Europe’s main science academies reveal their anti-growth agenda
Europe faces a catastrophic economic crisis and tens of millions of redundancies as a result of the political measures to contain the Covid-19 pandemic. As a result, there is growing tension among policy makers between saving the economy and economic growth and saving Europe’s costly climate agenda.
In her speech to the United Nations last year, the eco-socialist activist Greta Thunberg denounced world leaders for their main interest in what she called “the fairy tale of eternal economic growth.” Her anti-growth attack didn’t come as a surprise. After all, critical observers have always known that this kind of radical climate activism is driven by an anti-capitalist agenda.
Now Europe’s main scientific body, the European Academies Science Advisory Council (which comprises of the National Academies of Science of all EU Member States, Norway, Switzerland and UK), has followed in Greta’s footsteps, hitting out against policy makers and governments who prioritise economic growth.
“Generation Greta gets it. Our focus should be on well-being and welfare, but our economic system puts all focus on growth and GDP which adds fuel to the climate and biodiversity crises.”
That’s how the European Academies Science Advisory Council press release highlights the main take of its report which calls for “‘transformational’ change that is necessary if policy-makers and their public (sic) are to support the conclusions of the advocates of change.”
The capture of Europe’s scientific institutions and organisations by degrowth ideologues is a tragic reflection on the state of green ideology which is bringing institutional science ever more into disrepute.
Focus on GDP and economic growth is unhelpful for the climate, European group says
Tracking happiness could be the key to beating climate change, a group of European scientists has said.
The report by the European Academies’ Science Advisory Council, chaired by British chemist and former civil servant Dr Michael Norton, argues that measuring GDP has led to rampant consumption and financial growth which is destroying the planet and not making us happier.
They therefore suggest replacing the widely-used wealth measure with “indicators of human well-being”.
Co-author Anders Wijkman, a former politician and member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said focus on economic growth and GDP “adds fuel to the climate and biodiversity crises”.
Current “incremental” measures are not enough to head off “dangerous” climate change and more fundamental shifts are needed, the report argues, criticising political leaders for caving to business interests in a quest to maintain growth.
Instead policymakers should recognise that current consumption levels are unsustainable if environmental damage is to be mitigated, the group said.
The call is at odds with the stance of European countries including the UK, with ministers insisting that continued economic growth is possible alongside a phase-out of fossil fuels, through investment in new industries including renewable energy.
The group said their conclusions “challenge the social and political paradigm of at least the past 70 years where leaders have campaigned on the basis of continuing improvement in the traditional economy, with science and technology expected to allow economic growth to be indefinitely sustained.”
Must see Tony Heller on the data manipulation by NOAA and NASA.
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During the cantankerous September 29 presidential “debate,” candidate Joe Biden proclaimed “I am the Democratic Party.” He is in charge, he insisted, and his views will be Democrat policy. Others aren’t so sure - about that, about what his views actually are, or about how far to the left he would be pushed, prodded and pressured by Kamala Harris, AOC, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Antifa mobs, and coastal and blue city governing, academic and technology elites.
Mr. Biden has pledged to eliminate the Trump tax cuts, but has refused to say whether he supports single-payer nationalized healthcare, Second Amendment self-defense, packing the Supreme Court, eliminating the Senate filibuster, or adding Puerto Rico, Guam and Washington DC as new (Democrat) states.
Like Nancy Pelosi on ObamaCare, he wants us to vote for him, so we can find out what his positions are.
When he’s in California or Manhattan, he says he’ll ban fracking - which he claims to support when he’s in Ohio and Pennsylvania, where he needs rural and blue-collar voters who support and benefit greatly from this amazing technology. However, Mr. Biden does say he will put controlling Earth’s climate at the center of US foreign policy. So he strongly supports the Green New Deal (GND), which would completely replace fossil fuels with “clean, green” electricity and biofuel energy by 2035.
GND proponents want us to believe this can be done quickly, easily, affordably, ecologically, sustainably and painlessly - almost with the wave of a magic wand. Not a chance. Those in power would undoubtedly protect their privileged status. But the GND would control and pummel the jobs, lives, living standards, savings, personal choices and ecological heritage of rural, poor, minority, elderly and working classes.
