A recent Politico article, “Climate change threatens EU’s survival, German security report warns,” claims that “global warming will exacerbate conflicts, hunger, and migration worldwide, with growing risks for Europe.” Evidence undermines these claims. In reality, the world is not suffering destabilization due to climate change, but European populations are far more likely to suffer from climate policy, as Politico briefly mentions.
Politico reports on a “landmark” political report from the German federal intelligence service (BND) that attempts to assess “the dangers climate change poses to German and European security over the next 15 years.” The report concludes that “climate change’s destabilizing effects will drive up migration and food prices, threatening economic and political upheaval,” and “the unequal impact of rising temperatures in the EU — with southern countries hit worse than others — risks tearing the bloc apart.”
Politico goes on to claim that as global average temperature rises, “so do the frequency, severity and intensity of flood-triggering extreme rainfall, deadly heat waves, harvest-destroying droughts and the conditions that allow wildfires to spread easily.”
These claims are false, as available data proves.
While rainfall has modestly increased over northern latitudes that contain the European Union member states, extreme rainfall that causes flooding has not. Claims that recent flooding events were “supercharged” or worsened by climate change are pure speculation based on attribution modelling. Data and historical records of flood frequency and severity debunk claims of unprecedented flooding. Recent flooding in Spain, for instance, was blamed on climate change by attribution groups, but the storm that hit Spain was consistent with a long history of similar storms that are not becoming more severe or frequent. In the Climate Realism post, “Flooding Facts Drowned by Climate Hysteria: The BBC Ignores Spain’s Weather History,” meteorologist Anthony Watts and H. Sterling Burnett describe the history of the region struck by the floods:
Valencia, which sits along and at the mouth of the Turia River on the Mediterranean Sea, suffered similar flooding, for example, in 1897, 1957, and 1996, 127, 67, and 28 years of warming ago, respectively, when temperatures were cooler than at present.
…
As Caroline Angus’ account of the 1957 Valencia flood reveals, these conditions are neither new nor unprecedented. The BBC’s focus on “climate change” and a warmer atmosphere as the primary cause of the recent flooding ignores the atmospheric mechanics behind these storms and downplays the recurrent pattern of similar natural events.
Likewise, Climate Realism debunked other regional European flooding events, here.
Heatwaves and drought are likewise not getting worse, and contra Politico and the German report’s claims, crop production is not declining in Europe due to those conditions, as pointed out in numerous Climate Realism posts, here, here, and here, for example. Wildfires are also on the decline globally.
Interestingly, Politico and the German report do admit that government response to climate alarmism may also cause tension. Politico reports that policies meant to address climate change “will cause tensions, noting that carbon pricing — the backbone of EU climate efforts — disproportionately affects poorer households.” This fact should be obvious to anyone. Carbon pricing does not bother the elites, who can afford higher energy prices.
Politico and the report authors also warn “the cost of decarbonization and its (perceived) unfair distribution … provide space for populism, right-wing and left-wing extremism, and disinformation campaigns[.]”
That claim should be taken further, it already has caused tensions, and has contributed to a growing threat to European food supplies, resulting in frequent mass protests in multiple countries by farmers. Not only that, but its not a perception that the distribution of the costs is unfair, it is a fact. Looking beyond carbon taxes, the push for electric vehicles is a subsidy for a luxury product that most cannot afford. London’s “ultra low emission zones” (ULEZ) are basically a tax on the poor who cannot afford to purchase new electric or low emitting hybrids.
What is true for Europe with regards to crop production is also true for other major crop producing parts of the world, and so climate change is not driving or likely to drive mass migration that could destabilize Europe. Climate Realism has debunked claims that climate change was causing mass emigration in multiple posts, here, here, and here, for instance.
If Politico and German leaders are worried about “populism” and right leaning sympathies rising in their nations due to concerns about mass immigration from unstable parts of the world, then perhaps they could impose restrictions on immigration, no need to blame climate change.
It’s shameful that Politico and the German government are downplaying the harm that the unnecessary, unjustified, climate policies which they have supported have had on Europeans. Extreme weather is not getting worse, but the impacts of government overreach and taxation in the name of climate change are.
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Anyone that takes up “Net Zero” agendas..
.. is threatening their own survival. !
Basically just Economic Suicide.
Climate Change Policy is definitely the problem, seeing as how there is no evidence their climate change policies are needed.
Well, I don’t have much confidence in the German Intelligence Service after reading their conclusions about CO2. They are obviously delusional and easily fooled. It’s not good when your intelligence service is delusional. It’s counterproductive.
I disagree, re: delusional. They’re just marching to the orders of the propagandists.
Did I say marching? I meant to say goose-stepping.
Have you ever noticed that in all these totalitarian societies, their armies all goose-step when they march? Dictators seem to like this style for some reason.
The only reason the IPCC has made CO2 its miracle mascot is to tie it to fossil fuels which Europe does not have enough of.
The woke Euro elites went hog-wild for wind and solar, but at about 30% W/S on the grid, various costs increase exponentially.
