Former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel’s famous axiom is that a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. It’s even a worse thing to manufacture.
Although Joe Biden obviously disagrees. Creating an unwarranted sense of drama and urgency around climate change is central to his approach — to catalyze action unsupported by the facts or common sense.
In announcing his climate and energy team the other day, the president-elect declared climate change a crisis requiring a “unified national response.”
Going even further, he called it “an existential threat of our time,” a frankly preposterous claim if taken literally, or even seriously.
To maintain that increasing global temperatures are a threat to human existence itself entails believing that human beings — an endlessly adaptive species that has drastically increased its own life span over the last century — will be snuffed out if the planet gets a few degrees hotter.
If the worst comes, and sea levels rise significantly, we won’t move away from the coasts and find better ways to control flooding. If summers get much hotter in places unaccustomed to it, we won’t invest more in air conditioning.
If droughts markedly increase, we won’t husband our water resources more intelligently. If some areas become uninhabitable, we won’t leave for more hospitable climes.
No, a humanity that is wealthier and more technologically proficient than ever will be content to expose itself to the worst depredations of nature that it has done so much to master over the last millennium.
This is a laughable account of how the world works. The globe has been getting warmer for decades now, with no adverse effects on the human population or longevity. Heck, even polar bears, once held out as the pitiable victims of global warming, aren’t being driven to extinction.
In a climate speech during the campaign a few months ago, Biden relied on the tried-and-true alarmist tack of attributing every adverse weather event to global warming.
The flooding in the Midwest was an artifact of climate change, he suggested. Never mind that, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, the United Nations isn’t sure that whether flooding overall is getting more or less frequent.
Somewhat counterintuitively, Biden also blamed the drought in the Midwest on climate change, even though, according to Lomborg, the federal government’s National Climate Assessment says “drought has decreased over much of the continental United States in association with long-term increases in precipitation.”
Of course, Biden maintained that California wildfires have been caused by the upward trend in the global temperature, and they are probably a factor. Still, as Lomborg notes, the amount of land that is burning around the globe has fallen sharply since the late 19th century in response to changing human behavior (e.g., more cultivation of the land).
Finally, Biden cited Hurricane Laura, the Category Four storm that made landfall in Louisiana, as yet more climate-driven extreme weather.
The studies do show more storm activity in the Atlantic, Lomborg writes, although not necessarily from climate change. Meanwhile, there’s no global trend in tropical cyclones.
Biden spoke of “a feeling of dread and anxiety” over climate change, but this isn’t a sentiment that, to the extent it exists at all, he wants to address or assuage.
Instead, he seeks to stoke it, and if that requires frankly distorting the scientific consensus to paint catastrophic scenarios, so be it.
There is no doubt that human activity contributes to climate change. It is a long-term challenge that we should seek to understand better and prepare to address through adaption and innovation should the worst come decades from now.
But that isn’t enough for Biden. He doesn’t want to get us thinking about climate change, but rather to suspend all rational thought about the issue — especially about the downsides of costly measures to crimp the US economy in the name of saving the planet.
In short, he needs a crisis atmosphere, the facts and science be damned.
Read more at NY Post
Climate is never static. There is always something to blame on anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions (natural ones don’t seem to matter).
Its all about Politics and Junk Science not the truth they wan to use this fake crisis of Global warming/Climate Change to control the way we live from cradle to grave and make us all give as the want us to live a total vegan diet and living in some Bee Have Apartment Complex
There are many mistakes made in the current new Luddite climate hysteria. The first mistake is to assume that the coincidental rise of CO2 and temperature from the mid twentieth century to today, must mean that more CO2 causes higher temperatures. The evidence shows it does not. In nature, quite the opposite is true. The only temperature relationship between CO2 and temperature is that changes in temperature cause changes in CO2 levels. This happens because CO2 solubility changes with temperature. As temperature increases, CO2 outgasses from water and increase CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The changes in CO2 levels lag temperature changes by about 800 years. Except in left wing politics, there is a great deal of doubt that human activity contributes to climate change. What is true is that there is little doubt that fossil fuel use, as well as temporary fallow when converting to palm oil production or other agricultural uses are increasing CO2 concentrations. But this does not change temperature. The most important question we face though is does the evidence show more CO2 is good or bad for the environment, for the climate, and for humanity? For the environment, there is no doubt in the science (of biology) that more CO2 is always better. Multicellular life began in CO2 levels ten to twenty times those of today. All life dies without CO2 and during glacial phases of our current ongoing Pleistocene ice age, CO2 drops to within 30ppm of nominal lethal lows. Chlorophyll is the photosynthetic green enzyme and what paints the environment green. Although too few schoolchildren and television ‘journalists’ are educated well enough to realize it, CO2, water, and sunlight are the basic ingredients of life on earth. More is always better. The minuscule 41% increase of CO2 (from our starvation level lows) has increased the biomass of life on earth as much as 40%. More CO2 is shrinking earth’s deserts by increasing plant strength and drought tolerance. And it is causing a string of world record crop yields through ‘CO2 fertilization’. But in spite of CO2 levels not seen in twelve million years, temperatures remain well under the maximum of the twelve degree C range of our ongoing three million year Pleistocene ice age. Well within the twelve thousand year 4 degree C range of the Holocene interglacial. And two degrees C below the one thousand year Eddy cycle maximum. The current dominant factor controlling climate in our current continental configuration is Milankovitch Eccentricity, the one hundred thousand year oscillation in the shape of earth’s orbit between near-circular and elongated ellipsoidal. In the one thousand year Eddy cycle, our temperatures have been increasing since the “Little Ice Age” in the 1600s. They will continue increasing another two degrees before turning back down to complete the current cycle. As they have done at least a dozen times before in our Holocene interglacial. The 103 CO2 driven climate models exaggerate warming by up to 500%. Yet the UN-IPCC continues to relay on them despite their complete failure to accurately reflect the climate. Their failure proves that CO2 is insignificant to climate. In real life more CO2 is always better.