Dependable coal and natural gas power plants will be replaced by intermittent, weather-dependent wind and solar power; gasoline-powered vehicles with electric models. That’s obvious.
But our nation’s abundant coal, oil, natural gas and petroleum liquids provide over 80% of the energy that makes America’s jobs, lives and living standards possible. Locking them in the ground would have far-reaching impacts that are far less apparent, and have (deliberately?) received little media attention.
In 2018, America’s fossil fuels generated about 2.7 billion megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity. But almost two-thirds of the nation’s non-exported natural gas served industrial, commercial and residential needs - including factories, hospital emergency power systems, and furnaces, ovens, stoves and hot water heaters in restaurants and tens of millions of US homes. That’s equivalent to another 2.7 billion MWh.
The nation’s 65 million cars, light trucks, buses, semi-trailers, motor homes, tractors, backhoes and other vehicles consumed the gasoline and diesel equivalent of yet another 2 billion MWh.
Altogether, that’s nearly 7.5 billion MWh that the Green New Deal would have to replace by 2035!
Even assuming the United States and world could mine, process and transport enough metals and minerals - and manufacture and transport all the components and finished equipment to make this happen - this brave new all-electric nation would require millions of onshore wind turbines, tens of thousands of offshore turbines, billions of solar panels, billions of vehicle batteries, billions of backup energy storage batteries, thousands of miles of new high voltage transmission lines, and billions of tons of concrete!
The GND would turn our Midlands - what elites denigrate as flyover country - into vast energy colonies. Millions of acres of farmland, wildlife habitat and scenic areas would be blanketed by industrial wind, solar and battery facilities, and power lines to electricity-hungry towns and cities. Windswept ocean vistas and sea lanes would be plagued by towering turbines. Birds, bats and other wildlife would disappear.
With mining still under assault in the USA, the metals, minerals, components and equipment would come mostly from China or Chinese companies in Africa, using vast quantities of fossil fuels, under minimal to nonexistent environmental, workplace safety, fair wage and child labor laws. This smells of slavery and racism - making us complicit in perpetuating it, and making it increasingly difficult for the United States to criticize or challenge China on human rights, pollution, military aggression or territorial expansion.
The GND would also mean ripping out, and throwing out, the natural gas appliances you now have, replacing them with electric models, and installing rapid charging systems for your cars. That will mean upgrading household, neighborhood and national electrical systems, to handle the extra loads.
Oil and natural gas are also feed stocks for pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, paints, synthetic fibers, fertilizers ... and plastics for computers, wind turbine blades, solar panel films and countless other products. Under the GND, wed have to shut down those US-based industries, import feed stocks for them, or turn hundreds of millions of acres into biofuel plantations.
Up to 10 million high-pay petroleum, petrochemical and manufacturing jobs would be lost - with many replaced by low-pay, temporary or short-term jobs hauling, installing, maintaining, dismantling and landfilling wind turbines, solar panels and batteries. The GND would cost tens of trillions of dollars!
GND ringleader California wants the entire country to emulate its policies. Its families and businesses already pay the highest electricity prices in the continental USA - and are getting hammered repeatedly by blackouts. Now the state has mandated electric cars, cooking and heating. No more natural gas. How its legislators expect to generate all that extra electricity and avoid more blackouts, no one knows.
Families, factories, hospitals, schools and businesses used to paying 7, 9 or 11 cents per kilowatt-hour for 24/7/365 electricity better brace themselves for rude shocks. Under the GND, you’ll be paying 14, 18, 22 cents per kWh, as they do in green US states ‘ or even 35 US cents per kWh, as they do in Germany. You’ll also be using twice as much electricity, and probably experiencing repeated power interruptions.
Get used to having electricity when it’s available, rather than when you need it, however “essential” your business services or family needs might be. How you will survive, whether your job will disappear, whether you will join the ranks of those who must choose between heating and eating, is anyone’s guess.
A week of cloudy weather will really reduce solar output - and wind turbines generate roughly zero electricity on the hottest and most frigid days. Be careful where you live or need to recharge your EV.
