As Australian senator Malcolm Roberts recently pointed out, there’s been a noticeable phenomenon happening whenever climate cultists announce their latest ‘We’re All Gonna Be Rooned!’ nonsense. People are laughing at them. “The ABC and the BOM are so discredited that the majority of interactions on a post attempting to create fear over their summer forecast are laughing emoji,” Roberts said in a Facebook post.
And he’s right: on nearly every post from those two groups, as well as just about any legacy media account, laugh reacts outnumber any other reaction by at least 100 to one. And he’s right as to why: they’ve simply beclowned themselves with their endless hooting and shrieking, not just based on almost no evidence, but often directly contrary to all evidence. Like so many boys crying wolf, nobody is listening to their alarmism any more.
Along with the Covid hysteria, it’s been the single greatest self-inflicted blow to the credibility of institutions in perhaps the entire history of science.
At least some scientists are trying to rescue their institution’s shredded credibility. A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate is a report from the US Department of Energy, written by a slew of uniquely credible scientists and aimed squarely at the educated non-scientist.
John Christy, Judith Curry, Steven Koonin, Ross McKitrick, and Roy Spencer. Each is a veteran of climate debates, with decades of work in atmospheric science, climate modelling or economic analysis.
The authors are not “deniers”. They concur with the mainstream that greenhouse gases “exert a warming influence on the climate and weather”, a long-established theory first postulated in the late 19th century. But they dispute the attribution of most or more than half of the 1.07C of global warming since 1850 to human activity, contrary to most other government agencies.
The most obviously ludicrous conceit of the Climate Cult is to pretend that natural variability simply stopped dead some time during the Industrial Revolution and that all climate variation since and into the future is entirely human-caused – especially solar activity, which, astonishingly, is treated as a constant in the holy climate models.
The authors find it implausible that such “natural external drivers” have had essentially no net impact on the warming since 1850, which is a core assumption of analysis commissioned by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
For instance, the sharp increase in global temperatures in the past decade could be explained by “a significant reduction in planetary albedo since 2015, which has coincided with at least two years of record global warmth”. This refers to a decline in the fraction of incoming solar radiation that is reflected back into space rather than being absorbed by the planet.
The Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age of the 17th and 18th centuries are two better known examples of climate change that cannot be attributed to humans. Others include a period of global cooling between 1945 and 1976, known as the Grand Hiatus, which included a 0.3C drop in ocean temperatures between about 1968 and 1972.
These well-known natural variations are so problematic for the Climate Cult that they tried to do away with them altogether, whether by means of Michael Mann’s notorious ‘hockey stick’, or arguing implausibly that the Little Ice Age was solely confined to Europe. More to the point, the ‘warming’ is often a construct of computer models. The supposed ‘danger’ of the mild warming certainly isn’t reflected in the real world. The supposedly terrifying sea level rise, for instance? “About two stacked pennies a year,” which would explain why the vast majority of islands are either static or growing in area, not ‘vanishing under the waves’.
More importantly, the report asks the question that should have been asked from the start, but was ruled as heresy: what if global warming is a net benefit? After all, humans and nature have historically thrived in warm climates.
Between a quarter and half of the Earth experienced a beneficial “greening” between 1982 and 2011, owing to the increased levels of carbon dioxide in the air.
A 2021 National Bureau of Economic Research study found carbon dioxide “emissions had boosted US crop production since 1940 by 50 to 80 per cent”. Another study, from 2023, found a “warming climate would yield positive benefits for French agriculture that were between two and 20 times larger than had previously been estimated”.
After all, plants and animals evolved under much higher levels of carbon dioxide in the past. Drawing on the work of Institute of Public Affairs adjunct fellow Peter Ridd, the DOE report demonstrates that concerns regarding the impact of higher water temperature and decreasing pH on the Great Barrier Reef are unwarranted. Recent data shows coral coverage on the reef has surged across the past decade, rather than declined, as many people mistakenly believe.
Humans even could benefit from higher overall temperatures, given extreme cold is significantly more lethal than extreme heat, a fact on which the IPCC has been silent. Public policy expert Roger Pielke Jr noted, as highlighted in the DOE report, that “losses per weather disaster as a proportion of GDP have decreased by about 80 per cent since 1980”.
So, are we collectively shooting ourselves in the feet with the ‘de-carbonisation’ obsession and not just beggaring our economies, but striving to impose a worse world on the globe than would otherwise have been?
