Biden’s Climate Hypocrisy and 2021 Climate Facts
– By Howard Sierer –
So what’s it’s going to be, Joe: all in on reducing carbon dioxide emissions or lower gasoline prices?
With great climate fanfare earlier this year, Pres. Biden announced plans to cut U.S. domestic oil production by 25%. In a complete turnabout this summer, he’s encouraging Vladimir Putin’s Russia and OPEC to increase oil production to halt the climb in domestic gasoline prices.
Climate change religion is taking a back seat to domestic political reality while making us dependent on foreign oil producers.
Ironically, this blatant hypocrisy comes as Biden’s administration and the mainstream media are in a feeding frenzy over the latest U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, AR6. And true to form, they all ignore readily-available facts in favor of distorting the report’s science. Who “believes the science” and who doesn’t?
This recent IPCC report made only modest changes to its 2013 report and actually lowered the upper end of its 2100 global temperature range forecast by a half-degree Celsius. The report expresses “low confidence” in computer models that predict Antarctic Sea ice will melt and that hurricanes will become more frequent. Remember that when the media hypes this year’s first hurricane as evidence of pending climate change doom.
In previous columns here and here, I presented real, certifiable facts that expose media climate change propaganda for what it is. Take a look at other facts that undercut current media hype.
Start with 2021 western U.S. wildfires heralded in the media as the worst ever. Time magazine’s “world on fire” cover story is an over-the-top example. The facts show otherwise.
Data from the National Interagency Fire Center states that through 19 August 2021 ranks sixth in acres burned over the last ten years, with about 89% of the average of total acres burned annually during that time. That’s right, sixth and only about 11% of the area that typically burned in 1900. Likewise, European forest fires have dropped about half since 1980.
This year’s extensive fire property damage is a result not of an explosion in the number of fires but of increasing numbers of homes being built in fire-prone areas coupled with poor forest management practices. The message: don’t build or buy a home surrounded by forest or native scrub.
This year’s devastating floods in Europe, like most other natural disasters attributed to climate change, are nothing of the sort. Reporters and television crews flocked to Germany’s River Ahr, breathlessly attributing the damage and loss of life to climate change. While this year’s flood was exceptional, flows were less than floods in 1804 and 1910. Hard to see a climate-related trend here.
The government failed the Germans. Germany built an extensive flood warning system, but during a test last September most warning measures, including sirens and text alerts, didn’t work. The European Flood Awareness System predicted this year’s floods nine days in advance and formally warned the German government four days in advance, yet most people on the ground were left unaware.
Nonetheless, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel found it convenient to duck responsibility by claiming, “We must get faster in the battle against climate change.”
The IPCC report highlights trends that have accelerated in the last 50 years without mentioning a longer time horizon. Western U.S. heatwaves this year? The hottest heatwave ever struck California in July 1913. Almost every year from 1930 to 1938 featured historic heat waves and droughts somewhere in North America.
In the 1920s, climate-related weather disasters killed almost half a million people every year. Today’s hysterical reporting would lead us to believe even greater numbers today with increasing deaths expected in future years. Yet the International Disaster Database shows that climate-related deaths have dropped to less than 20,000 per year in the last decade while the global population has quadrupled.
Extrapolating deaths so far this year attributed to the North American heat dome, German and Belgian floods, climate-related events in India, and 200 other places around the world, results in a forecast of about 6,000 deaths in 2021. This year is hardly one of climate death catastrophes.
A recent study looked at the impact of temperature increases on mortality in the U.S. and Canada. Sure enough, the authors found an increase of about 7,200 heat deaths per year over the past two decades. But the study showed that warming prevented about 21,000 cold deaths per year over the same interval.
Globally, the study estimated that climate change causes almost 120,000 heat deaths per year but avoids about 300,000 cold deaths. Any death is a tragedy but forced to make a choice, most of us would opt for warmer weather.
An article in Science Direct uses scenarios provided by the IPCC to evaluate the economic impact of climate change on public economic wellbeing. The study finds that human wellbeing will likely increase to 450% of today’s wellbeing over the course of the 21st century. Climate change damage will reduce this increase to 434%. In other words, using the U.N.’s own data, climate change will have only a 3% economic impact.
That dramatically improving economic base will allow the world to do what it does best: adapt to our changing climate while reducing poverty worldwide. The ability to adapt is what is ignored by almost all those who, like Chicken Little, run around yelling “the sky is falling.”
Remember that the IPCC report is a political document that is intended to scare the public and motivate politicians to reduce CO2 emissions regardless of cost. Al Gore admitted this on PBS when he said “The language the IPCC used in presenting it was torqued up a little bit, appropriately. How do they get the attention of policymakers around the world?”
When you read the next “2021 climate catastrophe” story, do so with a skeptical eye. And expect more Biden hypocrisy if gasoline prices don’t fall.
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