On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science - in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At one point, Koonin read an extract from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report released the previous year. Computer model-simulated responses to forcings - the term used by climate scientists for changes of energy flows into and out of the climate system, such as changes in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and changes in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “can be scaled up or down.” This scaling included greenhouse gas forcings.
Some forcings in some computer models had to be scaled down to match computer simulations to actual climate observations. But when it came to making centennial projections on which governments rely and drive climate policy, the scaling factors were removed, probably resulting in a 25 to 30 percent over-prediction of the 2100 warming.
The ensuing dialogue between Koonin and Dr. William Collins of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - a lead author of the climate model evaluation chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report - revealed something more troubling and deliberate than holes in scientific knowledge:
Dr. Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30 percent factor when you project out a century.
Dr. Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.
Dr. Koonin: What are you using them as?
Dr. Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.
Dr. Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?
Dr. Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.
Koonin was uncommonly well-suited to lead the APS climate workshop. He has a deep understanding of computer models, which have become the workhorses of climate science. As a young man, Koonin wrote a paper on computer modeling of nuclear reaction in stars and taught a course on computational physics at Caltech. In the early 1990s, he was involved in a program using satellites to measure the Earth’s albedo - that is, the reflection of incoming solar radiation back into space. As a student at Caltech in the late 1960s, he was taught by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and absorbed what Koonin calls Feynmans “absolute intellectual honesty.”
On becoming BP’s chief scientist in 2004, Koonin became part of the wider climate change milieu. Assignments included explaining the physics of man-made global warming to Prince Philip at a dinner in Buckingham Palace. In 2009, Koonin was appointed an under-secretary at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration.
The APS climate debate was the turning point in Koonin’s thinking about climate change and consensus climate science ("The Science").
“I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe,” Koonin writes in his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters.”
“I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.”
“Unsettled” is an authoritative primer on the science of climate change that lifts the lid on The Science and finds plenty that isn’t as it should be.
“As a scientist,” writes Koonin, “I felt the scientific community was letting the public down by not telling the whole truth plainly.”
Koonin’s aim is to right that wrong.
Koonin’s indictment of The Science starts with its reliance on unreliable computer models. Usefully describing the earth’s climate, writes Koonin, is “one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems.” Models divide the atmosphere into pancake-shaped boxes of around 100km wide and one kilometer deep. But the upward flow of energy from tropical thunder clouds, which is more than thirty times larger than that from human influences, occurs over smaller scales than the programmed boxes. This forces climate modellers to make assumptions about what happens inside those boxes. As one modeller confesses, “it’s a real challenge to model what we don’t understand.”
Inevitably, this leaves considerable scope for modelers’ subjective views and preferences. A key question climate models are meant to solve is estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (ECS), which aims to tell us by how much temperatures rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet in 2020, climate modelers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute admitted to tuning their model by targeting an ECS of about 3 degrees Centigrade. “Talk about cooking the books,” Koonin comments.
The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Self-evidently, computer projections can’t be tested against a future that’s yet to happen, but they can be tested against climates present and past. Climate models can’t even agree on what the current global average temperature is. “One particularly jarring feature is that the simulated average global surface temperature,” Koonin notes, “varies among models by about 3C, three times greater than the observed value of the twentieth century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.”
Another embarrassing feature of climate models concerns the earlier of the two twentieth-century warmings from 1910 to 1940, when human influences were much smaller. On average, models give a warming rate of about half of what was actually observed. The failure of the latest models to warm fast enough in those decades suggest that it’s possible, even likely, that internal climate variability is a significant contributor to the warming of recent decades, Koonin suggests. “That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag - it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates.” Neither is it reassuring that for the years after 1960, the latest generation of climate models show a larger spread and greater uncertainty than earlier ones - implying that, far from advancing, The Science has been going backwards. That is not how science is meant to work.
The second part of Koonin’s indictment concerns the distortion, misrepresentation, and mischaracterization of climate data to support a narrative of climate catastrophism based on increasing frequency of extreme weather events. As an example, Koonin takes a “shockingly misleading” claim and associated graph in the United States government’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report that the number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records across the 48 contiguous states. Koonin demonstrates that the sharp uptick in highs over the last two decades is an artifact of a methodology chosen to mislead. After re-running the data, record highs show a clear peak in the 1930s, but there is no significant trend over the 120 years of observations starting in 1895, or even since 1980, when human influences on the climate grew strongly. In contrast, the number of record cold temperatures has declined over more than a century, with the trend accelerating after 1985.
