It was eight years ago this month that the United Nations said we had eight years to do something about global warming. If not, the planet would be in trouble. Well, here we are, and no climate disaster has befallen Earth. And none is on the horizon.
Since the United Nations’ forecast, in fact, new science suggests that the threat posed by human-caused climate change is substantially less than previously thought. The U.N.’s climate chief even admitted that the fight against global warming “is my religion and my dharma.”
It’s hard to know what it’s going to take to make those who believe that man is destructively heating his own planet back off their predictions, since reality seems to be a standard they’re not interested in. A group that will cheerfully believe their godfather’s claim that global warming will cause sea levels to rise 20 feet is a group that is not going to easily concede its error. They’re going to stick it out because the issue is all about politics and religion for them.
Maybe we’ll have to blow through another deadline, the 100-month-window Prince Charles established in March 2009, before we can get a rest from the hectoring.
More than likely that missed deadline would only prompt the community to fix another future date as the one by which we need to “alter our behavior before we risk catastrophic climate change and the unimaginable horror that this would bring.”
In any case, now that we’ve reached the U.N.’s point of no return, since there’s really nothing we can do because we haven’t really done anything yet, we’d like to politely ask the environmental community to stop issuing dire warnings, and move on to something more constructive.
