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COMMENTARY: Climate Alarmists Only Want the Headlines That Suit Them – Anything Else is Not Welcome – Jim Warren


These translations are done via Google Translate

 

by Jim Warren

News stories about global warming continue to be dominated by the views of the overly alarmed.

This is a problem for fans of the petroleum and natural gas industries in the alienated West. That’s because people who are continuously misinformed about climate change by the media are more likely to support high cost, ineffective federal environmental policy.

When the world’s temperatures stopped rising between 2000 and 2012, climate crusaders and their friends in the media rarely, if ever, mentioned it. So what if the 12 year warming hiatus back then didn’t match the predictions of the climate models and warming scenarios endorsed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). When the models proved faulty, mainstream journalists didn’t want to talk about it because it challenged the infallibility of their interpretations of climate science.

Fast forward to 2024, many journalists attribute the fires in California, heavy rainfall events associated with hurricanes in the US southeast and the 2023 climate spike to the use of fossil fuels and methane produced by cattle. There are talking heads on legacy media who assume California can be saved only by retaining the climate change policies implemented by the Biden administration and by sticking religiously to the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change.

Surprise! It has happened again. The IPCC climate models failed to predict the upward blip in the average global temperature of 0.2O C first observed in 2023—just like they failed to predict or explain the warming hiatus two decades ago.

According to the computer models climate scientists rely on, the planet wasn’t supposed to warm that fast—something like 0.2O C per decade is what they predicted. As was the case in the wake of the warming hiatus, climate scientists are scrambling to figure out what happened. And this time, they are not simply blaming the warming on higher levels of atmospheric CO2 and methane due to the burning of fossil fuels and belching cows. The effects of those “evils” were already built into the models.

One of the more popular explanations scientists are examining suggests that efforts backed by environmentalists to reduce sulfur emissions from large trans-Pacific cargo ships and coal-fired power plants in China could be to blame. Apparently, the sulfur they emitted reflected solar radiation away from Earth, producing a cooling effect.

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It’s par for the course. Environmentalists repeatedly call for policy measures that are fashionable in green circles which, when adopted, produce all sorts of adverse unintended consequences. They called for the shutdown of Germany’s nuclear reactors to reduce carbon emissions. That forced the Germans to reopen their coal-fired power plants which increased emissions well beyond previous levels. The imposition of carbon taxes in Canada was supposed to reduce emissions. It didn’t. But the taxes did have a huge inflationary effect on the cost of living.

Another theory for explaining the warming spike is that we have been going through the period in the solar cycle when the energy sent to the earth by the sun is most intense, and that helped warm us up. And then there is the El Nino that began in 2023 and lasted an especially long time—all the way into 2024. Or it could be because for some reason cloud cover over the Pacific has declined (the reduction in sulfur emissions could be the cause of that too). Or it could be all of the above or something else entirely.

Yet, while climate scientists are unclear about what caused the warming spike, there are journalists who continue to hang responsibility for any and all extreme weather events on warming generated by the usual suspects—fossil fuels and hamburgers. Journalists tend to rely more heavily on each other’s mutually reinforcing social media posts than they do on the actual findings of scientific research. Could be they don’t take the time to study the actual science. Could be they’re not bright enough to understand it.

CO2 induced global warming has probably been playing a role in increasing the intensity of some extreme weather events. However, determining which weather events global warming is influencing and by how much is beyond what anyone can confidently calculate with any precision at present—the climate system is simply too complex and chaotic.

You will find some news stories claiming there is such an average, but they are typically based on conjecture supported by limited and often misleading data such as rising insured losses. Sure, insured losses are higher today than they were in the 1920s, but that’s largely because fewer people carried insurance in past decades. In addition, the size of cities subject to coastal storms and tidal surges has been increasing exponentially. When hurricanes and typhoons occur today they often affect more people and built structures than they did in the past.

Conceivably there is a statistical average global effect of CO2 emissions on extreme weather events hiding somewhere in the mass of data used to build the climate models. I’m betting that in the unlikely event they ever actually find that elusive average, the effect will be closer to 0.5% than it is to 50%.

Even if human caused climate change is partly responsible for the problems people are experiencing in California, reducing fossil fuel and methane emissions by large amounts on Tuesday won’t be reflected in significant planetary cooling on Wednesday. It could take decades for the climate to fully respond to significant emissions reduction efforts. Furthermore, reducing emissions by a lot and quickly has proven to be extremely difficult and often comes with the side effect of being economically ruinous.

People should be focusing much more attention on resilience building: preparing for, coping with and adapting to hazardous weather conditions—and some already are. It turns out finding solutions doesn’t require rocket science, just common sense: quit building suburbs in forests and on seasonally parched scrubland, maintain fire breaks and bury the power lines, and if there isn’t enough water available to fight fires, quit building cities in the desert. But adaptation efforts come with costs. In Canada it will become increasingly difficult to invest in adaptation measures if the country is further impoverished by Liberal deficits and debt and the stifling of our most important export industry.

When average global temperatures decline or cease climbing at recently experienced rates, like they are bound to do, what are the chances it will be reflected in the headlines? The answer of course is “slim to none.” You can’t write sensational attention grabbing stories without scaring the crap out of people.

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