Notes Koonin, “temperature extremes in the contiguous U.S. have become less common and somewhat milder since the late nineteenth century.” Similarly, a key message in the 2014 National Climate Assessment of an upward trend in hurricane frequency and intensity, repeated in the 2017 assessment, is contradicted 728 pages later by a statement buried in an appendix stating that there has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones “nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.”
That might surprise many politicians.
“Over the past thirty years, the incidence of natural disasters has dramatically increased,” Treasury secretary Janet Yellen falsely asserted last month in a pitch supporting the Biden administration’s infrastructure package. “We are now in a situation where climate change is an existential risk to our future economy and way of life,” she claimed.
The sacrifice of scientific truth in the form of objective empirical data for the sake of a catastrophist climate narrative is plain to see. As Koonin summarizes the case:
“Even as human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
Koonin also has sharp words for the policy side of the climate change consensus, which asserts that although climate change is an existential threat, solving it by totally decarbonizing society is straightforward and relatively painless.
“Two decades ago, when I was in the private sector,” Koonin writes, “I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was ‘a challenge,’ while in government it was talked about as ‘an opportunity.’ Now back in academia, I can forthrightly call it ‘a practical impossibility.’
Unlike many scientists and most politicians, Koonin displays a sure grasp of the split between developed and developing nations, for whom decarbonization is a luxury good that they can’t afford. The fissure dates back to the earliest days of the U.N. climate process at the end of the 1980s. Indeed, it’s why developing nations insisted on the U.N. route as opposed to an intergovernmental one that produced the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.
“The economic betterment of most of humanity in the coming decades will drive energy demand even more strongly than population growth,” Koonin says.
“Who will pay the developing world not to emit? I have been posing that simple question to many people for more than fifteen years and have yet to hear a convincing answer.”
The most unsettling part of “Unsettled” concerns science and the role of scientists.
“Science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected,” Karl Popper wrote nearly six decades ago.
That condition does not pertain in climate science, where errors are embedded in a political narrative and criticism is suppressed. In a recent essay, the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford observes that the pride of science as a way of generating knowledge - unlike religion - is to be falsifiable. That changes when science is pressed into duty as authority in order to absolve politicians of responsibility for justifying their policy choices ("The science says,” we’re repeatedly told). “Yet what sort of authority would it be that insists its own grasp of reality is merely provisional?” asks Crawford. “For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge.”
At the outset of “Unsettled,” Feynman’s axiom of absolute intellectual honesty is contrasted with climate scientist Stephen Schneider’s “double ethical bind.” On the one hand, scientists are ethically bound by the scientific method to tell the truth. On the other, they are human beings who want to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.
“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest,"Schneider said.
“Being effective” helps explain the pressure on climate scientists to conform to The Science and the emergence of a climate science knowledge monopoly. Its function is, as Crawford puts it, the manufacture of a product - political legitimacy - which, in turn, requires that competing views be delegitimized and driven out of public discourse through enforcement of a “moratorium on the asking of questions.” This sees climate scientist gatekeepers deciding who can and cannot opine on climate science. “Please, save us from retired physicists who think they’re smarter and wiser than everyone in climate science,” tweeted Gavin Schmidt, NASA acting senior climate advisor, about Koonin and his book. “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote,” a chair of a university earth sciences department tells Koonin, “but I don’t dare say that in public.” Another scientist criticizes Koonin for giving ammunition to “the deniers,” and a third writes an op-ed urging New York University to reconsider Koonin’s position there. It goes wider than scientists. Facebook has suppressed a “Wall Street Journal” review of “Unsettled.” Likewise, “Unsettled” remains unreviewed by the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post” (though it carried an op-ed by Marc Thiessen based on an interview with Koonin) and other dailies, which would prefer to treat Koonin’s reasoned climate dissent as though it doesn’t exist.
