H. Sterling Burnett March 17, 2022
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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Climate Change Poses No Existential Threat. Nada. Not Any.
- Podcast of the Week: Gas Prices Skyrocketing, Energy Crisis Incoming?
- Indian Subcontinent’s Climate Dominated by Natural Factors
- Australian Court Determines No Climate Duty of Care Owed to Children
- Climate Comedy
- Video of the Week: The Oil Crisis, Saving the Planet, and Talking Climate Realism
- BONUS Video of the Week: Is the Climate Agenda Dead?
- Recommended Sites
Climate Change Poses No Existential Threat. Nada. Not Any.
A refreshing article in the Washington Examiner demonstrates what I have repeatedly said for more than a decade: climate change does not pose an “existential threat.” In fact, that’s the title of the article: “Climate change is not an ‘existential threat.’” In discussing the energy crisis that has arisen during Joe Biden’s brief tenure as president of the United States—primarily because of Biden’s climate policies—David Simon writes,
The Biden administration’s climate change policies have sharply increased oil prices, damaging the domestic economy and increasing the cost of nearly everything consumers buy. By increasing revenues for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime, they also made Russia stronger and more dangerous at a critical time, thus damaging national security. …
But worst of all, the Biden administration’s basis for these policies, the claim that global warming presents an “existential threat,” is fraudulent. It is not based on any scientific consensus, and in fact, it ignores evidence of environmental benefits of global warming that offset its harm.
In this article, chock full of data, Simon schools so-called journalists in the corporate media on how to examine claims that humans are causing a climate catastrophe. Simon presents data and research that conclusively demonstrate temperature and climate-related deaths have significantly declined during the period of modern warming. Climate Realism has also pointed this out on numerous occasions, refuting alarmists’ claims to the contrary.
For example, arguably the largest study ever to examine excess mortality associated with temperature was published in the July 1 edition of The Lancet, one of the world’s most prominent health journals. The study’s authors, 68 scientists representing universities and research institutes in 33 countries spanning all regions of the world, came to two clear conclusions: cold temperatures contribute to far more deaths each year than warmer temperatures, and deaths associated with extreme temperatures, hot or cold, are declining. The researchers found nearly 10 times more people die due to cold temperatures than hot temperatures. Moreover, as global temperatures modestly increase, the number of people dying because of suboptimal temperatures is decreasing.
“Importantly, cold-related death decreased 0.51 per cent from 2000 to 2019, while heat-related death increased 0.21 per cent, leading to a reduction in net mortality due to cold and hot temperatures,” the study reports.
Considering that 10 times more people were dying from cold than from heat, the study indicates the warming between 2000 and 2019 saved 3.1 million lives from cold-related deaths, at the expense of just 130,000 extra deaths caused by heat. As a result, global warming saved a net of nearly three million lives during the past 20 years.
This study confirms what previous research has consistently shown. In 2015, for example, The Lancet published the results of another large-scale temperature/mortality study, in which the researchers found cold weather directly or indirectly killed 1,700 percent more people than warm or hot weather. The scientists examined health data from 384 locations in 13 countries, accounting for more than 74 million deaths. The authors of this study wrote,
[N]on-optimum ambient temperature is responsible for substantial excess in mortality, with important differences between countries. Although most previous research has focused on heat-related effects, most of the attributable deaths were caused by cold temperatures. Despite the attention given to extreme weather events, most of the effect happened on moderately hot and moderately cold days, especially moderately cold days.
Even The New York Times acknowledged the importance of that study, with Jane Brody writing, “Over time, as global temperatures rise, milder winter temperatures are likely to result in fewer cold-related deaths, a benefit that could outweigh a smaller rise in heat-caused mortality.”
In addition to correcting the record on heat-related deaths, Simon dismantles various climate fictions about worsening natural disasters, using readily available data:
The facts regarding natural disasters also do not support the “existential threat” claim. The number of hurricanes per year, a 2021 EPA report shows, has not increased since the late 19th century. Moreover, although you wouldn’t know it from the panicky, sensationalized news coverage, the total acreage burnt by forest fires annually has decreased, and most rivers flood less today than they used to.
