Note:
This is a long excerpt from chapter 3 of Marc Morano's book "Green Fraud". I shortened this "Climate Realist" article by deleting paragraphs about the Climate Liars. Consider this article to be Climate Realism 101. The deleted paragraphs about the Climate Alarmists (Climate Liars) are mainly their always wrong prediction of climate doom, false statements about climate history, and blaming unrelated bad weather on "climate change". Their usual anti-science narrative. This blog is the antidote for the Climate Liars.
Ye Editor
CHAPTER 3
Man-Made Climate Change Is Not a Threat
... In fact, there is no “climate crisis” or “climate emergency.”
The UN, climate activists, the media, and academia are using the climate scare as an opportunity to lobby for their alleged “solutions,” which require massive government expansion and central planning.
This chapter will take the reader through the facts on the claims about climate, energy, and the environment from the media, UN, and Green New Deal advocates.
Princeton professor emeritus of physics Will Happer explained why climate activists are wrong.
“Aside from the human brain, the climate is the most complex thing on the planet.
The number of factors that influence climate—the sun, the earth’s orbital properties, oceans, clouds, and, yes, industrial man—is huge and enormously variable,” Happer said.3
The global warming coalition can accurately be called climate change cause deniers.
They deny the hundreds of causes and variables that influence climate change and instead try to pretend that carbon dioxide is the climate control knob overriding all the other factors and that every bad weather event is somehow “proof” of “global warming” and an impending climate “emergency.”
The Consensus “Pulled from Thin Air”
... There is absolutely no scientific “consensus” about catastrophic man-made climate change.
Claims that 97 or 99 percent of scientists agree are not backed up by any credible study or poll.
UN IPCC lead author Dr. Richard Tol has admitted, “The 97% is essentially pulled from thin air, it is not based on any credible research whatsoever.”5
The claim that 97 percent of scientists agree is based in part on a survey of seventy-seven anonymous scientists.
Not thousands of scientists or even hundreds of scientists—but seventy-seven.
Scientists were quick to debunk another study, authored by blogger John Cook and claiming a 97 percent consensus of climate studies.
Climatologist David Legates of the University of Delaware and three co-authors reviewed the same studies as Cook did, and their research revealed that “only 41 papers—0.3 percent of all 11,944 abstracts or 1.0 percent of the 4,014 expressing an opinion, and not 97.1 percent—had been found to endorse” the claim that human beings are to blame for a majority of the current warming.7
MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen called the purported 97 percent consensus “propaganda.”
Dr. Lindzen:
“They never really tell you what they agree on.
It is propaganda.
So all scientists agree it’s probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age.
Almost all scientists agree that if you add CO2 you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming.
But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce CO2, etc.”8
In 2017 Princeton professor emeritus of physics William Happer pointed to the parallels with the seventeenth-century “consensus” on witches.
“I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches.
At the witch trials in Salem, the judges were educated at Harvard.
This was supposedly 100 percent science.
The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung.
Not much has changed,” Happer quipped.
Carbon Dioxide Is Not the “Control Knob” of the Climate
There is a lack of connection between higher levels of CO2 and warming.
During the Ice Age, CO2 levels were ten times higher than they are today.9
There are many, many factors that impact climate—including volcanoes, wind oscillations, solar activity, ocean cycles, volcanoes, the tilt of the Earth’s axis, and land use.
CO2 is just one factor, not the control knob of the climate.
University of Pennsylvania geologist Dr. Robert Giegengack has declared, “CO2 is not the villain that it has been portrayed.”
Today’s levels of roughly four hundred parts per million (PPM) of CO2 are not alarming. In geologic terms, today’s CO2 levels are among the lowest in earth’s history.10
“Climate change is governed by hundreds of factors or variables, and the very idea that we can manage climate change predictably by understanding and manipulating at the margins one politically selected factor (CO2), is as misguided as it gets.
It’s scientific nonsense,” University of London professor emeritus Philip Stott has noted.
Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, a pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute, declared:
“I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.”
According to Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore:
“We had both higher temperatures and an ice age at a time when CO2 emissions were 10 times higher than they are today.”
MIT climate scientist Lindzen’s 2020 study debunked the “implausible claim that a change in one variable—CO2—is predominantly responsible for altering global temperatures.”12
The study, which was published in the European Physical Journal, found that a “doubled- CO2 effect has less than 1/5th of the impact that the net cloud effect has.