The moratorium on the asking of questions represents the death of science as understood and described by Popper, a victim of the conflicting requirements of political utility and scientific integrity. Many scientists take this lying down. Koonin won’t. For his forensic skill and making his findings accessible to non-specialists, Koonin has written the most important book on climate science in decades.
----------
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Green Tyranny and Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.
Back just over 40 years ago in the incredible cold of the late 1970s, the world was worrying about the cooling which began in the late 1950s was returning to the climate regime that persisted from 1600 to the 1850s, a period called ‘The Little Ice Age” (The Weather Conspiracy, the Coming of the New Ice Age)
Leonard Nimoy (Spock) presented this story in videos like this.
While I worked on my BS and MS at the University of Wisconsin with my Master’s Thesis on Explosive Redevelopment In East Coast Cyclones), the scientists were blaming fossil fuel burning and man introduced particulate matter acting as a ‘human volcano’ which like volcanos reflected the sun’s rays and lead to cooling that enhanced natural forces.
The solutions were thought to be eliminating pollutants and for even then a quest to find alternatives to fossil fuels. The second goal focus during the 1973 Arab Oil embargo induced shortages and price rises but renewables were not then ready for prime-time and and as the Texas debacle showed even today not reliable for providing the base load and will lead to soaring energy prices and life-threatening blackouts.
THEN THE PACIFIC CHANGED MODES
But after the Great Pacific Climate shift in the late 1970s, warming ensued as stronger, longer lasting El Ninos which produce global warming suddenly were favored over the La Ninas whose dominance lead to the cooling that had dominated in the 1960s to mid 1970s.
By 1988, many began to think this new mode might be the golden opportunity to take control of our energy policies and redirect media coverage.
SHOWTIME
In 1988 the democrats orchestrated a hearing orchestrated by then Senator Al Gore and stagecrafted by Senator Tim Wirth (later headed up the UN Foundation - see Chris Horner’s Red Hot Lies) featuring NASA scientist James Hansen who had traded in his ice age hat for one advertising man-made global warming.
As the NYT reported:
Senator Timothy E. Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who presided at hearing today, said:
‘’As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth’s atmosphere gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.’’
NYT 1988
As the stagecrated link stagecrafted shows, Tim had other reasons to pursue this path.
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Timothy Wirth quoted in Science Under Siege by Michael Fumento, 1993
The politicians and media began their 30-year warm cycle attack on fossil fuels and our way of life at that meeting. Fed by a sudden flood of grant money, many people in a wide array of disciplines jumped aboard as self proclaimed climatologists, environmental scientists and modellers.
So at both ends of the warm and cold cycle, the enemy was the same - people and fossil fuel.
Notice the flatlining since the late 1990s. My guess if a cooling ensues as the oceans both cool in the second straight dud of a solar cycle, the leaders and media will find a way to try and convince the gullibles it was their own fault.
See this one of several papers on the new Grand Solar Minimum we may have entered.
Note the greatest scientific fraud belies the truth about the blessing increased CO2 levels have provided to mankind.
The Arctic invasion that recently swept the United States was truly historic, and the record books prove it. First see this NOAA February map and the very large areas with -12F or greater cold anomalies in pink.
For the nation, it was the 19th-coldest February in the 127-year record. The nation’s monthly average temperature of 30.6F was 3.2F below the 1901-2000 mean, the coldest February since 1989 and fifth coldest since the end of the Dust Bowl era, behind 1960, 1978, 1979, and 1989.
According to NOAA, 10,127 record low mins and maxes were observed, 703 monthly record low maxes and mins and 200 all time record low maxes and mins (year -to-date) dating back 100+ years. Note also the 3514 record snow reports too this year to date.
Dalles has ts coldest ever three day assault, beating out 1983 and the incredible 1899.
A new all-time never-before-witnessed benchmarks often in record books dating back 100+ years.
NOAA said the “cold snap” peaked between Feb. 14-16, during which time approximately 30% of available U.S. sites set cold-maximum records, and about 20% set cold-minimum records:
The severity of the polar cold was extreme, unexpected, and ill-prepared for the western world has been instructed to brace for catastrophic warming for going on 4 decades now:
Meteorological Analysis
Three weeks ago, a major cold snap and series of winter storms enveloped the southern plains and parts of the Mississippi River Valley, sending temperatures below zero as far south as central Texas. According to NOAA NCEI, a total of 8,632 daily record low temperatures - including both maximums and minimums - were set or tied from February 10-20, as opposed to only 262 daily warm records. Additionally, a whopping 693 monthly record lows were set, 199 of which were all-Time record lows.
