The age of overpopulation is over. The age of underpopulation is here. After decades of warnings and fear about an overpopulation crisis, population is now rapidly declining in most of the world. The overpopulation disaster predicted by world elites did not occur.
Total fertility rate is the average number of children born per woman. Demographers tell us that a country’s fertility rate must be at least 2.1 children per woman to sustain the current level of population.
According to data from the United Nations, total world population still continues to rise, but population is declining in all major nations, where fertility rates have fallen below the minimum population replacement rate. Africa is the only continent where the population continues to grow. According to birth rates and without counting immigration flows, population is now falling in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Russia, the United States, and all European nations except Monaco and the Faroe Islands.
For the last four decades of the 20th Century, world leaders warned of a coming catastrophe from an uncontrolled rise in global population. In 1950, the average woman was birthing about five children during her lifetime. Global population was growing at a rate of about two percent per year by 1955.
The Population Bomb, written by Paul Ehrlich in 1968, became a worldwide best seller. The prologue of the book stated, “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The author warned of coming famines and resource shortages and advocated for compulsory population control.
The fear of overpopulation produced a population control movement by the early 1970s. A consistent theme of the movement was that population growth was unplanned. Ehrlich stated: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people.”
The United Nations indicated that people were not intelligent enough to plan their own families. James Grant, Undersecretary General for the UN, wrote in 1992: “Family planning could bring more benefits to more people at less cost than any other single technology available to the human race.”
Convinced by the overpopulation elites, governments of the world endorsed tragic population control measures. By the 1970s, it became US government policy to grant foreign aid only if population control measures were implemented. The World Bank and the UN also established policies requiring population control in exchange for loans or aid.
During the last decades of the 20th Century, population programs proposed by Western intellectuals and the UN were implemented in the form of anti-human policies by the governments of China, India, and dozens of other nations. The government of India established sterilization and intrauterine device insertion quotas in 1966. Over 40 million people were sterilized between 1965 and 1985, most coercively.
The People’s Republic of China implemented population policies in 1970 and adopted a one-child policy for all families in 1979. By March 2013, the China government reported that 336 million abortions and 222 million sterilizations had been carried out since 1971. Sex-selection abortion became common and even the killing of girl babies was practiced in both China and India.
Population control policies typically disproportionally impacted disadvantaged races or social classes. In India, coercive policies often targeted people of lower castes. In 1966, sterilization programs were set up at federally funded Indian Health Service hospitals in the US. Thousands of Native American women were sterilized between 1966 and 1976, often without informed consent. In Peru, sterilizations targeted rural natives of Incan descent.
But the overpopulation intellectuals were wrong. Famine did not kill hundreds of millions of people as Ehrlich predicted. Instead, an agricultural revolution increased global output of corn, rice, and wheat by a factor of five from 1960 to 2023. The malnourished portion of world population declined from 30 percent in 1950 to 10 percent today and continues to fall.
A graph showing the growth of corn and rice
The world fertility rate dropped from about five children per woman in 1950 to 2.3 children per woman in 2021 and continues to fall. The population growth rate dropped to 0.82 percent per year by 2021 and is declining rapidly.
A graph showing the number of fertility rates
Nations moved from agricultural, to industrial, to technological societies, achieving the elimination of infectious disease, improved sanitation, improved food supply, a decline in infant mortality, and rising levels of education. Women entered the work force in larger numbers and family sizes declined.
But despite tragic implementation of population control policies in several nations, today’s families are having fewer children, the world population is stabilizing, and the predicted overpopulation disaster did not happen. Governments now pursue programs to boost family size in China, Japan, South Korea, and many nations of Europe.
But didn’t population control programs cause the drop in fertility rates? The answer is “no.” Fertility rates dropped faster in South Korea than in China, driven by economic development, rising incomes, and increased levels of education and workforce participation for women, without forced population control measures. Fertility rates dropped faster in Brazil and Mexico due to demographic changes, than in India where forced population control was employed.
What is the lesson from the overpopulation crisis that did not occur? The United Nations, the intellectuals, and strident political leaders were dead wrong about overpopulation. People do not multiply like cancer cells. Rather than being a species “out of control,” humans plan their own families and react to changing societal conditions. The lesson from the overpopulation debacle is that people adapt to their environment.
