One cannot help but wonder why the Democratic self-proclaimed “party of science” has given up on science. I shall discuss their flight from real science into a pseudo-science of their own making in a series of blogs. This one will deal with climate change. No one, that is no scientist and no educated adult will dispute that the earth’s climate changes. It always has. There have been warming periods such as the one in the early Middle Ages that allowed populations to move farther north in Europe, to till previously frozen ground, and to survive in what were much milder winters, causing a surge in population. But this increase in human population (and the burning of fossil fuels) was followed by the “Little Ice Age,” a period of extreme cooling of the earth, rather than the warming we are told that fossil fuels bring about. Climate Alarmists disregard these historical events and a few of them even claim they never occurred, despite the historical records to the contrary.
Virtually every Democratic presidential hopeful has bought into the “Green New Deal.” “It is vital,” they chorus, “in order to save the world from annihilation” in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 12 years or Beto O’Rourke’s 10 years. But neither AOC or Beto is a climatologist or a meteorologist, and even if they were, nature has a funny way of doing what it wants, not what it is projected to do. For example, one day last week our part of Illinois was projected to have rain most of the day. Instead, the sun shone, much to the relief of the farmers! So, the weather prognosticators were wrong.
If they cannot accurately predict the weather from day to day, how can they predict the devastating warming of the earth that they predict will soon be upon us if we don’t . . . forget science?
Let’s start with the Green New Deal. AOC wants us to forgo airplane travel (planes burn too much fossil fuel) and go with trains, instead. How Companies will be willing for their businessmen to spend two or three days going from New York to San Francisco instead of the mere hours it takes now, I cannot imagine, but that is what AOC would have the government impose upon us. And how much is it going to cost to build all those “high speed” electrical trains? The tracks will no doubt be made of steel which itself is a combination of iron, carbon, and often magnesium. Iron is one of the most abundant metals, yet it only makes up a little over 4% of the earth’s crust. And where will the electricity come from? Wind and solar farms? Certainly not from fossil fuels which will also be done away with! Yet the use of wind and solar energy is highly unlikely to power transcontinental trains. These energy sources cannot produce enough electricity to meet the needs of any of our major cities much less also power fast trains. And how long will it take to build this system? Can it be built in the 10-12 years they say we have left before we all burn up?
And how expensive will it be? A good guide might be the failed high speed train in California which was given the go ahead in 2008 with a projected cost of $36 billion. It was to connect Los Angeles with San Francisco and eventually extend to Sacramento and San Diego, a length of 800 miles of track, not the 2,902 miles from New York to San Francisco. This year, California Gov. Newsom put the majority of the project on hold, allowing only the 171 miles from Bakersfield to Merced to continue, a car’s drive of only 2.5 hours with nothing that can be done in either city without a car, so few passengers are going to be interested in taking the new train if and when it is completed. Why the hold off on the rest of the proposed line? Because in addition to the 11 years that have passed since voters agreed to the project, the cost has skyrocketed to $98.1 billion. And at its fastest, the train would only travel about 220 mph, less than half the speed of an airplane. So, we give up increasingly clean coal for the insufficient power from wind and sun, and give up swift travel for much slower trains which will likely not have been constructed by the time the world ends in 10 or 12 years anyway.
In the great climate debate, Democrats have forgotten other things as well. Hard though it is to believe, records show that the average summer temperatures in Illinois is about 86 degrees. Now, we who live here know it is often in the upper 80s and 90s and has climbed from time to the 100 degree plus for a day or two, though not in recent years. How do we survive? We have air conditioners! In Phoenix, Arizona, on the other hand, the July average is 106 degrees, yet people fare very well there also. If the temperature in Illinois raises from 86 degrees to 88 degrees in the next decade and temperatures in Arizona raise from 106 to 108 degrees, what impact is that really going to have upon our lives? Has the left forgotten how good our scientists are to finding ways to ease our living in unforgiving environments? Consider the space station as an example. If we can create a safe living environment in space with ways to grow their own food, why could we not do that in an extremely warm or cold earth? In addition, the earth has barely warmed more than 1 degree in the last century so an increase of 2 degrees in 10 years is hardly likely!
Oh, yes, I have forgotten the melting of the polar ice caps, have I not? An increase of a degree or two of temperature might indeed melt some ice, but hardly the entire ice caps. Former Vice president Al Gore predicted in 2006 that by 2013 the North polar ice cap would disappear along with polar bears and that the sea could rise as much as twenty feet. The ice cap is still here in 2019, polar bears have increased in number, and the seas have risen somewhat, but they have risen about 7 inches in each of the previous centuries according to Dr. Fred Singer, so some rise is normal. “The rate of sea level rise during the period ~1925–1960 is as large as the rate of sea level rise the past few decades,noted climate scientist Judith Curry. “Human emissions of CO2 mostly grew after 1950; so, humans don’t seem to be to blame for the early 20th century sea level rise, nor for the sea level rise in the 19th and late 18th centuries.” Hmm. Has someone explained that to the left? They don’t seem to have gotten the message, but then perhaps it is because so many of them own stock in wind farms, solar companies, and electric car manufacturers.
