Climate Change Calamities

In a barely coherent rant, our president yet again made a fool of himself on the world stage yesterday. Among his embarrassing statements was the assertion that those who had denied the truth about climate change and global warming had recently come to accept that they had been wrong.

As it happens, our demented president ignored a statement signed by 1609 scientists from the Global Intelligence Group. It was published last week and entitled, “There Is No Climate Emergency.”

Naturally, the media and the administration ignored the views of the world’s leading climate scientists, led by Nobel prize winning physicists.

For your edification, here are some excerpts from the statement:

Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures…

The geological archive reveals that Earth's climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.

Warming is far slower than predicted…

The gap between the real world and the modeled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models.

Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. They do not only exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases, they also ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial…

Global warming has not increased natural disasters.

There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, there is ample evidence that CO2 mitigation measures are as damag­ing as they are costly.

Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities.

There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are.

The authors underscore the existential threat to human life that is being posed by-- green energy policies. 

Reported by Robert Williams of the Gatestone Institute:

The Biden administration, however, appears not to be concerned about the widespread poverty and massive starvation that will be caused by the unavailability of cheap and reliable energy in underdeveloped countries, or the inflation caused by the skyrocketing prices that are crushing Americans "barely able to afford one meal a day".

These are man-made problems, created by importing expensive (nearing $100 a barrel again) -- often dirtier -- oil from adversaries of the United States, such as Russia and Venezuela, instead of extracting it far less expensively at home. The Biden administration also does not seem concerned that so long as China and India keep burning coal – the Chinese Communist Party is permitting two new coal-power plants a week, easily cancelling out whatever benefits the US might be providing, and reportedly exceeding "all developed nations combined" in carbon emissions.

If that does not suffice, consider this:

The Biden administration also does not seem concerned that it is killing wildlife, sea life and the fishing industry by installing offshore wind turbines along the Atlantic seaboard, or that mandating electric vehicles will throw virtually the entire auto maintenance industry out of work (EVs do not need routine maintenance), or that lithium batteries not only explode but cost thousands of dollars to replace. The administration even wants military equipment, such as tanks, to be electric, as if there were charging stations in the middle of foreign deserts in the event of a conflict. Moreover, according to NBC News, volcanoes, unimpressed with executive orders, "Dwarf Humans for CO2 Emissions."

To the extent that the climate is changing, as it always has, the fault does not lie with fossil fuels or excessive exhaling. The scientists remark:

Never mind that much of climate change is apparently caused by sun flares, about which we can do nothing, and which, unlike commercial industries, do not offer grants; or that major wildfires are, ironically, exacerbated by "environmentalists" for refusing to let tinderbox brush be cleared lest the creatures there be disturbed other than by a wildfire.

So, environmentalist policies are producing many of the horrors they are declaiming about. It’s quite an irony. It’s even more ironic to see the Western world, infatuated with grand ideas and its own virtue, falling behind a country like China, which is moving ahead by producing coal and nuclear power plants.

The light might be going out in Europe and America. But the Chinese leadership will not allow it to happen in the Middle Kingdom.

Go figure.

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