But the United Nations and world elites now warn of a coming climate catastrophe. They demand a costly energy transition to Net Zero emissions. They demand that we change our transportation and our home appliances, that we stop eating meat, and that we adopt hundreds of other proposed climate-saving remedies. Will we have a climate disaster, or will the global elites be wrong again?
Steve Goreham is a speaker on energy, the environment, and public policy and the author of the new bestselling book Green Breakdown: The Coming Renewable Energy Failure.
Sea level rise on planet Earth could be attributed in part to astronomical influences that involve the sun, moon, and other planets, according to a new research paper from The Heritage Foundation taking aim at media reports on climate change that fixate on carbon dioxide emissions while ignoring other factors.
The gravitational interactions of heavenly bodies throughout the solar system figure into a larger set of natural phenomena affecting the oceans, cited in Heritage’s special report. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news and commentary outlet.)
But because many media outlets and academic journals falsely assume that only warming periods and human activity can have significant impacts on sea level rise, they typically seize on definitions that are “ambiguous” and “insufficient,” writes David Legates, a climatologist and professor emeritus at the University of Delaware who is a visiting fellow at Heritage.
“A more useful definition of sea level rise or, as it should be called, coastal inundation, is the increase in water levels relative to the adjacent land,” Legates says in his report.
The new research paper can be a vital tool for policymakers, Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of Heritage’s Center on Energy, Climate, and Environment, said.
“Professor Legates’ paper is extraordinarily important, because it explodes the myth that carbon emissions and industrialization are causing the seas to rise,” Furchtgott-Roth told The Daily Signal. “It is vital to understand the true causes of sea level rise in order to have cost-effective policies to deal with it.”
In the paper, Legates cautions policymakers against halting all man-made emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the U.S., as climate activists urge, since there is “no evidence” these actions would mitigate whatever processes cause sea levels to rise, whether natural or man-made.
It’s a mistake to presuppose, as many media definitions do, that land is “immovable” when clearly it isn’t, he writes. Land may rise or descend in response to several factors, Legates explains:
Isostatic processes - where the crust [of the Earth] returns to a state of equilibrium due to the addition or removal of surface forces - usually occur over long time scales, often involving ice sheet formation and removal. But changes in coastal elevation also can be induced by glacial outwash, channelization of rivers, pumping of groundwater, and changes in land use.
Legates argues that sea levels have been rising since the end of the last ice age about 22,000 years ago, and more is at work than carbon dioxide, or CO2.
Legates dismantles climate alarmists’ positions on sea level rise that are part of a larger media narrative on “extreme weather” and related issues that, in his view, falsely conflate recent trends with human activity.
“Sea levels were rising at an accelerated rate between 7,000 years and 15,000 years ago, and that change in the rate of global sea level rise was not solely due to atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations,” Legates writes. “A much better explanation is that most sea level rise is a response to the interglacial period and that equilibrium of the polar ice caps has not yet been attained.”
The often circulated idea that sea levels will rise between 15 and 30 feet from 2023 to 2100 is “clearly political hype and does not represent the science, even as advocated by climate alarmists,” Legates writes.
The climatologist calls for a deeper appreciation and understanding for the natural processes at work.
“Understanding the intricacies of how sea levels rise and fall is considerably more nuanced than simply linking sea levels to changes in temperatures due to carbon dioxide emissions,” Legates writes, then cites jurisdictions in Florida and Virginia as examples.
“Clearly, when news reports highlight locations where coastal inundation has been the greatest (such as in Miami Beach and Virginia Beach), something other than global-warming-driven sea level rise must also be operating. Otherwise, the story would be the same in all coastal areas of the world.”
Factors other than CO2 “play a nontrivial role in sea level fluctuations and variability,” Legates writes. This is where the effects of planetary rotation and gravity enter the equation.
The sun’s activities have an impact on portions of the Pacific and Indian oceans, while the gravitational pulls of other heavenly bodies can alter how the Earth rotates, according to his paper.
