Walter E. Williams
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.
Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite such harebrained predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.
Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” “The 3rd rock from the sun is a fragile oasis.” “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation’s youth from kindergarten through college. That’s why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.
Let’s examine just a few cataclysmic events that exceed any destructive power of mankind and then ask how our purportedly fragile planet could survive. The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. Before that was the 1815 Tambora eruption, the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer.” It led to crop failures and livestock death in the Northern Hemisphere, producing the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages. Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions - Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947) - spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activities during our entire history.
Our so-called fragile earth survived other catastrophic events, such as the floods in China in 1887, which took an estimated 1 million to 2 million lives, followed by floods there in 1931, which took an estimated 1 million to 4 million lives. What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? Chile’s 1960 Valdivia earthquake was 9.5 on the Richter scale. It created a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China’s Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles.
Our so-called fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa, which has a diameter of 190 miles. In Ontario, there’s the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago. At 39 miles long, 19 miles wide and 9 miles deep, it’s the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there’s the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.
My question is: Which of these powers of nature could be duplicated by mankind? For example, could mankind even come close to duplicating the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the earth or can match nature’s destructive forces. Our planet is not fragile.
Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”
Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.
Update: ICYMI, the U.N. told us we’d have ‘disaster’ by year 2000 ‘if global warming was not checked’
Anthony Watts / 16 hours ago March 3, 2019
I must have slept through that event, thankfully, I’m still here. Global Warming zealots have been predicting doom for years, the latest being that we now have only 12 years left.
But, back in 1989, we were told we have only 11 years left, till the year 2000. If we didn’t act, “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels”.
That date came and went. Yet here we are again, with the same old doom-mongering.
Don’t believe me? AP archived the story here:
https://www.apnews.com/bd45c372caf118ec99964ea547880cd0
And, I’ve saved it as a PDF, since things like this tend to get “disappeared””.
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Tony Heller, aka Steven Goddard of the Deplorable Climate Science Blog, has compiled a must-read list of the five top arguments against climate alarmism. This was in response to a challenge by Scott Adams, who is unsure what position to take on this issue and needs persuasion.
On one of his Periscopes, Adams - creator of the Dilbert cartoons, now with a flourishing side-career as an internet seeker-after-truth - said that if Heller could produce five unassailable arguments then he would become a climate sceptic; but that if Heller failed, then he (Adams) would “come down hard on the opinion that there’s something big to worry about.”
So how has Heller fared?
I think he has done a great job. The five arguments, which I’ll rephrase slightly, are as follows:
Climate alarmism is just a modern version of man’s primal superstitions about cataclysmic natural events. But these fears are baseless for there is no legitimate evidence to show that “extreme weather is increasing or sea level rise is accelerating.”
Climate alarmism is a form of Groupthink - or, as Heller puts it, the Emperor’s New Clothes. This Groupthink requires ignoring the evidence and instead deferring to the opinions of a very small body of parti pris “experts”.
If the case for the “global warming” were as strong as these experts say, the debate would be over by now. Instead, all of their “apocalyptic predictions” have failed miserably. What reason do we have to believe them after all this time?
Climate alarmism is entirely dependent on graphs and computer models which rely on cherry-picked or corrupt data. Few if any of these models have come close to forecasting real world outcomes.
The proposed solutions to “climate change” are “unworkable, dangerous and useless.”
In my view the last argument is the clincher. It’s the one that ought to unite all of us, skeptics and true believers alike. After all, even those who fully subscribe to the theory that climate change is dangerous, unprecedented and man-made ought surely to agree that there’s no point chucking money at the problem if it’s going to do more harm than good.
Yet this is exactly what is happening.
Taxpayer-subsidised wind and solar are doing huge damage to the environment, to wildlife, and to the economy.
Biofuels are destroying rainforest and agricultural land, driving up food prices, needlessly hurting nature.
Rent-seekers in crony capitalist Potemkin industries like renewables are being subsidized to produce inefficient, intermittent, unnecessarily costly power, misallocating scarce resources and driving the indigent deeper into fuel poverty.
