Climate Change Propaganda Versus Facts (Part 2)
– By Howard Sierer –
Looks like climate change won’t end the world as we know it. We can take hope from the fact that longtime climate change alarmists are backing off from their doomsday predictions. Rational re-assessments are sprouting like weeds.
David Wallace-Wells, the author of 2019’s climate-crisis book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” has called on fellow activists to revise their advocacy “in a less alarmist direction.” Writing in the New York Intelligencer, Wallace-Wells says, “a new narrative about the climate future has emerged, on balance encouraging, at least to an alarmist like me. For once, the climate news might be better than you thought. It’s certainly better than I’ve thought.”
An article in the prestigious journal “Nature” urges climate alarmists to stop using the unrealistic worst-case climate scenario RCP 8.5, one that assumes the world reverts to using coal for all power generation. The RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modelers a high-emissions scenario for comparison purposes but became widely misused by alarmists erroneously claiming it represented the future if drastic action wasn’t taken.
The upshot: Climate science isn’t settled. As the science-trained novelist Michael Crichton summarized in a famous 2003 lecture at Caltech: “If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.”
Backtracking by respected climate alarmists has gone largely unreported since it would embarrass influential politicians and undercut the media’s gloom and doom narrative that continues to attract readership.
Surprisingly, many on the environmental left and the media have ignored even the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The panel explained that “The second-to-lowest RCP” [with about half the emissions of RCP 8.5] is “consistent with a baseline scenario that assumes a global development that focuses on technological improvements and a shift to service industries but does not aim to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as a goal in itself.”
In other words, if the world stays on its current path without embarking on multitrillion-dollar programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the world will become greener.
Media propaganda routinely includes cherrypicked data intended to reinforce the image of impending doom. I’ll respond with a few cherrypicked facts of my own that the media intentionally ignores since they would undercut its crisis narrative:
Are warming temperatures causing more severe weather? No. Tornado frequency has been steady since 1954 and tornado severity has trended down. As for hurricanes, according to NOAA “the historical tropical storm count record does not provide compelling evidence for a greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.”
How about droughts and fires? Droughts worldwide since 1951 have shown a slight increase in frequency, duration, and severity but have decreased in the Northern Hemisphere. According to NASA, “around 1900, global fire occurrence began a rapid decline that continues until the present.”
Surely, we’re experiencing more killer heat waves. No again. Heat waves in the U.S. are now far less frequent and less severe than they were in the 1930s and for the majority of states, all-time, high-temperature-records, were set in the first half of the 20th century.
We must be heading to a food crisis. No. Global crop yields are rising, not falling. And any losses in food production in more southerly countries in coming decades will be more than made up by vast increases in arable cropland in today’s cooler regions of Canada and Asia.
There is no apparent scientific conspiracy to mislead the public on climate change: most primary scientific reports are factual. (Summary reports tend toward alarmism.) But since the public gets its cherry-picked climate information almost exclusively from the media, very few people actually read primary climate assessment summaries. As a result, climate alarmists and the media have managed to convince 67 percent of the public – most of whom only read headlines – that the federal government should be doing more to mitigate climate change.
No climate model, not one, can match the year-to-year temperature swings we’ve experienced in recent decades despite the steady increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. For example, global temperatures in the first three months of this year are the coldest since 2014. Why? No one knows beyond the obvious fact that natural forces larger than carbon dioxide are at play.
Common sense dictates that using any of these models as the basis for spending trillions of dollars is madness. Never have so many planned to spend so much on the basis of claims that are so unsettled.
The multitrillion-dollar political – dare I say, socialist program to commandeer the economy in the name of limiting carbon dioxide emissions is gathering momentum, taking on a life of its own, facts be damned. Whether the public will recognize in time that it’s a gargantuan and unnecessary waste of money will determine our quality of life for decades to come.
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Homo sapiens is the name given to us humans by Linnaeus in the mid-1700s. In Latin our name translates to “wise man”. Let’s consider that in terms of the latest opinion by Mr. Sierer on climate change.
Mr. Sierer quotes author David Wallace-Wells who recently suggested that his relatively extreme alarmist view of global climate change was too extreme, and that things are not as bad as he wrote in his articles and book “The Uninhabitable Earth.” That is comforting, until you learn that his previous writings exaggerated scientific findings to begin with.
https://climatefeedback.org/evaluation/scientists-explain-what-new-york-magazine-article-on-the-uninhabitable-earth-gets-wrong-david-wallace-wells/
Mr. Sierer then quotes author Michael Crichton “If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” I understand that to mean that it’s not science if the consensus is that the Earth is spherical, or that the Earth is not the center of the Universe (geocentrism), or that the Earth is very old. Everybody ok with this garbage?
No global warming since 1998, that’s over 20 years. That’s the graphs you see published by denier groups. If you look up these groups, you will find they are mostly supported by…fossil fuel and related corporations (vested interests anyone?).
If you look at longer term graphs you will discover that there is indeed clear, but sporadic increases in global temperature beginning in the mid-1800s. This increase closely parallels global increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Of interest is the main Industrial Revolution, supported by using fossil fuels for energy, also began in the mid-1800s. Nah, must be coincidence.
As a geologist, I am used to working with long intervals of geologic time. What is evident is that measured past global temperature changes occur over, at minimum, many hundreds of years, but more commonly over thousands or 10s of thousands of years. What we see in current warming trend is a rate of change that is much more rapid, perhaps by an order of magnitude, and this suggests that carbon dioxide from human activity is the driving force.
Returning to our “wise man” definition. I submit that a truly wise human will consider the future. I submit that a truly wise human will look at the options and make a decision. Choose to ignore human caused global warming or choose to recognize human caused global warming and support efforts to control it. It is kind of a gamble, isn’t it?
If you choose to ignore and the future gets grim, your children will not thank you. If you choose to support efforts to control, it becomes a win, win situation. We spend a lot of money and effort to have a future using “clean” energy, and we hopefully don’t face climate disasters. Well, compare this with the final comments in Mr. Sierer’s opinion.
“The multitrillion-dollar political – dare I say, socialist program to commandeer the economy in the name of limiting carbon dioxide emissions is gathering momentum, taking on a life of its own, facts be damned. Whether the public will recognize in time that it’s a gargantuan and unnecessary waste of money will determine our quality of life for decades to come.”
I guess to him it’s all about money, all about some “trumped” up bit about socialism, all about whose facts should be damned. Yeah, lets gamble with our future quality of life. Like my friend Mike said, “Las Vegas was built on losers.”
Finally: Check out this article in the Independent.
http://suindependent.com/global-warming-human-activity-climate-change/
Rick+Miller: You fail to mention stronger forces that affect our climate. Our Sun also affects our climate and more so than human activity. You fail to mention the earth’s and sun’s maturity and life cycles. There is much more to be said regarding what affects our climate: but to climate alarmists it is just that, scaring people. The trillions of dollars that are willing to be spent will only enrich the alarmists themselves. Politicians and media pundits that peddle climate change hysteria do not have any idea of what is really happening and yet the fiscal financial decisions they make are destructive to our treasury and taxpaying citizens. Perhaps we will eventually become carbon free but it will not be because of government intrusion and dictates, it will come through free market and technology evolution.
Well said. Thanks for some common sense.