Here is how Legates describes the astronomical dynamics in his paper:
Variations in the Earth’s rotation are induced by interactions within the sun - Earth - moon system (including the effects of Jupiter and nearby planets) and the solar wind that affects the Earth’s magnetosphere. As a result, water is redistributed among the tropics and poles due to the increase in the equatorial diameter of the Earth that occurs when the Earth’s rotation increases.
Sea levels, therefore, rise in the equatorial Pacific and Indian oceans during periods of the Grand Solar Minima, while they decrease during the Grand Solar Maxima. Observed variability in sea levels of 20 years to 26 years in duration can be attributed to the Earth’s rotation. The Earth’s gravitational attraction also is an important component in global and regional changes in sea levels.
Overall, where gravitational forces are stronger, sea levels will be higher, which is counterintuitive. In fact, as an ice sheet melts, sea levels decrease near the melting ice sheet but rise at a considerable distance from the melting ice sheet due to changes in gravitational forces. Since gravity is not constant over the entire planet, local and regional variations exist in sea level resulting from differences in the gravitational force.
Legates also addresses some concerns related to rising sea levels, such as the potential for storm surge and flooding in coastal areas. The professor concludes that coastal warning systems are far more efficient in protecting life and property than any efforts to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
That’s because sea levels are rising from natural causes that have nothing to do with man-made circumstances, and the influence of greenhouse gases is “exceedingly small,” he writes.
The complete special report, “Coastal Inundation: Rising Sea Levels Explained,” is available here.
Have an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email letters@DailySignal.com, and we’ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular “We Hear You” feature. Remember to include the URL or headline of the article plus your name and town and/or state.
David Evans, who consulted for the Australian Greenhouse Office (now the Department of Climate Change) 1999-2005 and 1998-2010, and was a believer in AGW until the evidence supporting the idea that CO2 emissions were the main cause of global warming reversed itself in 1998 to 2006, when he became a skeptic.
“The AGW scam involves a “regulating class’ of believers, consisting of the UN, western governments, major banks and finance houses, NGOs and greenies, totalitarian leftists, government-funded scientists, academia, renewables corporations and the mainstream news media. Against them are the doubters: independently-funded scientists, private-sector middle class, and amateurs. The regulating class does not try to hide its belief that it is cleverer and morally superior. Their solution is regulation of the whole world’s economy by themselves, which was the object at the failed Copenhagen climate conference. On climate change, the regulating class has won over the leadership of most professional and business organizations by lobbying and pressure.”
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Eisenhower’s farewell address to the nation
“The free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.
The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present- and is gravely to be regarded. Yet in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite. “
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Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic, visited Australia in July 2011. In referring to the ideological orientations of those individuals and organisations who have significant financial and other vested interests in propagating the ‘Doctrine’ of anthropogenic induced climate change, President Klaus said: “They want to change us, to change our behaviour, our way of life, our values and preferences, they want to restrict our freedom because they themselves believe they know what is good for us. They are not interested in climate. They misuse the climate in their goal to restrict our freedom. What is endangered is freedom, the climate is okay.”
After noting that today’s human-induced climate change alarmists are the ideological descendents of the zero and negative population growth advocates of the 1970s who erroneously forecast that human population pressures would lead to increases in global poverty and growing shortages in resources, President Klaus went on to add: “They hate us, the humans, they consider us selfish and sinful creatures who must be controlled by them. I used to live in a similar world - called communism - and I know that it led to the worst environmental damage the world has ever experienced.”
SEEN IN THEIR OWN WORDS:
* Maurice Strong, senior advisor to Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General who chaired the gigantic (40,000 participants) “U.N. Conference on Environment and Development” in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 , who was responsible for putting together the Kyoto Protocol with thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats, and politicians, stated: “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrial civilization to collapse...isn’t it our job to bring that about”.
* “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention ...and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself....believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or...one invented for the purpose.” Quote by the Club of Rome.
* UN Climate Chief Christine Figueres said “Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system (destroy capitalism).”
* UN IPCC Lead Author Ottmar Edenhofer in November 2010. “One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” Instead, climate change policy is about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
* Timothy Wirth, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues, seconded Strong’s statement: “We have 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.”