And yet we are asked to accept the ‘implausible’ claim that change in one variable, CO2, is predominantly responsible for altering global temperatures.”
There Is No “Climate Emergency”
Princeton physicist Will Happer, a former science advisor in the Trump administration, ripped the claims of a “climate emergency” in 2019.
“We are here [at the UN climate summit in Madrid] under false pretenses, wasting our time talking about a non-existent ‘climate emergency,’” Happer explained.
“It’s hard to understand how much further the shrillness can go as this started out as ‘global warming’ then it was ‘climate change or ‘global weirding’, ‘climate crisis’, ‘climate emergency’.
What next? But stick around it will happen. I hope sooner or later enough people recognize the holiness of this bizarre environmental cult and bring it to an end.”13
University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. explained how the UN has helped shape the hysterical nonsense of a “climate emergency.”
The UN IPCC switched to “extreme scenarios” in their most recent report and thus “helped to create the climate apocalypse, a scary but imaginary future,” Pielke explained in 2019.
“The decision by the IPCC to center its fifth assessment report on its most extreme scenario has been incredibly consequential.
Thousands of academic studies of the future impacts of climate change followed the lead of the IPCC, and have emphasized the most extreme scenario as ‘business as usual’ which is often interpreted and promoted as where the world is heading.”
Pielke added, “The bottom line for today is to understand that a fateful decision by the UN IPCC to selectively anoint an extreme scenario from among a huge range of possible futures has helped to create the climate apocalypse, a scary but imaginary future.”14
... The 2018 federal National Climate Assessment warned of dire consequences from man-made global warming.
But even a cursory reading of the National Climate Assessment reveals that it was written by environmental activists and overseen by President Obama’s former UN Paris climate pact negotiator, Andrew Light.
The National Cli- mate Assessment is a political report masquerading as science.
The media hyped a rehash of frightening climate change claims by Obama administration holdover activist government scientists.
The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environ- mental pressure groups—because it is.
Two key authors are longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists, Donald Wuebbles and Katha- rine Hayhoe.
The government is paying our National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to come up with alarming report with a bunch of scary climate computer models. (NAS is almost entirely dependent on federal funding.)16
... Dire predictions about climate tipping points date back to at least 1864.
... In 1989, the United Nations was already trying to sell their “tipping point” rhetoric to the public.
According to a 1989 AP article, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.”
It’s difficult to keep up with whether it is hours, days, months, or years until the climate apocalypse arrives.
Here are a few recent examples of alarmists predicting “tipping points” of various durations.
Hours—Flashback March 2009:
“‘We Have Hours’ to Pre- vent Climate Disaster,” declared Elizabeth May of the Cana- dian Green Party.19
Days—Flashback October 2009:
UK’s Gordon Brown warns of global warming “catastrophe”; only “50 days to save world.”20
Months—Flashback July 2009:
Prince Charles claimed a ninety-six-month tipping point in July 2009.21
Years—Flashback 2009:
NASA’s James Hansen declared Obama only “has four years to save Earth.”22
Decades—Flashback 1982:
UN official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, that the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.”23
A Millennium—Flashback June 2010:
a thousand years’ delay: Green Guru James Lovelock: “Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out.”24
Perhaps the best summary of the tipping-point phenomenon comes from UK scientist Philip Stott:
“In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years.
We have been serially doomed.”25
Mass Extinction!
And despite the claims of a 2019 UN report, climate change is not driving a mass extinction event.
Climate analyst Kenneth Richard rebutted the report:
“During the last few hundred years, species extinctions primarily occurred due to habitat loss and predator introduction on islands.
Extinctions have not been linked to a warming climate or higher CO2 levels.
In fact, since the 1870s, species extinction rates have been plummeting.”
He added that there is “no clear link between mass extinctions and CO2-induced or sudden-onset warming events.”26
Der Spiegel’s Axel Bojanowski reported,
“The IPCC admits that there is no evidence climate change has led to even a single species becoming extinct thus far.
At most, the draft report says, climate change may have played a role in the disappearance of a few amphibians, freshwater fish and mollusks.
Yet even the icons of catastrophic global warming, the polar bears, are doing surprisingly well.”
“If You Believe in Magic . . .”
MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen said that believing CO2 controls the climate “is pretty close to believing in magic.”
As Lindzen explained, “Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget.