According to the NOAA Weather Prediction Center, over 30% of all of the official weather stations in the United States set at least record low maximum temperatures between February 14 and 16. Without a doubt, this was the coldest 10-day period that this part of the country had experienced in over a century.
The animation HERE conveys just how widespread the cold was between February 10 and 20. Locations approaching or surpassing daily, monthly, and/or all-time record lows; February 10-20, 2021 - coolwx.com.
While no statewide records were broken, some of the records that were reported were quite shocking to say the least. The two coldest days were Monday, February 15 and Tuesday, February 16, where temperatures were some 40-50F below average across Oklahoma and Texas. Between February 11 and 18, temperatures across much of the Heartland averaged some 30F below average (Figure 2). Temperatures this cold for such a sustained period can lower the monthly and seasonal average by a wide margin.
Figure 2: 7-day 2 meter air temperature anomaly (F) with contour lines labeled; February 11-18.
On Monday, February 15, Oklahoma City only rose to 4F (-15.6C), which was colder than the daily record low of 7F (-13.9C) set in 1909! San Angelo, Texas dipped to a bone-chilling -1F (-18.3C), which tied with December 29, 1983 and February 2, 1985 for the city’s second coldest temperature, only behind the reading of -4’F (-20C) set on December 23, 1989. That was also the only subzero reading for the date, smashing the old record of 16F (-8.9C) from 1909. Houston, Texas dipped to 16F on Monday the 15, which was their coldest temperature since December 24, 1989, when it plunged to 11F (-11.7C). That also broke the old daily record of 18F (-7.8C) from 1918.
Kansas City, Missouri plunged down to -10F (-23.3C), breaking the old record of -6F (-21.1C) from 1936, while the high of -1F smashed the old record of 8F (-13.3C) from 1900. According to the local National Weather Service office, a wind chill of -32F (-35.6C) was recorded, the coldest wind chill there since 1989.
The following morning, Tuesday, February 16, even more notable record lows were set. Oklahoma City once again set a record low, this time falling to a jaw-dropping -14F (-25.6C), which not only obliterated the old daily record of 4F (-15.6C) set in 1903, it was the coldest reading there in over 120 years, only second to the -17F (-27.2C) recorded on February 12, 1899. Oklahoma City also recorded its longest stretch of temperatures at or below 20F (-6.7C), at 210 consecutive hours, surpassing 1983. Meanwhile, Tulsa dropped to -13F (-25C), tying the city’s coldest temperature on record, originally set on January 12, 1918.
Dallas, Texas even dipped to -2F (-18.9C), which matched January 31, 1949 for the second coldest temperature ever recorded there, just behind February 12, 1899, when it dipped to a bone-chilling -8F (-22.2C). Tyler, Texas broke their all-time coldest temperature of -3F (-19.4C) from January 18, 1930, dipping to six below zero. Hastings, Nebraska tied their all-time coldest temperature of -30F (-34.4C), originally set on January 12, 1912. It also obliterated the old daily record low of -13F set in 1979.
In Arkansas, Fayetteville fell to -20F (-28.9C), which not only anihilated the old record of 7F from both 1958 and 2007, it was their all-time coldest temperature, and only nine degrees short of the statewide record set on February 13, 1905 in Gravette.
Perhaps the most impressive record that was set was in Bottineau, North Dakota, approximately ten miles from the Canadian border. On the morning of February 13, the mercury dove to an incomprehensible -51F (-46.1C), which not only crushed the previous daily record of -37F (-38.3C) from 1936, it also broke the towns prior all-time record low of -50F (-45.6C) set on February 3, 1893, a record that stood for over 128 years! This reading was only nine degrees off the statewide record, set on February 15, 1936 in Parshall. Other impressive readings were temperatures as low as minus 20 as far south as northern Texas.