* Richard Benedick, a deputy assistant secretary of state who headed policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, stated: “A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
* “The data doesn’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations on the data. We’re basing them on the climate models.” Prof. Chris Folland, Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research
* “The models are convenient fictions that provide something very useful.” Dr David Frame, Climate modeler, Oxford University
* “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” Paul Watson, Co-founder of Greenpeace”
* “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.” Sir John Houghton, First chairman of the IPCC
* “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony...climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
* “A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States. De-development means bringing our economic system into line with the realities of ecology and the world resource situation.” Paul Ehrlich, Professor of Population Studies
* “The only hope for the world is to make sure there is not another United States. We can’t let other countries have the same number of cars, the amount of industrialization, we have in the US. We have to stop these Third World countries right where they are.” Michael Oppenheimer, Environmental Defense Fund
* “Global Sustainability requires the deliberate quest of poverty, reduced resource consumption and set levels of mortality control.” Professor Maurice King
* “The big threat to the planet is people: there are too many, doing too well economically and burning too much oil.” - Sir James Lovelock, BBC Interview
* “We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.” David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
* “Complex technology of any sort is an assault on human dignity. It would be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy, because of what we might do with it.” Amory Lovins, Rocky Mountain Institute
* “The prospect of cheap fusion energy is the worst thing that could happen to the planet.” Jeremy Rifkin, Greenhouse Crisis Foundation
* “Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.” Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
* “My three main goals would be to reduce human population to about 100 million worldwide, destroy the industrial infrastructure and see wilderness, with it’s full complement of species, returning throughout the world.” - Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!
* “Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class - involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing - are not sustainable.” Maurice Strong, Rio Earth Summit
* “All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.’ - Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
* “Mankind is the most dangerous, destructive, selfish and unethical animal on the earth.” - Michael Fox, vice-president of The Humane Society
* “Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.” - Sir James Lovelock, Healing Gaia
* “The Earth has cancer and the cancer is Man.” - Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
* “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells, the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” - Prof. Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb
* “A reasonable estimate for an industrialized world society at the present North American material standard of living would be 1 billion. At the more frugal European standard of living, 2 to 3 billion would be possible.” - United Nations, Global Biodiversity Assessment
* “A total population of 250-300 million people, a 95% decline from present levels, would be ideal” -Ted Turner, founder of CNN and major UN donor
* “… the resultant ideal sustainable population is hence more than 500 million but less than one billion.” - Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind
* “One America burdens the earth much more than twenty Bangladeshes. This is a terrible thing to say in order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
- Jacques Cousteau, UNESCO Courier
* “If I were reincarnated I would wish to be returned to earth as a killer virus to lower human population levels.” - Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the World Wildlife Fund
* “I suspect that eradicating small pox was wrong. It played an important part in balancing ecosystems."- John Davis, editor of Earth First! Journal
* “The extinction of the human species may not only be inevitable but a good thing.” -Christopher Manes, Earth First!