So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable?
Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic.”27
CO2 is not “pollution.”
The term “carbon pollution” is unscientific and misleading.
Carbon dioxide—CO2—is a harmless trace essential gas in the atmosphere that humans exhale (after inhaling oxygen).
Princeton professor William Happer testified to the U.S. Congress: “Warming and increased CO2 will be good for mankind….
CO2 is not a pollutant and it is not a poison and we should not corrupt the English language by depriving ‘pollutant’ and ‘poison’ of their original meaning.”28
As Happer also pointed out,
“To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian.
You are calling something a pollutant that we all pro-duce.
Where does that lead us eventually?”29
A 2016 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that “Carbon Dioxide Fertilization” was in fact “Greening Earth.”
The research revealed, “From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.”
The Hottest Year EVAH!
Global temperatures have been holding nearly steady for almost two decades, according to satellites from the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH).30
Many peer-reviewed studies have found the Medieval Warm Period and the Roman Warming Period were as warm as or warmer than current temperatures.31
Climatologist Pat Michaels explained that the world’s current temperature “should be near the top of the record given the record only begins in the late 19th century when the surface temperature was still reverberating from the Little Ice Age.”32
So-called “hottest year” claims—based on surface data dating only back to the nineteenth century—are political statements designed to persuade the public that the government needs to take action on man-made climate change.33
In addition, temperature revisions made by NASA and NOAA have enhanced the “warming” trend by retroactively cooling the past.34
“While NOAA/NASA claims 2019 as the ‘second warmest year ever,’ other data shows 2019 cooler than 2005 for the USA,” noted meteorologist Anthony Watts, who analyzes temperature surface station data.35
In his 2018 State of the Climate Report, Norwegian professor Ole Humlum explained,
“After the warm year of 2016, temperatures last year (in 2018) continued to fall back to levels of the so-called warming ‘pause’ of 2000–2015.
There is no sign of any acceleration in global temperature, hurricanes or sea-level rise.
These empirical observations show no sign of acceleration whatsoever.”36
Professor Humlum’s 2020 report found that the global temperature in 2019 was “cooler than 2016….
In 2019, the average global air temperature was affected by a moderate El Niño episode, interrupting a gradual global air temperature decrease following the strong 2015–16 El Niño.”37
While global warming proponents declared 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2016 all to be “hottest years” or “near-hottest,” based on heavily altered surface data, a closer examination revealed that
the claims were “based on year-to-year temperature data that differs by only a few HUN-DREDTHS of a degree to tenths of a degree Fahrenheit—differences that were within the margin of error in the data.”38
MIT climate scientist Richard Lindzen ridiculed “hottest year” claims.
“The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree.
It’s just nonsense.
This is a very tiny change period,” Lindzen said.
“If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree.”
Award-winning climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson has stated,
“We are creating great anxiety without it being justified….
There are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic….
The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”39
Prominent Scientists Bail Out
Nobel Prize-winning scientist Ivar Giaever, who endorsed Barack Obama, called the president “ridiculous” and “dead wrong” on global warming:
“Global warming is a non-problem….
I say this to Obama: Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong.
Dead wrong.”
Dr. Giaever also said, “Global warming really has become a new religion.”40
Climate scientist Anastasios Tsonis retired, and then declared, “I am a skeptic”
in 2019. Tsonis, a distinguished professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who has authored more than 130 peer-reviewed papers and nine books, said, “I am a skeptic not just about global warming but also about many other aspects of science….
Climate is too complicated to attribute its variability to one cause. . . .
The fact that scientists who show results not aligned with the mainstream are labeled deniers is the backward mentality.
We don’t live in medieval times.”41
Prominent climate activist Michael Shellenberger officially recanted in 2020: “On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare.”
The former Time magazine “Hero of the Environment” explained, “On behalf of environmentalists everywhere, I would like to formally apologize for the climate scare we created over the last 30 years.
Climate change is happening.
It’s just not the end of the world.
It’s not even our most serious environmental problem….
I feel an obligation to apologize for how badly we environmentalists have misled the public.”42
UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning environmental physical chemist, said that global warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in history. . . .
When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.”43
UN IPCC lead author Richard Tol ripped the warmist narrative:
“It disturbs me hearing people like Al Gore say that he is worried about the future of his grandchildren.
Complete madness.”44
“Rivers and Seas Are Boiling!”
