By Paul H. Tice
Just days before the Climate Week NYC celebration to coincide with the annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released a report declaring with metaphysical certitude that “global warming is set to cross 1.5oC above pre-industrial levels,” most likely within the next few years.
This is the same 1.5oC temperature target that the UN has been harping about for the past decade as a climate tipping point for the planet. According to the international organization, above this warming mark, the effects on the Earth’s climate systems will be catastrophic and “irreversible for centuries to millennia,” with severe coastal flooding, widespread food shortages, forced migration waves, and biodiversity and species losses becoming the norm by 2100.
If you thought that such news might put a damper on this year’s climate festivities in the Big Apple, you would be mistaken. Overshooting was always part of the plan.
The 1.5oC global temperature goal, which was set by the UN under the 2015 Paris Agreement, is measured in terms of a mean temperature anomaly against an 1850–1900 baseline. It is based on a melding of disparate land and sea surface temperatures taken unevenly across the planet, consistent measured data for which only extends back roughly 50 years. Prior to that, average global temperatures are interpolated using proxy data sources such as tree rings and ice cores. This is why all the standard temperature anomaly charts have a hockey stick break in them circa 1979.
Away from these measurement problems, the 1.5oC target is also a completely arbitrary number. It was set mainly for political reasons and designed to be tripped to heighten the sense of urgency and increase the pressure on national governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions and throw more money at the problem. Cumulative global warming during the post-industrial period was already 1.0oC as of the signing of the Paris Agreement so 1.5oC was always in the bag—especially if you control the planetary thermometer.
Reducing the goals of the climate change movement to just one temperature number is basically a sales gimmick meant to simplify a very complex issue for the public and gin up popular support for the cause. For the UN, marketing the message is more important than perfecting the science. For the past four decades, the UN has not deviated from its original conclusion—greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels production must be curtailed to save the planet from climate disaster—despite gaping holes in the argument and growing uncertainties about the accuracy of climate models and the quality of the underlying data.
But rather than checking its premises, the UN’s public relations strategy has instead focused on conflating climate with weather, citing every extreme (and not-so-extreme) weather event as a sign of man-made climate change to play on people’s emotions, and shouting down any opposing or contradictory view from “climate deniers.”
Since taking up global warming as part of its multilateral mandate back in the late 1980s, the UN has served as both the main Cassandra and the chief calendar-keeper, regularly warning about climate Armageddon by the year 2100 if global emissions are not drastically cut by specific millenarian dates.
Under the doom-maxxing UN Secretary-General António Guterres, who famously warned in 2022 that the world was on “a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator,” the rhetoric has built to a crescendo in recent years as the latest climate milestone year of 2030 has approached.
Other than pushing back the planetary deadline, not much has changed about the UN’s climate scaremongering since 1989 when Noel Brown, the director of the New York office of the UNEP, publicly warned that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels” if the global warming trend was not reversed by the year 2000.
The global climate change movement has always been less about solving the purported problem and more about accruing economic and political power by perpetuating the issue. With the UNEP’s recent calculated admission of “defeat,” the UN’s climate mission will now shift to “limiting overshoot” between now and 2100.
Despite failing to stop global warming over the past 40 years—during which time worldwide emissions increased by 68%—the UN will now spend the next seven decades attempting to lower average global temperatures to “try to return to below 1.5oC by the end of the century.”
Regardless of outcome, this ensures an almost eternal 75-year lease on life for the sprawling UN climate bureaucracy, which is the whole point.
That’s why, at this year’s Climate Week NYC, the UN crowd will still be partying like it’s 1989.
Paul Tice is a senior fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics and author of the book, “The Race to Zero: How ESG Investing Will Crater the Global Financial System.”
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
