Climate Activists, at least the ones covered and propped up by the mainstream media use dishonest and quite frankly immoral tactics to get people to go along with whatever they say. In particular, the phrase “climate denier” comes to mind. It’s a term used to describe pretty much anyone who doesn’t immediately bite at the idea of a “Green New Deal.” As always with the left, two things can never be true at once. Many can’t seem to fathom the idea that someone could care about the environment, but also not want Al Gore or AOC in charge of fixing it. I happen to be one of the people that care deeply about the environment but am not even slightly interested in an Elizabeth Warren or really any politician’s environmental proposals. So no, I am not a climate denier, rather a government denier. In general I wish to deny the government all additional power grabs regardless of it being in the name of trees, animals or rising tides.
The tactics environmental activists use should cause immediate pause. “Climate Denier” is a riff on “Holocaust Denier.” Holocaust denier is a grave insult and if someone truly is a holocaust denier they should be avoided at all cost. There is undeniable evidence of the Holocaust. There are people still living who went through it (on both sides) and can give testimony. There are videos. There are pictures. There are countless first-hand books written about it. There are physical sites left over. All of these proofs can be cross referenced against each other. This is how one determines if something is true or false. The fact of the matter is this cannot be replicated in climate change science and even if it could there is still no equivalanecy between denying the murder of millions of Jews and denying that the tides are rising. The term climate denier belittles the seriousness of the Holocaust and is an insult to Jewish memory. But climate activists don’t care about respecting Jewish history – they want to make it extremely uncomfortable for anyone to even question their authority.
This is the next cause for pause: with climate extremists, there’s no room for debate. Climate activists scream obscenities at rallies and anyone who critiques Greta Thunberg is threatened. If you’re proposing everyone stop eating beef, stop driving cars, and stop using plastic, we need to have a healthy debate first. Drastic lifestyle changes such as these will have drastic effects on society – many of them negative. I need to be certain impending doom is right around the corner before I vote to implement policies that lower the quality of my life and devastate the lives of people living in developing countries.
But history has shown us the climate is a very difficult thing to predict. Climate predictions have been wrong since long before I was born. Before you call me a climate denier let’s first take a look at some of today’s climate change claims and see how they compare to the past. Perhaps you’ll see why I don’t always take the scientists seriously.
Three Common Climate Claims
“We’re All Going To Starve”
1967 – LA Times, “Dire Famine Forecast by 1975”
2004 – The Guardian, “Now the Pentagon tells Bush: climate change will destroy us”
2014 – Inquisitr, “Global Warming Will Lead To Worldwide Famine By 2050, Study Claims.”
The 1967 forecast came courtesy of biologist Paul Ehrlich, the article stating, “It’s already too late for the world to avoid a long period of famine.” In 1969, Ehrlich told the New York Times, “Unless we are extremely lucky, everybody will disappear in a cloud of blue steam in 20 years.” And in 1970, he claimed that within a decade, the oceans would be “dead” and Americans would be subject to food and water rationing. 1975 came and went, 1989 came and went and he couldn’t have been more wrong.
We are 15 years out from the Pentagon’s report, does it feel like we’re five years away from absolute climate catastrophe? Are we on the brink of famine and war due to food shortages? Not exactly.
The 1976 (and eventually 2004) prediction was followed by decades (or a decade) of increased economic prosperity and a decline of hunger and starvation around the world. Despite the overall population increasing by 2 billion from 1991 to 2016 the number of people around the world who were undernourished dropped from 1 billion to 821 million. To put it more plainly, the malnourished rate went from 19% of the world to 11%. None of this good news matters, the starvation predictions continue today, simply pushing back the timeline.
“Oceans will rise to the point of destroying towns, states and entire islands”
1989 – U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
1988 – “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water.” – Climate Scientist Jim Hansen in response to the question of how New York would change in the next 20 years.
2019 – CBS News, “Rising sea levels on track to destroy the homes of 300 million people by 2050”
In 1989 the UN, as backed up by many a climate scientist believed entire nations would be wiped off the face of the earth by 2000 if the global warming trend was not reversed. Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program claimed governments had a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it went beyond human control.
Well, it’s been 30 years and the Maldives, one of the island countries predicted to disappear has seen its tourism economy grow tenfold since 1989 with 2019 being one of its best years. Not one major island has disappeared in the past three decades. There have been a handful of small islands that have disappeared due to changing sea levels but there have also been a handful of new small islands in development. Islands come and go and have since the beginning of time.