The W/S variable output, or too-little output, or too-much output, creates operational difficulties that become increasingly more challenging and expensive to counteract, as proven by the UK for the past 5 years, and by Germany for the past 10 years.
Both countries have “achieved” near-zero, real- growth GDP, the highest electricity prices in Europe, and stagnant real wages.
Their angry native populations are further burdened by the Euro elites bringing in tens of millions of uninvited poor, uneducated, inexperienced folks from all over, a chaotic burden the native populations never voted for.
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After spending all that money, while uglifying the countryside, killing fisheries, tourism, and view sheds, etc., the Euro elites are richer and living in posh places, but the climate is not any different than 30 years ago.
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Here in New England, we are freezing our butts off. Snow everywhere.
In Detroit, there was flooding up to car windows in the streets, and then it froze!
Such flooding is due to not spending on flood-prevention measures for decades.
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When will woke Euro elites finally admit, CO2 is a good gas, absolutely essential to grow more flora and fauna, and increase crop yields to feed hungry people?
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/co2-has-a-very-minor-role-in-the-atmosphere
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/we-are-in-a-co2-famine
The Euro elites are using Orwellian measures, such as censorship, misinformation labeling, throwing out elections if they do not like the results, freezing out major political parties, blacklisting people, companies, social media, etc., to cow/brainwash/disenfranchise their populations, similar to what the USAID-subsidized US Corporate Media are still doing.
I think Germany is holding elections tomorrow, and the Afd is gaining ground. The Status Quo is losing ground.
Voters better make good choices, or all your car companies are going to voluntarily move to the United States, and that will just be the beginning of your problems.
So, now Climate Change is causing it to warm FASTER in the southern area than the northern area? I thought CC was supposed to be warming the Poles faster. 🤔 Maybe it was the Pols?😎
I wouldn’t touch that with a 10 foot Pole named Pavel.
Not immediately bu climate change is definitely a threat to any inhabitant of land north of 40N over the coming millennia.
The current interglacial is in its end phase. Oceans in the NH started getting more intense sunlight 500 years ago and started warming about 300 years ago. They are warming up quite fast now, there is a steady increase in atmospheric moisture and that is causing more snow. So far only Greenland has increasing ice extent but other regions along the Arctic Ocean coast will eventually accumulate ice again. I expect within 200 years.
Climate models have a serious blind spot to the precession cycle. The peak sunlight at 35S at summer solstice is currently 80W/m^2 more than the summer solstice sunlight at 35N. But the imbalance is slowly shifting.
Climate models are based on energy not power. The SH gets as much energy as the NH but in four days less. The only reason why SH is cooler than the NH is that oceans are temperature limited to 30C but land can rise to above 50C. There is no temperature regulation over land with a dry atmosphere.
It is in the long term interest of Western Europe, Canada and Northern USA to keep the planet warmer in order to avoid slipping into another ice age like the last one, so take your time going for net zero and work out what global temperature is needed to maintain your civilisations into the looong distant future.
Two things.
1) We’re still in an ice age. We’re in an interglacial period between longer glacials. Words matter.
2) You seem to assume that we can do anything about “global temperature”.
Big Oil really needs to pick a country to make an example of and just cut them off.
In less than 48 hours that country will be calling up its military to try and get the oil back. They won’t be able to of course once they discover that their entire army is useless without fossil fuels.
But oh what a grand experiment.
The problem with that is, there is no one “Big Oil”. They don’t work in lockstep. If we don’t sell them FF, someone else will.
When activists refer to ‘Big Oil’ they generally mean only the large western oil companies – BP, Conoco Philips, Chevron, ENI, Shell and Total Energies.
Rarely do they say anything about the National oil companies such as Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil Company, Kuwait Petroleum Company, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company . The Middle East has 5 of the top 10 oil producing countries supplying 26% of world production. Saudi Arabia is the second largest oil producer in the world.
There are national oil companies in more than 70 countries worldwide producing 55% of all oil and gas and at least 25 countries are NOC dependent in that they supply over 20% of government revenue.
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Exactly my point.
Net zero policies create far more harm than any mild warming.
“climate change’s destabilizing effects will drive up migration and food prices, threatening economic and political upheaval,”
Expensive energy caused by renewables are already pushing up the cost of living, including food prices, the political upheaval is happening as people are waking up to globalist politicians and tossing them out.
Mild warming is entirely beneficial. The Holocene Optimum was several degrees warmer than today.
Plants and animals thrived.
The headline say it all👍
No mention of the huge democratic deficit.
Funny that.
Yes. The real threat is nationalism. The EU has no guide rails to keep Brussels reasonably close to what the citizens want and don’t want. So it drifts off. This allows the populist parties to make opposition to Brussel’s direction a question of nationalism, which in turn has a distincly Xexit tone to it. But the root problem is their Potemkin Parliament and the lack of any democratic control over Brussels.and the Commission. People express dissent in the only way they have available.
As I suspect we will see this weekend.
