Indur Goklany: “No Empirical Evidence that Anything Bad is Happening B/C of Climate Change”

Climate realism

Tom Nelson Podcast #43

Dr. Indur M. Goklany, has 30-plus years in federal and state governments and the private sector, during which he has written more than one hundred monographs, book chapters, and papers on topics ranging from climate change, human well-being, economic development, technological change and biotechnology to sustainable development.

He has been a visiting fellow with the American Enterprise Institute and was the first Julian Simon Fellow at the Political Economy Research Center in Bozeman, Montana. Working for the U.S. Department of the Interior, he has represented the United States at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in the negotiations leading to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Is climate change the number one threat to humanity? https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wcc.194

2007 book: The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet https://www.amazon.com/Improving-State-World-Healthier-Comfortable/dp/1930865996/ref=sr_1_1

IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE: PERCEPTION AND REALITY https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publications/impacts-of-climate-change-perception-and-reality
Fossil Fuels are the Greenest Energy Sources https://co2coalition.org/publications/fossil-fuels-are-the-greenest-energy-sources/
——
Tom Nelson’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/tan123
Substack: https://tomn.substack.com/
About Tom: https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2022/03/about-me-tom-nelson.html
Notes for climate skeptics:
https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2019/06/useful-notes-for-climate-skeptics.html
ClimateGate emails:
https://tomnelson.blogspot.com/p/climategate_05.html

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November 26, 2022 10:04 am

I am certain there is NO climate emergency because nothing has changed in my Columbia Basin region since 1964 when I moved there.

Too many people ignore cycles of warming and cooling which is a shame since this current warming cycle is nearing the end of it cycle according to past changing warm/cool cycles pattern of the past few thousand years.

MarkW
Reply to  Sunsettommy
November 26, 2022 10:50 am

Too many people have no knowledge of anything that happened more than about 10 years ago.
The result of this is that too many people actually believe the media when they declare that a run of the mill storm is “unprecedented”.

Reply to  MarkW
November 26, 2022 11:13 am

They lack the knowledge because they are too lazy to look it up and never learned to be a Free Thinking Independent human being thus, they uncritically swallow baloney easily because….. they are too mentally lazy to think on their own.

It is really sad that so many people are conformists and being herded into an unhappy unproductive life.

I go over some of this at my forum because I am hoping to help Americans become Patriots again to defend the Republic while it still exists.

Scarecrow Repair
Reply to  Sunsettommy
November 26, 2022 11:49 am

People are non-thinking conformists because government has taken over so much of our daily lives. The average voter knows his vote makes very little difference even if his candidate wins. It does not matter whether government fixes anything, makes things better or worse. We have little control over outcomes, so why bother?

That is why people are conformists.

Reply to  Scarecrow Repair
November 26, 2022 2:59 pm

It rather seems to me that the majority of the populations of everywhere have been just as conformists as they are now, in behavior if not in thought.

MarkW
Reply to  Scarecrow Repair
November 26, 2022 7:43 pm

That would make people apathetic, not conformists.
Conformists punish those who disagree with group think.
Someone who was apathetic wouldn’t care whether you agreed with them or not.

Reply to  MarkW
November 28, 2022 2:40 pm

The point is, most people will not do anything “while Evils are sufferable”.

Reply to  Sunsettommy
November 26, 2022 12:45 pm

Actually thinking is hard work, so of course a lefty can’t /won’t do it. Much easier to parrot the accepted talking points and be one of the “cool guys.”

1saveenergy
Reply to  slowroll
November 26, 2022 6:17 pm

It’s not a lefty / righty thing … it’s a stupid sheeple thing.

Plenty of people from all walks of life & all political & religious beliefs just parrot the accepted dogma of their group because they feel safe in that group.
As a species, we have lost a major survival tool … critical thinking.

Allan MacRae
Reply to  1saveenergy
November 27, 2022 12:58 am

“It’s not a lefty / righty thing … it’s a stupid sheeple thing.”

Wasn’t it Hillary Clinton who said, “Democrats are stupid and they believe what we tell them”? I think it’s more of a lefty thing.

Lefty’s believe fervently in the Climate and Covid scams – just repeat a Big Lie a few times and you’ve got them for life.