Perhaps one of the biggest giveaways climate change may not be as big of a threat, even to those who profess its dangers are the behaviors of these so called climate activists. If rising sea levels were that big of a concern you would expect leftists to be moving from California in droves, coastal real estate prices should be plummeting, of course that is not what’s happening. Barack and Michelle Obama recently purchased waterfront property. Barack Obama gave a speech at the UN Climate Change summit in 2017 stating “No nation, however large or small, wealthy or poor, can escape the impact of climate change. Rising sea levels threaten every coastline. More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.” Pretty odd to buy a multi-million dollar home on the coast if you think there is such a near present threat. Leonardo Dicaprio owns six homes…pretty odd for someone who presumably wants everyone to lessen their carbon footprint. All of his properties are on the coast, one of which is a literal island Dicaprio is developing for eco-tourism. I wonder how he knows that island isn’t at risk of drowning under rising sea levels?
“We can predict the effects of human caused climate change.”
1971 – Washington Post, “In the next 50 years, the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees…If sustained…such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!” – Dr. S.I. Rasool of NASA
1978 – NY Times, “International Team of Specialists Finds No End in Sight to 30‐Year Cooling Trend in Northern Hemisphere”
2017 – Carbon Brief, “Why scientists think 100% of global warming is due to humans”
Purely on common sense alone, this claim doesn’t seem like it can be true. We can’t even accurately predict weather a week out but somehow we know what climate change will look like in 30 years? The climate is changing, it always has and always will, no one is disagreeing with this point. The problem is that the natural climate changes throughout history don’t follow any sort of distinct pattern making it very difficult to discern what changes are natural versus man made.
In the past 2000 years there has been the roman warm period where temperatures are estimated to have been warmer than now. This was followed by a cool down during the dark ages with another uptick during the Medieval warm period when it was at least as warm as it is today. Perhaps one of the most famous climate phases of the past was “the little ice age.” This was the event that eventually lead to the vikings leaving Greenland. Currently we appear to be in a gradual warming period which started roughly 300 years ago. The earth is constantly ebbing and flowing between hotter and cooler periods and has since long before humans had the technology to affect the climate. There simply is no way to predict when this warming period will end and a cooling phase will begin, whether natural or not.
The second part of this claim is that not only do we know how the climate will change, we know what percent will be caused by humans. This is a very, very important statistic to understand if we are going to introduce truly life changing legislation in order to combat climate change. But there simply is no way to determine the human effect on climate change. While most scientists agree that humans affect climate change, no one can determine to what degree and/or if its reversible. Climate models have been universally wrong and cannot account for human innovation. Almost every prediction will say something along the lines of “if nothing changes…” Well that’s when you can throw out that prediction because of course things will change. New technology being the main.
In 2017, the US’s carbon emissions were their lowest since 1992 despite more people, more vehicles on the road and overall increases in consumption generally. This is possible because human innovation has created better processes of production that reduce carbon emissions. This is a trend we can also expect to continue but is equally difficult to predict in magnitude.
We can’t ignore that there is motivation to falsely cry climate change. Before you make fun of skeptics who may be seen as conspiracy theorists, let’s think about what might motivate one to claim climate change is manmade. Global warming is big business. The 2019 federal funding bill included $776 million in bilateral allocations for environmental programs. And that’s just for one year. In 2013, the EU announced 20% of its budget from 2014-2020 would go to “climate issues.” Not only is there a lot of public funding for climate issues the “sustainable product” market could hit $150 billion by 2021 in the US alone. Grant seeking scientists, businesses and politicians are all motivated to propagate the idea of climate change because one way or another it means more money in their pocket.
Be careful with headlines such as “97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by humans.” This may be true, but if you can’t tell me what percent of climate change is caused by humans then the conversation really can’t advance to solutions. The science isn’t clear on the who, what, and when in regards to climate change. The government is bad at pretty much everything. Everyone is motivated to make a buck off climate change. Forgive me if I am hesitant to give millions or billions of dollars to politicians and bureaucrats so they can save us from a problem no one knows how to solve. So no, I’m not a “climate denier,” I’m a climate abider. I treat Mother Earth as kind as I can, I have faith in human ingenuity and I think we can afford to wait until the science is sound before fundamentally changing the way humans around the world live and survive.