Another “indicator” of the warming planet caused by humans has been the melting of the glaciers in Glacier National Park, according to the “experts.” In fact, President Obama had signs posted in the park that warned that the glaciers would be gone by 2020. Those signs have been quietly removed and replaced with signs saying that the glaciers will “eventually” disappear because of global warming. There exist several problems there: First of all, every summer the glaciers recede a bit in the heat, and those are the measurements that Climate Alarmists have quoted. However, every winter, the glaciers increase in size again. Especially abundant snow falls in the last several years have made the glaciers larger than ever. Also, while some glaciers in the United States have receded, others have grown. If a warming earth was melting glaciers, it would melt all of them, not just some. And the Greenland glacier, which was receding, is now growing again. How is this possible in the dangerously warming earth that Climate Alarmists claim we are living in?
“In their efforts to promote their ‘cause,’” Judith Curry told Congress, “the scientific establishment behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate problem.” She continued: “This behavior risks destroying science’s reputation for honesty. It is this objectivity and honesty which gives science a privileged seat at the table. Without this objectivity and honesty, scientists become regarded as another lobbyist group”.
And a lobbying group whose arguing point has been mostly wrong.
An article on Townhall.com offers 18 examples of the spectacularly wrong predictions made around 1970 when the “ Earth Day started:
1. Harvard biologist George Wald estimated that “civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” That would have been in 2000 at the latest.
2. “We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation,” wrote Washington University biologist Barry Commoner in the Earth Day issue of the scholarly journal Environment.
3. The day after the first Earth Day, the New York Times editorial page warned, “Man must stop pollution and conserve his resources, not merely to enhance existence but to save the race from intolerable deterioration and possible extinction.”
4. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make,” Paul Ehrlich confidently declared in the April 1970 issue of Mademoiselle. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”
5. “Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born,” wrote Paul Ehrlich in a 1969 essay titled “Eco-Catastrophe! “By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s.”
6. Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the 1970 Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
7. “It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.
8. Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”
9. In January 1970, Life reported, “Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half….”
10. Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, “At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it’s only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable.”
11. Barry Commoner predicted that decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America’s rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.
12. Paul Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in 1970 that “air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone.” Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during “smog disasters” in New York and Los Angeles.
13. Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons “may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945.” Ehrlich warned that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and he predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out. (Note: According to the most recent CDC report, life expectancy in the US is currently 78.8 years).
14. Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, “By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won’t be any more crude oil. You’ll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill ‘er up, buddy,’ and he’ll say, `I am very sorry, there isn’t any.’”
15. Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.
16. Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look that, “Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.”
17. In 1975, Paul Ehrlich predicted that “since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it.”
18. Kenneth Watt warned about a pending Ice Age in a speech. “The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years,” he declared. “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
Yet, here we still are in 2019, going strong, growing crops, feeding the world, raising the standard of living in third world countries and prospering in our own country. Rather than plunging into an Ice Age, the earth has continued to warm, but only by a fraction of a degree in the last 30 years. When the Ice Age didn’t materialize, Climate Alarmists switched to a dangerously overheating planet, caused by the very CO2 that actually causes crops to grow and is thus beneficial to both plant and animal life. When unusually deep snow falls and record cold temperatures suddenly appeared a few years ago, “Global Warming” suddenly became “Climate Change.”
Now, floods, droughts, snowstorms, hurricanes, tornadoes, hot spells, cold spells are all blamed on “Manmade climate change,” regardless of the fact that we have not seen as many killer tornadoes nor as many damaging hurricanes as in years past. It matters not to the left because facts are malleable. They change them to suit their purposes and expect all of us to blindly follow along behind. Because governmental organizations under President Obama, NASA and the Environmental Protection Agency for example, have gone along with the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since it fit Obama’s mindset, this has made it easier for people to believe the constantly changing dire predictions of the left despite the myriads of scientists and environmentalists around the world who find problems with their conclusions. The fact that those climate alarmist often have to stand on their heads to explain away the real weather which doesn’t fit their prediction doesn’t seem to bother anyone.
Dire prediction after dire prediction has failed to come to pass. The computer models they depend upon simply do not work. And yet they push the government to spend billions of dollars, wipe out entire industries, and if the Green New Deal people have their way, return us to pre-flight days. . . all for nothing. All for reducing, maybe, the warmth of the earth by a fraction of a degree, while India and China continue building coal plants, China alone expects to build hundreds of new coal plants by 2030. Climate Alarmists say that what they tell us is settled science: Humans are causing the earth to destruct by their use of fossil fuels. But science, real science is never settled. It evolves constantly as scientists learn more and more.
I asked on Facebook once, why Democrats were Democrats. One answered “Because I believe in science.” She would be very surprised to find out that what she believes in is not really science at all.