As to all those electric vehicles, a basic $39,000 Model 3 Tesla sedan has a battery module that weighs some 1,200 pounds and gets around 250 miles on a charge. Just don’t use the heater or AC, don’t take long family trips, and don’t get caught in a blizzard, or a traffic jam trying to escape a roaring forest fire.
How many tons of batteries a bus, semi-truck or mining excavator would require, where you’d put them, and how many hours a day you’d waste recharging them, are other important considerations. Perhaps Mr. Biden or Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has the answers.
The Obama Administration sent a heavily armed SWAT team into Gibson Guitar offices over a phony Endangered Species Act violation. Democrats refuse to condemn BLM and Antifa mob violence, arson and looting. How a Biden-Harris-AOC Deep State and its allies might respond to organized or even spontaneous resistance to Green New Deal dictates and impacts is pretty easy to imagine. So is their response to cities, counties and states declaring themselves “sanctuaries” to GND or gun control decrees.
Keep in mind, too: This entire GND energy, economic and living standards “transformation” is being justified by claims that we face a “climate emergency” and “ongoing ravages of climate change.”
It’s all a gigantic Climate Hustle. There is no climate emergency. Humans cannot control Earth’s climate and weather. Fossil fuel emissions have negligible effects. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant; it is the miracle molecule that makes plant, human and animal life possible. Climate change and extreme weather have been “real” throughout history. What we are seeing today is in no way unprecedented.
Green New Dealers would bring us, our country and our planet enormous pain for no gain - except that they would get more money, power and control.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues.
See the issues of wind power ignored to our peril here.
Climate change may rank dead last in nearly every US opinion poll, and be the #1 priority for only 1% of American adults. But it is at the very top of the list for Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, AOC and other Democrat Party leaders. Indeed, it is the primary justification for the Green New Deal that they plan to implement and impose, to control and transform the entire US energy and economic system ... and much more. In fact, some of them plan to force us to spend some $100 trillion over the next decade on this great crusade.
In this article , David Wojick and I take a closer look at what they have in mind, and how it will affect virtually every aspect of our lives, livelihoods, living standards and liberties. As the DNC national convention wraps up, and the RNC convention gets underway, it’s a good time for every American to ponder this very carefully.
Thank you for posting our article, forwarding it to your friends and colleagues - and noting that David is my coauthor.
Best regards,
Paul
Green New Deal disruption and destruction
Not just energy, but every aspect of our lives, living standards, history, culture and freedoms
David Wojick and Paul Driessen
Kamala Harris co-sponsored the Senate resolution to support the Green New Deal. Now Joe Biden has endorsed the plan. Naturally, people want to know what the GND will cost - usually meaning in state and federal government spending. But that is the wrong question.
The real question is, how much do Green New Dealers expect to get out of it, at what total cost? Mr. Biden says he wants the feds to spend nearly $7 trillion over the next decade on healthcare, energy and housing transformation, climate change and other GND agenda items. But that is only part of the picture.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (who has a degree in some socialist version of economics) and the folks who helped her write Biden’s so-called Climate Plan have a clear idea of how much money they want, and pretty much know where they expect the money to come from. Here it is in its clearest form, as stated by Rep. Ocasio-Cortezs then chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti:
World War II was a time of great sacrifice and hardship, as part of a dramatic and historic mobilization to win a horrific global war. However, that hard reality doesn’t matter to these folks. They say we are now waging a war to stop catastrophic climate change. So money, sacrifice and disruption are irrelevant
“The resolution describes the 10-year plan to transform every sector of our economy to remove GHG [greenhouse gases] and pollution. It says it does this through huge investments in renewables, at WW2 scales (which was 40-60% of America’s GDP).” [emphasis added].
Our nation’s GDP is around $20 trillion a year, or $200 trillion in ten years. 40-60% of that is $80-120 trillion. For simplicity, let’s call it an even $100 trillion to finance the Green New Deal utopian dream.
$100 trillion! The ways and means of raising this stupendous sum are also clear in their minds. It will be done the same way WW2 was financed, however that was. To them, it’s obvious that we can simply do this, because we did it before. The specifics don’t matter. Government elites will figure them out.
