Walter Williams: ‘Environmentalists Are Dead Wrong’
By Walter E. Williams
Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.
In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.” Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.
In International Wildlife (July 1975), Nigel Calder warned, “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.” In Science News (1975), C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization is reported as saying, “The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed.”In 2000, climate researcher David Viner told The Independent, a British newspaper, that within “a few years,” snowfall would become “a very rare and exciting event” in Britain. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past.” In the following years, the U.K. saw some of its largest snowfalls and lowest temperatures since records started being kept in 1914.
In 1970, ecologist Kenneth Watt told a Swarthmore College audience: “The world has been chilling sharply for about 20 years. If present trends continue, the world will be about 4 degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990 but 11 degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”
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Oh No! Global warming will cause increase in exercise — But exercise increases global warming!
Flashback 2007: Exercise Causes Global Warming – Walking to the Shops ‘Damages Planet More Than Going By Car’
By Noel Sheppard | August 8, 2007 – Newsbusters
As reported by the Times Online Saturday in a piece hysterically titled “Walking to the Shops ‘Damages Planet More Than Going By Car'” (grateful h/ts to all NBers and readers who forwarded this article for consideration, emphasis added throughout):
Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.
Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.
Absolutely amazing. But there was more:
The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.
“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”
Now, just imagine where this insanity could go:
- Gymnasiums and athletic clubs closed to slow global warming
- Jogging made illegal to slow global warming
- Golf banned to slow global warming
- All organized sporting events including amateur, collegiate and professional banned to slow global warming.
Is it becoming obvious the amount of control environmentalists seek over personal behavior all in the name of global warming?…
Study in Nature: 21 climate models find climate change ‘may increase net recreational physical activity in U.S.’ by 2099
Here’s abstract of Nature Human Behavior paper on global warming predictions of exercise rates in next 40-80 years.
Regular physical activity supports healthy human functioning1,
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New Study impresses AP’s Seth Borenstein – Uses ‘extensive computer models’ to find ‘man-made extreme weather has hit all over the world’
By SETH BORENSTEIN
Published: Yesterday
In a first-of-its-kind study, scientists analyzed weather stations worldwide and calculated that in 85 percent of the cases, the record for hottest day of the year had the fingerprints of climate change. Heat-trapping gases from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas made those records more likely or more intense.
“The world is not quite at the point where every hot temperature record has a human fingerprint, but it’s getting close to that,” said lead author and Stanford University climate scientist Noah Diffenbaugh.
Climate change’s influence was spotted 57 percent of the time in records for lowest rainfall in a year and 41 percent of the time in records for most rain in a 5-day period, according to the study in Monday’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
For the last several years, researchers have come up with a generally accepted scientific technique to determine whether an individual weather extreme event was made more likely or stronger because of climate change. It usually involves past weather data and extensive computer models that simulate how often an event would happen with no warming from greenhouse gases and compare that to how often it does happen.
Outside scientists said what makes Diffenbaugh’s study different and useful is that he doesn’t look at an individual event such as California’s five-year drought. Instead, he applies the technique to weather stations as a whole across the world, said Columbia University climate scientist Adam Sobel, who wasn’t part of new work.
“This is a step forward in that it allows general statements about what fraction of events of the given types selected have a statistically significant” human influence, Sobel said in an email.…
Former Obama Official: Bureaucrats Manipulate Climate Stats To Influence Policy
By CHRIS WHITE – The Daily Caller
A former member of the Obama administration claims Washington D.C. often uses “misleading” news releases about climate data to influence public opinion.
Former Energy Department Undersecretary Steven Koonin told The Wall Street Journal Monday that bureaucrats within former President Barack Obama’s administration spun scientific data to manipulate public opinion.
“What you saw coming out of the press releases about climate data, climate analysis, was, I’d say, misleading, sometimes just wrong,” Koonin said, referring to elements within the Obama administration he said were responsible for manipulating climate data.
He pointed to a National Climate Assessment in 2014 showing hurricane activity has increased from 1980 as an illustration of how federal agencies fudged climate data. Koonin said the NCA’s assessment was technically incorrect.
“What they forgot to tell you, and you don’t know until you read all the way into the fine print is that it actually decreased in the decades before that,” he said. The U.N. published reports in 2014 essentially mirroring Koonin’s argument.…
Bill Nye, The Cognitive Dissonance Guy – ‘He is a junk science guy’
Bill Nye Says Climate Change Deniers Have a Bad Case of Cognitive Dissonance | WIRED
By Tony Heller – Real Climate Science
Had Bill ever actually looked at the data, he would have known that the frequency of February 70 degree days has actually declined since 1920. The warmest February was 1976, which came immediately before the three coldest winters on record in the US.