Since 1920, Earth’s average temperature has risen by 1.12 degrees and the world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to almost eight billion. Even so, the number of people killed each year by natural disasters has declined by about 90 percent. That statistic, more than any other, puts the lie to claims of an existential crisis due to climate.
There is also the global air pollution death rate, which has declined by about 45 percent over the last three decades. Again, no “existential threat” here.
Simon is correct. Research published at Climate Realism has refuted assertions about worsening wildfires and hurricanes on multiple occasions.
Simon also discusses research showing the positive side of climate change: “global warming has increased both agricultural yields and growth of forests, grasslands, and tree leaves.”
Climate Change Weekly and Climate Realism have refuted claims climate change is a threat to crop production more than 100 times. We have cited research and hard data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showing regional and global crop production and crop yields have regularly, almost yearly, set new records during the recent period of modern warming.
Basic agronomy explains why crop production is booming under current climate conditions. As detailed by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change in Climate Change Reconsidered: Biological Impacts and Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels, the carbon dioxide humans have been pumping into the air since the middle of the twentieth century has enriched plant growth and improved plants’ water-use efficiency, thereby contributing to record crop yields.
Laboratory experiments and real-world field research show as carbon dioxide increases, plant fitness and flower pollination improve, plants develop more-extensive root systems to extract greater amounts of nutrients from even poor-quality soil, plants use water more efficiently by reducing the number and openness of stomata through which they lose moisture during transpiration, and plants produce greater amounts of natural substances that repel insects and fight off competing weeds.
All of this has helped bring about the largest decline in hunger, malnutrition, and starvation in human history.
Simon’s conclusion is spot-on and speaks for itself:
Biden administration climate change policies are sensationalizing the threats while ignoring all the benefits. They rely on speculative “models” that supposedly project global temperatures and predict disasters. But these models are highly unreliable, … unable even to reproduce the temperature changes of the 20th century.
The Biden administration’s campaign against U.S. oil production and pipelines is not just harmful—it is an environmental fraud.
To quote longtime radio host Paul Harvey, that’s “the rest of the story”: the very good news the mainstream media and various scientific and political shills aren’t telling you about climate change.
SOURCES: Washington Examiner, Climate Realism; Climate Change Weekly
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Podcast of the Week
The Heartland Institute’s Donald Kendal, Jim Lakely, Linnea Lueken, and the Center on the American Experiment’s Isaac Orr present episode 336 of the In The Tank Podcast. On this episode, the ITT crew talks the rise in gas prices and the Biden Administration’s contradictory responses to the increases. From promoting green energy and recommending electric vehicles, to buying more oil from Saudi Arabia and touting increased oil production in the U.S., the Biden Administration seems to be scrambling.Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!
IPCC Report Misrepresents Climate Data
A new book from the academic publisher Elsevier examines the factors that drive weather conditions, particularly the all-important monsoon seasons that affect the billions of people living in and around the Indian subcontinent. Monsoon rains bring periodic destruction and support regional agricultural production.
With contributions from more than 60 researchers and scientists across 23 chapters, the book examines the factors that drive, contribute to, or influence monsoons on seasonal, annual, decadal, and longer-term scales, both in the “big picture” and in minute detail.
The book indicates all evidence suggests short, medium, and long term monsoons patterns are dominated by nature. If climate change has any effect, it hasn’t been definitively measured or identified thus far.
Looking ahead, the book shows climate model simulations of future negative changes in seasonal monsoon timing and severity tied to human greenhouse gas emissions all flow from RCP 8.5 model runs, which are impossible to obtain because of the limits of available fossil fuels. This and other factors have definitively discredited RCP 8.5 in the literature, so it is unclear why some chapter authors use its simulations to forecast possible future monsoon trends in and around the Indian subcontinent.