But even this arrogant, cavalier attitude is only part of the picture.
If you read what Green New Dealers say, confusion arises because people think the GND is an ordinary policy proposal: “Here’s what we want done, and this what it should cost.” It is nothing like that. The Green New Deal is more along the lines of, “Here’s the level of effort we require to transform our entire economy, and this is what we should be able to do with that much money.”
People tend to interpret Green New Dealer talk of a WW2-like mobilization as a simple metaphor. But these folks mean it as an actual measure of what they are determined to do. So far they have glossed over and ignored the extreme hardships of mobilization. Here’s just one example - not from front lines mayhem, but from the United States home front during World War II.
Gasoline, meat and clothing were tightly rationed. Most families were allocated three US gallons of gasoline a week, which sharply curtailed driving for any purpose. Production of most durable goods, like cars, new housing, vacuum cleaners and kitchen appliances, was banned until the war ended. In industrial areas housing was in short supply as people doubled up and lived in cramped quarters. Prices and wages were controlled. [Harold Vatter, The US Economy in World War II]
No doubt the Green New Deal mobilization would impose different hardships. But all mobilizations are oppressive. You can’t commandeer half of the GDP without disrupting or even destroying people’s lives.
The argument is sound in its way, provided there is a need for all-out war - which there is not. The minor to modest temperature, climate and extreme weather changes we’ve been seeing (in the real world outside computer models) explain why most Americans see no need for a painful war. So does the fact that China, India and other emerging economies are not about to give up fossil fuels anytime soon.
In fact, polls show that roughly half of Americans do not even believe in the idea of human caused global warming, much less that it is an “existential threat,” as Senator Harris claims it is. The latest Gallup poll found that only 1% of US adults consider “climate change/environment/pollution” to be “the most important problem facing this country today.” That’s down from a meager 2% in the May 28-June 4 poll.
Even more revealing, a 2019 AP-NORC poll found that 68% of adult Americans were unwilling to pay even an extra $10 on their monthly electricity bill to combat global warming. Indeed, 57% of them would not be willing to pay more than $1.00 in added electricity charges to fight climate change!
Just wait until they see what the Biden-Harris-AOC-Democrat Green New Deal would cost them.
And it’s not just that their costs would likely skyrocket from an average US 13.2 cents per kilowatt hour (11.4 cents or less in ten states) to well beyond the nearly 20 cents per kWh that families are already paying in California and New York, or the 30 cents that families are now paying in ultra-green Germany. Or that factories, businesses, hospitals, schools and everyone else would also see their costs escalate - with blue collar families, the sick and elderly, poor and minority communities hammered hardest.
It’s that the GND would force every American to replace their gasoline and diesel cars and trucks with expensive short-haul electric vehicles; their gas furnaces and stoves with electric systems; their home, local and state electrical and transmission systems with expensive upgrades that can handle a totally electric economy. They’ll see their landscapes, coastlines and wildlife habitats blanketed with wind turbines, solar panels, transmission lines and warehouses filled with thousands of half-ton batteries. Virtually every component of this GND nation would be manufactured in China and other faraway places.
The cost of this massive, total transformation of our energy and economic system would easily reach $10 trillion: $30,000 per person or $120,000 per family - on top of those skyrocketing electricity prices. And that’s just the intermittent, unreliable energy component of this all-encompassing Green New Deal.
These are stupendous, outrageous costs and personal sacrifices. Every American, at every campaign event and town meeting, should ask Green New Deal supporters if they think America needs to - or can afford to - cough up $10 trillion or $100 trillion over the next ten years. And not let them get away with glib, evasive answers, or attempts to laugh these questions off as meritless or irrelevant.
The American people are not about to be mobilized into an all-out war against dubious climate change, with price tags like these coupled with repeated blackouts, huge personal sacrifices, and massive joblessness in every sector of the economy - except among enlightened government ruling classes.
They’ve already seen news stories about the latest rolling blackouts in California (here, here, here and here) - ?resulting from one-third of that state’s electricity coming from “renewable” sources, and with another third of the state’s electricity imported from other states that also get heat waves. They should ponder what their lives, livelihoods and living standards would be under 100% wind and solar power.
