In 2023, We Became Lost in Neverland on Climate Change 

 

By Tom Harris
ThePostEmail.com

Wikimedia Commons, public domain

This year, the UN, governments and even some scientists lost their collective minds on climate change.

In July, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said:

“Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning. Children swept away by monsoon rains, families running from the flames (and) workers collapsing in scorching heat.”

Guterres now claims that “the era of global warming has ended” and “the era of global boiling has arrived.”

Three months later, Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir said the same at the opening session of the 2023 Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik. She said,

“We no longer find ourselves in an era of global warming but of global boiling.”

Not to be left behind in absurd, end-of-the-world rhetoric, President Joe Biden told the media in Hanoi in September (see Remarks by President Biden in a Press Conference | The White House:

“… the only existential threat humanity faces even more frightening than a — than a nuclear war is global warming going above 1.5 degrees in the next 20 — 10 years. We’re — that’d be real trouble. There’s no way back from that.”

And, in October, twelve international scientists had a study titled “The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory” published in the journal Bioscience declaring:

“life on planet Earth is under siege” and that “we are pushing our planetary systems into dangerous instability.”

And don’t get me started on the insanity of 97,000 delegates getting together in Dubai to proclaim even crazier proclamations.

Rather than focus on preparing for the very real problems of a continually changing climate, our leaders are concentrated instead on the politically correct, but scientifically impossible goal of ‘stopping climate change.’ The whole lot of them seem to have been transported to Neverland.

Peter Pan author J. M. Barrie tells us that Neverlands are found in the minds of children.

There, with the help of fairy dust, Peter Pan can fly, and he teaches others to overcome their common sense and soar as well. Peter claims greatness, is able to feel danger when it is near, and even has the ability to imagine things into existence. In fact, there is almost nothing the hero of Neverland cannot do — yet in order to maintain such powers, Peter must stay childlike and forget everything he learns about what happens in the real world.

Today’s climate alarmism could have come directly out of Barrie’s book. The UN believes they can sense climate danger decades in advance, a power that requires forgetting that every prior prediction they made turned out to be wrong. They imagine that today’s global climate models (GCM), simulations that utterly failed to forecast the recent extended “pause” in global warming, provide lawmakers with the “unequivocal” knowledge they need to enact trillion-dollar policies to limit planetary temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

To back up such extraordinary claims, they tell us that there is an “overwhelming consensus” of scientists who agree with their position. This statement requires that they imagine thousands of well-qualified skeptical scientists out of existence, or imagine that they constitute a tiny minority of the scientific community that isn’t worth their time to listen to.

They apparently know nothing about the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). These are among the most comprehensive documents ever published about the current state of climate science. Citing thousands of peer-reviewed scientific references published in the world’s leading science journals, the NIPCC reports show clearly that today’s climate is not unusual and the evidence for future climate calamity is very weak. These documents conclude that we are not causing a climate crisis.

The most recent (December 2018) volume of the NIPCC reports concluded:

“…fundamental uncertainties arising from insufficient observational evidence and disagreements over how to interpret data and set the parameters of models prevent science from determining whether human greenhouse gas emissions are having effects on Earth’s atmosphere that could endanger life on the planet. There is no compelling scientific evidence of long-term trends in global mean temperatures or climate impacts that exceed the bounds of natural variability.”

In other words, the modest changes we are now seeing in climate are almost certainly natural.

If they don’t have time to read the CCR reports, the least they can do is study the short NIPCC booklet, “Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming.” The report was authored by climatologist Dr. Craig Idso of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change in Arizona, geologist the late Dr. Robert Carter, former Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at James Cook University in Australia, and physicist the late Dr. S. Fred Singer, Emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia and NIPCC founder.

The booklet refutes most of the alarmist proclamations. For example, it states:

• “There is no survey or study showing “consensus” on the most important scientific issues in the climate change debate.”
• “Neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late twentieth century surface warming lay outside normal natural variability.”
• “No evidence exists that … [a future warming of 2°C] would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being.”
• “No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions.”
• “GCMs [Global Climate Models] systematically over-estimate the sensitivity of climate to CO₂.”
• “Significant correlations exist between climate … and solar activity over the past few hundred years … Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO₂ emissions.”
• “Melting of Arctic sea ice and polar icecaps is not occurring at ‘unnatural’ rates.”
• “Sea-level rise is not accelerating.”
• “No convincing relationship has been established between warming over the past 100 years and increases in extreme weather events.”

It is not just within the science where the UN and their supporters have imagined away reality. To accomplish their fantastic goals, they want to “decarbonize” the world’s energy supply — expensive solar and wind power would be in, relatively inexpensive coal, oil and natural gas would be out. Hydrocarbon fuels — the current source of over 80% of the world’s energy — has to be quickly replaced with renewable power to meet the UN’s new goals, according to climate activists.

But were this ever to come about in the real world, billions more of the world’s poor would join the nearly one billion people who currently lack access to electricity.

Millions more would be thrown out of work as companies went bankrupt due to soaring energy prices. Social unrest would naturally follow and once-prosperous societies that took generations to build would inevitably crumble.

Some fantasy.

The developed world must wake up to the climate hoax that threatens to ruin us all. The NIPCC gives the following sensible policy advice:

• “Policymakers should seek out advice from independent, nongovernment organizations and scientists who are free of financial and political conflicts of interest.”
• “Individual nations should take charge of setting their own climate policies based upon the hazards that apply to their particular geography, geology, weather, and culture.”
• “Rather than invest scarce world resources in a quixotic campaign based on politicized and unreliable science, world leaders would do well to turn their attention to the real problems their people and their planet face.”

After drinking the poison Captain Hook had intended for Peter Pan, Tinker Bell survived only because children across the world clapped loudly to show their belief in fairies. The UN believes their hopeless, naïve, and dangerous climate change plans can survive as long as the media and politicians keep clapping. It’s time they stopped and let the climate scare die.

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Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.