American Stewards | Red Flag Warning for Climate Hysteria

(Liberty Matters) The progressive left predicts assured apocalypse of planet earth if we do not take drastic action today. They have been telling us the science is settled and demand we embrace the Green New Deal and 30 x 30 (soon to be 50 x 50) to avoid the inevitable climate catastrophe. 

Yesterday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) upped the hysteria as they released the Sixth Assessment Report proclaiming human influences are warming the planet beyond repair.  We must embrace their solutions, which conveniently place them in charge of every function of our lives.

Energy and Environment News (E&E News) ran with the following lead to their story published yesterday: 

“World leaders are rapidly running out of time to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. And without dramatic action, even less ambitious goals — such as checking climate change at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — soon could be out of reach.

That’s the sobering conclusion of the world’s top climate scientists, who today released a milestone report on the state of global warming. … It forecasts a grim future in which babies born today would grow old on a planet that’s hotter and more dangerous than the one their parents entered.” (IPCC: Window closing to stop worst effects of climate change, E&E News, August 9, 2021)

This report is one of the more measured accounts of the panicked sentiment pouring out from the environmental community.  Nevertheless, cooler heads — or the scientists who seek to inform rather than persuade— have thoroughly discredited the models and alarmist predictions.

Earlier this month, Science Magazine published an article entitled, “U.N. Climate Panel Confronts Implausibly Hot Forecasts of Future Warming,” that reveals the predictions the earth will rapidly warm, are, well, implausible.

“[A]s climate scientists face this alarming reality [of a warming world], the climate models that help them project the future have grown a little too alarmist. Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast.” (As quoted by Steven Hayward in Powerline August 2, 2021)

What has always been problematic about the climate crisis predictions is that they are based on projections, or highly fallible guesses. The conclusions drawn — that human-caused activities are making the world hotter, weather more extreme, biodiversity lost and species extinct — are based on models informed by historical data and future assumptions. One can manufacture a model to predict any number of scenario’s by changing the assumptions, using different methods, cherry-picking historical timeframes, or simply relying on incomplete data, all of which has been done to manufacture the climate crisisSociety wants to trust that those generating the models are doing so in an unbiased and honest manner, but are they?

Many climatologists have been sounding the alarm for years that the science is being misinterpreted and that the models cannot accurately predict our future because in large part, we do not know enough about the complexities and influences for climate to make an educated guess.  

The Science article reveals this to be true.  Not only do they now believe the climate models predicted a “too hot” future, they also have found that these same models “were out of step with records of past climate.” In other words, when run backwards they failed to agree with what actually occurred.

Yesterday, the Climatologist Bjorn Lomborg, critic of the alarmist viewpoint, took to twitter to respond to the IPPC’s claim that climate related deaths will increase if we don’t reduce fossil fuel use and agriculture’s methane contributions drastically today. He posts a historical chart of climate related deaths with a dramatic trend line going down and states:

“Here is the updated version to 2021: still fewer people die from climate-related disasters.  Climate-related deaths have dropped 96%-98% over the last century. Breathless climate reporting misleads us, and panic makes us less likely to tackle climate smartly.”

You can read his peer-reviewed article, published July 2020 in Science Direct here.

Earlier this year, Steven E. Koonin, who served as Undersecretary for Science in the U.S. Department of Energy under President Obama, published one of the best sourced and level-headed analyses of these flawed methods and interpretations in his book “Unsettled.” Analyzing the same data, models, and science as the climate alarmists, he shows how their conclusions are more than misinformed, they are dishonest.

“That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag — it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates. In particular, it greatly complicates sorting out the relative roles of natural variability and human influences in the warming that has occurred since 1980.” (Page 91)

In one analysis, he shows how the data concludes that climate in the United States has become milder, not more extreme as alarmists have claimed.  Referring to two graphs plotting the land and oceans temperature over time, he states: “These two panels together show something that is completely contrary to common perception — that temperature extremes in the contiguous US have become less common and somewhat milder since the late nineteenth century.” (Page 107)

He also shows how the data and primary studies conclude that extreme weather events, such as hurricanes and tornadoes are not increasing.  Reports concluding otherwise have selectively chosen time-periods depicting an increase in storm frequency and enabling them to graph sharply upward trend lines. But when the complete known history is charted, the graph results in a “straight-line,” or no change.

“Whatever the future holds, the descriptions of hurricane data in the assessment reports misleads by omission. … As for the media, pointing to hurricanes as an example of the ravages of human-caused climate change is at best unconvincing, and at worst plainly dishonest.”

Thankfully, Koonin’s book is widely available and written expressly so the non-scientist and scientist alike can understand what the climate data really tells us, and importantly what it does not. We highly recommend you read the book.

Another good source that thoroughly and quickly debunks the climate crisis is the website Climatism.)  You can read recent their post here. 

It is through this same flawed modeling that agenda driven biologists have claimed over one million species will go extinct in the coming decades — hence the need to permanently protect 30 percent of our land and oceans by 2030.  The science does not support their claim, and neither should we. Americans should not cower to their calls to control our land.