In 2016 politicians must let climate scare die
By Tom Harris
It seems that the United Nations and governments across the world have
abandoned rational thought about climate change. Rather than focus on
preparing for the very real problems of a continually changing climate,
they concentrate instead on the scientifically impossible goal of
‘stopping climate change.’ They seem to have flown away to Neverland.
Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie tells us that Neverlands are found in the
minds of children. There, with the assistance of fairy dust, Peter Pan
can fly and teaches children to ignore their common sense and soar as
well. Peter claims greatness, is able to feel danger when it is near,
and can even imagine things into existence. There is almost nothing the
hero of Neverland cannot do, provided he stays childlike and forgets
everything he learns about the real world.
Reality for the UN and most politicians is now more determined by what
imaginative climate activists say than what science and observational
evidence actually show. December’s United Nations climate conference in
Paris is a case in point.
Sounding like an episode out of Barrie’s fairy tale, politicians pledged
to prevent ‘global temperature’ from rising more than two degrees
Celsius. That we are as yet unable to meaningfully forecast climate
decades in advance, let alone control it, didn’t matter. Humankind has a
global thermostat, they imagine.
Delegates believed that scientists have Peter Pan-like powers to sense
climate danger decades in advance. They dream that today’s global
climate models (GCM), simulations that utterly failed to forecast the
current 18-year “pause” in warming, provide lawmakers with the
“unequivocal” knowledge they need to enact trillion-dollar energy
policies.
To back up their extraordinary claims, we are told that there is an
overwhelming consensus of scientists who agree with the UN’s position.
Thousands of well-qualified skeptics are imagined out of existence.
On December 7, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
(NIPCC) released the report “Why Scientists Disagree About Global
Warming.” Authored by climatologist Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for the
Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Arizona, geologist Dr.
Robert Carter, former Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at James
Cook University in Australia, and physicist Dr. S. Fred Singer, Emeritus
Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, the
new report refutes the claims of climate alarmists. For example, the
NIPCC states:
• “There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important
scientific issues in the climate change debate.”
• “Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late twentieth
century surface warming lay outside normal natural variability.”
• “No evidence exists that … [a future warming of 2°C] would be net
harmful to the global environment or to human well-being.”
• “No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the
past 150 years and human-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.”
• “GCMs systematically over-estimate the sensitivity of climate to CO2.”
• “Melting of Arctic sea ice and polar icecaps is not occurring at
‘unnatural’ rates.”
• “Sea-level rise is not accelerating.”
• “No convincing relationship has been established between warming over
the past 100 years and increases in extreme weather events.”
The naïve crusade to stop the world’s climate from changing might be
laughable were it not for its cost and other impacts. The November 2015
report of the San Francisco-based Climate Policy Initiative shows that
$395 billion was spent in 2014 on climate finance. Of this, only 6% went
to helping vulnerable people adapt to climate change in the present. The
rest was spent on mitigation, trying to affect events that may or may
not happen someday. Letting people suffer today so as to possibly help
those yet to be born is immoral.
After drinking the poison Captain Hook had intended for Peter Pan,
Tinker Bell survived only because children across the world clapped
loudly to show their belief in fairies. Activists clearly believe that
the climate scare will also survive as long as politicians keep
clapping. Its time they stopped and let this, the most expensive hoax in
the history of science, die.
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Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based
International Climate Science Coalition
(www.climatescienceinternational.org).