I’m heartened to see that gradually … the number of people who see through the climate boondoggle is increasing thanks to alternative media… I mean.. who can trust MSM… ordinary folks are not mindless imbeciles…they have to survive in this bullshit world of user pays… and pays… and pays..it’s a sad indictment of the ways that the elected can twist the rhetoric to line their own pockets.. and those of their friends.My advice for what it’s worth.. Turn your telly off when the 6pm news comes on….. you don’t need to be treated like a subject. Look elswhere for your information…..use your own nous…. form your own opinion from a broader discussion…. there’s plenty of alternate views out there. Peace…. Some day soon. 🙂
If crop production is dropping it will be because Far Left governments and the fascist EU have pushed up fertiliser costs; pushed through rewilding schemes; paid farmers to grow trees; or covered farmland with solar panels.
If after Sunday the new German government contains the Green ecoloons then they are finished industrially as they are seriously proposing a new energy system where factories only work when the wind blows or the sun shines. That should complete the exodus from Germany, not just of companies but of educated workers up the aged 45.
Politico is state media. Proof of that comes in the form of the outrageous “subscriptions” paid out by USAID, I think it was. They obey their masters’ orders.
Payments to Politico from USAID were probably the smallest. Many departments were paying the $10k “Politico Pro” subscription.
There was a time when Politico at least tried to pretend that they weren’t a far left news/propaganda outlet.
Over the last couple of years, they have abandoned all pretense.
At this point, the Climate Scamologists are just phoning it in. The jig is up, and they know it.
Story tip:
https://www.climatedepot.com/2025/02/20/politico-trumps-30-day-climate-assault-trump-has-done-more-to-unravel-u-s-climate-policy-in-past-30-days-than-during-entirety-of-his-1st-administration/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=politico-trumps-30-day-climate-assault-trump-has-done-more-to-unravel-u-s-climate-policy-in-past-30-days-than-during-entirety-of-his-1st-administration
Arianna Skibell of Politico wrote this article against President Trump’s reversal of the Biden climate agenda.
Ms Skibell starts out by claiming “Despite the widely accepted scientific consensus that the planet is warming to dangerous levels — and with an escalation of disasters to back it up — the Trump administration has cast global efforts to zero out carbon pollution as a malevolent tactic of governments to acquire power.”
How is “the planet warming to dangerous levels”, when most of the central USA is in a deep freeze of sub-zero (Fahrenheit) temperatures, and there was recently a blizzard in New Orleans?
Ms Skibell then writes “The planet, meanwhile, has six years before it surpasses a critical warming threshold.”
Says who? Greta Thunberg or AOC? There is nothing magical about a warming of 1.5 C (or some other arbitrary number) of the average climate since 1900 (or some other arbitrary date in the past) that will suddenly throw the Earth’s climate into chaos.
The earth’s climate was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period (circa 1000 to 1200 AD) and Roman Warm Period than it is now, yet both of these warm periods were followed by cooling periods a few centuries later. Neither of these warm periods could be attributed to human emissions of CO2. The Medieval Warm Period enabled the Viking colonization of Greenland, which had to be abandoned during the later cold period, which also led to the Black Plagues in northern Europe. It can definitely be argued that warmer climates are more favorable to human life and health than colder climates.
Ms Skibell then writes: “At worst, rising temperatures could bring on the collapse of numerous ecosystems, crop failure on a massive scale, rapid ice sheet melting, extensive coral bleaching, extended heat waves, droughts, floods and other potentially irreversible events — all of which are likely to cost the U.S. lives and billions if not trillions of dollars.”
Global-warming alarmists have been making similar predictions for about 40 years now, none of which have occurred. Crop failures? World food production is at a record high. Rapid ice sheet melting? With sea levels rising at a rate of 2.5 to 3.0 mm/year (depending on location), with no sign of acceleration, it will be centuries before any sea walls will have to be built to protect low-lying cities. Coral bleaching? The latest studies have shown that the Great Barrier Reef off Australia is actually growing.
So after climate alarmists crying wolf for 40 years, people are getting the idea that the “climate wolf” is really a chihuahua–all bark and no bite.
Ms. Skibell continues:
“Gutting the government: Trump has trounced Biden-era clean energy programs, decimated the federal workforce and dammed the flow of climate and infrastructure dollars — sometimes flouting court orders to reverse course.”
The Biden-era “clean energy” programs spent trillions of dollars but accomplished very little, except to make energy much more expensive, and the increased energy costs were passed on to consumers of all sorts of needed products, including food, resulting in the worst inflation since 1980.
The Trump campaign in 2024 repeatedly stated his intention to “drill, baby, drill” (for oil and gas), and reverse the “climate scam”, and the American people elected him, so President Trump is now doing what he promised to do. Isn’t that how democracy is supposed to work?
The only thing that needs to be “dammed” is rivers in northern California, so that people in central and southern California have water for their crops and putting out wildfires. It’s a really old idea, copied from the Romans who built aqueducts from the Alps to the Mediterranean coast, some of which are still operating.
But the Politico people are probably upset that Trump and Elon Musk found out that Politico was subsidized by taxpayer funds, which will soon be cut off.
Gee, was USAID, i. e. The CIA, supporting Politico because of their opinions, or is Politico supporting the CIA because of their support?