Now that we have flipped the calendar to March, to really shed some light on how large of an impression the Arctic outbreak had on the monthly outcome, last month was the coldest by departure from average in the Continental United States since December 2000 (Figure 3) and third coldest since December 1989.
Figure 3. PRISM temperature anomaly analysis for February 2021 - weathermodels.com.
Major cold snaps that impact the southern plains all share similar characteristics with respect to their meteorological evolution. While the event itself was arguably predictable with moderate confidence as early as two weeks out, something my friend meteorologist Joe Bastardi over at WeatherBELL.com was very bullish -and ultimately correct - on from over ten days out, the threat for such cold became elevated within weeks following the sudden stratospheric warming event which was the primary cause of the stratospheric polar vortex (SPV) displacement.
Winter Rolls on for Denver
By the way, a blizzard left behind 27.1 inches of snow in Denver this weekend, the 4th largest snow in the history back to 1881.
Also see A CLIMATE AND ENERGY PRIMER FOR POLITICIANS AND MEDIA by contributing author Allan MacRae Allan is a highly respected energy leader in Canada who has worked with true climate experts and has helped make Alberta the shining star of Canadian energy over the decades. There too the politicians and media and the public have been programmed by false claims and green energy frauds and are willing to toss the low cost clean fossil fuel energy legacy out and replace it with unreliable and expensive green energy. Greens expect population to adapt its consumption to the available supply and simply come to accept rationing and power interruptions, of the sort that are unfortunately still common in underdeveloped countries. They insist that is the necessary price for averting the phoney climate apocalypse.
This week Myron Ebell (director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) and Steven J. Milloy published a post on the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) blog titled ”Wrong Again: 50 Years of Failed Eco-pocalyptic Predictions:”
Modern doomsayers have been predicting climate and environmental disaster since the 1960s. They continue to do so today. None of the apocalyptic predictions with due dates as of today have come true. What follows is a collection of notably wild predictions from notable people in government and science.
More than merely spotlighting the failed predictions, this collection shows that the makers of failed apocalyptic predictions often are individuals holding respected positions in government and science. While such predictions have been and continue to be enthusiastically reported by a media eager for sensational headlines, the failures are typically not revisited.
The first 27 failed alarmist predictions below are from the CEI post (many were previously collected and posted by Tony Heller on RealClimateScience, see Tony’s video below) and the additional 14 doomsday predictions the climate alarmists got wrong were added by John Nolte in a Breitbart post titled “Climate ‘Experts’ are 0-41 with Their Doomsday Predictions”:
For more than 50 years Climate Alarmists in the scientific community and environmental movement have not gotten even one prediction correct, but they do have a perfect record of getting 41 predictions wrong. In other words, on at least 41 occasions, these so-called experts have predicted some terrible environmental catastrophe was imminent ...and it never happened. And not once - not even once! - have these alarmists had one of their predictions come true.
Think about that...the so-called experts are 0-41 with their predictions, but those of us who are skeptical of “expert” prediction number 42, the one that says that if we don’t immediately convert to socialism and allow Alexandria Ocasio-Crazy to control and organize our lives, the planet will become uninhabitable. Why would any sane person listen to someone with a 0-41 record? Why would we completely restructure our economy and sacrifice our personal freedom for “experts” who are 0-41, who have never once gotten it right? And if that’s not crazy enough, the latest ploy is to trot out a 16-year-old girl to spread prediction number 42, because it is so much more credible that way.
Below are the 41 failed doomsday, eco-pocalyptic predictions (with links):
1.1967: Dire Famine Forecast By 1975
2.1969: Everyone Will Disappear In a Cloud Of Blue Steam By 1989 (1969)
3.1970: Ice Age By 2000
4.1970: America Subject to Water Rationing By 1974 and Food Rationing By 1980
5.1971: New Ice Age Coming By 2020 or 2030
6.1972: New Ice Age By 2070
7.1974: Space Satellites Show New Ice Age Coming Fast
8.1974: Another Ice Age?
