The Alarmist Claims Of Climate Doom Are Missing One Thing: Evidence

It might take a catastrophe to stop politicians (and other cohorts) from making assertions to justify consequential decisions without evidence – like during Covid.

The habit was acquired over the past three decades as AGW (remember?) was hoisted on the world as if it were scientifically acquired knowledge.

It wasn’t.

It was politics dressed in a white lab coat, the intent now becoming clearer: destructive change to Western societies. Just look around… The attack on fossil fuels has brought us closer to a dystopian world where fuel is a scarce and valuable currency. [Emphasis, links added]

It has been a spectacularly successful campaign to effectively brainwash people (those who were/are susceptible) into believing the premise that the planet was warming dangerously – because we were burning fossil fuels to generate our energy.

The fear this scenario generated fueled the campaign.

The scenario has been funneled through what appeared to be credible scientific processes. Like the IPCC, whose scientific-looking front hides a politically driven engine room.

(November 14, 2010: Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, is quoted by the Zuricher Zeitung: ‘Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.’)

Created with the objective of generating fear (with help from self-interest-driven high priests like Al Gore), it is also the body that ‘keeps us safe’ from danger, by urging limits on our fossil fuel burning.

The ‘evidence’ used is modeling: the dark art that has been discredited for models being wrong every single time.

The tsunami of often dicey scientific data (e.g., Michael Mann’s widely criticized hockey stick graph, East Anglia ‘ClimateGate’ scandal, Australia’s temperature record ‘homogenized’ by BOM) was so successful that the fear of emissions has been absorbed.

It is now accepted as fact. Nobody bothers to scrutinize the claims and check the data. Ask for evidence that our fossil fuel emissions drive global warming. They don’t.

The evidence that they don’t is overwhelming and can be easily found in the geologist’s handbook. But nobody bothers to look.

The claim that man-made emissions are threatening the planet’s very existence – we have about 8 years left, apparently – is extraordinary. There is certainly no evidence for anything of the sort.

As the late and great Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…

Instead of evidence, the climate scenario relies solely on generating fear. The media has been seduced by this ‘movement’ partly because it is such easy drama to copy.

‘The end is nigh’ is a better seller than ‘The end is not nigh’. Of course now, three decades later, the big drama story would be that it has all been a. ‘Climate change is a hoax.’

But my point in this article is not about climate change but about the need for evidence. Beware of the risks that come from politicians promising to keep us safe.

Keep us safe from global warming by banning fossil fuel emissions. Keep us safe from Covid death by banning everything we hold dear.

Keeping us safe from Covid was a strategy taken straight out of the climate playbook: minimal evidence, lots of scary messaging.

Like closing schools, not to really protect the children but to send a message, for example. ‘Keeping you safe’ is the mantra that could answer any probing question and shield our politicians’ bad policies from scrutiny.

It is my sad task to put much of the blame on the many journalists who have allowed partisanship to blind them to their professional responsibilities.

That is, to ask questions – good probing questions. On the subject of climate policies, I don’t recall ever seeing or hearing a question seeking evidence that led to a policy decision. It has just been taken for granted that the alarmist claims are valid. They’re not.

During the peak Covid years, evidence underpinning the ‘health advice’ – that drove those crazy, undemocratic orders, mandates, police brutality, and lockdowns – is still in secret folders somewhere, hidden from scrutiny.

Remember the daily feast of assertions about risks that are now revealed as having been false, whereas it was the decisions made that posed the real danger. Now, we see the extent of the catastrophe caused, and are seeking answers.

Imagine the catastrophe – or catastrophes – that could arise due to our failure to demand evidence for the dangerous climate change scenario. Many people, including it seems our politicians, think that such evidence has been provided: ‘the science is settled.’

In the nine years of researching the subject, the one thing that I have consistently come across is the opposite of that sentiment: the deep uncertainty among scientists about how our climate works.

It is a vastly complex phenomenon with multiple moving parts, impervious to modeling.

Yet it is modeling that has been used as ‘evidence’ to forecast the warming that will extinguish entire species. But if we keep asking the great Greta how to save the world from species-killing ‘climate change,’ we can’t expect anything but hot air.

Had we insisted on scientific evidence to show how CO2 drives warming, we would have heard from geologists that natural variability – warming and cooling, ice age/no ice age – has occurred for millennia.

Carbon dioxide, we would have been relieved to discover, does not drive warming, much less man-made carbon dioxide, a mere trace gas in the atmosphere.

Climate alarm would never have taken hold. Children would not be crying from fear of a fried planet.

Evidence found through the scientific method is in short supply. We must insist on politicians refraining from making assertions that cannot be supported by evidence.

Dear colleagues in the media: please always ask for it. Don’t wait until a catastrophe forces us to look in the rear-view mirror in regret. Like with Covid.

Perhaps we are seeing the beginning of one such major catastrophe as climate change alarmism meets war in Ukraine.

The war threatens food supplies, misguided climate-fear-driven energy policies have created fuel shortages … and you can bet it will all be Putin’s fault that millions starve or freeze to death. If only our leaders had been skeptical of alarmist claims and insisted on evidence.

Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check – What You Haven’t Been Told.