By Linnea Lueken and H. Sterling Burnett
A recent post at The Nation titled “Climate Change Is the Real National Security Threat” claims that climate change is the reason hurricanes Helene and Milton were so damaging and that it is the premier national security threat to the United States. This is nonsense. Not only is there no evidence supporting the idea that climate change is “supercharging” hurricanes, but contrary to The Nation’s assertions, mass migration and unrest are also not being caused by climate change.
The Nation begins by describing the usual threat assessment reports given to Congress by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI). This report covers a range of international threats like our enemies abroad, international conflicts etc., but The Nation highlights and amplifies a section in the report which cites climate change is a threat.
The Nation writes:
“…in a section on “transnational issues,” are we told that climate change also poses a risk to US security, by triggering mass migrations and unrest overseas. Missing from the DNI’s warning, however, is the threat that climate change poses to our country—to our lives, communities, and vital infrastructure. Now, in the wake of Hurricanes Helene and Milton, this oversight should be recognized as one of the nation’s greatest intelligence failures ever.”
The Nation claims that “while we’ve spent trillions of dollars on the ostensible effort to defend our country and our allies from hostile nations, we’ve done pitifully little to protect ourselves or others from the destructive forces of climate change.” This claim is ironic since federal, state, and local governments have spent trillions of dollars on green energy boondoggles, climate related subsidies, and implementing and enforcing climate restrictions over the past couple of decades. This fact is conveniently ignored by The Nation and the numerous climate grifters, who keep demanding ever more money and power.
This is an especially grotesque amount of money spent because there is no evidence that the money being spent or the restrictions imposed on people’s freedom have had or will have any impact on climate change; or that climate change, based on the impacts so far, is a problem warranting government action to prevent it at all.
For instance, the DNI report claims that climate change triggers mass migrations and unrest overseas. This is false. So-called “climate refugees” have not materialized in over a hundred years of climate change, even as alarmists claimed that nations would be displaced due to rising seas. As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Climate Refugees, nearly all the nations that are commonly listed as at risk due to crop failures have actually seen increasing crop yields during this allegedly dangerous period. Data show that deaths due to climate and weather-related disasters have actually declined over the past few decades. (See figure below)
Bad weather can cause unrest, but it doesn’t mean climate change is the cause of any bad weather or weather related unrest abroad. As discussed in more than 70 posts at Climate Realism addressing similar claims, in the countries where mass emigration has occurred in recent years, it has been driven by war, civil strife, and political unrest, and economic conditions unrelated to changing climate conditions in the form of long term trends in worsening weather or agricultural or economic decline.
The Nation’s claim that hurricanes Helene and Milton were made more destructive because of climate change equally lacks any basis in scientific fact or data. The magazine writes: “[t]he destructive powers of Helene and Milton were vastly amplified by the effects of climate change,” because of rising water temperatures due to human emissions of greenhouse gases, which then created “the energy that transforms ordinary hurricanes into superstorms like Helene and Milton.” This is false. Climate Realism has debunked similar claims made by various mainstream media outlets that climate change caused or contributed to Hurricanes Helene and Milton in multiple posts, here, here, here, and here, as a few examples.
While warm waters do contribute to hurricane formation, this has always been the case. However, the majority of this year’s warming is known and widely reported to have been driven by a natural El Niño event in the Pacific. It is notable that The Nation neglected to mention this fact, when other outlets, for instance, the typically-alarmist BBC acknowledged it. Warm water is a necessary but not sufficient condition for hurricane strength and formation. In a recent Climate Realism post, here, the South China Morning Post admits that, in addition to warm waters, factors such as wind shear and favorable regional circulation patterns contribute to or prevent the formation of cyclones.
Data show that hurricanes have not been getting more extreme amid the modest warming of the past century, as discussed dozens of times at Climate Realism. This fact is backed up by hurricane records that have been reported even by outlets like CBS.