9.1974: Ozone Depletion a ‘Great Peril to Life’
10.1976: Scientific Consensus Planet Cooling, Famines imminent
11.1980: Acid Rain Kills Life In Lakes (additional link)
12 1978: No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend (additional link)
13.1988: Regional Droughts (that never happened) in 1990s
14.1988: Temperatures in DC Will Hit Record Highs
15.1988: Maldive Islands will Be Underwater by 2018 (they’re not)
16.1989: Rising Sea Levels will Obliterate Nations if Nothing Done by 2000
17.1989: New York City’s West Side Highway Underwater by 2019 (it’s not)
18.2000: Children Won’t Know what Snow Is
19.2002: Famine In 10 Years If We Don’t Give Up Eating Fish, Meat, and Dairy
20.2004: Britain will Be Siberia by 2024
21.2008: Arctic will Be Ice Free by 2018
22.2008: Climate Genius Al Gore Predicts Ice-Free Arctic by 2013
23.2009: Climate Genius Prince Charles Says we Have 96 Months to Save World
24.2009: UK Prime Minister Says 50 Days to “Save The Planet From Catastrophe”
25.2009: Climate Genius Al Gore Moves 2013 Prediction of Ice-Free Arctic to 2014
26.2013: Arctic Ice-Free by 2015 (additional link)
27.2014: Only 500 Days Before ‘Climate Chaos’
28.1968: Overpopulation Will Spread Worldwide
29.1970: World Will Use Up All its Natural Resources
30.1966: Oil Gone in Ten Years
31.1972: Oil Depleted in 20 Years
32.1977: Department of Energy Says Oil will Peak in 1990s
33.1980: Peak Oil In 2000
34.1996: Peak Oil in 2020
35.2002: Peak Oil in 2010
36.2006: Super Hurricanes!
37.2005: Manhattan Underwater by 2015
38.1970: Urban Citizens Will Require Gas Masks by 1985
39.1970: Nitrogen buildup Will Make All Land Unusable
40.1970: Decaying Pollution Will Kill all the Fish
41.1970s: Killer Bees!
Update: I’ve added 9 additional failed predictions (via Real Climate Science) below to make it an even 50 for the number of failed eco-pocalyptic doomsday predictions over the last 50 years.
42.1975: The Cooling World and a Drastic Decline in Food Production
43.1969: Worldwide Plague, Overwhelming Pollution, Ecological Catastrophe, Virtual Collapse of UK by End of 20th Century
44.1972: Pending Depletion and Shortages of Gold, Tin, Oil, Natural Gas, Copper, Aluminum
45.1970: Oceans Dead in a Decade, US Water Rationing by 1974, Food Rationing by 1980
46.1988: World’s Leading Climate Expert Predicts Lower Manhattan Underwater by 2018
47.2005: Fifty Million Climate Refugees by the Year 2020
48.2000: Snowfalls Are Now a Thing of the Past
49.1989: UN Warns That Entire Nations Wiped Off the Face of the Earth by 2000 From Global Warming
50.2011: Washington Post Predicted Cherry Blossoms Blooming in Winter
But somehow this time will be different, and the ‘experts’ and 16-year olds of today will suddenly be correct in their new predictions of eco-doom and eco-disaster? Not.
Related: Bonus video below from Tony Heller titled “My Gift To Climate Alarmists,” which he describes as “my most concise expose of climate fraud.”
Mark J. Perry
Mark J. Perry is a Professor of Economics and Finance in the School of Management at the Flint campus of The University of Michigan, where he has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in economics and finance since 1996. Starting in the fall of 2009, Perry has also held a joint appointment as a scholar at The American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., where he has been a regular contributor to the AEIdeas blog. Perry holds two graduate degrees in economics (M.A. and Ph.D.) from George Mason University and in addition, and has an MBA degree in finance from The University of Minnesota.
See also Dr. john Happs’ version of ‘In their own words” and the sinister motivations of the Beneficiaries Of The Climate Fraud: Green Groups, Scientists And Politicians here.
On Wednesday, a short item in the Federal Register underscored the regressive nature of the “everything” effort that is being promoted by some of America’s highest-profile environmental groups, climate-change activists, politicians, and academics. The item, published by the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy, forecasts the “representative average unit costs of five residential energy sources for the year 2021.”
The forecast shows that on an energy-equivalent basis, electricity will cost about $39 per million Btu. It also projects that one million Btu in the form of natural gas will cost about $11, propane will cost about $19, No. 2 heating oil will cost $20, and kerosene will cost $23. Thus, electricity will cost nearly four times as much as natural gas and twice as much as propane, a fuel that is commonly used by rural Americans in their homes, and on their farms and ranches.