And yet, once again, even all this insanity is only a small part of the picture.
Remember, the Green New Deal is also about government run healthcare - and an economy and nation where “progressive” “woke” legislators, regulators, judges and activists tell companies what they can manufacture and sell...and tell us what we can buy, eat and drink; how and how much we can heat and cool our homes; and what we can read, hear, think and say, as they “transform” our culture and traditions.
The GND is being promoted by politicians, news and social media, “educators” and “reformers” who also want to eliminate free enterprise capitalism; have totally open borders, even for criminals and people who might have Covid and other diseases; and want to defund the police, put anarchists, looters and terrorists back on our streets, and take away our right and ability to defend ourselves, our homes and our families.
The time to think long and hard about all of this is NOW. Not sometime after the November 3 elections.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, environment, climate and human rights issues. David Wojick is an independent analyst specializing in science, logic and human rights in public policy, and author of numerous articles on these topics.
Stacey Abrams, who ran for governor of Georgia, and Tom Steyer, who ran for president of the United States, are now trying to run me out of town. Abrams, Steyer, and the leaders of 17 large environmental lobbies recently asked Facebook to ban a research group that I direct the CO2 Coalition, made up of 55 climate scientists and energy economists.
The annual budgets of these lobbies total over half a billion dollars, and Steyer alone is worth $1.6 billion. Their alarmist view of our supposedly impending environmental doom predominates in mainstream media, centering on the impact on the earth of emissions of carbon dioxide -a non-polluting, mild warming gas, and an important source of plant and plankton food.
By contrast, the CO2 Coalition’s annual budget is half a million dollars. Like all scientists and economists who ask for any proof of the looming apocalypse, we are excluded from mainstream-media discussion. You might wonder: how did the Steyer-Abrams crowd even notice us, let alone conclude that we posed a threat to their enforced consensus, which calls for an end to the affordable, reliable energy that powers over 80 percent of the world?
The answer is found in the work of a Silicon Valley computer entrepreneur named Eric Michelman, who became fabulously wealthy creating a modification of the computer mouse. For more than a decade now, Michelman has devoted his wealth to squelching media debate on climate change - a successful dry run for the cancel culture that we see engulfing many other issues today.
In 2016, Michelman was the founding and lead funder of a group called Climate Feedback, whose purpose is to “fact-check” and label as “false” any and all deviant thoughts about fossil-fueled climate catastrophe. The group has been certified as an unbiased source on climate issues by the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, which was founded by the Tampa Bay Times and operates the left-leaning PolitiFact. At some point, Facebook turned its censorship oversight over to the Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.
That’s when our organization’s problems started.
In September 2019, a “false” label appeared on Facebook when the Washington Examiner posted an article I had written there with Dr. Patrick Michaels, our senior fellow and a former president of the American Association of State Climatologists. The op-ed described the poor performance of climate models that had projected alarming increases in future temperatures. The “false” label triggered a wave of censorship from Facebook’s algorithms, blocking reposting and advertising.
The detailed, scientifically referenced letter we wrote to Facebook that soon got the label reversed is almost identical in form and argument to responses this summer to similar Climate Feedback censorship written by environmental writer Michael Shellenberger, Dr. Michaels (after a televised appearance on Fox’s Life, Liberty, and Levin), and climate statistician Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. All of us agree: Climate Feedback is biased, sloppy, and often just flat wrong. For example, in its “fact-checks,” the group blatantly contradicts the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s finding that there has been no statistically significant increase in rates of sea-level rise, hurricanes, droughts, and floods during the carbon emissions era that began with the dramatic industrialization after World War II.
Climate Feedback is Michelman’s third major attempt at promoting climate alarmism and silencing opposing views. First came the Climate Change Education Project, in 2008, followed by the More than Scientists campaign in 2015. When he set up that campaign, Michelman said:
It’s about showing the science is settled. Studies consistently show that 97 percent of scientists agree. We want the public to both hear from them that, yeah, this is settled, but also see scientists for who they are. They’re our neighbors, our fellow citizens, and community members. They’re people with kids, and they’re worried about the future. When they say, “I am concerned about climate change and I think we need to act on it,” you can understand they’re saying it because they have kids just like you do.
