Now that the dust has settled from the release of the IPCC report, I’d like to interject some facts, as opposed to local politicians and climate activists who use personal feelings and emotional thoughts for scare tactics.
Fact: U.N. scientists just released a report detailing the “world stands little chance of hitting the Paris climate target without China … global greenhouse gas emissions are expected to rise 16% by 2030.”
Why should we race to spend billions of dollars and re-tool our homes and industries if we, as a world, have already missed current goals? Sure bet humanity will miss the next climate target as well.
Fact: According to Bjorn Lomborg’s latest book “False alarms: How Climate Change panic costs us trillions, hurts the poor and fails to fix the planet.”
He goes on to write, “Eight times as many people die from cold as heat and the fix for both is access to cheap fuel. They also leave out that climate change has saved more lives from temperature-related deaths than it has taken. Heat deaths make up about 1% of global fatalities a year — almost 600,000 — but cold kills eight times as many people, totaling 4.5 million deaths annually.”
Fact: Mr. Lomborg, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institute continues — “climate change is often blamed for wildfires in the U.S., but the reason for them is mostly poor forest management like failing to remove flammable undergrowth and allowing houses to be built in fire-prone areas. Despite breathless climate reporting, in 2021 the burned area is the fourth lowest in the last 11 years. Contrary to climate clichés’, annual global burned area has declined since 1990 and continues to fall.”
Fact: According to Bloomberg News, California is going to build five 30 megawatt natural gas generators. Ask yourself why? Because trying to run the entire state with 100% solar and wind is unobtainable. Wake up people!
Fact: The United States has reduced it’s CO2 emissions by almost 25% in the last 20 years.
Fact: Climate.gov — Why did Earth’s surface temperature stop rising in the past decade? Using the data that were available at the time (through 2012), the last climate report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that there had been no statistically significant increase in global surface temperature from 1998-2012.
Fact: A September Wall Street Journal article points out in the recently released IPCC report, the panel has reduced the worst case temperature rise from 4.5 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees C. This 10 percent reduction is a major reduction not widely reported by most media. The article continues, “More important, with much greater confidence than before, disastrous outcomes above 5 degrees are now found to be very unlikely.”
Why have many of the so-called journalists omitted these important facts?
Fact: “Hurricane Lizards and Plastic Squid: The Fraught and Fascinating Biology of Climate Change,” by Thor Hanson — “warmer conditions have prompted animals and plants to adopt new habits and evolve new traits: Squid are shrinking, lizards are growing bigger toes and trees are migrating.”
Fact: No one, not one climatologist can claim for certainty that if humans reduced CO2 emissions to zero it would stop the so-called climate crisis.
Furthermore, most people expect the climate and weather to be the same year to year, decade to decade, this is simply nonsense.
I rest my case. Please educate yourself. These statistics are found in level headed, unbiased articles and books that are readily available. Do not take a politician’s word for it. They are just chasing the money, as they always do.
Jim Bates lives in Gill.