The overall consensus of the book is that the primary factors driving seasonal monsoon rains are shifts of various natural teleconnections along different time scales. Teleconnections are recurrent and persistent large-scale patterns of pressure and circulation anomalies. The patterns responsible for monsoon frequency, severity, stability, and duration overlap include global, regional, and localized oceanic and atmospheric anomalies. These include the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation (AMO), El Nino and La Nina oscillations (ENSO), Eurasian snowfall trends, the Indian Ocean Dipole, and others.
Any measurable anthropogenic forcing affecting monsoon patterns has yet to be discovered.
The view of the authors of the book’s chapters on climate models is summed up fairly well in this statement from Chapter 1:
Despite the improvements in [General Circulation Models] over the last two decades, the quality of their prediction of ISM (Indian Summer Monsoon), especially in its operational mode, is still a matter of debate. The dynamical prediction skill originates mainly from the fact that monsoon strength is tightly linked to teleconnections. Current couple models have limited skills in predicting teleconnections to ISM.
In Chapter 18, the authors observe that among the third generation of climate models only two of the 38 accurately describe the established relationship between ISM and the AMO. The fifth generation of models (CMIP5) does only slightly better, and their projections of the ISM/AMO teleconnections are all over the map. The CMIP 5 models are incapable of modelling or only weakly model the known (observed) relationship between the AMO and changes in the tropical Pacific region and shifts in sea surface temperature anomalies, the authors explain.
The authors of Chapter 20 find climate models don’t agree on what kinds of changes in the ISM one might expect from anthropogenic forcing:
[T]here has been no consensus among modelling studies on either the past change or the projections of the future change of the [ENSO-ISM] teleconnection. [A]nalyzing CMIP5 model simulations … showed that natural variability plays a dominant role in decadal ENSO-ISM teleconnection during the twentieth century.
Although climate models forecast some monsoon pattern changes going forward in the twenty-first century, the changes are based on multiple model runs from the discredited RCP 8.5 extreme emissions scenarios. The RCP 8.5 simulations don’t produce consistent projections that rise above “noise,” or natural background fluctuations in the climate in the region. The authors state the “ENSO-ISM relation during the twentieth and twenty-first century shows no robust change in the sense that most of the models agree on the sign of change, leaving us with inconclusive results.”
In short, this book catalogs what is known and what remains unknown about the global, regional, and local teleconnections that drive the Indian summer monsoons, and it concludes any anthropogenic impact on monsoons is swamped by natural factors, as far as can be determined and reasonably expected.
SOURCE: Elsevier
Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites
Australian Court Determines No Climate Duty of Care Owed to Children
A unanimous Australian Federal Court ruling found the nation’s government does not have an enforceable duty of care to protect young people from harm from climate change, when assessing fossil fuel projects or other government actions that might result in greenhouse gas emissions.
The ruling overturned an earlier win by a group of eight youths who brought a class action on behalf of all Australian children, in which Justice Mordecai Bromberg ruled the government did have a common-law duty of care.
Although the federal court did not dispute climate change is occurring or that it may pose serious harm to humanity, the court ruled existing Australian law establishes no such duty of care. Chief Justice James Allsop wrote in his decision, “allowing the ‘duty of care’ ruling to stand would have required changes to government policy, [an action] that should be left to the government itself, not the courts.”
SOURCE: Australian Broadcasting Corporation News
Video of the Week: The Oil Crisis, Saving the Planet, and Talking Climate Realism
The Heartland Institute’s H. Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, and Linnea Lueken are featured on this episode of Climate Change Roundtable. Join us every Friday at the same time for another episode, and subscribe to the channel and “hit the bell” to get notifications of when the show is about to start.
ISSUE 1: Why are gas prices rising?
ISSUE 2: Our ‘Leaders’ Are Ruining Our Lives and the National Economy to ‘Save the Planet.’
ISSUE 3: Watts Up With That Essay Contest – Is there really a climate crisis? (A Greta Leap Forward)
BONUS Video of the Week: Is the Climate Agenda Dead?
The Heartland Institute’s Donald Kendal, Jim Lakely, Linnea Lueken, and JunkScience.com’s Steve Milloy present episode 337 of the In The Tank Podcast. On this episode, the ITT crew discusses the question “is the climate change agenda dead?” In light of rising gas and energy prices, it looks as though the climate change agenda is being put on the back burner.
Climate Comedy
Current models have such low vertical resolution that they can never even hope to replicate the convective instability that create monsoon and limit ocean surface temperature to 30C.
If they ever get convective instability right then any notion of catastrophic global warming goes away. They will realise that Earth’s energy balance is a function of two ocean surface temperature limits. 30C at the top end and -1.8C at the lower end.
In fact, the real existential threat, to billions, esp the poorest, are the plans to combat the phony threat of climate change from fossil fuels.
We have this exactly backwards; anthropogenic CO2 will give warming that is net beneficial and greening from anthropogenic CO2 will be amazingly cornucopious.
Our descendants will understand and be amazed that we couldn’t.
And oh boy will they curse our blind foolishness and our susceptibility to unnecessary fear and misplaced guilt.
==========•••
Increasing atmospheric CO2 will drive higher crop yields, but insignificant global warming. Climate is INsensitive to rising CO2. Also, green energy is not green and produces little useful (dispatchable) energy. Told you so 20 years ago.
We also predicted in 2002 that solar-drive global cooling would start ~now, and that seems to be happening. There was a major crop failure across the Great Plains of North America in 2019 due to cold and wet weather, but good harvests elsewhere and lots of grain in storage meant prices were stable.
This year there may be grain shortages – I’m going to research this further in the next days. What I think now:
Nino34 SST’s are still quite cold so spring on the Great Plains should be late, cold and wet. Nino34 is a good predictor of global average temperature ~4 months in the future.
Nino34 Index below -0.5 indicates a “la Nina” condition. It is now about -1.0.
Cold, floods and droughts have reduced crop yields around the world. Grain crops in Ukraine will probably be greatly reduced by the war.
The only remedial measure I can see now is to switch planting of the huge USA corn crop for fuel ethanol to edible corn – but politicians think at “the speed of dark” so this is unlikely to happen in time. Fuel ethanol from corn never made sense – I inherited a corn ethanol plant in the USA in the 1990’s.
Here is more news on crops.
Regards, Allan
ARCTIC FOUND TO WARM DURING BOUTS OF OTHERWISE ‘GLOBAL’ COOLING; BEZYMIANNY JUST ERUPTED TO 38,000 FEET; + WITH UKRAINE’S GRAIN HARVEST SLASHED, ALL EYES TURN TO BRAZIL
March 17, 2022 Cap Allon
Brazil’s 2021 corn crop was decimated by historic freeze after historic freeze. Now the same fate is threatening the 2022 crop, too, further increasing global food security concerns after the Black Sea export halt.
Concerns in the USA are for cold and wet in the North and drought in the South.
This USDA report does not show much concern for food supply.
World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates March 9, 2022
wasde0322.pdf (usda.gov)
AMERICA WAS WRONG ABOUT ETHANOL – STUDY SHOWS – YouTube
Mar 4, 2022
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-yDKeya4SU
Why Gas Engines Are Far From Dead – Biggest EV Problems – YouTube
Feb 5, 2020
Climates will be in a state of disruption when they STOP changing.
The entire climate change foundation is based on pseudo-science. All of the ~15 micron IR radiation from the surface is already absorbed within 10 meters of the surface.
http://www.john-daly.com/artifact.htm
This means the only possible warming comes from a process called pressure broadening which adds a little energy but is offset by the additional cooling that comes from increases in upward IR radiation out of the atmospheric boundary layer.
Of course, the climate change industry does not accept the cooling effect from upward radiation and instead claims it is part of another warming process. The basis for this claim comes from their calculation of opacity changes due to increases in CO2.
The problem is they treat CO2 like any light blocker such as particulates and clouds. But CO2 does not just absorb radiation, it also reemits it. That means CO2 only blocks 50% of the energy. In addition, added CO2 also increases the amount of IR radiation making the signal itself stronger.
Once a proper view of the upward radiation signal is done, we find that energy loss is a fixed percentage of the signal itself and occurs at every altitude all the way to space. Therefore, more CO2 results in more energy loss to space. This is a cooling process which appears to almost exactly balance the warming from the pressure broadening mentioned above. The net change as CO2 levels increase is effectively nil.
As a result more CO2 emissions are an almost 100% net benefit to the environment.
People should read real work by real atmospheric physicists like William Happer, not Richard.
To clarify, presumably that is 1.12F.
Greenhouse effect seems to all hinge on surface temperature ^ 4.
The indisputable facts are that the 2.4 million year old Quaternary ice age we now live in is ongoing. Aside from brief intervals of warming due to obital mechanics every 100,000 years, the earth is a frozen wasteland for 90% of the time.
Modern Humans cannot live well under a mile of ice, so everyone in the northern hemisphere is moving back to the tropics eventually. That is the only existential threat that the changing average temperature of the earth holds.
I chuckle when thinking about how “United” the United Nations really are when they are all crammed below 25 degrees latitude.
Doubt the UN will exist by then.
The main “existential” threat comes from the policies adopted to solve the non-existent problem of AGW.
We been living in 34 million year Ice Age, and last 2 million years has been the coldest.
I would like a study of how many polar bears die from the cold.
There is no average temperature for the Earth. All temperatures are local….
Gregory
I have been harping on about the issue.
There is no such thing as an homogeneous climate but various climate and sub-climate zones. There are various phenomena that can be easily explained why it can be cold in the day and much warmer at night or much colder in a valley than higher on the surrounding mountains.
Then there is the cooling effect of rain in a hot desert area or the moderation of the sea of the adjoining land temperature. Even the averaging of one locality by using the maximum day and minimum night temperature is misleading when one looks at the graph of the temperatures of this area across 24 hours. These numbers do not tell us how “livable” the area is. 95°F in a dry area is more bearable than 86°F in a very humid place. 32°F with no wind chill is more bearable than with 45°F and a severe windchill. How little rain falls in an area does not matter if we can store and irrigate efficiently.
These are all simple things children could or should be learning at school in Geography – all things that we can empirically verify – and not all the political alarmist climate garbage.
In this article, chock full of data, Simon schools so-called journalists in the corporate media on how to examine claims that humans are causing a climate catastrophe. Simon presents data and research that conclusively demonstrate temperature and climate-related deaths have significantly declined during the period of modern warming. Climate Realism has also pointed this out on numerous occasions, refuting alarmists’ claims to the contrary.
Yes, but this is not really the point. Focus on the policies. Even if humans were causing a climate catastrophe, the point is that none of the Biden policies would have the slightest effect on it.
That is the really devastating criticism. Not that they are unneeded, which is an argument that rages without result for years, but that if they are needed, they are both useless to the world and harmful to the US citizens.
This last is an easy argument to make and prove. Its basic arithmetic. If you are the alarmists, you prefer to have a recondite argument about climate science, ice core readings, proxies, hockey sticks, climate sensitivity and so on.
But the way through the madness is to focus on the fact that the policies they advocate are useless regardless.
They are like people claiming there is an obesity crisis, and to solve it we should all eat more walnuts or stand on our heads every morning. The way in is not to argue about whether there is an obesity crisis. Its to point out that eating more walnuts or standing on our heads will make no difference to obesity.
“Emergency” . . . “crisis” . . . “existential threat” . . . “catastrophe” . . . “tipping point” . . . “point-of-no-return” . . . “disaster” . . .”climax” . . . “end times” . . . “how-dare-you point” . . .
I sure wish the AGW/CAGW alarmists would make up their mind.
A powerful high over Europe is pulling frigid air from Russia to the west. Frosts will occur during the night. The further east we go, the stronger the frost.
Is it not the case that it is a fraud intended to produce not only the noted harm but much more destruction?