Unsettled Science
With the demolition of the “expert” views on COVID — mask mandates are useless; vaccines don’t stop transmission; the virus likely came from that Wuhan lab — it’s time to take a very hard look at another major “settled science” pseudo-consensus: climate doom-saying.
Climate change is real, with human activity contributing to it. But the exact mechanics aren’t remotely as well understood as received wisdom has it — and the terror-campaign hysteria about how to address it, from Greta Thunberg and Al Gore all the way to Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul and most of the media, is utterly anti-science.
Carbon fuels and the technologies that depend on them are vital to modern society: Pretending that governments can simply mandate them away, ordering replacements into existence, is out-and-out magical thinking — and policy based on unicorns and magic crystals can only bring disaster and suffering.
Yes, the hysterics also point to disasters and suffering. But that involves even more disconnects from reality (long documented by brave skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and others). Here are just a few:
At the 2021 Glasgow UN climate summit, John Kerry said we had only nine years left to stop global warming. That followed Prince (now King) Charles’ 2019 claim that we had only 18 months. Which conflicted with AOC’s claim that same year that we had only 12 years left. Which cut against the 2004 claim from British greens that climate change would destroy all human civilization by 2020. That timeline undermined the 1989 UN prediction that we had only three years left to win the climate fight — a major fail, after the same body said in 1972 that only a decade remained before time ran out.
Then there are climate refugees, i.e., people supposedly sure to be driven from their homes by climate change. The Institute for Economics and Peace predicts as many as 1.2 billion climate refugees by 2050; but the big brains have as bad a record here as they do on the date of doomsday. The United Nations not so long ago foresaw 50 million such refugees by 2010, a massive migration flow that utterly failed to materialize.
On individual extreme weather events, the record of “experts” is just as miserable. Despite endless predictions of raging wildfires and citydrowning floods, the death toll from such events is down drastically, from some 500,000 worldwide in the 1920s to about 18,000 from 2012 to 2022.
As for the helpless critters greens love to hype up: The vanishing polar bear was a keystone of Al Gore’s moral-panic masterpiece “An Inconvenient Truth”; turns out their numbers are up from 2.5 to five times since the ’60s. The allegedly dying coral of the Great Barrier Reef now holds more coral than at any time since record-keeping began.
Green fanatics, the numbers show, are just as much in the dark about the climate situation as Anthony Fauci et al were about COVID. Their “solutions” — ban gas stoves! mandate Teslas! eat mealworms! — are equally nonsensical, catering to the imaginations and emotions of rich progressives rather than aiming rationally to mitigate the (very real) risks climate change actually presents.
It’s time we stopped listening to them, for good.