* “Childbearing should be a punishable crime against society, unless the parents hold a government license. All potential parents should be required to use contraceptive chemicals, the government issuing antidotes to citizens chosen for childbearing.” David Brower, first Executive Director of the Sierra Club
* “We need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination… So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements and make little mention of any doubts… Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.” - Stephen Schneider, Stanford Professor of Climatology, lead author of many IPCC reports
* “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen."- Sir John Houghton, first chairman of IPCC
* ‘In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.’ - Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
* “It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.” - Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
* The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe” - emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
* “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis.” David Rockefeller, Club of Rome executive manager
* *Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send out entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced - a catastrophe of our own making.” Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth
* “By the end of this century, climate change will reduce the human population to a few breeding pairs surviving near the Arctic. Sir James Lovelock, Revenge of Gaia
* “Climate Change will result in a catastrophic, global seal level rise of seven meters. That’s bye-bye most of Bangladesh, Netherlands, Florida and would make London the new Atlantis” Greenpeace International (It has risen less than 7 inches in 100 years and is decelerating)
* “We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth.” Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
“ “In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a Master Plan, a Blueprint. Such a ‘master plan[ is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system. Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late.’ Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
“ “The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.’ UN Commission on Global Governance report
* ‘The earth is literally our mother, not only because we depend on her for nurture and shelter but even more because the human species has been shaped by her in the womb of evolution. Our salvation depends upon our ability to create a religion of nature.” Rene Dubos, board member Planetary Citizens
* “A keen and anxious awareness is evolving to suggest that fundamental changes will have to take place in the world order and its power structures, in the distribution of wealth and income.” Club of Rome, Mankind at the Turning Point
* “Adopting a central organizing principle means embarking on an all-out effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, to halt the destruction of the environment.” Al Gore, Earth in the Balance
* “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced - a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.” - UN Agenda 21
* “Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. These facts must be faced squarely. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time.” - Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution
* ‘In my view, after fifty years of service in the United National system, I perceive the utmost urgency and absolute necessity for proper Earth government. There is no shadow of a doubt that the present political and economic systems are no longer appropriate and will lead to the end of life evolution on this planet. We must therefore absolutely and urgently look for new ways."- Dr. Robert Muller, UN Assistant Secretary General
* “Nations are in effect ceding portions of their sovereignty to the international community and beginning to create a new system of international environmental governance as a means of solving otherwise unmanageable crises.” Lester Brown, WorldWatch Institute
* Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff recently admitted that the ‘Green New Deal’ was not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing”.. nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy. The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it was not originally a climate thing at all,” Saikat Chakrabarti said
This is a paper that will be celebrated with great joy and fervor by the great sea of people who are worried, near unto death, that “climate change” is going to cause the destruction of all things.
Roy showed that, “The observed rate of global warming over the past 50 years has been weaker than that predicted by almost all computerized climate models.”
And that, “Climate models that guide energy policy do not even conserve energy, a necessary condition for any physically based model of the climate system.”
He concluded: “Public policy should be based on climate observations-which are rather unremarkable-rather than climate models that exaggerate climate impacts.”
What wonderful news! News sure to be welcomed by activists, politicians, and exhausted windmill replacement blade salesmen the world over!
All those people who drag themselves out to early morning marches can sleep in! Been considering gluing yourself to works of art or the asphalt? No need! And you needn’t keep your appointment with your therapist to work on your devastating climate anxiety. Hallelujah, there is nothing to be anxious about!
I fully expect the White House will invite Roy to receive some kind of medal or award for the great scientific service he has done our panicked nation, and indeed the world. There is no reason for the anxious, nerve-wracking despair we have seen from all quarters. The order of the day shall be Stand Down and Enjoy the Weather!
Right?
Here’s the best bits, which are so good they’re self-explanatory.
We’ll come back to that caption in a moment. Because what it means is that things are even better than Roy has suggested, sober and cautious man that he is.
This is the kind of plot scientists or yore would look at and say, “Oops.” As we are confident modern scientists will do, too. They got it wrong, and badly wrong. Embarrassingly wrong. So wrong that they will surely go back and fix the mistakes before allowing anybody to even see, let alone rely on their models.
What I like best about this are those three lines, the green, black, and blue ones, which show the average temperatures from three different measurement sources. I make the discrepancy between the three 0.2C at the end, or perhaps a bit larger. Say, that’s a lot, isn’t it? Especially when the hand-wringing in the “climate community” has been over tenths of a degree changes.
What this means is that there is more uncertainty in climate measurements than what is normally considered. So much more uncertainty that it is yet another reason not to worry. The good news multiplies!
Roy goes on to suggest why climate models produce too much warming, and gives hints about other causes besides man that account for observed signals in temperature. Read the whole report. It’s good - and cheering!
He says things like, “The models must be ‘tuned’ to produce no climate change, and then a human influence is added in the form of a very small, roughly 1 percent change in the global energy balance.” This kind of tuning over such a small signal would make any model hyper-sensitive to the tuning. Which indeed we see.
Let’s return to the footnote on the first plot, which brings us to this site. Which you might want to play with. One word you’ll see on the site is ‘hindcasts’. I don’t want to get into the details today, but what it means is that past data is used to make predictions of the past. The past data is first used to create the models which make the predictions.
