The U.N.’s Climate Change Halloween Scarefest
– By Howard Sierer –
All the usual suspects will be in Glasgow, Scotland, for the UN Climate Change Conference starting on Halloween. The choice of date is ironically appropriate since the conference’s primary purpose is to scare the public with misleading statistics and forecasts of apocalypse now…or at least coming soon.
The usual suspects start with global-warmist true believers who claim belief in science but unlike true scientists, ignore facts and data that don’t fit their narrative.
Socialist politicians will be well represented since the global warming scare is by far their best chance to commandeer economies worldwide, remaking them into government-controlled workers’ paradises. See the Green New Deal for their plans for this country.
The mainstream media lapdogs in attendance will dutifully report that all-natural disasters, past, and future, can be attributed to climate change. Unlike the media’s traditional and responsible role, no attempts will be made to verify alarmist claims or to publish alternative explanations.
Finally, corporate promoters will be swarming like flies to honey, or in this case leeches to government funding. They’ll be brandishing brochures describing how their companies’ products and services can avert climate Armageddon with copious amounts of government funding.
Progressive filmmaker Michael Moore derides this “corporatization” of the climate movement in his documentary “Planet of the Humans.” He finds that much of what’s currently promoted as renewable energy is ineffectual, wasteful, and far from “clean.”
Just as museums offer interpretive guidebooks to help visitors understand what they’re seeing, I’ll offer some factual background that will help readers unable to arrange a flight to Glasgow interpret the propaganda they’ll be reading.
Heat-related Deaths. Expect to hear that increasing numbers of heatwaves in the U.S. and Canada in recent decades have been estimated to cause about 7,200 deaths per year. What we will not hear is that warming has prevented about 21,000 cold deaths per year. Worldwide, warming causes about 120,000 deaths per year while preventing about 300,000 deaths annually.
These findings are documented in the highly-regarded British medical journal Lancet, available to – but ignored by – the media. Gloom and doom attract readers.
Malnutrition. We’ll certainly hear about the World Health Organization’s estimates that 85,000 people worldwide will die of malnutrition caused by climate change by 2050. Surely anyone with an ounce of compassion will support reducing carbon dioxide emissions, regardless of the trillions of dollars needed to do so.
Yet WHO’s own data shows that even while the globe has been getting warmer over the last two decades, malnutrition has been dropping dramatically. The reason is clear: economic growth has allowed families to purchase more food.
What should concern conference attendees instead is that the Paris climate agreement is projected to keep 11 million more people in poverty, limiting progress against worldwide malnutrition. Adopting the even more stringent policies to be promoted in Glasgow could add 80 million people to poverty rolls with a much larger increase in malnutrition.
Natural disasters. Every hurricane, every flood, and every forest fire of recent years will be attributed to global warming. We’ll be told to expect dramatic increases in all of them in the coming decades unless a drastic reordering of world economies is undertaken immediately.
Facts readily available to the media will be ignored:
According to NOAA “the historical tropical storm count record does not provide compelling evidence for a greenhouse warming-induced long-term increase.” Per a paper in Nature, the strong hurricanes of the last several decades are “not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s.”
This year’s Hurricane Ida will be fresh in our minds but as of late October, it was the only significant U.S. hurricane of the season.
Tornado frequency has been steady since 1954 and tornado severity has trended down. Rivers worldwide are flooding less, not more over the last 100 years. (Damage is up since many more structures are being constructed in flood plains.) According to NASA, “around 1900, global fire occurrence began a rapid decline that continues until the present.”
Natural disasters are always newsworthy and the media haven’t missed an opportunity to feed their climate change narrative, facts notwithstanding.
Carbon Reduction Cost. Here’s something else we won’t hear in the conference. The Paris Climate Agreement, recently reaffirmed by Pres. Biden will cost the U.S. $50 billion per year or $140 per person per year by 2030.
Biden’s latest fantasy is to eliminate all carbon emissions by 2050. Yet a new study in Nature shows that even a 95% reduction would cost 11.9% of our gross domestic product annually or $11,300 per person. That’s more than we currently spend on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid combined.
Add our share of $750 billion per year demanded by poorer nations from rich countries to meet their climate goals.
All this expense for what? The Obama administration admitted that U.S. commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement would lower worldwide temperatures by 0.06 degrees in 2100. If all nations met their commitments – a very big “if” – worldwide temperatures would be lower by 0.09 degrees in 2030.
Despite being subject to decades of climate change scaremongering, the American public is not concerned enough to make even a modest contribution to address it. A recent poll showed that 68% of Americans wouldn’t pay even $10 per month more on their electricity bills to combat climate change. Only when the hypothetical figure was dropped to $1 per month, would 57% agree to an increase.
Unfortunately, the media’s incessant drumbeat of impending doom has convinced almost half of American young people that “humanity is doomed” and almost two-thirds think “the future is frightening.” This is sadly reminiscent of the 1970s when the then-projected global population boom would lead to worldwide starvation in the 1980s. Today’s equivalent: scaremongering about coastal flooding – “187 million made homeless” – assumes that countries take no measures to adapt to the risks.
Climate change is not a gloom and doom future. Mankind has adapted to a variety of what seemed at the time daunting challenges. The 20th century’s unprecedented economic growth provided the wherewithal to meet them. Adaptation is far more effective than climate regulation.
We can do it again and with ease if we can resist the forces that want to remake our economies with vast government-mandated makeovers that will stunt the growth needed to improve lives worldwide.
