing a beachfront mansion!
2. Increased Tornadoes – declining for decades.
3. New Ice Age in Europe – they’ve been spared; it never happened.
4. South Sahara Drying Up – completely untrue.
5. Massive Flooding in China and India – again didn’t happen.
6. Melting Arctic – false – 2015 represents the largest refreezing in years.
7. Polar Bear Extinction – actually they are increasing!
8. Temperature Increases Due to CO2 – no significant rising for over 18
years.
9. Katrina a Foreshadow of the Future – false – past 10 years, no F3
hurricanes; “longest drought ever!”
10.The Earth Would be in a “True Planetary Emergency” Within a Decade Unless Drastic Action Taken to Reduce Greenhouse Gasses – never happened.
Summary
The arrogance of Man is so obvious it blinds most. Are we so naive or illiterate to think that anything we could possibly do would be sufficient to make a significant difference in the climate of this planet? Do we honestly feel we could do something so drastic, so devastating that would actually destroy Earth in just a bit over a decade? THINK ABOUT THOSE THINGS!
Although we are far from being the smallest country on the planet, we’re certainly not the largest either. What things regarding the environment are just a drop in the bucket of what scientists tell us will turn Earth into another Jupiter or Mars.
How much of what we see today regarding those evolutionary changes that would simultaneously occur as our climate changes have we witnessed the last 50, 60, 70, or even 80 years? Certainly the climate changes. But it’s almost as if Mother Earth was getting a few chuckles at climate experts and their predicitons. I remember the Ice Age predictions that were rampant in the early 1990s. I remember the Global Warming predictions. Of course we hear everyday the new climate change folks scolding us about carbon emissions. Do you know how the United States carbon emissions have changed over the last couple of decades?
This bar chart may be difficult to read because of its size. But just glance across the top. Since the early 1990s, the U.S. carbon emissions on which climate change experts base ALL of their dire predictions have virtually been flat. In fact they are trending down! And this happened while the U.S. population has swelled 33%!
If you ask most people on the street they would say that the U.S. has done a pretty good job taking care of our environment.
Don’t get me wrong: taking care of the resources we have been given is a critical thing. All Americans need to be more responsible for the ways in which we can help do just that. However, alarmists have through decades continued to forecast the destruction of Earth through Man’s refusal to fix the environment. They’ve even been so naive as to predict specific times for that destruction to occur. And they’ve been wrong every time.
A thought for consideration: where do the statistics originate on which climate change experts base their predictions? “Computer models.” What are those models: mathematical equations (algorithms) that are manually prepared by “experts.” What determines the substance of each? The opinions of those who prepare them. Are we so naive as to think a mathematician’s personal and political views are not going to impact the data process they prepare? And the science of climate change as we have seen is NOT accurate, NOT factual, and is ALL opinion.
Is is smart for everyone to simply swallow predictions of these experts that (if we follow their conclusions) will dramatically change the content and directions of every part of our lives knowing every one of their cataclysmic predictions have failed miserably in the past? And their conclusions demand we permanently alter our way of existence.
Climate change specialists, Leftist politicians, and the Mainstream Media find it mesmerizing to perpetuate their climate change theories in the minds of Americans. Their doing so keeps the sob story alive. Who in the U.S. is willing to roll the dice on meat and carbohydrates in the name of climate change?
To finalize this story, who are those experts that over and over tell us “The Sky is Falling…The Sky is Falling?” Where is the incontrovertible science that supports that hypothesis? I’ll answer that: There is none!
And there’s on little thing they forget to tell Americans: more than half the time they make weather conditions — like the ones we see in the early evening news shots — THEY ARE WRONG!
Are we going to roll the dice to pay for a government to take all of our dollars and cents to end climate change? If so, how will Americans transport themselves? Who will we feed them? How will we transport that food without fossil fuel? How can they possibly be fed without oil, carbon products to undergird production.
Yes, it is complicated. And, no, we don’t have an absolute. But one thing we DO know: For certain if the U.S. implements programs like the “Green New Plan” crafted by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, we will immediately run out of money. THIS NATION CANNOT EXIST (nor can any other) without the capability to buy or barter for those things you need to survive. “NO MONEY” certainly means the Green New Deal cannot survive, nor would we.
Can we make it better? Sure. Should we make it better? Absolutely. You won’t hear that from Socialism supporters. Well, we CAN make it better according to Ocasio-Cortez, but we must stop cows from farting first!