The electrify everything push will impose regressive energy taxes on low-income consumers.
As I wrote in these pages last month during the deadly blizzard that paralyzed Texas for almost a week, there are a myriad of problems with attempting to electrify all of our transportation, industrial and residential energy systems. I wrote, “attempting to electrify everything would be the opposite of anti-fragile. Rather than make our networks and critical systems more resilient and less vulnerable to disruptions caused by extreme weather, bad actors, falling trees, or simple negligence, electrifying everything would concentrate our dependence on a single network, the electric grid, and in doing so make nearly every aspect of our society prone to catastrophic failure if - or rather, when - a widespread or extended blackout occurs.”
Indeed, the risks to our energy security, resilience, and reliability are obvious. But the bigger, and more immediate issue is the regressive nature of forcing consumers to use electricity instead of energy sources like natural gas and propane that sell for a quarter, or half, as much as the energy that consumers can get from the electric grid.
Last year, I published a report for the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity that looked at the natural gas bans that are being implemented in dozens of communities in California. According to the Sierra Club, 42 California communities have now imposed bans. On its website, the club, which is the largest environmental group in America, claims that gas-free homes are “a win for our climate, health, and safety.” In January, the city of Denver released a plan that aims to ban natural gas connections in new buildings by 2027. In February, the city of Seattle enacted legislation that bans the use of natural gas in new commercial buildings and large multifamily buildings. In Massachusetts, about a dozen towns have partnered with the Rocky Mountain Institute, which recently got a $10 million grant from the Bezos Earth Fund, to advocate for the right to ban the use of natural gas in homes and commercial buildings.
Banning natural gas forces consumers to use more-expensive electricity to heat their homes, cook their food, and heat the water needed to wash their clothes and dishes. Proponents of the electrify everything push, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, which got $100 million from the Bezos Earth Fund, prefer to call their efforts “beneficial electrification.” The more accurate term is “forced electrification” because it will increase the energy burden on low- and middle-income consumers.
Increasing the energy burden in states like California, which has one of the highest poverty rates in the country, is indefensible. When accounting for the cost of living, 18.1% of the state’s residents are living in poverty. Forcing poverty-stricken Californians to use electricity instead of lower-cost natural gas will increase the energy burden and worsen poverty.
Despite these facts, bans on natural gas are being cheered by some of America’s highest-profile climate activists. In January, Bill McKibben, the founder of 350.org published an article in the New Yorker in which he said if there is a “basic rule of thumb for dealing with the climate crisis, it would be: stop burning things” including natural gas. McKibben says we should shift our energy needs to solar and wind energy. Also in January, Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that New York City will “renounce fossil fuels fully” and “ban fossil fuel connections in the city by the end of this decade.”
In March, Peter Iwanowicz, executive director of Environmental Advocates of New York, declared that policymakers should stop looking at the use of alternative fuels like renewable natural gas because they “distract from the basic task of getting New Yorkers to stop burning things.”
I am pro-electricity. But the idea that we humans should “stop burning things” in the name of climate change ignores the need for energy security, resilience, and basic fairness. Over the past five years, I traveled to India, Iceland, Lebanon, Puerto Rico, Colorado, and New York to look at the world through the lens of electricity. I’ve recently published a book (A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations) and co-produced (with my colleague, Tyson Culver) a documentary (Juice: How Electricity Explains the World) that spotlights electricity. The book and film show that we need many terawatts of new generation capacity to bring the 3 billion people in the world who are now living in energy poverty out of the dark and into the bright lights of modernity.
In short, the people of the world need more electricity. Lots more. But the Texas Blackouts proved that we need diverse and resilient energy networks that can deliver huge quantities of energy during extreme weather events. Attempting to electrify everything is a recipe for increased inequality and decreased energy security and resilience.
Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn. Check out my website or some of my other work here.
Robert Bryce is the host of the Power Hungry Podcast. An author and journalist, Bryce has been writing about energy, politics, and the environment for more than 30 years.
_thumb.jpg)
.jpg){kind=link}