Less than one year after the warmest February in 1976, it was snowing in Miami
20 Jan 1977, Page 3 – Valley News
The warmest February temperature on record in the US, was 104 degrees at Rio Grande City, Texas on February 26, 1902. The average warmest February temperature at all 1,218 USHCN stations is 78 degrees.
It is painfully obvious that Bill is unfamiliar with both the data and the authorities he claims to represent. He is a junk science guy, and because of his influence on trusting children, his disinformation campaign is a threat to both science and civil society.
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Bill Nye Freaks Out On CNN After Scientist Schools Him On Climate Change
…New Climate Study Calls EPA’s Labeling Of CO2 A Pollutant ‘Totally False’
A new study published by seasoned researchers takes aim at the heart of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) authority to issue regulations to curb carbon dioxide emissions.
The study claims to have “proven that it is all but certain that EPA’s basic claim that CO2 is a pollutant is totally false,” according to a press statement put out by Drs. Jim Wallace, John Christy and Joe D’Aleo.
Wallace, Christy and D’Aleo — a statistician, a climatologist and meteorologist, respectively — released a study claiming to invalidate EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding, which allowed the agency to regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
“This research failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 14 temperature data sets that were analyzed,” the authors say in the release for the second edition of their peer-reviewed work.
“Moreover, these research results clearly demonstrate that once the solar, volcanic and oceanic activity, that is, natural factor, impacts on temperature data are accounted for, there is no ‘record setting’ warming to be concerned about,” the researchers say. “In fact, there is no natural factor adjusted warming at all.”
The study is intended to bolster a petition Wallace and D’Aleo filed with EPA as part of the Household Electricity Consumers Council (CHECC), asking the agency to reconsider its endangerment finding.
The libertarian Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) also filed a petition with EPA to reconsider the endangerment finding. The Trump administration has not indicated whether or not they will reconsider the Obama-era finding. Any challenge would be met with legal action from environmental activists.…
Research Report Disproves the Alarmists’ Basic Claims About CO2
This report and the earlier edition go far beyond this by disproving the alarmists’ basic claim that increases in atmospheric CO2 result in global warming. The Research Report results can be replicated using the basic data that the authors are willing to provide, most unlike the elaborate global climate models relied on by climate alarmists. Both the First and Second Editions have been extensively peer reviewed by experts in the relevant fields. So the reports have all the characteristics of good science, and should have the support of anyone who supports science, which the marchers claim to represent.
Climate skeptics have long argued that fluctuations in global temperatures are not primarily due to human-caused emissions of CO2 from using fossil fuels to improve their lives, and have generally attributed these fluctuations to changes in the sun, our source of heat and light. The importance of solar variations and other natural fluctuations has now been shown to be the case despite many tens of billions of taxpayer dollars spent by the US and other governments to try to disprove the obvious and mislead the public on this central scientific issue in the climate debate.…
Climate Marches Aren’t About Science — They’re About Trump
Organizers promised that hundreds of thousands would participate in an April 22 March for Science planned for hundreds of cities worldwide and an April 29 People’s Climate March in Washington, DC.
These events have no more to do with science or climate change than do UN programs or the Paris climate treaty. Their own leaders make that perfectly clear.
A climate website asserts that marchers intend to mark President Trump’s 100th day in office “with a massive demonstration that shows our resistance is not going to wane.” They intend to “block Trump’s entire fossil fuel agenda,” with Berkeley-style tantrums and riots, most likely.
A science march website says this is “explicitly a political movement, aimed at holding leaders in science and politics accountable” for trying to “skew, ignore, misuse or interfere with science.”
That pious language really means they intend to allow no deviation from climate cataclysm doctrines.
It means everyone must accept claims that fossil fuel emissions, not powerful natural forces, now govern Earth’s climate; any future changes will be catastrophic; despite growing wealth and technological prowess, humanity will somehow be unable to adapt to future fluctuations; and mankind can and must control the climate by regulating emissions of plant-fertilizing carbon dioxide, regardless of costs.
Equally revealing, former UN climate convention director Christiana Figueres has said the UN goal is to “intentionally change the economic development model” that has reigned since the Industrial Revolution.
“Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection,” former IPCC mitigation group co-chair Ottmar Edenhofer has stated. It is about negotiating “the distribution of the world’s resources.”