Andrew L. Urban
It is a wonder of the modern world how climate alarmists can still conjure up a climate emergency in 2021 after 30 years of climate emergency, predicated on fossil fuels like carbon dioxide warming the planet – without ANY scientific evidence to support the claim. To this day, it is enough to claim validity by uttering the phrase ‘follow the science’. But if you do actually follow ‘the science’ (a ridiculed phrase), you will find only evidence to the contrary of that claimed. Yet policy makers blindly accede to the hysteria.
Nothing says it better or more concisely than internationally acclaimed geology professor Ian Plimer’s formulation: “Annual human emissions (3% of the total) of carbon dioxide are meant to drive global warming. This has never been shown. If it could be shown, then it would also have to be shown that natural emissions (97%) don’t drive global warming.”
In his book Heaven and Earth (Connor Court), Plimer puts global warming in embarrassing context: “The history of temperature change over time is related to the shape of continents, the shape of the sea floor, the pulling apart of the crust, the stitching back together of the crust, the opening and closing of sea ways, changes in the Earth’s orbit, changes in solar energy, supernoval eruptions, comet dust, impacts by comets and asteroids, volcanic activity, bacteria, soil formation, sedimentation, ocean currents and the chemistry of air. If we humans, in a fit of ego, think we can change these normal planetary processes, then we need stronger medication.” And he wasn’t referring to the medicine proscribed by the likes of yesterday’s Al Gore or today’s John Kerry.
The IPCC was set up (1988) to serve the purposes of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The ultimate objective of the UNFCCC is the seed that bore such bastard fruit as ‘the science’. It set the objective as “to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [i.e., man-made] interference with the climate system”. This is saying “man made emissions of carbon dioxide and the like are the cause of global warming – fix it”. The unfounded, politically motivated and predetermined diagnosis was already in, even before the first dollar of research billions was paid out.
That bad seed has continued to bear unsafe product at the IPCC, as Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise uncovers in her thorough book, The Delinquent Teenager (Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert). The false confidence in the IPCC’s scientific probity trumpeted by the organisation and its uninformed – wilful or otherwise – adherents, makes a total mockery of the ruling orthodoxy on climate science as expressed by the IPCC.
Renewing the frenzied, hysterical calls for declaring a climate emergency have been unaccompanied by evidence of any emergency.
For example, Australia’s terrible bushfires, such as those of the summer of 2020, have been trumpeted as frightening evidence of the warming threat of climate change. The method is unscientifically simple: ‘Show picture – label picture as evidence of cause’. Retired Monash University researcher David Peckham told SBS news: “If there is any global warming … it is so slow and so small that the bushfire event is totally overrun by the fuel state.” He reckons that “If we got 10 per cent (fuel reduction burning) then our area burnt would drop by 90 per cent and our intensity by at least that and undoubtedly more …”
Pity the media doesn’t show the massive build up of forest fire fuel on the ground, eh? And what colour is the policy that has prevented better forest fire fuel management? Woke green.
So what does this ‘climate emergency’ actually look like?
* The most comprehensive modeling of remote sensing data so far shows the area on Earth covered by plants in the past 30 years or so has increased by 18 million square kilometres — about 2.5 times the size of the Australian continent — largely due to the fertilising effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). “[The greening] has the ability to fundamentally change the cycling of water and carbon in the climate system,” said Dr Zaichun Zhu, from Peking University in China and lead author of the (2016) study.
While the researchers found between 25 to 50 per cent of all vegetated areas of the land have become greener, only 4 per cent have become browner.
These included Mongolia, Argentina and areas of North America close to Alaska.
While south-eastern Australia also showed browning, overall the Australian continent was greening.
* Rain captured in ancient stalagmites shows Australian tropical cyclone activity is at its lowest level for the past 500 to 1500 years.
* Most pacific islands are safe from sea level rise. Numerous studies over the past decade, using aerial photographs that became available from World War II onward, show many atoll islands are growing.
* The good news that polar bears are thriving is unlikely to draw as much attention as images of a starving polar bear scrounging for food on Somerset Island. Nevertheless, the story of a resurgent polar bear population deserves to be told and applauded. In the 1950s, population estimates put their number at around 5,000. New estimates from the International Union for Conservation of Nature show a mid-point estimate of 26,500 (range: 22,000 to 31,000) in 2015. In The State of the Polar Report 2018, zoologist Susan J. Crockford says updates to IUCN data put the new global mid-point estimate at more than 30,000. (Sir David Attenborough and the BBC have been accused of misleading the public about the state of the polar bear population in Canada.)
The most important and useful recent essay on climate change is an op-ed by Dr Judith Curry writing for a Madrid paper coinciding with COP25, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid. One of her points is of great relevance in the context of a rush to a ‘climate emergency’: “We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations. However, the perception of manmade climate change as a near-term apocalypse has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.”
As she says, “The extreme rhetoric of the Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously.”