by JOHN MIKKELSEN – ACCORDING to recent calls by the Australian Greens, alarmist scientists and leaders from the UN and World Economic Forum, we should all become climate activists to save the world from “an era of global boiling”.
We saw the most recent result of that just last week when thousands of school students took part in a climate action strike under the guise of “A sick day for a sick planet”.
- There is no tangible evidence of a rapidly warming climate.
- Despite the headlines, nothing we have seen in the past decade is “unprecedented”.
- I won’t be buying any superglue unless something really needs mending.
“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
This quote is attributed to Samuel Clemens’ altar ego Mark Twain and sums up so much of “collective wisdom” in the world today.
BOYHOOD
Some claim it originated before his time but he’s one of my favourite boyhood authors, so I’ll go with him.
Nowhere is it more apt than with the Western world’s complete obsession with “climate change”.
The sickest aspect was a “sick note” provided by University of Melbourne Professor David Karoly and ANU’s Professor Nick Abel which stated: “The student is ‘unfit’ to attend school as the government’s inaction on climate change has caused increased anxiety among other symptoms.
These “symptoms” included: “Elevated stress on seeing the impacts of the climate emergency now in Australia and worldwide… [including] feelings of despair due to the disregard of leaders who won’t have to endure the future they’ll leave behind.”
What perpetual alarmists such as Karoly don’t acknowledge is the fact that repeated warnings of “catastrophic climate change” pushed by educators, governments and a mainly compliant media hungry for headlines is responsible for the “increased anxiety” rather than any tangible evidence of a rapidly warming climate.
All this is based on dodgy computer modelling and an unproven hypothesis that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are responsible, rather than natural cyclical changes.
Despite the headlines, nothing we have seen in the past decade is “unprecedented”.
As Dorothea Mackellar eloquently pointed out in My Country, we are a land of droughts and flooding rains.
There have been bigger floods, worse droughts, higher temperatures and more severe cyclones than any witnessed by any young millennials or their parents, despite efforts by The Bureau of Meteorology to expunge some historical records and “homogenise” temperature readings that stand out from an accepted average.
This has been highlighted by Dr Jennifer Marohasy.
The current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is about 400 parts per million and it has been much higher in eons past, where plants, animals and coral reefs survived and thrived.
NASA
According to an article published on US website PJ Media earlier this year: “Recently published data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows that there has not been global warming for the past eight years.
“NASA satellite data reportedly confirms that evidence, showing no global warming for eight years and five months.
“But Leftists are quick to warn people against drawing the obvious conclusion that the world isn’t about to become a burning ball of fire.
“Recently published evidence also showed that there was actually a near-record low of major hurricanes in 2022, indicating that weather isn’t getting progressively and exponentially worse globally, despite the climate frenzy of the media and governments.”
So before we buy a few tubes of superglue to anchor ourselves to a busy city street or catch a flight to Paris or London where we can deface Van Gough and Picasso’s priceless artworks to “save the planet”, it’s worth taking a step back to ponder some other dire warnings:
- Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the University of East Anglia, said in 2000 “within a few years winter snowfall will become a very rare and exciting event. Children just aren’t going to know what snow is”.
- Less than a decade later, former US Vice President Al Gore predicted sea levels could rise by seven metres “in the near future”. His movie An Inconvenient Truth included scenes from a science fiction movie. And the day before he was announced as co-winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, the British High Court ruled the movie contained nine significant errors. He subsequently bought a 20-room mansion that reportedly “guzzles more electricity in one year than the average American family uses in 21 years”.
- Former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd warned “climate change is the great moral challenge of our time” before jetting off to a climate change talk-fest in Copenhagen where delegates had to scramble home before the airport was snowed under. But the claimed sea level rise didn’t put him off purchasing a multi-million dollar beachfront mansion at Noosa’s Sunshine Beach a few years ago and he’s soon going to experience how cold an American winter can be as Anthony Albanese’s Washington ambassador.
- Professor Tim Flannery, of the Climate Council, claimed in 2007: “Even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams.” Keep trying Tim, there are thousands of subsequent flood victims who might not believe you. Back in the 1970s scientists seemed unable to agree on whether we were entering a new ice age or global warming was about to ramp up. Government funding ultimately persuaded them.
- Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 to 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind”. He died 26 years ago.
- “We are in an environmental crisis that threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” according to Washington University biologist Barry Commoner.
The day after the first Earth Day, The New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction”.
But when it comes to alarmist predictions, this one takes the prize: “As all the ice at the two poles melt, a stupendous volume of water will be released. Fish will swim in Buckingham Palace, the Sahara Desert will be a great inland sea, New York will be marked by taller skyscrapers, the climate will be as when dinosaurs roamed the earth…”
This woke piece from the Left’s prized New York Times is dated May 15, 1932!
VACATE
Well it hasn’t happened in the past 90 years. I don’t think King Charles nor Queen Camilla will need to vacate Buckingham Palace any time soon.
We’ll still have to walk a couple of hundred metres from our home to let our dogs enjoy our beautiful beaches for the foreseeable future.
So I won’t be buying superglue unless something really needs mending.PC
Practically all changes in our planet’s temperature are caused by natural events such as volcanic eruptions and solar activity.
Before climate science became politicized, historians called warm periods “climate optima” because Earth’s ecosystems and humanity benefitted from the warmth.
Conversely, during cold periods human condition declined.
During most of the warm periods, there were either no, or very few, humans on the planet and there was certainly no industrial activity or human-induced CO2 emissions.
The question, therefore, is why are so many people – including world leaders, government agencies and scientists – taking us down the path of climate alarmism?
The answer is two-fold. Firstly, the obvious fact that many of our leaders are clearly just plain ignorant and/or dumb. They don’t bother to check what they are told by people with vested interests or read in the left-wing media.
Secondly, many others are deliberately creating fear in the community so they can make money out of the renewables rort that’s entirely based on the ridiculous notion of ‘saving the planet’.
We all need to stand up to these people and make our voices heard.
I thought I’d seen all the predictions of climate doom but that NYT effort from 1932 is a beauty. All it needs is a few details about how the Global AquaRepublic of America maintains world peace with its fleet of warships, winning the love and gratitude of people everywhere with the Stars and Stripes riding proudly on their mainsails.
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Word is spreading openly of the awful third quarter results in wind and solar power, and in EV’s. Morningstar noted some $14 billion dollars moved out of sustainability funds in the last quarter even before the dismal results were announced. This is only a small part of the $300 billion total, but it’s a big bad shift in momentum in a sector that is supposed to be going exponential and theoretically “the next big thing”.
Two years ago funds were tagging anything they could with Sustainability. But the term has become a dirty word, and so has ESG. Funds that were enthusiastically adding these green terms to their titles are now dropping them and backing away slowly…
With major daily business newspapers now reporting the bad news it’s hard to see what will stop the slide — only massive subsidies would do that (temporarily), but the US has already done that with the bizarrely named Inflation Reduction Act.
But make no mistake, there is a $300 billion industry begging for help and a lot of politicians who don’t want to admit their renewables push was an economic disaster. The German government has bailed out Siemens, and the UK government is throwing money at wind power to try to get investors back. It’s like communism by stealth. The government demands industries do magical things, then when they fail, it saves them, making industry increasingly serve governments instead of customers. But the money, or the system can’t go on forever…
Note: The EV Transition is also imploding.
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Economic Systems: The alarmists keep telling us their concern about global warming is all about man’s stewardship of the environment. But we know that’s not true. A United Nations official has now confirmed this.
At a news conference last week in Brussels, Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change, admitted that the goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to destroy capitalism.
“This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution,” she said.
Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: “This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
The only economic model in the last 150 years that has ever worked at all is capitalism. The evidence is prima facie: From a feudal order that lasted a thousand years, produced zero growth and kept workdays long and lifespans short, the countries that have embraced free-market capitalism have enjoyed a system in which output has increased 70-fold, work days have been halved and lifespans doubled.
Figueres is perhaps the perfect person for the job of transforming “the economic development model” because she’s really never seen it work. “If you look at Ms. Figueres’ Wikipedia page,” notes Cato economist Dan Mitchell: Making the world look at their right hand while they choke developed economies with their left.