Roger Caiazza
Based on the Time Magazine opinion piece, “What Comes After the Coming Climate Anarchy?”, we may have reached a point where no facts have to be included in a climate fear porn editorial. This is just a short introduction to the piece and the author. I encourage you to read it yourself.
The author is Parag Khanna who Time describes as a founder of Future Map and author of the new book MOVE: The Forces Uprooting Us. According to Khanna’s long bio, he is a “leading global strategy advisor, world traveler, and best-selling author”. He is Founder & CEO of Climate Alpha, an AI-powered analytics platform that forecasts asset values because “the next real estate boom will be in climate resilient regions”. He also is Founder & Managing Partner of FutureMap, a data and scenario based strategic advisory firm that “navigates the dynamics of globalization”. Dr. Khanna “holds a PhD in international relations from the London School of Economics, and Bachelors and Masters degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University”. A quick look at the School of Foreign Service Georgetown core curriculum offers no suggestion of any scientific requirements that could provide a basis for Dr. Khanna’s climate beliefs.
The opinion piece starts out with correlation causation fallacy endemic to the scientifically illiterate and climate innumerate crisis mongers. He notes that in 2021, “global carbon dioxide emissions reached 36.3 billion tons, the highest volume ever recorded” and that this year “the number of international refugees will cross 30 million, also the highest figure ever”. Then he explains the basis for his climate anarchy belief: “As sea levels and temperatures rise and geopolitical tensions flare, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that humanity is veering towards systemic breakdown”.
This is just a windup to:
Today it’s fashionable to speak of civilizational collapse. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) states that just a 1.5 degree Celsius rise will prove devastating to the world’s food systems by 2025. Meanwhile, the most recent IPCC report warns that we must reverse emissions by 2025 or face an irreversible accelerating breakdown in critical ecosystems, and that even if the Paris agreement goals are implemented, a 2.4 degree Celsius rise is all but inevitable. In other words, the “worst case” RCP 8.5 scenario used in many climate models is actually a baseline. The large but banal numbers you read—$2 trillion in annual economic damage, 10-15% lower global GDP, etc.—are themselves likely massively understated. The climate bill just passed by the Senate is barely a consolation prize in this drama: a welcome measure, but also too little to bring rains back to drought-stricken regions in America or worldwide.
Then there is this:
Let’s assume that we are indeed hurtling towards the worst-case scenario by 2050: Hundreds of millions of people perish in heatwaves and forest fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and floods, state failures and protracted wars. Henry Gee, editor of the magazine Nature, wrote in an essay in Scientific American in late 2021 that even absent the hazards of climate change and nuclear war, humankind was heading towards extinction due to declining genetic variety and sperm quality.
He goes on to predict that even in the most plausibly dire scenarios billions of people will survive. He says that current population stands at eight billion but claims as a result of these dire scenarios “the world population would likely still stand at 6 billion people by 2050”. As you read on this opinion piece is simply an infomercial for Climate Alpha and FutureMap. He believes that climate migrations will be necessary for the survivors. His future vision is pockets of reliable agricultural output and relative climate resilience that may become havens for climate refugees.
He concludes:
What these surviving societies and communities will have in common is that they are able to unwind the complexity that has felled our predecessors. They rely less on far-flung global supply chains by locally growing their own food, generating energy from renewable resources, and utilizing additive manufacturing. A combination of prepping and nomadism, high-tech and simple, are the ingredients for species-level survival.
These demographic, geographic, and technological shifts are evidence that we are already doing things differently now rather than waiting for an inevitable “collapse” or mass extinction event. They also suggest the embrace of a new model of civilization that is both more mobile and more sustainable than our present sedentary and industrial one. The collapse of civilizations is a feature of history, but Civilization with a big ‘C’ carries on, absorbing useful technologies and values from the past before it is buried. Today’s innovations will be tomorrow’s platforms. Indeed, the faster we embrace these artifacts of our next Civilization, the more likely we are to avoid the collapse of our present one. Humanity will come together again—whether or not it falls apart first.
Comments
In my opinion there are several major flaws in his arguments. Apparently, his projections are based on the RCP 8.5 scenario because he thinks it is “actually a baseline”. Roger Pielke, Jr. has noted that the misuse of RCP8.5 is pervasive. Larry Kummer writing at Climate Etc. explains that it is a useful worst-case scenario, but not “business as usual”. For crying out loud even the BBC understands that the scenario is “exceedingly unlikely”. Relying on that scenario invalidates his projections.
Khanna’s worst-case scenario statement “Hundreds of millions of people perish in heatwaves and forest fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and floods, state failures and protracted wars” is absurd. He has to address the many examples that show that weather-related impacts have been going down as global temperatures have increased such as those described by Willis Eschenbach in “Where Is The “Climate Emergency?”. The theme of his opinion is climate anarchy so why are earthquakes and tsunamis included? I concede that his flawed climate projections could stress states and prolong wars but I am not convinced that climate is a major driver.
Finally, his argument that climate is a major driver is contradicted by his dependence on the Sustainable Development Index, a “ranking of countries that meet their people’s needs with low per capita resource consumption”. He states that the best performers are “Costa Rica, Albania, Georgia, and other less populated countries around middle-income status”. The fact that Costa Rica is in a tropical region and thus much warmer than mid-latitude Albania and Georgia suggests that warm climates are not a limiting factor for sustainable development.
Khanna may be a leading global strategy advisor, world traveler, and best-selling author but his lack of understanding of the uncertainties associated with climate change are evident in this editorial. Not unlike many of those advocates for climate change action, upon close review it appears that following the money is his motivation.
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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York. This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.
Credit Steve Milloy: Another corrupt and incompetent “science” advisor in the JoeBama criminal regime gets outed….
Jane Lubchenco, White House Climate Science Overseer, Sanctioned And Barred By The National Academy of Sciences
https://www.infowars.com/posts/white-house-climate-science-overseer-sanctioned-and-barred-by-the-national-academy-of-sciences/
When you get too bad for even NAS, you have gotten really bad.
like peter gleick , danielle dixson , richard attenborough, and others who have been caught openly lying this will get zero attention by the mainstream media . they even made a movie / tv show making phil jones into a brave hero for helping mikey mann with his fabricated hockey stick study
“Supersonic travel could be about to take wing as American Airlines has put in an order for 60 aircraft capable of flying at 1.7 times the speed of sound.”
None of the above mentioned ‘cosa nostra delusioni intelligensia’ would by flying these planes unless the turbines are powered by Tesla’s cars discarded lithium batteries fires.
yeah hear the guy giving a spiel on them IF they can get CCs and IF they can work out a hydrogen engine them maybe…
like the recent we got cold fusion and ooops we cant get it again story
unicorn farts and pipedreaming
Sir Richard Attenborough?
You mean he faked his dinosaurs?
Either you believe or… you’re an heretic
The High Priests of Climate Change™ are ensuring True Believers™
are “shielded” from false dogma & news from vile climate heretics.
They will monitor their “dedication to the Cause” in case if they’re
tempted to backslide!
Climate Depot-
Bloomberg News Exposes Eco-Hypocrite Billionaire Bill Gates’ Involvement to Save Biden Climate Bill
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2022/08/the-fact-checkers-come-for-hillsdale.php
https://www.dailywire.com/news/twitter-activates-steps-to-protect-midterms-fight-misleading-narratives
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken
Yet another progressively-credentialed, authoritarian-loving WEF stooge.
‘BA and MA, Georgetown University; PhD, London School of Economics. Founder and Managing Partner, FutureMap Pte Ltd. Author: Move, The Future is Asian, Technocracy in America, Connectography, Hybrid Reality, How to Run the World, The Second World. WEF Young Global Leader.’
and the WEF bit seals the fact hes a stooge with an agenda for power/money/fame
What goes on in their small brains when they generate illusions and fantasies based on nothing concrete it sounds like some people are just mentally ill, their vivid inability to do basic critical analysis that rational brain healthy normally do is absent in these climate charlatans who are always striving to be planetary savior of an imagined chaos and doomed future of the planet.
I am completely immune to propaganda and ideology because I long ago chose to be a fully independent free-thinking person who doesn’t belong to any organization or creed which is why I can often “see” bullcrap ahead long before it shows up and that especially the media and political circles since they exist to lie and make a lot of money.
Tommy, your “I am completely immune to propaganda and ideology …” can lead to hubris. I assume you are a human being with the potential to have any or all of the human foibles.
I’ll just assume that was a throw-away line. In the past I joked that I used my intellect to feed my emotions, thinking it witty. As the years go by I’m less and less sure that my emotions have not and currently are not affecting my rational processes. I find I’m taking a little more time in analyzing my motives and assumptions in making important decisions. It has not kept me from making significant decisions, though.
The Walking Dead TV series has inspired a lot of spinoff productions with similar science creds. I guess something had the fill the void of declining popularity of reality shows.
I aspire to be a world traveler also, but not with other people’s money or climate con games.
I have been a world traveller all my working life and have been paid well for a lot of it.
I don’t recognise the world that some other folk say they are are travelling in.
We appear to have developed an appetite for apocalypse stories – so it’s no wonder that a ‘reality based’ apocalypse drama gets attention, although it’s treated in the same way as other reality and apocalypse tv shows/films. I am surprised at the numbers of people that can’t tell the difference between fantasy and reality though. However – this, too, shall pass.
Georgetown school of foreign service (SFS) was often called “safe from science” because of its lack of a science requirement.
Can I take the under with this dude?
Climate resilient regions – that would be the moon then. Appropriate enough for all the climate crisis loonies.
following in the paul ehrlich tradition of nonsensical predictions beloved by orthodox catastrophists
Pieces like this are the reason I dropped Time many years ago. About same time I dropped SciAm because it was no longer either scientific or American.
Drop the ‘i’ and you have Scam….
The far-left is totalitarian. The far-right is anarchist. The left-right nexus is leftist.
Leftist cabal pushes Globalism and climate change hysteria as a means to that end. Again, follow the money.
The money all seems to be with fossil fuel companies and those that profit from them… then use that money to get political influence
ya reckon?
see rather a LOT of big green money behind a lot of dodgy brothers scams myself raking massive subsidies in at taxpayers expense. at least big oil paid its own way for the major part
and provided real jobs and real products with real outputs
Fossil fuel companies have more money than the governments of the world?
Do you ever bother actually thinking about the stuff you write?
It’s Time Magazine. What do you expect?
Time magazine is owned by tech billionaire Marc Benioff who acquired it in 2018. Benioff has a personal net worth of $6.6 billion, according to Forbes.
He joins Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in media acquisition of the Washington Post in 2013, Laurene Powell Jobs, the businesswoman and widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, who purchased a majority stake in Atlantic Media, the publisher of The Atlantic, in 2017 and biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong who acquired the Los Angeles Times and San Diego Union-Tribune in 2018.
So it is clear that tech billionaires want to control the narratives in America.
These moneybags will be supportive of tone deafness and fact free and context free in reporting without repercussions from advertisers. Except advertisers have also been coerced by the climate thugs.
Time Magazine. Now available where all good comic books are sold
Bad comic books surely. It’s the current incarnation of the Victorian ‘penny dreadful’s’.
The only place I’ve ever seen Time Magazine is in doctors’ offices. And most offices don’t even have magazines of any kind these days, probably due to the ubiquity of cell phones.
All magazines were removed from office waiting rooms because of Covid. It was supposed to be for two weeks to “flatten the curve” according to Fauci.
Correct. Take a book or newspaper along.
Time magazine, as long as I can remember, has always tried to control the narrative. Back in the 70’s the cover story was the coming ice age. Then, as the global coolist morphed into global warmists, the cover story was sea level rise with the statue of liberty depicted with sea levels up to her armpit. Can’t see how they stay in business as they are less credible then the National Enquirer.
Albania produces all its electricity from hydro. The incomes of the people are very low and corruption in government undermines and stunts growth. It is a real shame because of its location and Mediterranean climate it should be flourishing. Climate change is not the world’s biggest problem but climate corruption is.
…. and Mr. Albanese the new Australian PM is leading his country in the same direction.
With the UK leading the charge
“Khanna’s worst-case scenario statement “Hundreds of millions of people perish in heatwaves and forest fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and floods, ”
Actually more than that could easily perish around the world from fallout from Western Climate Policy-Caused damage to electricity grids and their rocketing prices for power because of deliberate harm to the oil and gas industry, harm to agriculture, all initiating a cascade of secondary damage like shuttering of major industries priced out by power costs, the millions of jobs lost and inflation leading to deflation. Sri Lanka was a WEF and marxists climate science success story.
Climate change causes earthquakes?
Only during earthquake weather.
‘Let’s assume that we are indeed hurtling towards the worst-case scenario by 2050: “Hundreds of millions of people perish in heatwaves and forest fires, earthquakes and tsunamis, droughts and floods, ” ‘
So – an assumption – for 28 years from now.
Ata rate of >50 million deaths a year, every year, as now, about 1.5 billion folk will die in that period. Many will die in heat waves [not OF heatwaves, perhaps]. Similarly tsunami [singular and plural, I thought], forest fires, earthquakes, etc.
All seems pretty limp to me – but Parag Khanna has a book to sell, as even World Travellers and Global Strategy Advisers need to pay the mortgage.
Auto
Putin is offering $16K and an honorary title to any woman who has 10 or more kids.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/putin-offers-16000-reward-honorary-title-russian-women-have-10-children
Climate related deaths have fallen by 99% in the last century. Fossil fuels haven’t taken a safe climate and made it dangerous, they’ve taken a dangerous climate and made it safe.
https://nypost.com/2022/04/30/deaths-in-climate-disasters-declined-99-from-a-century-ago/
As Americans get further and further away from seeing global warming as a serious threat the hysteria about it gets greater and greater. Both the magazine and the writer make their living creating hysteria, at least the latter is honest and admits it. I’ve lived with the msm for 70 plus years. I’m kind of sorry to see them is such a pitiful state, but it’s their choice to go out dishonorably.
‘He is Founder & CEO of Climate Alpha, an AI-powered analytics platform that forecasts asset values because “the next real estate boom will be in climate resilient regions”.’
So getting people to believe the worst-case scenario when it comes to climate change helps his company. No wonder he deals in climate fear porn. Time magazine knows this, but it suits their purpose, so they don’t care if he’s a biased fear monger using them to sell his snake oil.
I moved from New Hampshire to Florida several years ago in order to get away from that terrible global warming up north.
I bet Climate Alpha didn’t recommend Florida to you as a “climate resilient region.” I have to wonder if they offer a money-back guarantee to clients they send to Greenland under the promise that it will become prime real-estate in a few years when Greenland becomes the new Florida. Guarantee or not, they will go bankrupt before clients catch on and request a refund.
And the Aleutian Islands of Alaska become “new Hawaii”. Buy an island now; plant palm trees!
After checking my watch to be sure this was not an April Fools article, i will analyze these latest predictions of doom scientifically: Just this morning, after I woke up, I was thinking that this world really needs more predictions of doom, because so many children and leftists love scary stories.
(1) Every prediction of environmental doom since the 1960s has been wrong. So we are long overdue for a right prediction ! Even a broken watch is “right” twice a day.
(2) Scientists say CO2 is an evil satanic gas that causes every problem in the world, from cancer to warts. This must be true because “scientists say so”
(3) The climate will get warmer, unless it gets colder.
(4) +1.49 degrees C. is no big deal. Piece of cake
But +1.5 degrees C., which was almost reached in April 1998 and February 2016, in the peak month of two very large El Nino heat releases, will kill people by the millions,
(5) This TIME article was fear porn of the highest order. and I am amazed that Mr. Calazza, a New York energy expert, was able to read it …
without bursting our laughing.
(6) Based on my own research, the people least vulnerable to +1.5 degrees C,. will be unvaxxed Trump supporters. dwarfs and grossly overweight lesbian women of color.
Sorry, I can’t take climate fear porn seriously
This is high comedy to me.
Those leftists really know how to tell a scary story!
While in college, I had a digital watch that one day decided that there were 99 minutes in an hour.
I don’t know how often that watch showed the right time, but it was a lot less than twice a day.
‘The next real estate boom will be in climate resilient areas’
Yeh, sure, when everywhere is twice as endangered as everywhere else?
“Now, in the 21st century, more than one billion will be displaced by climate change.”
… made up nonsense.
The quote might turn out to be correct with one change:
“Now, in the 21st century, more than one billion will be displaced by OUR POLICIES
TO COMBAT climate change.”
How can people not see the illogic of claiming extreme weather will become an existential crisis then insist that civilization rely on weather dependent energy sources?
It’s nonsense, and as Alex Epstein rightly reminds us — it’s immoral.
These ideas need to be ridiculed.
By the end of the 21st century, 7 billion people will be dead. This is already a certainty and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
IMO the only migrations that will take place are of people who are desperate to get away from countries that will have fully embraced the whole net zero nonsense….
People will be leaving destitute countries with failing power grids, dying agriculture, un-affordable energy costs and draconian bans on the sorts of products and fuels that are actually known to work.
“just a 1.5 degree Celsius rise will prove devastating to the world’s food systems by 2025.”
NO.
From deliberate actions to reduce fertilizer supply and and therefore crop yields .
Thomas Malthus would be proud.
Breaking:
Court strikes down ruling that blocked Biden’s oil drilling pause
The moratorium on new oil and gas leasing in federal lands and waters was a key part of Biden’s climate plan
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/17/court-ruling-biden-oil-gas-leasing-pause/
Doesn’t matter. Biden just signed new legislation that expands lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, offshore Alaska and ties solar and wind expansion to ongoing gas and lease sale auctions.
“They rely less on far-flung global supply chains by locally growing their own food, generating energy from renewable resources, and utilizing additive manufacturing. A combination of prepping and nomadism, high-tech and simple, are the ingredients for species-level survival.”
This is hilarious because it mimics what I’ve been saying about the goal of modern climate policy, but from a hilariously optimistic direction. Where he sees people “locally growing their own food”, I see people forced to engage in subsistence agriculture by the complete lack of fuel, fertilizer, or meaningful agricultural equipment. Where he sees people “generating energy from renewable resources”, I see a bunch of peons farming amongst the windmills that provide their “betters” with guilt-frer electricity while the peons shiver and starve in the darkness, waking before dawn to scavenge bird and bat carcasses among the windmills for as long as they last. AND KHANNA THINKS HE WILL BE ONE OF THE ELITES RATHER THAN ONE OF THE PEONS.
“AND KHANNA THINKS HE WILL BE ONE OF THE ELITES RATHER THAN ONE OF THE PEONS.”
They all do.
It has been since 1992 when real facts were discarded. When Al Gore said we were going to die. I knew I had to oppose that poser
True believers are becoming more scarce …as if it matters anyway. emperial Evidence always rules
Another who gained his PhD from a packet of Kellog’s Corn Flakes.
Time Magazine 1970s the ice age again.
Time Magazine 1980s climate change warming.
This is Time’s own statement that a so called ‘Ice Age’ cover was a hoax…
The Truth on That Doctored TIME Magazine Ice Age Cover Hoax | Time
So what? I was there in the 1970s, Griff, and I assure you the global cooling scare was the rage for most of that period. You don’t forget shit like that.
I was just back from combat in Vietnam where it was finally driven home to me that government is populated with self-seeking liars. When the global warming scare reared its ugly head I recognized it for the scam it was. You need to read more than revisionist history and Leftist propaganda.
Griff, here is a list of some of the news articles in the 1970s that warned of a coming ice age. Notice that Time magazine had three stories in different years; none of the links to Time magazine now work, presumably because they have been disappeared from the archives.