Weather resilience is worthy of planning for and funding and critical for national security, but what The Nation is asking for is not that. They are asking for societal restructuring based on the false premise that current and future weather can and needs to be changed by human efforts, otherwise, the magazine implies, U.S. national security is at risk. No one should fall for this falsehood. The U.S. does face a variety of national security threats; climate change is not among them, much less it being the most important threat security threat the nation faces. Quite simply, the claim that climate change poses a national security threat to the United States is, in the words President-elect Trump uses to describe climate change itself, “a hoax.”
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
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More GIGO BS …
😉
Yeah, and it’s more of a scam than a hoax.
It is just another excuse to pour more money down the renewable energy rathole.
I expect that plenty of leftist politicos are heavily invested in climate change “solutions”. As such, they’re seeing that investment drying up, and nobody with a lick of sense thinks those re a great place to make an investment with Trump coming into office. Trying for the most action before the peaceful transition of power.
I would like to know where the money is going. I guess it goes to green companies that go out of business quickly, the executive level gets paid off. The long term investments in green energy companies, in general, do horribly compared to other stocks. As Rush Limbaugh said, “follow the money”.
According to the IPCC, the oceans have warmed up by something like 0.003 degrees C. Now exactly how much extra energy is 3 one thousandths of a degree supposed to add to a hurricane?
How much warming does 0.1% more water vapor in the atmosphere cause?
The poorly named Greenhouse Effect is often assumed to cause a temperature increase of around 30 Kelvin (K). An increase of 0.1% of water vapour, the main (98%) greenhouse gas, would result in an potential increase of 0.03K if, and only if, the effect were linear. It’s logarithmic, so the maximum possible effect would be considerably less.
To put CO2 in perspective, the amount we’ve added is roughly 0.5% of greenhouse gases. That would potentially add 0.15K if the effect was linear, and equal to the effect of water vapour. Neither are the case, so our impact cannot be anywhere near this figure.
To be honest, I can’t see why any intelligent, educated person could ever consider this to be noticeable, let alone problematic. It’s like a mass-hysteria.
Is Joe Biden a product of climate change?
Certainly a lot of wind
Anything bad that happens can be attributed to climate change.
So you are answering in the affirmative?
By some of the above logic, violent storms induced by climate change should have adversely impacted the state of Texas long ago. The worst hurricane in US history occurred in 1900 when Galveston was struck by one that killed upward of 7000 residents and wrecked much of the city’s infrastructure and homes. At the time the state’s population was 3 million; today it’s 31 million and faces the effects of hurricanes, tornados and even blizzards on an annual basis. So why hasn’t the population declined since it’s far too risky to live in such a disaster-prone region? Much the same could be said for Florida. The reality is that if there are threats, they’re much more likely to be caused by corrupt, incompetent governments, an absence of internal security, threats from foreign forces, economic weaknesses leading to shortages of employment opportunities, poor healthcare, lack of educational opportunities, housing shortfalls, etc. And even where weather/climate events cause population migrations, these are often reversible. Did’t the US Central Plains and Canadian Prairie provinces experience a population rebound after the Dust Bowl period of the 1930s ended and the entire region regained its agricultural productivity? So The Nation’s article is just another example of climate alarmism that the overwhelming majority of the population wisely ignores.
Galveston wasn’t the worst hurricane in US history. The most deaths, yes, but not the strongest.
The most deaths is the worst.
Anything else is confusing a proxy for the actual problem.
Peak wind speed is almost never a killer with tropical cyclones. What IS the main killer is water – either storm surge along the coast or freshwater flooding inland due to torrential rainfall.
In the minds of most people, the worst storms are those that kill the most people and/or cause the most property damage.
that the overwhelming majority of the population wisely ignores.
Oh, no, but if that were true, things would be better.
The Biden admin would have fallen for this crap hook line and sinker…
… but refused to do anything about the major threat of mass immigration/invasion.
What do you mean “would have”? They propagated this garbage.
“rising water temperatures due to human emissions of greenhouse gases”
A tiny rise in water temperature… which has absolutely nothing to do with anything humans have done.