Since Michelman had decided that the science was settled in favor of a 97 percent consensus on catastrophe before he even founded Climate Feedback, his group should never have been let into a network of “unbiased” reviewers. And its performance shows why.
I’m all for debating with Climate Feedback. For 15 years as a professor at American University, I invited to my classes on climate statistics and mathematical modeling many of the groups whose leaders signed the recent letter to Facebook calling for us to be banned. But there was no response because the cancel culture doesn’t believe in debate. It believes in silencing its opponents by denying them a platform. We’ll hold on as long as we can. I believe that the truth will out-even against “fact-checkers.”
Dr. Caleb Rossiter is the executive director of the CO2 Coalition.
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Thank you Dr. Rossiter,
I think that it is very important to put names and faces to the ‘Cancel Culture’ that is trying to defeat us with censorship. Note that none have any scientific background and therefore default to strong arm tactics. They cannot afford to let the truth be heard.
Here in Portland, the worst of the worst have turned to rioting, because Race is the hottest topic of the moment, surpassing Climate and COVID-19. And these mostly white folks are at their best when they are at their worst: rioting. Their latest tactic is to scream racist remarks at black Portland policemen. That goes over well!
But more generally, these folks have to be very unhappy about our climate. It has been almost too perfect of late. Due to a northerly flow, we have had trouble reaching normal highs, let alone exceeding them. On July 13, 14, and 15, our record highs (101, 103, and 103 F) were set the very first year records were kept at the new Portland Airport. That was 1941. We were in the 80’s this year. Then in 1942, we set record highs that still stand today of 102 and 105 F on July 1 and 2. We reached 66 and 72 F this year on those dates.
I understand the frustration of the Cancel Culture. Our destroyed downtown is a monument to their overwhelming stupidity.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
London, 20 June: The Global Warming Policy Forum has criticised the Environment Agency for claiming that the UK is no longer a wet and rainy country.
A new report, The Great British Rain Paradox (1), has just been published, warning of potential water shortages in the UK in years to come.
It claims that the major factor for this is climate change. The foreword, written by the CEO of the Environment Agency Sir James Bevan, states:
“Climate change is causing long spells of dry weather that are putting our water resources under increased pressure. May 2020 has been the driest on record and exceptionally dry weather across the south east between 2017 and 2019 led to some of the lowest groundwater levels we have ever seen.”
These claims have no basis in fact.
Official Met Office data shows that the UK has actually been getting wetter in recent decades.
May 2020 certainly was not the driest on record either - in the UK as a whole, it was only the ninth driest since records started in 1862. The driest May was in 1896.
Analysis of regional rainfall data also fails to support Sir James’ claims.
Neither does the claim of exceptionally dry weather in the South East of England stand up to scrutiny. Met Office data proves that rainfall there between 2017 and 2019 was in fact close to average.
There are undoubtedly good reasons why water shortages may occur in future, such as population growth and increased demands. Spurious claims about climate change will simply serve to draw attention away from these very real issues and the failure to expand storage and deal with water leaks.
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said:
“This is not the first time Sir James has been caught playing fast and loose with the facts to support a political agenda (3). He should apologise and issue a correction.”
Notes for editors
1) The Great British Rain Paradox is available here.
3) James Bevan’s speech not supported by scientific evidence - Environment Agency
Contact
Dr Benny Peiser
Director, Global Warming Policy Forum
e: peiser@thegwpf.com
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IPCC and Sceptics Agree: Climate Change Is Not Causing Extreme Weather
A new Global Warming Policy Foundation report from retired physicist Ralph Alexander, Ph.D. (Oxford University) supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion there is limited scientific evidence linking human-caused climate change to increases in extreme weather. Alexander’s conclusions are also confirmed by recent documents produced by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and meteorologist Anthony Watts on the Climate at a Glance website.
