In a recent article at PJ Media, Rick Moran discusses
an op-ed in The New York Post by “climate
skeptic” Bjorn Lomborg—perhaps we should say
“temperate climate skeptic,” for Lomborg believes
the earth is indeed gradually warming. This does not prevent
him from arguing that the frenzy regarding the immediate
or long-term heating of the atmosphere, owing to what
we might call “carbon load,” and the specter
of terrestrial catastrophe accompanying it are utterly
misplaced. We are emphatically not in the midst of the
climate cataclysm that Global Warmists insist is impending.
Lomborg’s
The Skeptical Environmentalist (2001) and Cool
It (2010) advance to a considerable extent an economic
rather than a purely scientific argument. His most recent
book False Alarm (2020) by no means eschews the
economic factor but focuses on the dodgy science and apocalyptic
fever that are currently agitating a portion of the scientific
community and roiling public consciousness.
As Moran writes,
“What makes Lomborg’s skepticism so unsettling
for hysterics is that he cuts through the alarmism and
BS to get at the truth of what the global warming mitigation
strategies are all about.” They are chiefly about
power, wealth, reputation, research grants, and professional
sinecures. They are about the Leftist agenda to replace
a free-market economy with a command economy. Those who
endorse the hurricane of doomsday warnings, repeated every
few years despite the evident lack of ecological compliance,
do not have the time of day for Lomborg except to excoriate
him.
In the Post
op-ed, “Don’t buy the latest climate-change
alarmism,” Lomborg agrees with the UN’s just
released IPCC report that global warming is a serious
problem, but deplores “how much one-sided thinking
takes place in the climate conversation.” The report
“confirms that climate change indeed has increased
heatwaves.” However, without dwelling on the subject,
“the report tells us that global warming means the
frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased.”
Lomborg continues:
“This matters because globally, many more people
die from cold than from heat. A new study in the highly
respected journal Lancet shows that about half a million
people die from heat per year, but 4.5 million people
die from cold.” To its credit, the IPCC report also
mentions in passing “that more CO2 in the atmosphere
has acted as a fertilizer and created a profound global
greening of the planet. One NASA study found that over
a period of 35 years, climate change has added an area
of green equivalent to twice the size of the continental
United States. But don’t expect to read about this
in any of the breathless articles on climate impact.”
Lomborg’s
brief is supported by Michael Shellenberger’s authoritative
Apocalypse Never (2020) and was anticipated by
Robert Zubrin, whose Merchants of Despair (2013)
effectively laid out the case for the miracle and necessity
of a rich lading of environmental CO2—a counterintuitive
fact not understood by the blinkered catastrophism of
the global warming crowd. No carbon, no food. Less carbon,
less food. The war against carbon boils down—no
pun intended—to a war against human flourishing.
As Zubrin puts it, the theory of harmful global warming
“is the core idea of antihumanism,” of which
the once noble idea of environmentalism has become a chief
incubator.
Zubrin points
out that there exists robust scientific proof derived
from ice core data and isotopic ratios in marine organism
remains that Earth’s climate is ultimately a stable
system, that CO2 emissions create surplus plant growth
that in turn absorbs any untoward excess of atmospheric
carbon dioxide, thus restoring climate equilibrium over
the long term, and that under conditions of cyclical global
warming agricultural productivity naturally increases
for the benefit of humanity. Warmth and nourishment are
certainly to be preferred to cold and scarcity.
Extensive
scientific research conducted by the Fraser Institute
and reported in its 1997 publication Global Warming:
The Science and the Politics reminds us that CO2
levels during the Ordovician Age 440 million years ago
were ten times higher than they are at present. Writing
in the Wall Street Journal (March 27, 2012),
acclaimed Princeton physicist William Happer also highlights
the fact that “Life on earth flourished for hundreds
of million years at much higher CO2 levels than we see
today.”