From a brief read, the whole article is just a mind-numbingly ignorant regurgitation of AGW mantra fallacies.
97% FAKE. !
Far more credible is that positions The Nation promotes are a danger to national security.
In fact, efforts to curb eliminate fossil fuel use are among the greatest national security threats faced by the US and any modern society. Fossil fuels are essential for food security because without FF you can’t have fertilizers, which are responsible over 50% of global food production; they are essential for water security since you would be unable to move water (or any other material) from one location to another, nor would you able to manufacture or transport anything in the quantities needed for the global economy to function.
Subscriptions for The Nation have been deflating like the objects hit by the AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles.
The writer, Michael T. Klare, is The Nation’s defense correspondent, and a professor emeritus …
“emeritus” – – meaning a person no longer useful to the organization. They are given a certificate, a few biscuits, and directions to the door.
You left out the hand shake.
Here’s one way of looking at the situation. It’s true that fossil fuels are essential for many products that we need for our safety and prosperity. The problem is, they are not an unlimited resource, therefore it is sensible to search for and develop alternative sources of energy so that our reserves of fossil fuels will last for many centuries, and will allow undeveloped nations to become more developed without a soaring of fossil fuel consuption, world-wide.
Unfortunately, one cannot expect private companies who are motivated by profits, to spend money now, developing alternative sources of energy when they estimate we have 200 years of fossil fuels in the ground, at the current rate of consumption.
The problem here is that increasing prosperity seems to be a goal for everyone. Not only do those below the poverty line wish to have a decent standard of living, but the working class wish to have the prosperity of the middle class, and the middle class wish to become billionaires, and so on.
Without a restraint on the consumption of fossil fuels, the estimated 200 years of reserves would become less than 100 years, and perhaps even only 50 years, depending on the rapidity of economic development.
So, how do we ensure a continuous supply of essential fossil fuels for centuries into the future. We have to start experimenting now, because it’s a very long process of technological development which requires the use of massive amounts of fossil fuels, which we currently have.
The problem would be much worse for our grandchildren if we waited until fossil fuels became a scarce resource, before we began experimenting with alternative sources of energy.
The minor little problem is that wind and solar are not a replacement for fossil fuels.
There is a good article over at Climate Etc. that used Broken Hill as a good case study as to why this is obviously true.
That’s true, to the extent that fossil fuels are necessary for the construction, installation, maintenance, and after-life disposal of wind and solar devices.
A sensible and pragmatic purpose of ‘alternative energy development’, is to find processes that produce more energy from a given amount of fossil fuel. An example would be nuclear power.
I suspect that the total amount of fossil fuels used to build and operate a nuclear power plant, mine and transport the uranium, maintain the nuclear plant during its lifetime, and dispose of the waste, would be less than the total amount of fossil fuels used to build a coal-fired power plant, mine and transport the coal, maintain the coal plant during its lifetime, and dispose of the waste, comparing the same amount of electricity produced in each case.
Wind and solar will only be more efficient than conventional fossil fuels in certain circumstances. For example, using the wasted space of the entire roofs of buildings, when they are designed to maximize the amount of energy received from the sun, should produce more energy than the equivalent amount of fossil fuel used in conventional power plants.
Engineering trade offs, analysis of alternatives, you are correct.
Too bad these are being avoided, silenced, cancelled in favor of a political agenda.
Yup. Experimenting. Not bankrupting the entire civilization.
When the technology is proven, we’ll use it. Until then, we have a proven, cheap, reliable method of generating electricity: Fission.
Fission is also safer than coal, oil, and much, much more than solar and wind, counting deaths per MWh of production.
Of course! The current subsidies for windmills, solar energy, and BEVs are to encourage development in those technologies and make them more efficient and affordable.
If that eventually fails, after decades of research and experimentation, I think the politicians and their economic advisors will have the nous to realize that.
