The Climate Crisis Crisis
Last week the World Economic Forum (WEF) was held in the ski resort town of Davos, Switzerland. Hundreds of gazillionaires flew in on their jets and supped on lobster, caviar and all sorts of goodies.
Their mission: the people who don’t need to play by the rules want to decide what rules you need to follow.
There were a bunch of ideas put out by WEF, including the fact that “Eating Insects Could Reduce Climate Change.” This, coupled with a speaker advocating that a billion people stop eating meat, were two of the more outlandish ideas discussed.
And, the histrionics of one WEF participant garnered a bit of ridicule, by stating that the oceans are boiling and that the energy equivalent of 600,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs are heating up the earth every day.
And right there is one of the problems with today’s climate change “industry.”
Before I go on, let me tell you that I totally believe there’s climate change. It’s an indisputable fact that, since it’s birth billions of years ago, the earth’s climate has been changing. The climate today is different than what the climate was when dinosaurs walked the earth. What I don’t believe is that the flyspeck of humanity has any real impact on our climate.
There are actually at least two problems with the climate change industry today. One is that climate activists make fantastic claims like the ocean is boiling or about the atom bombs exploding. Regular folk like us hear these and shrug our shoulders, “yeah, right!”
The other problem is that activists and scientists make predictions that also sound fantastic and don’t come true:
1970. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, D-Wisc., – often considered the “father of Earth Day” – cited the secretary of the Smithsonian, who “believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
1970. “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years,” ecologist Kenneth Watt said. “If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
1982. U.N. official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program, warned: “By the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible, as any nuclear holocaust.”
1989. The Associated Press relayed a warning from a U.N. official: "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."
2009. “We face the dual challenges of a worldview and an economic system that seem to have enormous shortcomings, together with an environmental crisis — including that of climate change — which threatens to engulf us all,” Prince Charles said, without revealing how he had “calculated” we only had 96 months left to save the world.
2009. John Kerry predicted that climate change and global warming were such imminent threats to humanity that the Arctic would have an ice-free summer by 2014.
JUNE 29, 2017. “We Only Have 3 Years Left to Prevent a Climate Disaster, Scientists Warn.”
2022. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated “The world has three years to avoid a major climate catastrophe.”
They said the quiet part out loud about their predictions:
"We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have,” Stephen Schneider, a professor of Biology at Stanford University, said to Discover magazine in 1989. “Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Sen. Timothy Wirth, a Democrat from Colorado, who said in 1988: "We've got to ... try to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong... we will be doing the right thing anyway in terms of economic policy and environmental policy."
You get the idea. They stink at predicting. And I think it may be backfiring. How many times can you hear that polar bears are becoming extinct, only to find out that’s not true? How many other wild claims will be false? Do we even believe them anymore?
It makes me wonder: is all the hyperbole made up for some other reason? Greater spending? Social change? More political power?
What do you think?
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“I’ll believe there’s a crisis when the people who tell me there’s a crisis start acting like there’s a crisis.” — Glenn Reynolds
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