Happer’s
“The Truth About Greenhouse Gasses” in First
Things (July/August 2011) presents the facts. “As
far as green plants are concerned,” he writes, “CO2
is not a pollutant, but part of their daily bread.…Most
green plants evolved at CO2 levels of several thousand
ppm [parts per million], many times higher than now. Plants
grow better and have better flowers and fruit at higher
levels. Commercial greenhouse operators recognize this
when they artificially increase the concentrations inside
their greenhouses to over 1000 ppm.” He points out
that “the Navy recommends an upper limit of about
8000 ppm for [submarine] cruises of ninety days, and NASA
recommends an upper limit of 5000 ppm for missions of
one thousand days. We conclude that atmospheric CO2 levels
should be above 150 ppm to avoid harming green plants
and below about 5000 ppm to avoid harming people.”
The current level is approximately 400 ppm.
Lomborg’s
circumspectly compatible handling of the IPCC’s
4000-page “code red for humanity” assessment
was not entirely unexpected. He is critical of some aspects
of it, less so of others. But the unvarnished truth of
the matter is that the various techniques and interventions
employed by the Green industry to reduce our so-called
“carbon footprint”—carbon capture, carbon
offsets (a complete canard), electric vehicles (so to
speak, a non-starter), a landscape-despoiling architecture
of wind turbines and solar panels—are not only largely
unworkable and punitively costly but are actually counter-productive.
Neither the economy nor the electrical grid can sustain
them, and neither can our supermarket shelves. The planet
is not only not going to burn up and sink beneath the
seas; rather, if climate projections from the best authorities
are disregarded, it may freeze before its time.
For it appears
that we are entering a Solar Minimum when the solar magnetic
field diminishes and cosmic radiation increases, producing
greater cloud cover and eventually cooler temperatures.
Agricultural and environmental economist Donald Avery
furnishes the latest data from the CERN particle physics
lab, which “foresees no runaway warming. Instead,
it sees an impending cold solar minimum.” Further
corroboration comes from many reputable sources (which
I have listed, albeit in abbreviated form, in an earlier
essay), including Arnab Rai Choudhuri’s closely
reasoned Nature’s Third Cycle (2015). Choudhuri
yields supporting evidence for drastically reduced sunspot
activity and the prospect of cooling summers and harsh
winters to come. We are in the initial stages of this
development now.
Of course,
there will be heatwaves, which Warmists will seize upon
to justify their prepossession; the inevitable cold spells
will be dismissed and forgotten since these are unwelcome
intervals of climatological refutation, or treated as
events to be analytically manipulated to suggest the opposite.
The New York Times (2008), for example, quoted
an array of scientists who regard cooling events as merely
“a cold kick from the tropical Pacific Ocean.”
Nothing much to see here. After all, “Many scientists
also say that the cool spell in no way undermines the
enormous body of evidence pointing to a warming world.”
Cold periods, then, are temporary fluctuations in weather
patterns, nothing more.
A NASA bulletin
(2010) added its weight to the hypothesis. A pressure
pattern called the Arctic Oscillation can cause “unseasonably
cold air masses to sweep over what are normally temperate
latitudes,” a local or interim phenomenon. Cold
spells then become indisputable signs of a planet heating
up. The effect is abetted by a mechanism called “radiative
forcing,” a chemical chain reaction producing a
multiplier heat result affecting the earth’s energy
budget. You can’t win. Present cold equals future
hot. Even if humans may one day find themselves beginning
to live in the cryosphere, climate apocalyptists will
undoubtedly dismiss it as a passing aberration.
As for Michael
Mann’s famous hockey stick graph indicating a spike
in recent temperatures, it is a flawed statistical artifact
and has been definitively disproved, as A.W. Montford
has shown in The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate
and the Corruption of Science (2010). The wrong time
scale was used to establish the mean temperature to compare
with recorded temperatures of the last century, which
accounted for the sudden vertical blade rising from the
shaft of the hockey stick. Professor Mann, it seems, did
not account for the Medieval Warming Period between approximately
800 and 1300 C.E. when temperatures were higher than they
are today. A hockey stick remains something to play hockey
with, not something you fudge a statistical lattice with.
The one thing
that is truly warming is the emotional temperature, as
well as the rhetoric of the interested parties. If against
the evidence we continue to believe that carbon is an
evil agent, and if the current anti-carbon delirium should
prevail, we are in for a chilling surprise, regardless
of our righteous convictions. This is a time for soberly
planning how to manage such dismaying contingencies of
temperature reduction rather than for accelerating them
by helping to cool the planet.
Ignorance
may be bliss, but only for a very short while.