Technological progress can sometimes be long and slow. Compare the first televisions sets in the 1950’s with the current state-of-the-art 8K TV sets, and their size. Would anyone in the 1950’s have thought it would be possible to manufacture a 98 inch TV which is less that half an inch thick and has a resolution of 33 million pixels? I don’t think most people even knew what a pixel was in the 1950’s. The first pixel was invented in 1957 by computer scientist Russell Kirsch.
People have always wanted to be better off. They have always worked to be better off.
They have succeeded, on average.
And yet we have never run out of anything, without finding an alternative that’s just as good or better.
Malthus was wrong. He has been wrong for centuries. Anyone who still believes in Malthusianism is protected under freedom of religion. But they should be treated like any other crank, fringe movement.
Respected but, politely ignored.
Note, Malthus was wrong while populations were rising exponentially. It is possible that declining populations may reduce our innovation and we may start to run out of things. Unlikely, but it’s rarely been tested. Only the end of the Middle Ages post-Black Death counts. N=1 is not a good source f confidence.
Valid points.
However, forcing a step function causes oscillations and negative consequences.
Evolving is the right approach. Mandating change is bad.
The Democrat Party/media complex is the biggest threat to national security. It has been lying to this country for years and infected every institution.
Very nice Linnea and Sterling. When you run out of facts the only thing left is to lie. Looks like the Nation has run out of facts.
Chicken Little strikes again.
The boy who cried, “Wolf!” ???
It is true that climate changes have historically driven some mass migrations, coupled of course with other factors (political, religious, economic, etc. etc.). But only to a relatively negligible degree.
But that only was an issue when populations had to subsist on what their farmers could produce locally. In a modern world where food shortages in one place are more than compensated for by excess production somewhere else, easily shipped in, makes modern societies immune to such factors today.
As to hurricane severity, of course the claims have been debunked endlessly and yet the climate mongers never give up their claims. There is no evidence at all that the world’s oceans are warming by any significant enough degree to matter to storm formation. If thermal energy stored in oceans by contact with the atmosphere is indeed the energy source for tropical cyclones, the slight atmospheric warming that is alleged to have occurred over the last two hundred years is negligible to oceanic thermal energy storage due to simple physics and the specific heat energy of liquid water in the oceans, which on a mass-corrected basis, is 1,000 times that of the atmosphere. In other words, if even the 2 deg C atmospheric warming claimed is correct (???), and all of that energy flowed into the oceans (which of course is not true) the difference in thermal energy storage in the world’s oceans would be on the order of 2 one thousands a degree C. And that is supercharging cyclones?
SMH
Obviously it is inbound thermal energy from solar radiation that warms the oceans, and that it is the oceans that warm or cool the atmosphere, not the other way around as claimed by warmunists.
Any decently educated geologist or physicist understands that the oceans are the heat sink for the planet, greatly moderating its atmospheric temperature … that there is practically zero effect of atmospheric warming, such as it is, on stored thermal energy in the oceans.
A basic principle of thermodynamics is heat doesn’t give mechanical energy, for instance to drive cyclones, only heat flow from higher to lower temperatures does. As far as I know, no one has ever demonstrated or even claimed that global warming increases temperature differences. Thermodynamics is one of the basic sciences underlying any real understanding of the atmosphere, so anyone who claims that higher temperatures alone will supercharge cyclones doesn’t understand atmospheric science; if some university gave hime a degree in that, don’t trust any graduate of that university!
You are correct, except your terminology is a bit off.
Temperature (not heat) doesn’t give mechanical energy.
Heat, which is the flow of thermal energy, does.
One of the greatest problem today, is the conflation of language, the nefarious creation of new definitions, etc., which only aids in confusion. Not that you are subject of this comment, you are not.
CO2 can neither create nor destroy energy. CO2 is only involved in the transfer of energy.
Loads of misused terminology. Save that for a later date.
Except the US does face an existential threat from climate change – the destruction of our energy systems, the loss of freedoms, the accumulation of unpayable debt, and so on, all in the name of solving the non-existent climate crisis.