Q&A: The Politically Incorrect Book That Debunks Climate Change Myths

Marc Morano, the founding editor of the award-winning website ClimateDepot.com, recently authored “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.” He spoke to Daily Signal Editor-in-Chief Rob Bluey about climate change myths and other facts you probably haven’t heard reported by the media. An edited transcript of their interview is below. You can also listen to it on The Daily Signal podcast.

Rob Bluey: What prompted your interest in the issue of climate change? There’s a great photo of you in the book next to a wanted poster. How did you become such a villain to the left?

Marc Morano: I always said I was a Republican, except when it came to environmental issues. I remember not liking James Watt, the former interior secretary. I remember not liking President Ronald Reagan’s environmental policies. I always wanted to be a forest ranger as a kid growing up. I got heavily involved emotionally in watching all the documentaries about the Amazon rainforest back in the 1980s and 1990s.

It wasn’t until I started reading Dixy Lee Ray and actually hearing her talk, it was actually on Rush Limbaugh’s show, the coverage of the Rio Earth Summit, that I started to look deeper into environmental issues. What I remember her specifically saying, as a nuclear physicist, Dixy Lee Ray, that the Amazon was one of the most intact forests and this idea that it’s about to disappear was complete exaggeration and hype. I started investigating that. It actually culminated in a documentary on the Amazon rainforest.

Global warming, when I started focusing on it, I actually started with a skeptical view and I was only able to get more and more skeptical because I saw the same tactics being used.

The way I ended up in the wanted poster in Paris—that was the movie premiere of my film “Climate Hustle” from 2015 at a Paris cinema. The environmental groups put out wanted posters of me the day of the premiere. All over the city, this was literally on the main streets of Paris. So I posed with one of them in the book and you can see the picture. They called me a “climate criminal wanted for climate crimes.” This is the kind of intimidation they like to do.

Morano: My goal here was to help conservatives and Republicans articulate the issue. During my time on Capitol Hill, I worked for the Senate Environment of Public Works Committee. I can’t tell you the horror stories, Rob, of being in high-level meetings, during the height of the cap-and-trade debate 2007, 2008, 2009; back when President Barack Obama was pushing this through all the way to 2010.

The staffers of very conservative Republican senators would be like, “Well, we don’t want to touch the science on this because we don’t want to be seen as against the Earth or against the environment. Let’s just solely focus on the economics.”

I remember arguing passionately. If people think we face the climate catastrophe, we’re Americans! They’re going to say we will bear any cost and overcome it. They never wanted to challenge it. So I’m trying to, and working for Sen. James Inhofe, we tried to challenge the science.

What I tried to do with this book is say it’s OK to espouse climate skepticism. The book is done for anyone from, I would say, sixth grade through highest levels of education to educate them with the top voices in science, the basic concepts, and to make it fun, informative in a talking point form.

This is a needed book because, in order to fulfill President Trump’s policies, you need the scientific justification, and this book fills that gap in, as well as talks about the policy.

Bluey: The other thing the book has is a lot of great facts that I think counter what you so often hear in the media and from liberal politicians. Could you share some of them? I know you have examples right on the cover. For instance, let’s take hurricanes because we’re in the midst right now of another hurricane story. You hear this all the time—that these hurricanes are more intense, they’re happening more often because of climate change. You say, “No.”

Morano: Not only do I say “no,” but the peer-reviewed scientific literature clearly and overwhelmingly says “no.”

There is nothing unusual, particularly on extreme weather. It’s not just hurricanes. Hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes, on the entire spectrum of extreme weather, we are either at stable or declining trends. And that includes droughts.

California droughts in previous centuries blew away anything we’re talking about now. Floods, no trends on 100-year, 85-year timescales. Hurricanes were much worse, many more powerful hurricanes in the 1940s and ’50s. In fact, we were in the longest period of no major hurricane category three or larger before last year’s big hurricanes hit. And even though there are this alleged record rains, in the 1960s hurricanes that hit Cuba had many more times rain and flooding events than that.

I go into that in the book about these so-called 1,000-year floods and I explain that all these extreme weather events they claim, it’s kind of like a lottery promotion scam. Where they say, “Oh, this is a 1,000-year storm hit this city, and a 1,000-year storm hit that, this is unusual.” No, there are going to be very few lottery winners. But the lottery winners there are, they highlight them. “Look, there’s a lottery winner and there’s a lottery, look the lottery winners are everywhere.” They make it seem like the extreme weather is everywhere. But taken as a whole, and in the peer-reviewed literature, it’s actually on a declining trend.

