Silly Season at the UN: 1989 vs. 2021 Climate Doomsday (it’s all politics now)

From MasterResource

By Robert Bradley Jr. — August 10, 2021

“The climate of many countries seems to be one of the great reasons why idleness, dishonesty, immobility, stupidity, and weakness of will prevail. If we can conquer climate, the whole world will become stronger and nobler.”

– Ellsworth Huntington, Civilization and Climate (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1915), p. 294.

Global government by an intellectual/political elite is the commanding height of commanding heights. Witness the (now) 33-year Great Alarm of anthropogenic global warming (aka climate change, global weirding).

UN 2021: 6th Climate Assessment

It’s all bad. it’s only going to get worse. It is civilization’s last chance. Red Alert for humankind….

But a massive energy transformation can avert the worst part. “The innovations in this report, and advances in climate science that it reflects,” said IPCC chair Hoesung Lee, “provide an invaluable input into climate negotiations and decision-making.”

That’s about all you need to know about the latest from the IPCC.

Where are the scientists who have documented that global warming is not a major threat? That real-world warming is well below model-predicted? That higher CO2 concentrations have distinct benefits to leave the sign of the externality unknown?

The dissenters are long gone, for the most part. Many well known names are in their own silos, patiently and politely conducting their own research and analysis. Some are keeping a low profile within academia. Still others have probably decided not to become climate scientists and have a career blackballed by a mainstream less concerned about human betterment than transforming an economic system that do not like.

The IPCC’s latest is all well orchestrated. A scientific report to save the world just ahead of the UN Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP26) conference to be held in in Glasgow, UK in less than two months. A conference, by the way, that finds itself in the headwinds of a tripartite fossil-fuel boom and splintering politics.

Reality Check: UN 1989

History matters. And in the climate debate, mankind’s long concern about climate and recent angst about global warming are worth revisiting for both perspective and optimism.

Reprinted below is an AP report from 1989 on the consensus of United Nations on climate change. I report; you decide ….

UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.

Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.

He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.

As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.

Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.

″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said.

UNEP estimates it would cost the United States at least $100 billion to protect its east coast alone.

Shifting climate patterns would bring back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time, according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.

Excess carbon dioxide is pouring into the atmosphere because of humanity’s use of fossil fuels and burning of rain forests, the study says. The atmosphere is retaining more heat than it radiates, much like a greenhouse.

The most conservative scientific estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the next 30 years, said Brown.

The difference may seem slight, he said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the 8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago.

Brown said if the warming trend continues, ″the question is will we be able to reverse the process in time? We say that within the next 10 years, given the present loads that the atmosphere has to bear, we have an opportunity to start the stabilizing process.″

He said even the most conservative scientists ″already tell us there’s nothing we can do now to stop a … change″ of about 3 degrees.

″Anything beyond that, and we have to start thinking about the significant rise of the sea levels … we can expect more ferocious storms, hurricanes, wind shear, dust erosion.″

He said there is time to act, but there is no time to waste.

UNEP is working toward forming a scientific plan of action by the end of 1990, and the adoption of a global climate treaty by 1992. In May, delegates from 103 nations met in Nairobi, Kenya – where UNEP is based – and decided to open negotiations on the treaty next year.

Nations will be asked to reduce the use of fossil fuels, cut the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases such as methane and fluorocarbons, and preserve the rain forests.

″We have no clear idea about the ecological minimum of green space that the planet needs to function effectively. What we do know is that we are destroying the tropical rain forest at the rate of 50 acres a minute, about one football field per second,″ said Brown.

Each acre of rain forest can store 100 tons of carbon dioxide and reprocess it into oxygen.

Brown suggested that compensating Brazil, Indonesia and Kenya for preserving rain forests may be necessary.

The European Community istalking about a half-cent levy on each kilowatt- hour of fossil fuels to raise $55 million a year to protect the rain forests, and other direct subsidies may be possible, he said.

The treaty could also call for improved energy efficiency, increasing conservation, and for developed nations to transfer technology to Third World nations to help them save energy and cut greenhouse gas emissions, said Brown.

The fix was in very early at the UN. The rest is history.