The IPCC report asserts, “Limiting global warming to 1.5 C [one degree already having occurred over the past 150 years] would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”
Oh, brother, here we go again: Another scare story about climate disaster—and just in time for Halloween. Like the boy who cried “wolf,” the global-warming crowd keeps proclaiming points of no return that come and go, while life on Earth goes chugging along as before.
Facts and Problems
Here are the facts upon which we can agree (no denial here): CO2 helps to “trap” or absorb heat in our atmosphere. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing rapidly. Human consumption of fossil fuel is partly responsible for that increase. Earth’s atmosphere has been getting warmer over the past 100 to 150 years.What is in dispute is the prediction that disaster is assured if humans don’t drastically curtail their consumption of fossil fuels.
There are at least three fundamental problems with the global-warming alarm: 1) Nobody can predict the future; 2) Nobody knows what the “right” or optimal global temperature is; and 3) Nobody knows what the “right” amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is.
Second, warmer temperatures: Not only don’t we know if, and to what extent, Earth’s atmosphere will warm or cool in the coming decades, centuries, and millennia, but the basic question of whether warmer is better or worse also hasn’t been settled. Anthropologists have found that human civilization seems to thrive better under warmer conditions than colder ones.
It’s totally arbitrary for the IPCC report to try to scare us with a story that a temperature a mere half a degree Celsius warmer than the present constitutes a threshold that, once crossed, will cause all heck to break loose.
Yes, Earth has warmed approximately one degree since “pre-industrial times,” i.e., over the last two centuries. So what? That is hardly remarkable, since Earth emerged from the frigid Little Ice Age in the 19th century.
Statements like “last year was the warmest year in history” are misleading. They are only true if one defines climate “history” as having begun in the 1870s, when the federal government began to record temperatures.
If you read geologist Gregory Wrightstone’s fact-filled book “Inconvenient Facts: The Science Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know,” you can see that Earth has periodically gotten much warmer than current conditions, and completely without human influence.
The four previous interglacial periods were all significantly warmer than the current interglacial. The previous interglacial was 8 degrees Celsius warmer than today, but the polar bear survived and only 25 percent of Greenland’s ice mass melted (quite different from some of today’s climate zealots telling us that a five-degree increase would melt all of Greenland’s ice).
Maybe Earth is supposed to warm over the coming centuries. If so, how could puny humankind prevent it?
Third, why make CO2 the culprit? Those warning of catastrophic human-caused climate change have embraced a reductio ad absurdum: the notion that CO2 is the thermostat regulating Earth’s temperature and that humans can dial the temperature up or down by increasing or decreasing the quantity of CO2 molecules in the atmosphere. That is both arrogant and ludicrous.
Good News
Having written above that it is impossible for humans to predict, much less control, Earth’s climate, I will nonetheless make one climate-related prediction: Whether Earth warms or cools, Mother Nature’s awesome might and fury will periodically assault us. We can’t prevent those onslaughts, but we can take measures to defend ourselves against them.This fantastic news has happened because humans have had the wealth to build safer homes and buildings and to monitor and broadcast the approach of dangerous weather so that people have time to escape to safety.
It is undeniable that natural disasters will continue to occur with lethal force. The proper policy response isn’t to cripple ourselves economically by forsaking the cheap energy on which human prosperity has been built, but by implementing pro-growth policies so that future generations of humans have the wherewithal to survive natural disasters.