Science in universities and schools is being corrupted by a Climate Industrial Complex which rewards science, however flawed, which promotes the alarmist narrative and which punishes science that defies the so-called “Consensus”.
Vast sums of public money - in excess of $1.5 trillion per year - are being squandered on the chimaera of “climate change.” Yet despite all this spending, using the alarmists’ own calculations, it will offset “global warming” by the end of the century by 0.048C (0.086F).
That’s 1/20th of one degree Celsius.
The activists, shyster politicians, rent-seekers, dodgy scientists, media second-raters and other useful idiots who are pushing for more climate action are demanding the impossible. If ever they achieved their ambitions, western industrial civilization would collapse.
As Heller puts it:
The reason winter is cold, is because of a lack of solar energy. The sun is low in the sky, days are short, and it is cloudy much of the time. Yet climate alarmists want people to be dependent on solar energy for their survival. They imagine that there is some storage technology which can store huge amounts of energy for long periods of time when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. But as Bill Gates pointed out, that technology doesn’t exist.
I have degrees in science and engineering, and have worked for most of the last 45 years as both. The job of scientists is to come up with ideas. By contrast, the primary job of engineers is to make things that work. If a bridge or a microprocessor, doesn’t work - very bad things will happen. Bad engineering is fatal to humans, companies and civilizations.
This is what I find so puzzling about self-proclaimed “environmental” campaigners. They keep telling us that they want to save the planet, that they are concerned about “future generations”, that the people who “deny” climate change are selfish, greedy, and anti-science.
Yet everything these “environmental” campaigners do achieves an effect diametrically opposite to their alleged good intentions.
These greenies are hurting the poor, they’re damaging the planet, they’re hampering the economic growth that historically has enabled us to overcome or limit such environmental problems as pollution, they’re killing birds and bats and orangutans. Yet still, somehow, they keep telling us that they have the moral high ground.
Think about this next time you read some scare story about the coming climate apocalypse or about kids bunking off school in order to protest that more needs to be done: it’s not science you’re seeing here but hard left politics.
That’s the main reason, Scott Adams, why you shouldn’t allow yourself to be troubled by the great climate scare: because even if the greenies are right about the science - which they’re not, by the way - they are completely wrong about the solutions.
Their claimed intentions may sound good; the outcomes they inflict on us are evil.
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Update: Expert calls Rapid Sea level Rise Claims Absolute Nonsense
World-leading sea-level expert Prof. emeritus Nils Axel Morner presents some stark examples that show how the IPCC and climate activists are wildly exaggerating their claims of rapid sea level rise here.
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The Green New Deal isn’t just un-American, it’s also completely bonkers.
By David Harsanyi
FEBRUARY 7, 2019
Note: Ocasio-Cortez’s office has taken down their page describing the Green New Deal.
A number of Democratic Party presidential hopefuls - including Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Julian Castro, and Beto O’Rourke, for starters - have already endorsed or expressed support for the “Green New Deal” (GND). Today, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Edward J. Markey dropped details about her plan.
It is not hyperbole to contend that GND is likely the most ridiculous and un-American plan that’s ever been presented by an elected official to voters. Not merely because it would necessitate a communist strongman to institute, but also because the societal cost are unfathomable. The risible historic analogies Markey and Ocasio-Cortez rely on, the building of the interstate highway system or moon landing, are nothing but trifling projects compared to a plan that overhauls modernity by voluntarily destroying massive amounts of wealth and technology. That is the GND.
While some of the specifics need to be ironed out, the plan’s authors assure us that this “massive transformation of our society” needs some “clear goals and a timeline."The timeline is ten years. Here are some of the goals:
Ban affordable energy. GND calls for the elimination of all fossil fuel energy production, the lifeblood of American industry and life, which includes not only all oil but also natural gas - one of the cheapest sources of American energy, and one of the reasons the United States has been able to lead the world in carbon-emissions reduction.
