Joe Biden has put a presidential imprimatur on climate change being an existential threat, and he doesn’t mean in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense of man’s search for meaning in an uncomforting universe.
He means the end of humanity, a claim nowhere found in climate science.
This is odd because the real news today is elsewhere. Its movement may be ocean-liner-like, the news may be five years old before the New York Times notices it, but the climate community has been backing away from a worst-case scenario peddled to the public for years as “business as usual.”
A drumroll moment was Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peter’s 2020 article in the journal Nature partly headlined: “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome.”
This followed the 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi asking why climate scenarios posit implausible increases in coal-burning a century from now.
And I could go on. Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues show how the RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modelers a high-emissions scenario to play with, and how it came to be embraced despite being at odds with every real-world indicator concerning the expected course of future emissions.
In a simple model of the world, authority figures say absurd and false things, and the media calls them out.
The reverse happened this time, with the climate crowd reacting to the media’s botched coverage of the Fourth National Climate Assessment in 2018, itself a strained compilation of extreme worst-case scenarios that still couldn’t deliver the desired global meltdown.
Even David Wallace-Wells, the author of 2019’s climate-crisis book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” was moved to call on fellow activists to revise their advocacy “in a less alarmist direction.”
To this day, the print edition of the New York Times has never mentioned RCP 8.5, the unsupported emissions scenario on which so many of its climate jeremiads rest.
The Washington Post has used it twice, once to say it portended a climate disaster, and more recently to suggest its falling out of favor didn’t mean the climate wasn’t headed for disaster.
How did we get from reality to Greta Thunberg, Joe Biden, and a Bloomberg columnist who says Exxon “threatens the continuation of human life on earth”?
Decades ago, casual theorizing suggested global warming might cause the oceans to stop circulating and North America to freeze over, giving rise to the 2004 cinematic and scientific disaster of a movie known as “The Day After Tomorrow.” (pictured above)
Al Gore touted the same scenario but later dropped it, and climate catastrophism has had to survive ever since without scientific underpinning.
The strain of holding realism at bay is starting to tell. John Kerry, the new climate czar, recently blurted out that the Biden green agenda will have no effect on climate unless countries like China and India join, which they already declared they won’t.
A bigger moment of truth will come with a book by Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist and chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department, demonstrating what the science—the plain, recognized, consensus science—says about climate change: It won’t be catastrophic.
It’s unlikely to be influenced in a major way by policy actions. The costs will be large in relation to everything except the future, richer economy that will easily pay for them.
Read rest at WSJ
True science and the media is an oxymoron. The oxy can go with the science and the morons with the media.
Some Climate media items
https://wp.me/pTN8Y-6RH
Journalists are usually the sort of people who say, “Listen to the science.”
Half a breath later they’re telling us not to listen to some scientists at all, such as Ian Plimer or Jo Nova, because those ones have gone rogue as ‘deniers’. How clever people such as journalists can become so bothered about what they say is just a fringe of two to three percent of ‘denier’ scientists is beyond me.
But then, when journalists write that 97% of scientists believe firmly in anthropogenic climate change they’re penning a work of pure fiction, aren’t they? Either that or they failed maths. Come to think of it, upon reading what they often write about the economics of subsidies on unreliables, the latter seems quite plausible…
Exactly. What astonishes me is that in more than two decades of “the world is going to end” journalism and politics, they have still failed to grasp even the basics of the science they claim to adore! Far easier to proclaim a love of science than to actually crack a textbook apparently. Science says that all life dies without CO2. Science says that life was born in life luxuriant levels of 9,000ppm CO2 about 3.8 billion years ago. In an atmosphere containing NO oxygen! And science says that CO2 levels have been declining from life luxuriant levels towards a LACK OF CO2 OBLIVION ever since. Science does say that in nature CO2 varies with temperatures. But not because CO2 level changes cause temperature changes. Rather because temperature changes cause changes in CO2 levels! Science says CO2 solubility is temperature variable. As water warms, CO2 outgasses, and vice versa. That is why CO2 levels and temperatures go hand in hand. Not because CO2 is capable of causing any significant warming. Science says that we are in an ongoing ice age called the Pleistocene Ice Age. It is the COLDEST earth has been since multicellular life began. That three million year old ONGOING ice age is characterized by a one hundred thousand year cycle of temperatures warming and cooling by twelve to thirteen degrees C. And today’s temperatures remain well within the normal, natural temperature range of our ongoing ice age. Science clearly shows that through the green biochemical reaction photosynthesis, sunlight, CO2 and water combine to provide the carbon based backbone that IS life on earth. It provides the high energy sugar that gives All of the energy required for life on earth. (Animals have to eat theirs.) And photosynthesis provides All of the atmospheric oxygen required by the animal half of life. Since coal, oil, and gas is the only source of energy that when used provides the two basic ingredients of life on earth, CO2 and water, fossil fuels are THE ONLY GREEN ENERGY! Yet we hear what from politicians and journalists? Crickets.
Dr Tim Ball – Historical Climatologist
http://www.generalistjournal.com
Book: ‘The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science’
Book: ‘Human Caused Global Warming, the Biggest Deception in History’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0o8Hhjes_0
https://www.technocracy.news/dr-tim-ball-on-climate-lies-wrapped-in-deception-smothered-with-delusion/
Excellent books Dr. Ball. I highly recommend them.
Seems Big Tech strikes again. Neither of your youtube videos are available. The left really doesn’t like having their left-wing beliefs questioned.