Ocean levels have been rising since the last Ice Age.
Global sea levels have been naturally rising for ~20,000 years.
There is no evidence of an acceleration of ocean-level rise, and therefore no evidence of any effect of mankind on sea levels.
According to tide gauges, ocean levels are rising less than the thickness of one nickel (1.95 mm thick) per year or about the thickness of one penny (1.52 mm thick) a year.45
The 2018 “State of the Climate Report” by Norwegian professor Ole Humlum explained,
“Data from tide gauges all over the world suggest an average global sea-level rise of 1–1.5 mm/year, while the satellite record suggests a rise of about 3.2 mm/year.
The large difference between the two data sets still has no broadly accepted explanation.”46
As former NASA climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer’s research has shown, “Sea level rise, which was occurring long before humans could be blamed, has not accelerated and still amounts to only 1 inch every 10 years.”47
University of Pennsylvania geologist Robert Giegengack has said,
“At the present rate of sea-level rise it’s going to take 3,500 years to get up there [to Al Gore’s predicted rise of 20 feet].
So if for some reason this warming process that melts ice is cutting loose and accelerating, sea level doesn’t know it.
And sea level, we think, is the best indicator of global warming.”48
Spencer’s research on Miami flooding and sea-level rise found “that flooding is mostly a combination of
1) natural sea-level rise (I show there has been no acceleration of sea-level rise beyond what was already happening since the 1800s), and
2) satellite-measured sinking of the reclaimed swamps that have been built upon for over 100 years in Miami Beach.”
... Not-So-Extreme Weather Events
In 2017 Roger Pielke Jr. of the University of Colorado testified to Congress there was simply “‘no evidence’ that hurricanes, floods, droughts, tornadoes are increasing.”54
A 2020 study by Pielke published in the journal Environmental Hazards found that the “evidence signal of human-caused climate change in the form of increased global economic losses from more frequent or more intense weather extremes has not yet been detected.”55
On nearly every metric, extreme weather is on either no trend or a declining trend on climate timescales.
Even the UN IPCC admitted in a 2018 special report that extreme weather events have not increased.
The IPCC’s special report found that “there is only low confidence regarding changes in global tropical cyclone numbers under global warming over the last four decades.”56
The IPCC report also concluded “low confidence in the sign of drought trends since 1950 at global scale.”
Pielke testified to Congress on the current state of weather extremes, “It is misleading, and just plain incorrect, to claim that disasters associated with hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or droughts have increased on climate timescales either in the United States or globally.”57
Floods
A 2017 study on floods found “approximately the number expected due to chance alone.”58
Another 2017 study in the Journal of Hydrology found no increase in global floods: “Compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”59
A 2019 study found that the world is the safest from climate-related disasters that it has ever been: “A decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability is evident.
Global average mortality and loss rates have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980 to 1989 to 2007–2016.
Results also show a clear negative relation between vulnerability and wealth.”60
Climatologist John Christy has explained why the extreme weather claims are unscientific:
“The non-falsifiable hypotheses can be stated this way, ‘whatever happens is consistent with my hypothesis.’
In other words, there is no event that would ‘falsify’ the hypothesis.
As such, these assertions cannot be considered science or in any way informative since the hypothesis’ fundamental prediction is ‘anything may happen.’
In the example above if winters become milder or they become snowier, the non-falsifiable hypothesis stands.
This is not science.”61
Tornadoes
Big tornadoes have dropped in frequency since the 1950s.
The years 2012–2018 all saw at- or near-record low tornado counts in the U.S.62
Twenty nineteen, on the other hand, was a more active tornado year, with the most tornadoes since 2011 and the deadliest tornado season of the previous five.63 And 2020 saw below-average activity in the U.S.
Meteorologist Paul Dorian reported, “In terms of tornado activity in the U.S. during 2020, the year will end up below-normal and, fortunately, this year has featured no EF-5 tornadoes which are the most powerful of all.”64
... "It’s obvious that no trend exists over a period that included both cooling and warming spells,” wrote physicist Ralph B. Alexander in a 2020 analysis entitled “No Evidence That Climate Change Causes Weather Extremes.”
Hurricanes
An August 2019 NOAA statement concluded, “It is premature to conclude . . . that global warming has already had a detectable impact on hurricane activity.”
