Posted on 06/02/2017 6:35:24 AM PDT by markomalley
So what are the consequences of Donald Trump pulling America out of the Paris Agreement on climate change? Bad news: the planet is going to die.
No, really. That’s what the Left is actually claiming. Scientific American tweeted out a photo of the Earth made into a barren wasteland as a result of this one decision.
My favorite reply: “You claim to be scientific but imply that increased C02 will kill trees?”
A few others stuck to the formula of the old joke: world to end, women and minorities hardest hit.
A Vice editor warns that “your kids are gonna die from climate change.” Christoper Mims at the Wall Street Journal declares that we have flunked as a species and that “we still have to de-carbonize our civilization or risk actual extinction.” Extinction.
But that seems mild by comparison to others. Trita Parsi says, “Trump just declared war on the very idea of life on earth.” One leftist website claims that “With each passing day, the long-term prospects for life on Earth grow increasingly dim,” and quotes John Kerry: “What’s the worst that happens if they’re wrong? The planet dies.” Both CNN and The Huffington Post summed up the message of the day as “Trump to Planet: Drop Dead.”
Way to keep things in perspective, everybody.
All of this is presumably calculated to impress us with the gravity and urgency of the situation, yet it actually has the opposite effect. It makes claims of catastrophic global warming look hysterically alarmist—and totally detached from any scientific basis.
This is certainly out of proportion to President Trump’s actual announcement. Pulling out of the Paris Agreement was the right thing because no one has actually proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide are warming the globe or that this is driving us toward a global catastrophe. But that’s not why Trump did it. He drew us out because he thinks the agreement is “unfair” to America, imposing too great a burden on us rather than other countries, and he specifically left open the idea that he might work with the international community to come up with a better deal. So he’s okay with an international climate agreement, he just thinks—as usual—that he could do a better job of negotiating it.
But the hysterical overreaction is instructive, because somehow the backers of the global warming cause can’t manage to remember the scientific substance of their own claims—or much of anything else about the science and history of the climate. If they did, they might know that there is absolutely no reason to think the very viability of life on Earth is at stake. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the geological record knows that the atmosphere has previously had far higher levels of carbon dioxide, particularly during the years when life originated. The Earth has also been far warmer during periods when life was even more abundant. That’s where all the vegetation came from to support giants like the dinosaurs.
The actual claims for global warming in the foreseeable future involve an increase in average global temperatures of 2.6 to 6.4 degrees Celsius and a rise in sea levels of 26 to 50 centimeters. (So far this century, temperatures have remained below the low range of those predictions.) To put this in perspective, at the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago, global temperatures rose 10 degrees Celsius, and ocean levels rose by nearly 100 meters. Yet this previous episode of massive natural warming was good for humans, and I doubt it’s an accident that our current period of warm weather coincides with the rise of civilization itself.
As for the planet, it doesn’t really care what temperature it is, and life will adapt to warmer or colder temperatures. The good news is that the historical record also shows that we humans have adapted and survived through significant variations in climate, even before we had modern science and technology. That’s good news, because we’re eventually headed back into another ice age.
Given the assumption that long-term global warming is actually happening and is caused by human activity, which is itself dubious, you could reasonably claim that it will lead to some significant costs: flooding in some areas, drought in others, the loss of coastal land to rising seas, or the cost of rebuilding cities to protect them from rising waters. Maybe there will even be an increase in big deadly storms like hurricanes—though the last time somebody predicted this, hurricane activity immediately fell to historic lows. Those costs may be significant, but they would have to be counterbalanced against the costs of global warming regulations.
Maybe that’s why the global warming alarmists have to crank it up to eleven. If we can point to billions of dollars drained from the U.S. government and diverted through an international bureaucracy, or trillions of dollars in lost production and regulatory costs imposed on the world economy over decades, the global warming alarmists have to be able to claim negative consequences so great that they dwarf these massive costs. There’s nothing bigger than the planet dying. It’s a claim that automatically wins the argument—or so they think.
But it’s so comically exaggerated, so over the top, that it actually has the opposite effect. It convinces a lot of us that claims about global warming have become a hype machine stuck at its maximum setting. This looks less like science than like a crackpot doomsday cult perpetually claiming that the end is nigh.
Global Warming is nothing but a religious cult and they have their own version of the Inquisition to force compliance with orthodoxy.
Still glad that we started coming out of the ice-age 22,000 years ago.
&^)
How come nobody ever asks how Taxing American Citizens and Companies and destroying it’s economy to give Welfare to the rest of the World appears to be the only way to Stop Man Made Global Warming??
Is everybody in the Media brain dead??
I’m so sick of all this. I just want to be left alone. But no, global Marxism does not want to leave anybody alone. They want a boot stamping each human face, forever. (To paraphrase Orwell.)
Any time these globalist bastards are in panic mode we are doing something right!!!
....Is everybody in the Media brain dead...
Yes, and most of the Democrats too.
There is no other side to this debate other than fringe lunatic liberals’.
It is a full apoplectic fit psychotic breakdown.
It is embarrassing to watch.
Religion invented by Marxists. The true believer parishioners being Lenin’s useful idiots. All others, in on the joke.
Put a boot in their ass.
It’s the American way.
As someone who still remembers the last century, I just want to say that I will be damned if I’ll let Europeans in general, and *Germans* in particular, tell America what to do.
“Is everybody in the Media brain dead??”
Yes when it comes to critical thinking.
Brainwashed!
Christiana Figueres, the Executive Secretary of UNFCCC, warns that the fight against climate change is a process for the necessary transformation of the world economy:
“Climate Change is an excuse to end the economic development model of the industrial revolution.”
‘Is everybody in the Media brain dead?’
I don’t think so... Most are following marching orders from the top to keep their cushy jobs. If management issued orders to change direction and support the conservative agenda, most in the business would fall right in line. They are, sadly, all prostitutes..
Well said.
They will not leave the country people alone. If we will not actively participate in their evil, they will coerce us, using the entire spectrum of force from subtle "nudging" (read Cass Sunstein's evil book for reference), to this "climate change" and "green energy" crap, to outright killing of people they don't like or who are against them.
I'm weary of this world, and I'm only 50 years old. I'm ready for Christ to come back and level the place.
And Trump is causing liberal heads to explode to such a degree that I wouldn't be surprised if there were soon some mass suicides a la Jonestown.
I spoke by phone with my liberal SIL early this week and she was spitting mad about Trump...completely irrational.
This is a woman who, to the best of my memory, does not cuss and, in this phone call, she was literally spewing foul language about Trump.
When the scheme collapses as farce, like the “Population Bomb” scare promulgated by Paul Ehrlich in the 1970s, we cannot let these Lysenkoist scoundrels get away with it again, like Ehrlich did.
They truly need to be chased out of both academia and science for good. The charge: science fraud.
Not just individuals, but organizations as well as publications. They drank the kool-aide, so they get the cyanide.
No amount of sniveling should allow them to escape scorn and punishment. And we must be clear. This is not anti-science, but to protect science from charlatans and fraudsters.
Right on! This seems to spell it all out in only one sentence. I,too would like to know how that’s supposed to work.
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