Climate Hysteria Hazards

Here we go again: another climate-change doomsday warning about the world’s failure to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. In reality, though, Monday’s report from the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change just highlights the absurdity of the climate war.

“By 2030,” it asserts (with just “medium confidence”), global temps “could exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850-1900 with a probability between 40% and 60%.” And?

Well, limiting warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) is a key goal of climate warriors, though it’s a fundamentally arbitrary figure and past plans to achieve it were always a joke.

Naturally, The New York Times headline left no doubt: “Earth to Hit Critical Warming Threshold by Early 2030s, Climate Panel Says” — though the story did concede that a 1.5°C rise hardly spells Armageddon.

The UN folks say the world (er, wealthier nations) need to shell out three to six times as much as they are now on “climate action” to keep global warming between 1.5°C and 2°C.

Yet it’s only the West that’s chasing this goal. China, for one, last year issued 168 permits for coal-fueled power plants with a capacity equivalent to two large facilities a week, per the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. New construction on such plants soared 50% from the year before.

Beijing is adding new emissions faster than Western nations can reduce their own, at great cost to their economies. India, too, has continued spewing emissions apace.

Temps are already up by 1.1°C compared to the late 19th century, the UN report notes. And for all the progress reducing CO2 output, “the challenge has become even greater” than flagged in the last report in 2018.

Want to bet the IPCC’s next “assessment” likewise sees the “challenge” greater still?

Truth is, when push comes to shove, the costs of global warming don’t come anywhere close to the mind-numbing price of trying to halt it.

Climate warriors want to upend the entire global economy, reduce living standards in the developed world (though they pretend the “transition” will be a winner) and stop the developing world from developing.

China and India refuse to go along except in lip service; Western elites caught in a quasi-religious fervor are simply refusing to face facts, at huge cost to the non-elite majority. Yet if the world does nothing, climate change will slow economic growth only slightly.

That doesn’t mean we should ignore climate change, but the answer is in encouraging innovation, not sending us back to the Dark Ages. All the screaming is as useless as any other fit of hysteria.