“Progressives are quick to empathize with the plight of the world’s have-nots, but not so quick to own up to what a crackdown on greenhouse emissions would do to them. It would consign them to the misery in which they are now mired — likely even plunge them deeper into misery.”
The Trentonia reports:
Climate change: Lethal fool’s errand
By Dave Neese, The Trentonian
Until the Hollywood mogul/stalwart liberal Harvey Weinstein burst into the news buck nekid, climate change was the biggest brow-furrowing worry among earnest, pursed-lipped progressives.
And those concerns go back way further than you might suppose. The archives fairly bulge with “scientific” warnings of approaching climate cataclysms. Scary stories that began with the words “Scientists say” were staples of the news going back at least to the 1890s.
But — and it’s a major “but” — those scary climate-change stories originally warned of an imminent deep freeze, not a planetary broiling.
Stories of a coming, merciless Ice Age filled the public prints in the decades after the 1890s and continued into the 1970s.
Time magazine (1974) and the New York Times (1975) warned that America would soon be Yukonized and had better get the sled dogs harnessed. The approaching Ice Age was said to be — does this sound familiar? — “a scientific consensus.” New Scientist magazine declared that the imminent Ice Age represented a greater threat to the human race than nuclear weapons.
These prophecies apparently were widely believed. At least, the media kept giving them good play and therewith credence.
Same goes for today’s global-warming doomsday prophets. Good play, credence galore. You might call both the Ice Age and Global Warming prophets “reverse Cassandras” — destined to be believed despite the dubious nature of their prognostications. Which may explain why there’s never been a Hollywood blockbuster sci-fi disaster movie screenplay with an ending that the whole scare turned out to be baseless. Such a movie would be a disaster itself, a box-office disaster.
The change from cold to hot happened all at once, like a cloud of swallows all changing direction at the same moment. The “scientific consensus” abruptly shifted, as if on command. The word was: Forget freezing, prepare to bake!
Fascinating factoid: The leading alarmist of the approaching Ice Age, a scientist named Stephen Schneider, seamlessly transitioned to become known as “the father of global warming.”
Of course, when it comes to prophecies, there’s always a chance the prophets’ predictions may prove accurate, just as there’s always a chance (however remote) of hitting the lottery jackpot.
When the religious apocalyptics tell us “The end is near!”, they hedge their bets by not specifying exactly how near. The environmental doomsayers work from the same script.
The priests of ancient Egypt were thought to be much “in the know” because they had figured out a few astronomical patterns that enabled them to “predict” the rise of the Nile.
Likewise, the global-warming scientists of today are thought to be “much in the know” because they’ve figured out some fundamentals regarding carbon dioxide, the “greenhouse” global-warming gas we all produce not only by using electricity but by merely exhaling.
We’re told that the scientists who say humans are turning up the thermostat on global climate are unanimous, or virtually so, in their assessments — 97 percent. This turns out to be a precise percentage figure that comes with a big fat asterisk. The constantly cited figure apparently traces back to a Queensland University survey of abstracts or summaries of 11,000 global-warming-related scientific studies. But the key finding here is not the figure 97 percent, it’s the figure 66.4 percent. It turns out on closer inspection that 66.4 percent, or two-thirds of the studies examined in the survey, took no position on the human role in climate change. As for the 97 percent figure, it might as well have been conjured by magic-wand-waving wizards in colorful conical hats and robes.
Yes, today’s PhD versions of ancient Egypt’s priestly class do likely believe — though maybe not quite by 97-percent margins — that human activity affects climate to one extent or another. But the reality remains that scientists are unable to sort out, with any degree of precision, how much global warming is attributable to man and now much to “natural variation.”
Stephen Koonin, NYU physicist and former science advisor to President Obama — no flat-earther denialist, in other words — sums up the situation in these words: The human influence on climate “is physically small in relation to the climate system as a whole.” The human addition of carbon dioxide by 2050 is expected to “directly shift the atmosphere’s natural greenhouse effect by only 1 or 2 percent.”
He doesn’t say that human emissions don’t affect climate and are of no concern. He does say, though, that much remains unknown about climate dynamics. And he further says that disaster-prognosticating computer climate modelling is “as much an art as a science.” Indeed, he adds, climate computer-modeling sometimes involves the input of estimated data weighted toward a desired conclusion.
The observation of Austrian scientist Genot Patzel, also no latter-day Neanderthal, may serve as a further antidote to climate-change panic. “Over the past 10,000 years,” he says, “it has been warmer than today 65 percent of the time.” Note that the climate-disaster hustlers have no solutions for the problem they decry. They gloss over the fact that China is now the No. 1 emitter of global-warming emissions, and that even drastic cutbacks by the United States are unlikely to have so much as a marginal effect on global climate.
Meanwhile, China has a communist bureaucracy that licenses capitalist pursuits to keep itself in power. It is unlikely to undercut its economic ambitions with “green” gestures that do little more than toss a wrench into the machinery of the nation’s hell-bent development.
The climate-change hustlers start to mumble and ramble when the topic comes around to solutions. There are vague, Panglossian references to “renewables.” There’s never a mention that any significant move in that direction must necessarily entail drastic rises in the cost of electricity and gasoline, for example, to make wind and solar economically competitive with carbon fuels.
The limitations of renewables are apparent in this U. S. Department of Energy statistic: From 2005-2015, energy derived from renewables — which were nothing less than a government-subsidized fad during that period — rose moderately from 9.3 percent to 11.3 percent of total energy production. Meanwhile, total energy produced by heavily taxed and reviled crude oil continued apace, rising from 16.4 percent of the total to 23.6 percent over the period.
Progressives are quick to empathize with the plight of the world’s have-nots, but not so quick to own up to what a crackdown on greenhouse emissions would do to them. It would consign them to the misery in which they are now mired — likely even plunge them deeper into misery.
Wind and solar are no more likely to lift the world’s poor out of their destitution than moonbeams and good wishes are. Helping the poorest will require electricity, will require the nasty fuels that make electricity an affordable possibility — i.e., coal and crude.
United Nations and other estimates are that 1.5 billion of the planet’s unluckiest people have no access to electricity. This means that they and hundreds of millions more with only sporadic access to electricity lack drinkable water and sanitary waste disposal systems. Diarrheal-related disease due to unsanitary water and waste disposal kill more people in a single year than AIDS, TB and malnutrition combined, according to the U.N. Development Project.
The Copenhagen Consensus, a Danish think tank, says that the money dubiously spent in one year’s time on a strict enforcement of climate-change measures (e.g the Kyoto Protocols) could provide the world’s down-and-out with clean water and sanitary disposal, thereby saving — immediately — countless millions of lives. But what is that against saving — and expanding — the sinecures of state and federal environmental bureaucrats and the multi-million-dollar government grants dispensed to university climate researchers to keep cranking out apocalyptic global-warming scenarios?
So the climate-change fuss looks to be more than a mere fool’s errand. It looks to be a lethal distraction — lethal on a colossal scale.
Lexington Libertarian 