I can’t believe I’m still writing about climate change. I’d have stopped long ago were it not for persistent calls to blow up the U.S. economy in order to save the planet. The cult-like demand for action permeates every part of public life, government, media, academia, even K-12. Rep. Among the draconian policy solutions, Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal would have enormous negative impact on our economy.
For the record, climate does vary—think ice ages. And a combination of natural climate variability and measurement problems make the likelihood of singling out a human fingerprint very low. I look here at how climate alarmism is being sold in a distinctly unscientific manner.
The term ‘science’ properly refers to the scientific method, which is a system of inference designed to weed out incorrect ideas in favor of those supported by experiment and observation. The crux of the scientific method is rejection of theory rather than proof of it. From Bacon to Hopper and Feynman, it has been well understood that scientific theory must be “falsifiable,” that is, subject to test and rejection. Falsifiability depends on narrow and specific conditions imposed by theory. If the conditions fail, the theory is wrong.
On the other hand, we hear a lot these days about consensus, skepticism, and denial. Warmists often cite the “97-percent consensus” that manmade climate change is true and “settled.” This claim stems from a single study of article abstracts dealing with climate. The study suffers from a number of serious method flaws and has been roundly debunked. A more reasonable conclusion from the study is that 3% of the abstracts support manmade warming, not 97%. In reality the science is not at all settled.
What else is wrong with climate change alarm?
First, how did global warming get to be climate change? At least with warming there is a scientific theory: increase CO2 levels and get two or three degrees of direct and indirect warming. Why the switch to talking about too cold/too hot and other severe weather? Perhaps it’s because satellite and weather balloon data have failed to bear out GW theory for almost 20 years. Well, says NASA, surface weather station data do show warming as expected. But this picture emerges only as a result of serial and unexplained fudging of the data. Plus, NASA is from the government and has made such a mess of land and sea surface data as to make it useless as evidence for anything but data manipulation.
Second, there’s an awful lot of argument from authority going on in the alarmist camp. The researchers there call themselves climate scientists and make the ostentatious claim that only they can understand the atmosphere. Did you get what I said about the scientific method? What in that description suggests that only experts can be critics? Not to mention, the most powerful cohort in the warmist universe is the computer modelers. These guys design code that reflects theory, what they think is going on in the air. CO2 is in; solar is out. Then they run the models to get a whole bunch of curves and say, well then; that proves it. The models did just what we told them to do. Anything funny about this logic?
The climate wonks have a receptive audience. A couple of generations of smart people who learned about science stuff in school say: if scientists say it’s going to be bad then by golly it will be bad. One of these smart people, presidential candidate Sen. Kamela Harris, declares climate change to be existential and demanding of action, no matter the cost. Existential? A couple of hypothetical degrees Celsius is existential? How do you think your petition to lighten up would fare in her office? How about Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse calling for RICO prosecution of deniers. Or former President Obama implying that climate change deniers don’t believe in the moon or think it is made of green cheese. I’m pretty sure we did away with the green cheese theory a long time ago.
It kind of sorts out into curious folks who aren’t much impressed with the historical record of Malthusian doom-casting and smart people who just know that our evil species is bad for the planet. The curious folks think about the evidence and the smart people just don’t understand why curious folks don’t like science. What? If I don’t believe in string theory I don’t like science?
But what if it isn’t about science in the first place?
The question of greenhouse gas warming has been around a bit more than 100 years, working its way through Fourier, Arrhenius, Callender and Revelle. But the political interest in CO2 is relatively recent. The global warming juggernaut began in the mid ‘70s as a crisis epiphany under the leadership of the late UN diplomat Maurice Strong. Mr. Strong served as the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Program and recognized the potential value of CO2-induced warming theory as a tool to proselytize for globalization. Strong was the driving force behind Agenda 21, a program to enforce sustainable energy development through public education and training.
The scientific arm of Agenda 21 is the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), which name telegraphs its staff of bureaucrats. IPCC has published Summaries for Policy Makers (SPM) based on existing refereed science papers. One of IPCC’s noteworthy accomplishments has been to assure that its SPMs are unencumbered by underlying technical detail. Translation: the SPMs say whatever the bureaucrats want them to.
Mr. Strong believed that pending environmental disaster required a globalist solution. His thinking was bold and not necessarily restricted to scientific inference:
“… in order to save the planet, [a group of world leaders] decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Later on, German economist Ottmar Edenhofer, Co-chair of the IPCC Working Group III Mitigation of Climate Change, opined:
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy,… We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy.” (Philosophy and position on climate change)
And more recently, Christiana Figueres, a former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and a leader of the 2015 Paris Accords said in an official UN press release:
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution.”
Wait a minute! You mean to tell us we’ve been pouring tens of billions down a climate change rat hole for a couple of decades and what you really want to do is screw up the economy? We’ve been robbed!
Dr. William Lippincott is a retired environment scientist. His inferences are based on extensive literature research on the mechanisms of climate variability, a task open to any student of the scientific method.
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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