The Associated Press has thrown cold water on an increasingly popular Democratic talking point: That the earth has just 12 years to stave off climate doomsday.
“There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem,” said the AP in a Monday fact-check.
The wire service weighed in after former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke made the 12-year claim as he kicked off his run for the Democratic presidential nomination last week in Keokuk, Iowa.
“This is our final chance. The scientists are absolutely unanimous on this. That we have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis,” Mr. O’Rourke said.
The week in faux facts: Beto O’Rourke misrepresents the science on global warming; President Donald Trump’s ‘no collusion’ refrain gets fact-checked by a judge: #APFactCheck https://t.co/TgiW1eO8O6
— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) March 16, 2019
He isn’t the first high-profile Democrat warning of disaster by 2030. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, New York Democrat, made the 12-year claim at a Jan. 21 event marking Martin Luther King Jr. Day at which she called climate change “our World War II.”
“I think that the part of it that is generational is that millennials and Gen-Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up and we’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,’ and your biggest issue is–your biggest issue is, ‘How are we going to pay for it?’” said Ms. Ocasio-Cortez.
For some reason GOP seems to think this is a gaffe, but it’s actually a generational difference.
Young people understand that climate change is an existential threat: 3,000 Americans died in Hurricane María.
The UN says we’ve got 12 years left to fix it: https://t.co/KzawP5oI1M https://t.co/xTjtM39cCL
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 22, 2019
Her Green New Deal resolution, introduced last month, called for sweeping national action to convert the U.S. economy to renewable energy by 2030.
Sen. Edward Markey, Massachusetts Democrat, her Green New Deal co-sponsor, said recent studies “have made it clear that we need bold action to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, and we may have as few as 12 years to achieve it.”
He cited findings by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the AP fact-check said the panel “uses 2030 as a prominent benchmark because signatories to the Paris agreement have pledged emission cuts by then.”
“But it’s not a last chance, hard deadline for action, as it has been interpreted in some quarters,” said the AP.
Axios issued a similar debunking Jan. 22, after Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks, quoting four climate scientists, including University of Florida researcher Andrea Dutton.
SEE ALSO: Tucker Carlson Takes On ‘Screechy Moron’ Ocasio-Cortez In Epic ‘Green New Deal’ Rant
“For some reason, the media latched onto the 12 years (2030), presumably because they thought that it helped to get across the message of how quickly we are approaching this and hence how urgently we need action,” said Ms. Dutton. “Unfortunately, this has led to a complete mischaracterization of what the report said.”
Not everyone was convinced. ThinkProgress declared Monday that “O’Rourke is right, and the AP is wrong,” arguing that the wire service misinterpreted the Democrat’s statement.
“But O’Rourke did not say, ‘the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.’ What he said was, ‘we have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis’ — and for that claim, there is a very robust consensus,” said ThinkProgress’s Joe Romm.
He quoted Penn State climate scientist Michael E. Mann, leader of the so-called warmist camp, who said, “I judge Beto’s quote as accurate.”
In October, the IPCC issued a special report that found “global warming is likely to reach 1.5C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate.”
James Skea, co-chairman of the report and professor of sustainable energy at Imperial College London, told AP that the panel “did not say we have 12 years left to save the world.”
“The hotter it gets, the worse it gets, but there is no cliff edge,” Mr. Skea said.
The 2015 Paris climate agreement calls for keeping the increase in global temperatures “well below” 2 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial levels by the end of the century.
“This has been a persistent source of confusion,” Kristie L. Ebi, director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington in Seattle. “The report never said we only have 12 years left.”
Read more at Washington Times
The Associated Press has thrown cold water on an increasingly popular Democratic talking point: That the earth has just 12 years to stave off climate doomsday.
“There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem,” said the AP in a Monday fact-check.
Nor is there any scientific unanimity, much less consensus, the AP fact-checked anything. The AP are just massaging the data… uhh, managing the message.
Speaking of messaging data and fact checks……. “Young people understand that climate change is an existential threat: 3,000 Americans died in Hurricane María.” ….Why slip in this gold gilded piece of BS???
The official (Puerto Rican) government report was 64 deaths attributed to Hurricane María. The 64 deaths from Hurricane María were attributed directly to the storm, e.g., those caused by structural collapse, flying debris, floods and drownings.
BUT… This number (64) was too low to meet the criteria for the Progressive agenda so it was therefore determined the conventions used for causal attribution were just not casual enough because they only allowed for classification of deaths attributable directly to Hurricane María.
The data has been massaged and final 69-page report, entitled “Ascertainment of the Estimated Excess Mortality from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico,” explained the marked disparity between the official (Puerto Rican) government report and the revised one which concluded that as many as 4,645 Puerto Ricans died as a result of Hurricane María over a two-and-a-half month period.
The only existential threat to people are progressive LIES.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/06/01/data-code-study-puerto-rico-deaths/
Good read, check out the comments.
First off, the world is in the process of ending right now. The beginning of the end has started because we missed our opportunities to reduce emissions from fossil fuels. Second, we have a window of 12 years to substantial turn our energy production around. The world will not end then, but weather events will become more and more extreme. Food production is already being impacted in California, and the Midwest. That’s going to get worse. Agricultural production depends on a stable climate. But you gotta wonder why there are still people out there now, questioning the science and undermining those who seek to advance solutions. What’s your reasoning going to be when your own kids are impacted, your own house floods, and your family suffers? It’s god’s punishment for the gays?
Yes, Lisa. Everything is terrible.
The evidence to the contrary has been suppressed.
Weather events are — weather.
Climate change — it has always been in flux.
CO2 is the big baddie, it is plant food. And volcanoes emit more CO2 and SO2 than mankind every has.
But keep on with your nonsense.
You cannot claim that weather events will “become more and more extreme” because they are not more extreme now than they were before. So-called extreme weather has been a fact of earthly processes since the Earth was invented. More and more people choose to place themselves in the path of destructive weather, but that is not a measure of how much nature goes on a rampage or takes a nap.
We do not question the science. The science is clear that climate change is part of the natural cycle of cycles and there is nothing new going on here. Any actual warming that we can detect is still mainly the measure of our continuing gradual recovery from the Wisconsinian glacial maximum of about 15,000 years ago.
Hell
I’ve heard that 12 yr claim for at least 20 straight yrs -these incompetent idiots really need to do their homework
The Green Elitists have been saying something similar since the 70’s. Back then it was Global Cooling.
But I have evidence of Global Warming. It was 45 DegF this morning, and now at noon it is 60 DegF. If this continues life will be unsustainable around midnight. Lights out. Life will end.
We have been hearing this load of malarkey ever since the first Earth Day i can still remember all this poppycock of the Earth would be so Polluted we would have our cities under giant domes or we would need to wear GAS MASKS to go outside(some nut burgers still wear gas masks in their silly protests)and if you saw the movie Silent Running where all the forests would be sent into orbit in fact according to some of these nut berry pies the earth would be a lifeless hunk of rock in space by now but they still yammer out these mindless poppycock