Nothing wrong with that, of course, because models have to be built somehow. But it does mean hindcasts-predictions of past data that was used once already in creating the models-will be better than forecasts, which are predictions of data never before seen.
So that when we look at the first picture and it looks like the models did better in the past, the reason for that is at least partly because the models are tuned to that data. Which means that true model performance is better estimated at the ends of the series. Which is worse performance. Which is more good news!
Another thing I think is true here (though I welcome correction) is that these are all one- or a few-time-periods-ahead predictions. That is, a climate model today could make monthly or yearly temperature predictions for next month or next year, or two months ahead or two years. Or three years, four, and so on. The predictions farther out will, all evidence suggests, be worse, and even far worse, than predictions made one time period ahead.
I think these pictures are all one-time-period-ahead predictions (made one at a time). If so, and if the farther-out predictions are worse like we expect them, and given the poor performance of these models near term, then that means we must put even less (or even no) trust in long-term predictions.
Which, again, is more great news! Whoo-hooo!, as The View audience would hoot. Because if the models are that bad, there’s no reason to get worked up over them.
I saved the best news for last. Most of what knots peoples’ panties about “climate change” are not small changes in some weird artificial global average temperature, but all the bad stuff that “climate change” is said will cause. Which is every bad thing.
Don’t you see why that’s terrific? Since the climate is not as bad as the models predicted, all that other bad stuff can’t be so bad either. Fantastic! Let us hear the sighs of relief sure to greet this spectacular news!
Democrats accuse Trump of proclivities that they blatantly engage in, especially in Washington
Paul Driessen
I choked on my coffee when I read the headline: “Democrats raise specter of Trump dictatorship to boost Biden.” What a textbook example of “projection,” I laughed, referring to the psychology term for deflecting attention away from one’s own blatant behavior by claiming someone else is doing it.
Partisan media and politicos parroted the accusation, and the Biden campaign doubled down.
In the interest of fairness and accuracy, it’s appropriate then to revisit ways the Biden Administration, Democrats and their allies have battled wannabe dictators and defended freedom, democracy and viewpoint diversity in recent years. (Or not.) For example:
* Incessant Antifa rage, riots, rampaging and legal warfare against “Russia-colluding” President Trump, from his election and inauguration throughout and after his term in office.
* School, park and restaurant lockdowns, “social distancing” and mask “advisories,” mandates for “safe and effective” inoculations with vaccines approved with minimal study under “emergency use authorizations”, and endless misrepresentation and censorship by Biden officials, Democrat governors and “journalists” in the name of preventing Covid.
* Opening our southern border to untold millions of “undocumented noncitizens” mostly Latin Americans but also Chinese agents, drug smugglers, sex traffickers, terrorists and disease carriers.
* Billions in “student debt forgiveness,” forcing taxpayers to pay off huge loans to graduates who struggle to get six-figure jobs despite prestigious degrees in gender studies or community organizing.
* Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and Environment Social Governance (ESG) programs, from K-12, college to law school, and into government and corporate arenas -to ensure that every component of society reflects racial, ethnic and gender proportionality, but never viewpoint or political diversity.
These and many other authoritarian actions impacted American society, freedoms, health and prosperity in countless negative ways. Far worse, many progressives and leftists hope they will pave the way for obeisance to even more dictatorial mandates promulgated in the name of saving our planet from supposed cataclysms inflicted by fossil-fuel-driven climate change.
Few will quibble that President Biden directed federal employees to take public transportation, ride bikes or rent electric vehicles for work travel, and hold virtual meetings instead of in-person gatherings.
These rules certainly won’t apply to private-jet globe-trotters like Climate Czar John Kerry, and EV’s mostly transfer emissions from tailpipes to distant countries where toxic pollution and child labor accompany the mining and processing of raw materials to make EV batteries. But at least some federal workers will now suffer the inconveniences they’re imposing on us commoners.
However, Team Biden’s endless torrent of dictatorial executive orders, regulatory mandates and twisted legal reinterpretations for electricity generation, vehicles, appliances, agriculture, housing and other matters are already impacting our industries, livelihoods, living standards and basic rights and freedoms.