The NOAA statement added that U.S. landfalling hurricanes “‘show a slight negative trend’ since ‘late 1800s.’”65
Norwegian professor Ole Humlum explained in his 2020 State of the Climate Report:
“Tropical storms and hurricanes have displayed large annual variations in accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) since 1970, but there has been no overall trend towards either lower or higher activity.
The same applies for the number of continental hurricane landfalls in the USA, in a record going back to 1851.”67
“The figure depicts the number of strong (EF3 or greater) tornadoes observed in the U.S. each year during the same period from 1954 to 2017.
Clearly, the trend is downward instead of upward; the average number of strong tornadoes annually from 1986 to 2017 was 40% less than from 1954 to 1985.
Once more, global warming cannot have played a role.
The most ferocious tornado outbreak ever recorded, spawning a total of 30 EF4 or EF5 tornadoes, was in 1974.”66
The data from 1954 to 2020 shows that the most violent tornadoes are declining.
In 2019, extreme-weather expert Roger Pielke Jr. noted that the federal National Climate Assessment released in 2018 ignored one of its own expert reviewers, who wrote:
“National Hurricane Center going back to the 1800s data clearly indicate a drop in the decadal rate of US landfalling hurricanes since the 1960s…
instead you spin the topic to make it sound like the trends are all towards more cyclones.”68
The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) said,
“No observational studies have provided convincing evidence of a detectable anthropogenic influence specifically on hurricane-related precipitation.”
The WMO assessment concluded that “anthropogenic signals are not yet clearly detectable in observations for most TC (tropical cyclones) metrics.”69
A study by NOAA hurricane researcher Chris Landsea found that “only 2 of these [recent] 10 Category 5s would have been recorded as Cat 5 if they had occurred during the late-1940s period.”70
Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico in 2017, with the eighth-lowest landfall pressure (917 MB) on record in the Atlantic Basin, was not an unprecedented storm.
Meteorologist Anthony Watts noted,
“With Irma ranked 7th, and Harvey ranked 18th, it’s going to be tough for climate alarmists to try connecting these two storms to being driven by CO2/global warming.
But they’ll do it anyway.”
Pielke noted in 2019 that the
“13 yrs ending 2018 had the fewest Cat 3+ USA landfalls since 1900 with 3….
3 periods had 12, most recently 1915–1927.
13 yrs ending in 2018 saw a 14 total Cat 1+ (tied 2nd fewest).
The most? 33: 1938–1950.”71
Meteorologist Paul Dorian noted that despite a very active Atlan-tic hurricane season in 2020, the “Pacific hurricane season was well below normal” and overall global hurricane activity was “below normal.”72
Climate analyst Kenneth Richard’s 2018 survey of scientific literature found, “The peer-reviewed scientific literature robustly affirms that land-falling hurricane frequencies and intensities have remained steady or declined in recent decades.
So have droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events.”
Atmospheric research scientist Philip Klotzbach’s research also found no trend in global accumulated cyclone energy (ACE) in the past thirty years.73
Droughts Aren’t Getting Worse, Either— and Neither Are Wildfires
“Droughts have, for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U.S. over the last century,” Professor Roger Pielke Jr. observed.74
NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has concluded there is “no trend in global droughts since 1950.”
Other studies found “a decline in drought levels in recent decades,” noted the Global Warming Policy Forum in 2020.
“The IPCC says it is hard to say (‘low confidence’) whether global drought has become better or worse since 1950,” said the GWPF.75
A 2015 study found that mega-droughts in the past two thousand years were worse and lasted longer than current droughts.76
There is “less fire today than centuries ago,” as scientists and multiple studies counter the claim that wildfires are due to “climate change.”
As I lay out in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change:
A 2016 study published by the Royal Society reported, “Indeed there is increasing evidence that there is overall less fire in the landscape today than there has been centuries ago, although the magnitude of this reduction still needs to be examined in more detail….
The ‘wildfire problem’ is essen- tially more a social than a natural one.”77
In the United States, wildfires are also due in part to a failure to thin forests or remove dead and diseased trees.
In 2014, forestry professor David B. South of Auburn University testified to the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that “data suggest that extremely large megafires were four-times more common before 1940,”
adding that “we cannot reasonably say that anthropogenic global warming causes extremely large wildfires.”
As he explained, “To attribute this human-caused increase in fire risk to carbon dioxide emissions is simply unscientific.”78
“It’s Like a Heat Wave!”
