Is There Really a Climate Emergency?

  • A five minute video by Prager University, presented by Steve Koonis who is a former Undersecretary for science in the Obama Administration.
  • He noted that the climate is the most complex system on Earth.
  • He considers a question: Is it possible to project with any precision what it will be like 20, 40, or even 100 years from now?
  • Koonis challenges the confident assumptions of climate alarmists.
  • Many people believe:
  1. The planet is warming catastrophically because of certain human behaviours.
  2. Thanks to powerful computers we can project what the climate will be like 20, 40, or even 100 years from now.
  3. If we eliminate just one behaviour, the burning of fuels, we can prevent the climate from changing as long as we like.
  • Steve Koonis argues that “each of these presumptions – together with, the basis of our hubris regarding the changing climate – is either untrue or so far off the mark as to be useless”.
  • It is true that the globe is warming and that humans are exerting a warming influence upon it. Beyond that the paraphrase aligned from the classic movie The Princess Bride “I do not think ‘The Science’ says what you think it says.”
  • Government reports say that heat waves in the United States are no more common as they were in the 1900s. Hurricane activity is no different at it was a century ago. Floods have not increased across the globe over more than seventy years. Greenland’s ice sheet is not shrinking any more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago.
  • He asks, why are these reassuring facts better known?
  • He answers the above by saying: “Because the public gets its climate information almost exclusively from the media.”
  • It is from the media perspectives that fear sells!
  • So, media is propagating a “myth” of climate change so everyone would think a certain way as they are anxious about something that is not really so.
  • Climate change doctrine is delusion.
  • Things are not so bad. However, for those brainwashed into a climate change cult, this may sound like a crazy dangerous argument.
  • Very few people, and that includes journalists who report on climate news, read the actual science. A hard data from real science, and from US government report says, “things aren’t that bad.”
  • Nor does the public understand the questionable basis of all catastrophic climate change projections: computer modelling.
  • Projecting future climate is excruciatingly difficult. There are human influences on this, but the climate is complex. Anyone who says that climate models are “just physics” either doesn’t understand them or is being deliberately misleading.
  • While modellers base their assumptions upon both fundamental physical laws and observations of the climate, there is still considerable judgement involved. And since different modellers will make different assumptions, results may vary widely among different models.
  • A good example: Modellers must make the impact clouds on the climate. Natural fluctuations in the height and coverage of clouds have at least as much of an impact on the flows of sunlight and heat as do human influences. But how can we possibly know global cloud coverage say 10, let alone 50 years from now? Obviously, we cannot! But to create a climate model, we have to make assumptions. That’s a pretty shaky foundation on which to transform the world’s economy.
  • Creating more accurate models is not getting any easier. The more people learn about the climate system, the more they realise how complex it is.
  • Rather than admit this complexity, the media, the politicians, and a good portion of the climate science community attribute every terrible storm, every flood, every major fire to “climate change”.
  • These weather events have always been there in the past, through all history of the world. The challenge is not these events, or climate change. The only challenge is that somehow “climate change” is making everything “worse”.
  • Climate alarmists cry that governments need to get rid of fossil fuel so this will help clean earth atmosphere and therefore eliminate possibility of a “worse” climate crisis. This is not true, for in science this word “worse” is not easy to identify. CO2 does not just disappear from the earth atmosphere in a few days say like smog. CO2 hangs up there for a long time.
  • About 60 percent of any CO2 that we emit today will remain in the atmosphere for 20 years, between 35 and 55 percent will still be there after a century, and between 15 and 30 percent will remain after one thousand years.
  • It takes centuries for the excess carbon dioxide to vanish from the atmosphere.
  • Any partial reductions in CO2 emissions would only slow the increase in human influences – not prevent it, let alone reverse it.
  • CO2 is not a knob that we can turn down to fix everything. No one has that ability. That someone out there does have that ability is … HUBRIS! Hubris leads to bad decisions. A little humility and a little knowledge would lead to better decisions about the climate issue.