Alexander’s paper begins by remarking, “"The purported link between extreme weather and global warming has captured the public imagination and attention of the mainstream media far more than any of the other claims made by the narrative of human-caused climate change.” This is odd because data and analyses from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body that climate alarmists in academic, political, and media circles continually cite as the authoritative source of information on climate change, confirm that “if there is any trend at all in extreme weather, it’s downward rather than upward. Our most extreme weather, be it heat wave, drought, flood, hurricane or tornado, occurred many years ago, long before the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere began to climb at its present rate,” writes Alexander.
“Recent atmospheric heat waves in western Europe,” writes Alexander, “pale in comparison with the soaring temperatures of the 1930s, a period when three of the seven continents and 32 of the 50 US states set all-time high temperature records, which still stand today.”
Nor has the IPCC discerned or identified any long-term trend in drought patterns, either in the United States or globally. And even though rainfall has modestly increased in recent years, there is no evidence floods are becoming more frequent or severe. Many recent flood events can be traced almost entirely to land-use changes such as channelization, deforestation, the destruction of wetlands, and the building of dams, Alexander notes.
Climate at a Glance: Floods, confirms Alexander’s assessment, citing data showing there has been no evidence of increasing flooding frequency or severity in the United States or elsewhere over the past century and a half. The IPCC states it has “low confidence” in any climate change impact regarding the frequency or severity of floods, going so far as to say it has “low confidence” in even the “sign” of any changes. In other words, the IPCC thinks it is just as likely that climate change is making floods less frequent and less severe.
On top of that, a 2017 study on the impact of climate change on flooding in the United States and Europe, published in the Journal of Hydrology, states, “The number of significant trends was about the number expected due to chance alone,” and “Changes in the frequency of major floods are dominated by multidecadal variability.”
Alexander notes hurricanes and tropical cyclones show a decreasing trend around the globe, with the frequency of landfalling hurricanes of any strength (Categories 1 through 5) remaining unchanged for at least 50 years. Although the frequency of major North Atlantic hurricanes, which are the most studied, has increased during the past 20 years, the current heightened activity level is merely comparable to the 1950s and 1960s, a period when the Earth was cooling, not warming.
Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes once again confirms Alexander’s hurricane conclusions, citing the IPCC and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who report there has been no increase in the number or severity of hurricanes as the planet has modestly warmed. The United States recently went through its longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane strike, experiencing its fewest total hurricanes in any eight-year period. The IPCC’s 2018 Interim Report observes there is “only low confidence for the attribution of any detectable changes in tropical cyclone activity to anthropogenic influences.”
“Likewise, there is no trend in the frequency of tornadoes in the United States since at least as far back as 1954,” writes Alexander about the absence of changes in tornado trends during the recent period of modest warming. “The frequency of strong (EF3 or greater) tornadoes has even diminished over that interval. The average number of strong tornadoes annually from 1986 to 2017 was 40 percent less than from 1954 to 1985.”
“But what about droughts?” alarmists ask. “We know droughts are increasing due to climate change!” Not so, says the data from the IPCC and other research bodies. The IPCC reports droughts are becoming less severe, with the United States benefiting from fewer and less extreme drought events as the climate modestly warms. In 2017 and 2019, NOAA reported the United States has undergone its longest period in recorded history with fewer than 40 percent of the country experiencing “very dry” conditions.
Similarly, the IPCC reports with “high confidence” precipitation has increased over mid-latitude land areas of the Northern Hemisphere (including the United States) during the past 70 years, and IPCC has “low confidence” about any negative trends globally.
Extreme weather events do occur, but they are the result of “natural patterns in the climate system, not global warming,” writes Alexander. He cites in particular the periodic but irregular shifts in the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation which governs many extremes such as intense hurricanes in the North Atlantic basin and major floods in eastern North America and western Europe, and El Nino and La Nina cycles in the Pacific Ocean, which often cause catastrophic flooding in the western Americas and severe droughts in Australia. In Europe, recent heat waves have been driven by changes in the jet stream blocking normal weather patterns.
In short, the oft-repeated assertion that weather is getting more extreme is false, with drought, flooding, hurricane, and tornado numbers being well within their normal historic range of severity and frequency. The data show there is no basis for alarm.
--H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: Global Warming Policy Foundation; Climate at a Glance: Drought; Climate at a Glance: Floods; Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes