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/17032-a-compilation-of-news-articles-on-the-global-cooling-scare-of-the-1970-s-2013-03-04
This is a later more complete list of articles.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/02/the-1970s-global-cooling-alarmism.html
First I’ve heard of this self-proclaimed, self-aggrandising hypocrite
Redge: “First I’ve heard of this self-proclaimed, self-aggrandising hypocrite”
You left out “and huckster looking for a ticket on the climate gravy train” Redge.
Did you accidently hit ‘Post Comment’ too soon?
😉
Those two roles imply that he’s not really worried about anthropogenic climate change.
A piece about a first-rate shaman and witchdoctor.
Second-rate, at best.
Let’s assume that we are indeed hurtling towards…
...the dooming. Obviously time to book the one way ticket to Sri Lanka for sustainable organic food under the circumstances-
Tanya Plibersek urged to block $4.5b fertiliser plant proposal amid fears for rock art – ABC News
Kindergarten level rock graffiti will bowl over feeding the current descendants any day of the week with these planet savers.
gee he assumes a whole lot of distopia doesnt he
and not a shred of reality
bet hes got a book on the go too
There are two issues here.
1) The IPCC over the decades has “rewritten the dictionary” for many words and phrases. For example they can’t even agree with their “parent” bureaucracy, the UNFCCC, on what the term “climate change” means.
2) The IPCC has just updated the “baseline” pathways from the “old / CMIP5 for AR5” RCPs to the “new / CMIP6 for AR6” SSPs.
The author’s link to “the most recent IPCC report” in the TIME article is to the latest WG-II (two) contribution to the AR6 cycle … all 3676 pages of it.
From the WG-I (one) contribution to the AR6 cycle of IPCC reports (updated to the “Final / Approved” version last May), section 1.6.1.4, “The likelihood of reference scenarios, scenario uncertainty and storylines”, on page 239 :
NB : Plots of both emissions and “projected” GMST rises for SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 tend to neatly bracket RCP8.5. If both SSPs are “counterfactual”, then so is RCP8.5 …
According to the IPCC (WG-I) the new “worst-case” scenario, the one where only currently “written into law” pledges are kept and no additional ones are made, is either the “old” RCP4.5 or the “new” SSP2-4.5.
Technically RCP8.5 can indeed be considered as a “baseline” (or “high emission”) scenario … as long as you specify that it’s a “counterfactual” one.
Amazing bureaucratic doublespeak. The analyses in AR6 predominantly feature the high-end scenarios. {Forgot the exact percentage.}
Roger Pielke (Junior) did the hard work of “Ctrl-f, check totals for each RCP / SSP number in each chapter, report the final sums” in a couple of articles that were copied here at WUWT.
For the WG-I (Accepted version, subject to final edits) report a year ago :
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/09/pielke-jr-on-ar6/
For the WG-II (Accepted version, subject to final edits) report this March :
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/03/01/pielke-jr-on-ipcc-ar6-wg2-release/
– – – – –
I have said under other articles that I think that apart from the SPM the WG-One report is actually reasonably “fair and balanced”, with a suitably “scientific” approach”.
WG-Two, on the other hand, instead of highlighting the “counterfactual” nature of the various “high emission” scenarios and only giving lip-service to the (extremely remote) possibility of forcings approaching those of RCP8.5 / SSP5-8.5 as WG-I does, sets the ground for the rest of the WG-II report (and the WG-III report) with the following passage (in the “Cross-Chapter Box CLIMATE”, on page 1-22) :
The attitude towards “traditional / historical science and scientific methods” is exemplified by FAQ1.5, “What is new in this 6th IPCC report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability?”, on page 1-76 :
Some biases of (at least ?) some of the WG-II (chapter ?) authors breaks through the facade in the following passage from the “Multiple knowledge systems and frameworks” section of “Cross-Chapter Box INDIG: The Role of Indigenous Knowledge and Local Knowledge in Understanding and Adapting to Climate Change”, on page 18-75 :
I repeat, in my opinion the WG-I report is actually quite good (once you get past the SPM), it’s the WG-II and WG-III contributions that veer towards scientific insanity.
He sure do like his big numbers, don’t he.