Green Climate Follies, part two: For decades, mainstream climate journalists have been trying to panic readers with scare stories of species extinctions; crop declines; forest fires; rising, acidified oceans; more powerful, more frequent hurricanes — all supposedly caused by human use of fossil fuels. These scare stories are now being used to promote the Green New Deal among gullible readers.
by Richard Schulman
Remember that polar bear your favorite Very Biased News Site (VBNS) displayed on a melting ice floe? He and his furry fellows were supposed to be extinct by now because of fossil-fuel-caused global warming. Reality, however, rudely disobliged the VBNS panic mongers. Already by 2011, International Business Times was writing that “The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s.” More recently, Climate Depot observes, “data published in 2018 brought that number to almost 29,5009… This is the highest global estimate since the bears were protected by international treaty in 1973.” This meant the demise of the polar bear as icon for the Green New Deal.
The premier VBNS of them all, the New York Times, predictably cried foul. How dare global warming “denialists,” the Times wrote, confuse our readers with facts and confiscate our cherished icon? As the Free Beacon noted of the Times coverage, “the story isn’t really about the bears. It’s about shutting down the other side of the debate.”
Shellfish and bees
So what else have the VBNS been telling us that didn’t turn out the way they described? Two other species-extinction whoppers come to mind.
“Google News,” Climate Realism reports, “is promoting claims that global warming is killing off Maine’s shellfish. However, objective data show that Maine is producing a record aquaculture harvest, and Maine’s lobster catch is also setting records.” Similarly, NPR and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) are claiming that climate change is devastating the bee population in North America, while ignoring the multiple non-climatic contenders for explaining Colony Collapse Disorder, including a mite, a virus, a gut parasite, stress from being transported around the country for pollination services, pesticides, habitat change, or a combination of the above.
Fossil-fuel forest fires?
Then there are the various regional climate scares the VBNS have been promoting. Thus, global warming — rebranded “climate change” to cover all contingencies – is blamed for recent Australian and western US forest fires. But there are two problems with the scare stories. First, both Australia and the US for decades neglected to follow proper chaparral and forest management practices of brush clearing, controlled burns, non-hazardous business and residential siting, and building codes mandating the use of fire-resistant construction materials near forest sites. Secondly, the historical record for both regions shows that they faced equal or worse droughts and forest fires in the non-fossil-fuel-using era preceding the present one. California added one more folly: forcing its power companies to neglect power line maintenance in favor of expensive green energy investments.
Crop declines? Imminent famine?
Another favorite VBNS scare tactic is the claim that fossil-fuels are causing crop declines and threatening global famine. Climate Realism makes short work of that false claim. On Oct. 22,2020 it reported that
At the top of Google News search results today for ‘climate change’ is an article claiming global warming is punishing global crop production, and is especially punishing sub-Saharan African, South American, and South Asian crops. However, objective crop data reported by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) tells an entirely different story. Not only is global food production setting new records virtually every year, but the regions and nations that are claimed to be suffering the most are almost all enjoying record crop production.
http://climaterealism.com/2020/10/google-sounds-climate-alarm-in-nations-enjoying-crop-production-records/
Indeed, Grain Central reports that “IMPROVED late-season yield prospects in greater Europe and Australia have lifted the estimate for global wheat production… from the previous Agricultural Market Information Systems (AMIS) estimate released last month… The net increase lifts the forecast for the world 2020-21 wheat crop to a record 764.9Mt,” topping “the previous records set in 2019-20 and 2017-18.”
One contributor to the recent record crops – one you are not likely to hear mentioned by a VBNS — is the beneficial increase in atmospheric CO2 from fossil-fuel combustion. CO2 is a premier plant food.
Rising seas? Environmentalists fake the evidence
Another VBNS tactic to promote authoritarian green energy policies is the hustling of phony marine scares. Thus, coastal cities and Pacific Islands are allegedly about to sink, like Atlantis, beneath rising seas, at the same time as CO2 dissolves coral reefs and acidifies oceans to the pH of vinegar. Except that “sea levels have been rising very gradually at a near constant rate since the end of the last ice age,” according to a report based on findings published in Geophysical Research Letters. Retired paleogeophysics Professor Nils-Axel Mörner found that “sea level off Bangladesh was actually falling” and that on
the few beaches where the sea had encroached, it had done so not because of global warming and consequent sea-level rise but because local prawn farmers had grubbed up the mangroves whose roots had previously kept the coastline stable…. On another occasion Professor Mörner was visiting the Maldives when he noticed a small tree, 40 years old, right on the beach, in leaf but lying on its side. The fact that the tree was still there, feet from the ocean and inches above sea level, after 40 years, told him that there had been no sea-level rise since the tree had first begun to grow, or it would have been drowned.
He enquired locally about whether there had been an exceptional spring tide caused by global warming and sea-level rise that had overthrown the tree. He discovered, however, that a group of Australian environmental extremists had visited the beach shortly before him. They had realized that the presence of the tree showed that the official [i.e., VBNS] sea-level record showing a sharp rise over the past half-century must be incorrect…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/10/19/professor-nils-axel-morner-1938-2020/
They therefore uprooted the tree to suppress the evidence.
Acid oceans?
The claims of dangerous ocean acidification – and its harms — are equally questionable. A green-dominated NOAA concedes that the data “are of unknown and probably variable quality” and will only hesitantly commit itself to a claim that “anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) has caused a pH decrease of approximately 0.1, which is about a 26% increase in the hydrogen ion concentration over the past 100 years.” One researcher writes:
[T]here are several lines of evidence demonstrating marine ecosystems are far more sensitive to fluxes of carbon dioxide from ocean depths…than from invasions of atmospheric CO2. There is also ample evidence that lower pH does not inhibit photosynthesis or lower ocean productivity (Mackey 2015). On the contrary, rising CO2 makes photosynthesis less costly.
More and larger hurricanes?
Lastly, the VBNS claim that “anthropogenic global warming” a.k.a. “climate change” is producing more and larger hurricanes is also dubious. A chart of global tropical cyclone accumulated cyclone energy shows “no warming-related trend whatsoever.” Furthermore, Weinkle et al. (2012) conclude that while there are considerable “challenges in constructing a homogeneous global hurricane landfall data set,” nevertheless “The global frequency of total and major hurricane landfalls shows considerable interannual variability, but no significant linear trend.”
Property damage has been increasing, of course, but that is because of economic development with insufficient attention to weather-related risks in property siting.
All the fake scares we have summarized above will continue to be published by each VBNS, along with new scares. This will be in order to promote authoritarian government and green policies in the US and abroad. Up to now, green progressives have never enjoyed the combined executive and legislative power to implement their policies comprehensively on a national scale. They have, however, had many smaller successes in placing their co-thinkers throughout the government and thwarting pro-growth initiatives dependent, for example, on pipeline construction. All these efforts to kill fossil fuels will radically accelerate if the Biden-Harris team wins in November, and especially if Democrats also win the Senate. If this happens, the US will be put on a path of very difficult-to-reverse economic, scientific, and geopolitical decline, with serious consequences for world peace.
We will be discussing these specific dangers in subsequent installments of this series. (Part one covered the context — how green energy policies especially harm developing countries and the poor everywhere.)
Leave a Reply