You’ve got to hand it to the climate alarmists: They do some really skillful marketing (or what a skeptic might call “propagandizing”) to promote their cause.
One effective tactic in public discourse is to encapsulate one’s position—especially one about an exceedingly complex issue—in a short, pithy, and easy-to-remember phrase. Lightning has struck twice for the climate alarmists in that regard. The now widely known phrases “1.5 degrees C” and “net zero” have become popular slogans for the alarmist agenda. The only problem is that the two terms don’t stand up to scrutiny: 1.5 degrees Celsius is an example of silly arbitrariness, and “net zero” is spectacularly fatuous.
Let’s debunk the brazen pretentiousness of 1.5 degrees C first. Alarmists would have us believe that a 1.5 degree C increase in average global temperature since the dawn of the industrial age is an ominous threshold, which, should we cross it, will turn us all, by some mystical power, into pumpkins (or something equally horrific).
The problem with this assertion is that it ignores several inconvenient facts.
First, by arbitrarily selecting the dawn of modern industrialism as its starting point—a point from which global temperatures already have risen at least 1 degree C—they essentially chose the tail end of the punishingly cold Little Ice Age (LIA) as the starting point. We should be grateful for this. Do the alarmists seriously believe that the human race world would be better off if we were to return to LIA temperatures by Earth’s average temperature falling by a degree than for Earth’s temperature to rise by another full degree? By every measure, the climate is so much more benign and beneficial for terrestrial life with today’s warmth than it was during the frigid LIA. I doubt most human beings would even be able to detect an increase of another half a degree.
The historical climatological record shows that temperatures were warmer than today during the Roman Period 2,000 years ago and even warmer than that during the Minoan Age of about 3 1/2 millennia ago—eras when human civilization thrived and prospered.
Another way to look at the supposedly dangerous 1.5 degree C temperature increase is to ask the people broadcasting this alarm, “What is the correct temperature of Earth’s atmosphere anyhow?” There is, in fact, no objective way to answer this question. It’s all a matter of opinion. To pluck a number such as 1.5 degrees C out of thin air creates an air of pseudo-scientific precision, but the assertion is truly arbitrary.
Recall that in the 1970s, some scientists were sounding the alarm about an impending ice age because temperatures had been in a downtrend since the 1930s (even, by the way, as industrial emissions of carbon dioxide were rising sharply). But then, starting in about 1980, the temperature trend reversed and Earth got warmer. Then the alarm became, “Oh no, we’re all going to fry!”
The inference here is that scientists, like other human beings, are often influenced by recency bias. In the ’70s, it was colder than it had been a few decades earlier, and so they said Earth was threatened by dangerous cooling. But since 1980, the alarm has been just the opposite—that because the temperature was reversing the decline of 1940–80, humanity is threatened by dangerous warming.
Neither of these hysterical theories rests on any sort of “proof” that, say, the 1960s was the ideal, “right” temperature of planet Earth. Assertions that humans should strive to stop changes in global temperature are arbitrary and ultimately groundless. (And whether humans even have the capability of somehow controlling Earth’s temperature is an empirical question that no scientist today can claim to know.)
That brings us to the other mantra of alarmists—the “net-zero” dogma. This is the thesis that carbon dioxide (CO2) is the control knob for Earth’s temperature and that the human race must act to collectively keep the atmospheric concentration of CO2 from rising any higher than its current about 420 parts per million through a combination of reducing carbon dioxide emissions (essentially, reducing human consumption of fossil fuels) and finding clever (not to mention costly) ways to extract CO2 from the atmosphere.
Future historians may well marvel at the mania that infected the progressive political movement in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, when opportunistic politicians seized on wild, scientifically shaky (even absurd) assertions about how a beneficent CO2-enriched atmosphere and environment was treated as some sort of curse to be reversed. “1.5 degrees C” and “net zero” deserve places in whatever future Hall of Fame is established to commemorate pseudo-scientific irrationality or fatuous sloganeering.
