CNN and the field of Democratic Candidates proved once again that we are indeed living in clown world. For seven hours, the brainy individuals engaged in a forum discussing climate change and the coming end of the world. The big takeaway: stop eating meat and we all must drive electric cars.
Left out of course were a few key details like how do people in emerging countries find sustenance, and what will all of this do to the economy? Like, what happens to the trucking industry, the airline industry, the boating industry, and really just about every other industry. Exactly, how many dreamy windmills and solar panels will it take to light up Topeka… not to mention Chicago?
These clowns talked about everything except empirical data. Well, here’s some:
All proxy temperature data sets reveal that there have been cyclical changes in climate in the past 10,000 years. Climate has always changed. And it has changed in both directions, hot and cold. Until at least the 17th century, all these changes occurred when almost all humans were hunters, gatherers, and farmers.
Industrialization did not happen until the 17th century. Therefore, no prior changes in climate were driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide. In the last 2,000 years alone, global temperatures rose at least twice (around the 1st and 10th centuries) to levels very similar to today’s, and neither of those warm periods were caused by humans.
Polar bears and the ice caps are actually doing fine. The 10,000-year Holocene paleoclimatology records reveal that both the Arctic and Antarctic are in some of their healthiest states. The only better period for the poles was the 17th century, during the Little Ice Age, when the ice mass levels were higher than today’s. For the larger part of the past 10,000 years, the ice mass levels were lower than today’s. Despite huge losses in recent decades, ice mass levels are at or near their historic highs.
Polar bears are one of the key species in the Arctic. Contrary to the hype surrounding their extinction fear, the population numbers have actually increased in the past two decades.
Last year, the Canadian government considered increasing polar bear killing quotas as their increasing numbers posed a threat to the Inuit communities living in the Nunavut area.
And it is not just the polar bears in the Arctic. Other critical species elsewhere, like tigers, are also making a comeback.
Carbon dioxide does not have a huge effect on climate.
While most of the current climatologists who collaborate with the United Nations believe anthropogenic CO2 emissions have exacerbated natural warming in recent decades, there is no empirical proof to support their claim.
The entire climate cabal was in for a rude awakening when global temperature between 2000 and 2016 failed to rise as anticipated. The scientists assumed that rising CO2 emissions from human activity would result in a rapid rise in temperature, but…they didn’t.
This proved that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are not the primary factor controlling global temperature. Consideration of a much longer period (10,000 or more years) suggests that CO2 had no significant role to play in temperature increases. CO2 never was the global thermostat.
W. W. Soon in Geophysical Research Letters(2007) has reviewed much of the literature on air temperature-CO2 relationships. He concludes, “there is no quantitative evidence that varying levels of minor greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 have accounted for even as much as half of the reconstructed glacial-interglacial temperature changes or, more importantly, for the large variations in global ice volume on both land and sea over the past 650,000 years …changes in solar insolation at climatically sensitive latitudes and zones exceed the global radiative forcings of CO2 and CH4 by severalfold, and that regional responses to solar insolation forcing will decide the primary climatic feedbacks and changes.”
A real worry is the impending solar minimum that NASA has predicted for the next two solar cycles between 2021 and 2041, ushering in a period of global cooling like it did during the solar minimum of 17th century.
There has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported low confidence that global warming—manmade or not—was driving increases in extreme weather events.
So, stop listening to these people. As we speak, California is planning to add climate change fear to the school curriculum. We are raising a generation of kids who are living in fear, like the poor girl from Holland that says every day she wakes up afraid for her future, so much so that she had to sail to New York. All of this is based on theory, and not empirical evidence, or as some call it, science.
Do you really want to be a punk driving around in a Prius? Screw that, crank up the Harley, and get that Dodge Challenger if you want it.
Keep Calm and Chive on.