Multiple studies find that long-term data show extreme heat waves in the United States have decreased since the 1930s.79
A study published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology found that extreme heatwaves in the United States decreased from 1930 to 2010.
According to the authors,
“Several daily maximum [extreme heat events] near the 1930’s led to 1930-2010 trends of daily maximum [extreme heat events] decreasing.”
The overall trend of U.S. heat waves saw a decline from the 1930s until the 1970s global cooling and the coming–ice age scare, followed by a warming with temperatures still not up to levels seen in the 1930s in the U.S.80
EPA: “This figure shows the annual values of the U.S. Heat Wave Index from 1895 to 2015.”
University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy’s research has found that “about 75% of the states recorded their hottest temperature prior to 1955, and over 50 percent of the states experienced their record cold temperatures after 1940.”81
Data from the Environmental Protection Agency agree.
The EPA website features a 2016 chart labeled “the U.S. Heat Wave Index from 1895 to 2015,” and it reveals that the worst U.S. heat waves by far happened in the 1930s.82
“Melting, Melting—Oh What a World!”
A 2015 NASA study found that Antarctica was not losing ice mass and “not currently contributing to sea level rise.”83
NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally is working on a paper that will show the eastern ice sheet is expanding at a rate that’s enough to at least offset increased losses in the west.
The ice sheets are “very close to balance right now,” Zwally has said.84
A 2017 NASA study found volcanic activity is heating up the western portion of the continent’s ice sheet.85
Other Antarctica ice studies receive lots of media hype, but miss the key scientific significance.
A 2019 hyped study that alleged a six-times increase in Antarctic ice melt was found to be “statistically insignificant” by climate analysts.
“Such a tiny loss in comparison to the total mass of the ice sheet, it’s microscopic…. insignificant,” writes Anthony Watts.86
A 2019 study in the Journal of Geophysical Research:
Atmospheres found that the West Antarctic ice sheet was growing.
The ice saw a “significantly positive trend” in the twentieth century.
The Associated Press has a long history of hyping alleged catastrophic Antarctic melt fears.
The AP recycled the same scary Antarctic melt claims from 2014, 1990, 1979, 1922, and 1901.87
Meanwhile, at the other pole of the planet, a 2019 study revealed that the Arctic region was 4.6°C warmer during the decade of the 1930s than today.88
Recent Arctic ice changes are not proof of man-made global warming, nor are they unprecedented, unusual, or cause for alarm, according to experts and multiple peer-reviewed studies.89
A study published in 2017 in the Hydrological Sciences Journal found that Arctic sea ice extent grew during the 1940s to about 1980 before declining.
“The recent period of Arctic sea ice retreat since the 1970s followed a period of sea ice growth after the mid-1940s, which in turn followed a period of sea ice retreat after the 1910s.”
The study found that the start of the satellite era monitoring of Arctic ice in the late 1970s “coincided with the end of several decades during which Arctic sea ice extent was generally increasing.”90
Norwegian professor Ole Humlum explained in his 2020 State of the Climate Report: “Since 1979, Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extents have had opposite trends, decreasing and increasing, respectively.”91
Dr. Jochem Marotzke, who has been director of the German Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg since 2003, dismissed Greenland melt fears in 2020.
“It’s gonna take so long—a couple thousand years.
I don’t see any risk with Greenland,” Marotzke said.92
A 2019 study of sea surface temperatures in Greenland between 1796 and 2013 found warmer temperatures from the 1920s to the 1940s: “Temperatures were warmer than today in the 1920s and 1940s and even briefly during the 1800s,” Kenneth Richard wrote of the study, which was published in the American Geophysical Union’s journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.93
As climatologist Pat Michals said in 2016,
“Humans just can’t make it warm enough up there to melt all that much ice.”94
... A 2006 peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research concluded,
“The warmest year in the extended Greenland temperature record is 1941, while the 1930s and 1940s are the warmest decades.”96
Another study the same year, by Danish researchers from Aarhus University, found that “Greenland’s glaciers have been shrinking for the past century, suggesting that the ice melt is not a recent phenomenon caused by global warming.”
Glaciologist Jacob Clement Yde pointed out, “Seventy percent of the glaciers have been shrinking regularly since the end of the 1880s.”97
Projections Are Not Evidence
The scientific fact is that heralded “state-of-the-art” climate models can “show” any outcome their creator wants them to.