These diktats are designed to force us to convert everything we now operate with coal, gasoline, diesel or natural gas to electric models. The United States will soon need 3-4 times more electricity than today - and still more to power the AI revolution.
But the same bureaucrats are shutting down coal, gas, nuclear and hydroelectric generators ensuring that electricity will be in short supply, generated primarily by weather-dependent wind turbines and solar panels, backed up by massive grid-scale battery systems, and thus unavailable or unaffordable during the coldest and hottest days, when electric heat or air conditioning becomes a matter of life or death.
In fact, just the batteries to back up nationwide electricity would cost up to $290 trillion (13 times US 2021 GDP)! Add that to wind, solar and transmission costs, and the juice to run your all-electric home, business, hospital, school or transportation will likely cost 30-40 cents per kilowatt-hour, instead of the 12-15 cents the average American is paying now.
It’s a prescription for repeated blackouts, economic disaster - and unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats micromanaging every aspect of our lives: what size home we can have; how warm or cool we can keep it; what cars we can drive and how far, or whether we too will be forced to walk, bike or take a bus; how many trips we can take in jetliners, in our lifetime; what foods we can eat (hint: not beef); maybe even how many new clothing items we will be “allowed” to purchase each year!
Earlier this month, every House Republican voted to block President Biden’s electric vehicle mandates. They were joined by just five Democrats. That means 197 Democrats say Team Biden should be able to dictate what kind of car or truck you can drive. And Donald Trump has dictatorial proclivities?
The US and global ecological impacts will be equally harmful and widespread. Here are just a few.
Wind and solar installations, transmission lines and enormous battery complexes would sprawl across millions of acres of now scenic, wildlife habitat and agricultural land. A single solar facility proposed in Virginia would involve 3,000 acres of panels on 21,000 acres (over half the land area of Washington, DC). It’s just one of dozens of Virginia solar plans - on top of onshore and offshore wind turbine projects.
The installations “will power millions of homes,” supporters insist. Perhaps- but only when the wind is blowing and sun is shining at optimal intensities… maybe 15-30% of the year in northern latitudes, considering winter snow and sunlight, clouds, nighttime, zero wind and other factors.
Many local residents and other citizens don’t want these massive installations in their backyards; the habitat and scenic vista destruction, bird and bat killings, health problems, and electricity costs and disruptions that go with them; or being turned into energy colonies for progressive urban centers. They’ve already blocked more than 500 wind and solar projects, on environmental and other grounds.
That’s why Michigan, California, New York and Illinois have already enacted laws that give state bureaucrats authority over land use - the ability to exercise eminent domain and other powers over local governments that want to slow or stop the onrush of enormous, heavily subsidized industrial wind, solar, transmission line and other “green’ projects. More are likely to follow - depriving rural communities of their rights, property values and autonomy - to serve corporate interests that bankroll Democrat pols.
The federal “deep state” is likely to seek similar legislative authority - or simply assert authority - to implement President Biden’s national net-zero “renewable” energy transformation agenda.
UN and Biden “30x30” plans to “conserve” (make off limits to development) 30% of US and global lands and waters by 2030 will massively increase all these impacts and usurpations of power. Any areas not made off limits by 30x30, wilderness, park, refuge and other actions will be developed and desecrated to the hilt by wind, solar, transmission line, mining, biofuel and other “green energy” projects.
Meanwhile, international climate alarmists and bureaucrats are telling African and other impoverished nations how much they will be “permitted” to develop and improve their health and living standards - using only “sustainable, renewable” wind and solar power. It’s dictatorial colonialism at its worst.
And amid all that, China, India, Indonesia, Vietnam and other rapidly developing countries are burning more coal, oil and gas ‘ and emitting more greenhouse gases - than most developed nations combined. That means US and EU economic suicide on the climate altar won’t make an iota of difference.
What we need is a president who will roll back or cancel these dictatorial decrees. Stop fast-tracking wind and solar projects. End abusive environmental justice, DEI and ESG programs. Return America to energy independence and affordable energy. Build the wall and control immigration. Stop weaponizing the Department of Justice. Above all, follow the law and Constitution.
How revolutionary, “dictatorial”. and refreshing… that would be!
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor to the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate, environmental and human rights issues.
