Activists are warning that the upcoming United Nations climate conference is the last chance to save the world. Fair enough. So if no deal is reached at the meeting, can we please stop hearing about global warming?
The 21st session of the Conference of Parties to the U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change starts Nov. 30 and will ponderously drag on until Dec. 11. Call it the “Last Chance in Paris,” because that’s what the fearmongers, from the Vatican to Prince Charles, believe it is.
Of course we’ve heard all this before.
It seems as if every time there’s a U.N. climate conference, we hear the warnings: It’s the final opportunity to save Earth, the “last chance.” Consider these caveats:
- ¬ï In 2001, Time magazine said the U.N.’s Bonn conference was “a global warming treaty’s last chance.”
- ¬ï Four years later, activist Mark Lynas wrote in an open letter that the Montreal climate summit represented “a last chance for action.”
- ¬ï Before the 2007 meeting in Bali, Tony Juniper of Friends of the Earth declared that the conference “could be the last chance to avoid the worst effect of global warming.”
- ¬ï Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery said in 2008 that the Poland “round of negotiations is likely to be our last chance as a species to deal with the problem.”
- ¬ï Then before Copenhagen in 2009, European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas said that conference was “the world’s last chance to stop climate change before it passes the point of no return.”
We could go on. The warnings have continued every year since without fail. So it’s unlikely we’ve heard the last of the “last chance” warnings, even if no agreement is reached in Paris.
But we should have.
There’s a growing stack of evidence that contradicts the alarmists’ warnings and refutes the scientific “consensus” that man is overheating his planet with carbon-dioxide emissions.
Start with NASA’s recent finding that Antarctica is actually gaining ice, not losing it, and the fact that the North Pole has not been ice-free in any summer although climate extremist Al Gore claimed it would be by now.
Then move on to the global warming models used to predict climate calamity. They have been about as accurate as wild guesses.
Why has this happened? Maybe because, as Australian electrical engineer David Evans discovered through mathematical calculation, CO2 is not as strong of a greenhouse gas as the U.N. says it is.
Evans found that it’s about “a fifth or 10th” of what activists claim it is, having “caused less than 20% of global warming in the last few decades.”
Related to the flawed models is the measured reality that Earth hasn’t warmed in 16 to 18 years.
Other events and circumstances that hurt the warming narrative include: doctored data used by alarmists; admissions by former activists that they either overestimated temperature increases or were simply altogether wrong; and the work of credible scientists that goes hard against the warming claims.
None of these counter-examples will move the activists from their position. They will continue to agitate for government-enforced limits on CO2 emissions and lecture us about how we live.
Their last chance should have come long ago, but now it looks as if they will never run out of them.