Even Penn State climate activist professor Michael Mann admitted in 2017:
“Predictions can never be ‘falsifiable’ in the present:
We must ultimately wait to see whether they come true.”98
Prominent scientists have exposed the climate model con.
In 2007, top UN IPCC scientist Jim Renwick admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable.
“Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don’t expect to do terrifically well,” Renwick conceded.99
Former UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Vincent Gray of New Zealand, the author of more than one hundred scientific publications and an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990,
had declared that IPCC claims are “dangerous unscientific nonsense,” because “all the [UN IPCC does] is make ‘projections’ and ‘estimates.’
No climate model has ever been properly tested, which is what ‘validation’ means, and their ‘projections’ are nothing more than the opinions of ‘experts’ with a conflict of interest because they are paid to produce the models.”
Atmospheric scientist Hendrik Tennekes, former director of research at the Netherlands’ Royal National Meteorological Institute and a pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction, rejected the overemphasis on climate models.
“I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society,” Tennekes wrote.
... a policy that promotes a massive expansion of U.S. domestic energy production is one of the best safeguards against going to war over energy supplies.
The Trump administration actually achieved energy independence and dominance as the U.S. exceeded energy imports in 2019 for the first time since 1952 and U.S. energy production exceeded energy consumption in 2019 for the first time since 1957.103
The Green New Deal is bad for America’s national security because its goal is to either place more restrictions or eliminate altogether Ameri-can drilling, mining, fracking, pipelines and energy extraction.
The GND will result in more reliance on conflict energy from such places as the Middle East, Venezuela, and China, where human rights and environ- mental protection may be less than desirable.
“Shutting down U.S. energy supplies means dependence on Middle East oil ...
The GND with its restrictions on fossil fuels and mandates on solar, wind, and electric vehicles will result in the U.S. losing both energy independence and dominance, and the GND will further increase U.S. dependence on rare earth mining operated by China and Russia.
“China, for example, supplies about 90% of rare-earths for the world.
On the cobalt front, China has also quietly gained control over more than 90% of the battery industry’s cobalt refining, without which the raw ore is useless.
Russia is a massive nickel producer,” explained energy analyst Mark P. Mills of the Manhattan Institute.105
If We Had a Problem, This “Solution” Wouldn’t Solve It
A 2019 study by the American Enterprise Institute found that the Green New Deal would have “no effect” on climate change:
“In total, completely enacted, funded, and efficiently meeting goals—things AEI does not anticipate the GND would ever do
—the full plan would cut the global increase in temperature by a whopping “0.083 to 0.173 degrees”— a number that is “barely distinguishable from zero.”106
In 2019, climatologist Patrick Michaels ran the Green New Deal through the National Center for Atmospheric Research’s so-called “MAGICC” climate model simulator, developed with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency.
The result?
“I seriously think the effect would at best—be barely detectable in the climate record,” Patrick Michaels explained.
“The year-to-year variation is very close to the total amount of warming that would be ‘saved’ by 2100, according to EPA’s own model.”107
... University of Pennsylvania geologist Robert Giegengack noted,
“None of the strategies that have been offered by the U.S. government or by the EPA or by anybody else has the remotest chance of altering climate if in fact climate is controlled by carbon dioxide.”108
In 2017 Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center noted of the UN Paris Agreement:
“We will spend at least one hundred trillion dollars in order to reduce the temperature by the end of the century by a grand total of three-tenths of one degree…
the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years….
Again, that is using the UN’s own climate prediction model.” Lomborg added, “If the U.S. delivers for the whole century on President Obama’s very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.”
Given the facts, it’s no wonder alarmists don’t want to debate skeptics. Instead, prominent climate activists now call for jailing their critics.
... The UN and EPA regulations are pure climate symbolism designed to promote a more centrally planned energy economy.
The Green New Deal is simply a vehicle to put politicians and bureaucrats in charge of our economy on the pretense of saving us from bad weather.
... Climatologist Roy Spencer wrote, “Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100 percent caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime.
Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and other natural disasters have yet to show any obvious long-term change.
This means that in order for politicians to advance policy goals (such as forcing expensive solar energy on the masses or creating a carbon tax), they have to turn normal weather disasters into ‘evidence’ of climate change.”120"
Footnotes were not provided here,
so you'd have to buy the book to see them.