Interestingly enough, cold weather is actually more extreme than warm weather. In the 1970s, they blamed tornadoes, floods, even the threat of war and increased violence on global cooling at the time. So there’s just not the science there at all when it comes to that. And also I go through all the other myths you’ve heard about from the hottest year on record, the hottest decade.

Bluey: Let’s tackle that one because we hear this one it seems month after month—another record-breaking month. At the same time, I love the chart that The Daily Signal published of the temperature throughout history. You see the lines going up and down. Tell us what we need to know.

Morano: First of all, in the book, I interviewed geologists, I have Nobel Prize-winning scientists endorse the book. They explain that in the geologic history of the Earth, we are in the coldest 10 percent of the geologic history of the Earth. In other words, 90 percent of our Earth’s history was too warm to have ice at either pole. So we are in the 10 percent coldest. That’s No. 1.

No. 2, if you go back to the Roman warming periods during the time that Jesus Christ walked the Earth—and I show this in the peer-reviewed studies in the book, in a very reader-friendly way—we are actually now cooler than we were. So we’ve cooled since the time Jesus Christ walked the Earth. We’re actually about the same temperature or cooler since the medieval warm period, since about 900 to 1300.

First of all, you say the hottest year, what time scale? Then, you jump ahead to about 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age, where the New York river, New York Harbor froze over, the Thames river was frozen, it was a brutal period, coinciding with low sunspot activity and a bunch of other factors.

Suddenly, we get thermometer data. So the thermometer data comes online right at the end of the Little Ice Age. It’s very cold. All these things you hear about the glaciers retreating, most of that glacier retreat happened by 1900. Now, 80 percent of the carbon dioxide came after 1940, or after World War II in 1945. We had a huge warm spell from the 1920s into the ’30s and then, we had a cooling period from the ’50s all the way up to about the late 1970s. I go into the whole global cooling scare.

They now claim, “Oh, that never happened.” They have studies out, they claim that that was overblown, there are only a couple scientists. I show in the book it was National Academy of Sciences, CIA, some of the same scientists warning of global cooling in the ’70s who then flipped and became global warming.

I actually feature in the book an article from the 1977 and ’78 in The New York Times, two articles. During this time, the scientists were battling it out when global cooling was morphing into a climate change, global warming.

To answer the question on the hottest year, we warm from the late ’70s to the late ’90s. Then essentially we flatlined. Essentially, there’s no statistically significant global warming. We had a thing called “the pause.” They didn’t like that, so they actually went back in the records and erased the pause. They changed the data.

Besides, even doing all that, the hottest year claims are within hundredths of a degree and that margin of error is tenths of a degree and they adjust the temperatures to within tenths of a degree without explanations. The so-called claims of the hottest year fall easily within the margin of error. That’s why it’s a political statement. It is utter nonsense from beginning to end.

It’s a fancy way of saying the temperature hasn’t changed since the ’90s. That’s where they get the hottest decade on record. On record just means since the Little Ice Age ended, when we put thermometer data out and that’s what that means. If you go back further, we’ve cooled, Middle Ages, Roman warming period, and even further.

Bluey: Thank you for setting the record straight on that. One of the other things that you argue is that the left has abandoned this fact-based science and instead resorted to just dramatic fear-mongering. What do you mean?

Morano: Go back to the 19th century, Rob, to explain this. Every storm is allegedly unprecedented, we’ve never seen it, this is the new normal, so to speak. This hurricane has a name, it’s Hurricane Katrina. This hurricane has a name, it’s Hurricane Harvey. The same lines over and over. Everything is done as a tactic of fear in order to get action. This started in the 1960s with the modern environmental movement.

Particularly, I go into a little bit about Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb.” I actually show, Rob, that they use this hysteria for the different environmental scares in the 1970s, whether it’s resource scarcity, over-population, rainforest clearing, et cetera.

They will say, “We need a global solution; we need global governance; we need wealth redistribution; we need sovereignty threatening treaty or some kind of economic activity limiting.” No matter what environmental scare in the past that they tried to scare people with, it was the same solutions they’re proposing now.

In the book, I go back and show over and over that global warming is merely the latest scare they’re using to get their agenda. I show Naomi Klein, who’s an adviser to Pope Francis, who wrote “Capitalism vs. the Climate.” I interviewed her for the book. She actually says that they would be seeking the same solutions even if there was no global warming and that essentially, capitalism is incompatible with a livable climate. She actually urges people, “We need to jump on this because solving global warming will solve what we’ve been trying to achieve all along.”

They’re open about it. They use the climate scare tactics to achieve their ends. And in order to get those ends achieved, they have to hype and scare. It’s been a very effective strategy because they’ve bullied Republican politicians, who should know better, into at least submissiveness and silence and/or activism when you come to the case with John McCain and even Mitt Romney.

Read rest at Daily Signal