But there are lots of stupid people out there.

“You know how stupid the average person is, right? Well, half of them are stupider than that!”
– George Carlin 🙂

Mariner
Reply to  Sunsettommy
November 26, 2022 2:59 pm

You should take into account the relentless, cagw misinformation coming from the media. In Perth Australia we are coming into summer. Que numerous TV adds from our water board about conserving water. Our water shortage is apparently completely due to climate change. The adds ignore the fact that the Perth population has over doubled since 1980 and no dams have been built since 1994. Most people do not have the time to check everything they see or hear.

sherro01
Reply to  Mariner
November 26, 2022 9:11 pm

Perth Aust hosts Chris Gillham, whose web page waclimate has some of the clearest, inarguable, careful, relevant, non-judgemental, unbiased essays on global warming and climate change available about Australia.
Tell your errant newspaper writers to check it out before putting foot in mouth, again and again.
Chris has put into numbers what we less capable commenters talk about. You cannot argue with what the simple numbers show, unless you are employed to so do by people on a mission. Chris and I and our mates have been unpaid volunteers for many years. Geoff S

Reply to  Sunsettommy
November 26, 2022 1:28 pm

nothing has changed in my Columbia Basin region since 1964 

The changes are subtle and will not manifest serious consequences in the life of anyone presently on earth.

This region will eventually be abandoned as the snow/ice becomes permanent. That is at least 4000 years off but the changes are already observable.

Mount Rainier has experienced an upward trend in snowfall over the past century. The whole of the northern hemisphere land has steadily increasing snow cover. January temperatures on land in the northern hemisphere north of 40N is the most significant contributor to “global warming”. The January temperature can only increase as a result of more snowfall.

It will eventually be widely recognised that the current interglacial reached its turning point in 1400. That is when the NH experienced its lowest annual solar EMR. Re-glaciation is in the early stages of accelerating and earth may not yet be beyond peak melt. However Greenland is already gaining elevation.

The last four cycles of glaciation all began once perihelion moved later than the austral summer solstice causing the northern oceans to warm up and accelerate the NH winter water cycle. That acceleration is now under way. Record snowfall will be a climatic feature for the the next 9000.

sherro01
Reply to  RickWill
November 26, 2022 9:18 pm

Rick,
Are more and more people now learning about these largely untold calculations of irradiance with geometry change?
They are hard to argue against, they fit past observation and measurement, they are large enough to be felt – what is not to like?
Are they being incorporated into those general climate models that have been so wrong for so long with global temperatures?
Thank you for your continuing diligence. Geoff S

Lee Riffee
Reply to  Sunsettommy
November 26, 2022 3:48 pm

I grew up and have spent most of my life in central Maryland, not far from DC. My birthday is in mid-April, and in the half century or so I’ve been around I’ve had birthdays where I was wearing shorts and a t-shirt. I’ve had birthdays where I’ve been bundled up in a heavy coat – and birthdays with everything in between!
The only difference I could possibly notice between now and when I was a kid, is that there was more snow then. But, the flowers still bloom in the spring, the leaves turn green, my garden grows nicely (as long as I can keep certain critters out of it!), leaves fall in late October and we almost never get snow before Christmas. In fact, as a child, I could never understand why Charlie Brown, Rudolph and just about every other movie and cartoon character got to have a white Christmas while I did not. We don’t have white Christmases (or even hardly any snow pre-Christmas) now and we didn’t have them then. Snow always came in January and February, and sometimes into March. As it does these days….

1saveenergy
Reply to  Lee Riffee
November 27, 2022 2:11 am

“We don’t have white Christmases (or even hardly any snow pre-Christmas) now, and we didn’t have them then. Snow always came in January and February, and sometimes into March. As it does these days….”
Same in UK (except Scottish Highlands ) 75 yrs experience.
PS: did get caught in a freak snowstorm in the Brecon Beacons mid-July ~ 1970, compleat white-out, about 4″ fell ( I was on a motorbike ) day after my birthday.

