Dear Editor,
St. George residents may want to bring up some “inconvenient truths” with the new Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL) chapter being formed in partnership with Conserve Southwest Utah.
Across the world people suffer due to climate change. Yet aid agencies are unable to secure sufficient funds to help them because, of the more than $1 billion spent globally every day on climate finance, only 6% of it goes to helping vulnerable people adapt to climate change today. The rest is spent on mitigation, trying to stop phenomena that might someday happen.
This is happening largely because groups like CCL promote the unfounded idea that we know that we can control our planet’s climate merely by regulating our carbon dioxide emissions.
Yet, reports such as those of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change illustrate that debate rages in the scientific community about the causes and consequences of climate change. We don’t even know whether warming or cooling lie ahead, let alone whether our activities have significant impact.
By focusing their activism on mitigation, CCL unwittingly encourages an ethical tragedy. It is the valuing of people yet to be born, those who might someday be affected by human-caused climate change, more than people who need help coping with real climate change today.
Sincerely,
Tom Harris, B. Eng., M. Eng. (Mech.)
Executive director, International Climate Science Coalition
Ottawa, Ontario K2E 6L5, Canada
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The War on Carbon has three elements: the Greenhouse Effect, the causes of warming, and the predicted outcome of warming.
Climate activists like the Citizens’ Climate Lobby like to blur the distinctions between these three, otherwise their cause would fall apart.
The Greenhouse Effect is well-understood. That’s the settled science part. The causes of warming still remain uncertain, as do the outcomes.
Certainly, human emissions of carbon dioxide have contributed something to warming. The science says that this can only have had a small effect. Natural cycles in the oceans and in the output of the sun remain the predominant drivers of planetary warming and cooling.
Doomsday predictions of disastrous warnings come from computer models that have to be carefully tuned to replicate the temperatures of the past. Over just the last 20 years their future predictions have departed substantially from reality.
Climate activists pretend that the settled science label applies to the causes and predictions as well.
The trillions being spent on the War on Carbon could better be spent on global economic growth and the elimination of poverty. Then when extreme weather strikes, as it always has done and will continue to do so, the developing nations will be able to fund their own rescue and recovery programs.
Yes, exactly. Great reply!
Michael – well said….. Dr. Judith Curry, some time ago, warned us of the risk of the “error cascade” which has proven to be the case…..Without a solid point of reference we have no anchor from which to establish a reasonable action plan for any of our efforts to deal with excess GHGs. https://judithcurry.com/2012/01/05/error-cascade/
Sadly our Federal government chooses social justice warriors, lawyers and such to deal with such issues when in fact the better choice would be someone with a solid background in the pure sciences such as someone with a PhD in Engineering……. but then again I am biased in favor of engineers……
The audio story indicates that only 6% of the money collected for the climate endeavor goes to help the poor with the rest going into so-called “alternate green energy solutions”! As and electrical engineer with more than 30 years experience in a wide range of conventional and alternative electrical power systems…. the ones that are proving out to be epic failures are more often than not, the ones proposed by the “informal experts” who are presenting themselves to the mainstream news media as scientists etc.
At the best of times the following are turning out to be incredibly weak and expensive….. IR solar collection, i.e., the $2.2 billion Ivanpah project, Geo-thermal in less than optimum regions, e.g., Alberta versus Iceland, urban rooftop PV solar where rooftops lack appropriate slope and direction and/or there is unexpected solar obstruction as a result of new building construction, trees, seasonal snow/ice cover etc.