Eliminate nuclear energy. The GND also calls for eliminating all nuclear power, one of the only productive and somewhat affordable “clean” energy sources available to us, in 11 years. This move would purge around 20 percent of American energy generation so you can rely on intermittent wind for your energy needs.
Eliminate 99 percent of cars. To be fair, under the GND, everyone will need to retrofit their cars with Flintstones-style foot holes or pedals for cycling. The authors state that the GND would like to replace every “combustion-engine vehicle” - trucks, airplanes, boats, and 99 percent of cars - within ten years. Charging stations for electric vehicles will be built “everywhere,” though how power plants will provide the energy needed to charge them is a mystery.
Gut and rebuild every building in America. Markey and Cortez want to “retrofit every building in America” with “state of the art energy efficiency.” I repeat, “every building in America.” That includes every home, factory, and apartment building, which will all need, for starters, to have their entire working heating and cooling systems ripped out and replaced with...well, with whatever technology Democrats are going invent in their committee hearings, I guess.
Eliminate air travel. GND calls for building out “highspeed rail at a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary.” Good luck Hawaii! California’s high-speed boondoggle is already in $100 billion dollars of debt, and looks to be one of the state’s biggest fiscal disasters ever. Amtrak runs billions of dollars in the red (though, as we’ll see, trains will also be phased out). Imagine growing that business model out to every state in America?
A government-guaranteed job. The bill promises the United States government will provide every single American with a job that includes a “family-sustaining wage, family and medical leave, vacations, and a pension.” You can imagine that those left in the private sector would be funding these through some unspecified “massive” taxation. On the bright side, when you’re foraging for food, your savings will be worthless.
Free education for life. GND promises free college or trade schools for every American.
A salubrious diet. The GND promises the government will provide “healthy food” to every American (because there are no beans or lettuce in your local supermarket, I guess).
A house. The GND promises that the government will provide, “safe, affordable, adequate housing” for every American citizen. I call dibs on an affordable Adams Morgan townhouse. Thank you, Ocasio-Cortez.
Free money. The GND aims to provide, and I am not making this up, “economic security” for all who are “unable or unwilling” to work. Just to reiterate: if you’re unwilling to work, the rest of us will have your back.
Bonus insanity: Ban meat. Ocasio-Cortez admits that we can’t get zero emissions in 10 years “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” The only way to get rid of farting cows is to get rid of beef.
The GND uses the word “massive” to explain the size “investments” (formerly known as “taxes") 13 times. How will we pay for this plan? “The same way we did the New Deal, the 2008 bank bailouts and extend quantitative easing,” say Markey and Cortez, who earned her degree in economics at an institution of higher learning that should be immediately decertified. The plan itself seems to insinuate that billionaires can pay for the whole thing. Of course, best case scenario, it is estimated that instituting a top marginal tax rate of 70 percent would raise a little more than $700 billion over that decade. She does not explain how we’re going to raise the other 20 bazillion dollars it will cost to tear down modernity.
Cortez and Markey claim that 92 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans support the Green New Deal. I’m not sure where that number is derived. But ask them again when government agents come to take out their water heater.
Cortez demonstrates the failure of our education system which has indoctrinated instead of educated our young people. There is a new movement to go after universities to recover tuition for their failure to educate (they indoctrinate) and prepare students for real world jobs. Students leave and are qualified for jobs as social media trolls, activists and social justice warriors but not prepared for real jobs. Students leave with debts equivalent to home mortgages, that will delay or deny their future. I only hope this movement grows and we penalize the schools and eat into their precious endowment money to create more balanced and useful education.
Markey is a typical Massachusetts politician (doesn’t matter if they have a D or R after their name) who is just full of himself. A friend sat in a restaurant and at the table behind him was someone who spoke loudly and used the word I more times than Obama at his SOTU addresses - it was Ed Markey. His last job before government was Mr. Frosty.
All this for what?? It really has little to do with climate which is not becoming more severe (see the updated alarmist claim fact check here) and more here and is solely meant to advance the green agenda and give the government more power over every aspect of out life.