Reply to  Lee Riffee
November 27, 2022 5:15 am

“What has been will be again,     what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”

Ecclesiastes 1:9

morfu03
November 26, 2022 10:37 am

Bad things happen because of climate change all the time!
The ice ages for example..
The author probably meant to say that anthropogenic part to the
global warming had no measurable effect so far..
Why do skeptics play this game of following alarmists redefinition of things?
Climate change is real, anthropogenic warming is real, but if the later had any influence on the first is as of yet unproven.
Same thing with “ocean accidification”, instead of playing the game and arguing endlessly if an effect happening above pH 7 can be called acidification, the main point here is while we certainly can follow the isotopic signature of fosil fuel carbon, the carbon and pH level of the complete oceans still has significant uncertainties and is buffered, so there is a “sea surface acidification”, but even that might have natural contributions..

Reply to  morfu03
November 26, 2022 10:56 am

About that silly Ocean acidification propaganda, I got David Appell go into a meltdown over it at then Steve Goddard’s blog (about 8 years ago) where with the help of an actual Ocean chemist utterly destroyed Appell’s rank nonsense whereupon he started a post run shortly afterwards showing the hilarious meltdown behavior that shortly afterwards led to his banning Tony made it into a blog post to highlight his collapse.

Acidification claims are dishonest and stupid as hell because the Ocean waters already has 99+% of the free CO2 of the system in it thus change is going to be very small, and the waters remains strongly alkaline.

morfu03
Reply to  Sunsettommy
November 26, 2022 7:03 pm

My point exactly (with said caveat that there is a surface effect and also a deep isotopic signature).. “Ocean acidification” is nonsense!

Just like mixing the meaining of anthropogenic global warming with (local) climate change and again why do skeptics play along so willingly.. I look at the current WUWT front page and I am quite horrified.. “climate change” is used in every article, when the author in all cases really meant anthropogenic global warming..
This is really bad.. I see brainwashing at work!

Neil Lock
November 26, 2022 11:15 am

Indur Goklany is one of the good guys. He’s a victim of misinformation; look at the Wikipedia article on him! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indur_M._Goklany

November 26, 2022 12:24 pm

The Improving State of the Word is an excellent book. It’s extremely well researched and full of references and endnotes. Practically every regular on this blog would enjoy it and learn from it — no matter how much you already know on the topic!

pillageidiot
November 26, 2022 12:45 pm

When commercial growers start using CO2 scrubbers in their greenhouses to REDUCE the levels of CO2 to optimize plant growth, only then will I start to consider the social cost of carbon.

Until we reach that point, I am almost certain the social cost of carbon is a net positive to humans and the planet.

Reply to  pillageidiot
November 26, 2022 1:03 pm

Good point Pillage, I’m gonna steal it if you don’t mind…..thanks.

n.n
November 26, 2022 2:22 pm

A cargo cult with em-pathtic appeal. Follow the Green, take a knee, beg, “donate”.

roaddog
November 26, 2022 4:07 pm

If climate does not reduce the quality of life, politicians will be happy to intervene.

“No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.” – Anarchist proverb

November 26, 2022 4:30 pm

“No Empirical Evidence that Anything Bad is Happening B/C of Climate Change”
This must be wrong because last night in our state election the climate catastrophe hawking Greens won extra seats and the climate change destroying Labor Party was voted in …again.

sherro01
Reply to  Mike
November 26, 2022 9:33 pm

Mike,
I am a Victorian resident. Before the last State and earlier Federal elections, indeed going back years, I have been asking non-Labor officials to lead the way out of the wilderness with policies that pay no attention to greenhouse gas fables. Not one has even replied to my data-rich little essays, so dominating has been the Establishment alarmist propaganda.
There will come a political tipping point in the next 4 years, when the public reverses its voting form and cheers on the politicians with policies to withdraw from the Paris agreement and more.
There is a significant probability that Donald Trump will catalyse this action in the next 2 years.
An astute Australian politician would be doing the homework right now to emerge as a leader of the New Wave. Dare to be different. I’d be in it boots and all if I was not so old. Geoff S

sherro01
November 26, 2022 9:03 pm

Tom Nelson,
Nice collection of climategate references on your web page, thank you, but have you confused Warwick Hughes (geologist) with Malcolm Hughes ? For the sake of accuracy. Geoff S

Allan MacRae
November 27, 2022 12:20 pm

I have used Dr. Indur M. Goklany’s work over the years and have found him to be highly competent and “ahead of the curve.”