One of the things to remember about climate change madness is that it has all the scientific validity of the flat earth theory or the ancient medical belief in humorism.
That is to say, it’s a sealed universe driven by self-reinforcing faith and fantasy without any serious reality attached.
The last two days have brought two new examples of the delusions and outright lies that drive the climate change narrative. [emphasis, links added]
On the delusion side, we have Axios’s horror that the Earth is within 1.5 degrees of the global warming limit set at the Paris Climate Accords, paired with its assurance that (and I’m quoting more accurately than Claudine Gay ever would), “The climate of 2023 was the hottest seen in at least 125,000 years…” (Emphasis mine.)
There are a couple of obvious problems with that article.
First, the Paris Climate Accords was a political agreement aimed at keeping the U.S. economy flat while other nations, which burn filthy coal, continue unfettered. Let’s just say that I don’t take its “limits” seriously—although, of course, the climate ‘changistas’ do.
Second, and this is the more important one, it’s nonsense to pretend we know to a “half-a-degree Celsius” how hot it was 125,000 years ago.
Humans began keeping temperature records in the mid-19th century. Everything before that is guesswork. Some of it is scientifically detailed guesswork based upon ice core samples and tree rings, but it’s still estimates without precision.
Here’s what NOAA (the government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has to say about those ice core samples:
Scientists run melted samples through various instruments—mass spectrometers, scanning electron microscopes, gas chromatographs—to find tiny pieces of pollution, like sulfates, traces of metals, or radioactive fallout, or natural aerosols like dust or volcanic ash.
[snip]
After analyzing enough ice core slices, which may each represent anywhere from a week to a year of time, a researcher can look for patterns to track changes in the atmosphere’s composition and temperature, and what activity on Earth shaped it.
The ratio of “light” oxygen-16 to “heavy” oxygen-18 in a sample, for instance, reveals the global temperature when the ice formed; it takes colder temperatures for water vapor containing the lighter oxygen isotope to turn into precipitation.
Examining the gasses trapped in ice cores is how scientists first learned that the amount of carbon dioxide and the global temperature have been linked at least the last million years of Earth’s history.
Thus, those cores allow us to go beyond merely concluding that a specific era was merely “hot” or “cold.” Instead, you get a level of detail that encompasses “warm,” “hot,” “very hot,” etc.
On the flip side, you’ve got “chilly,” “cold,” and Ice Age, 50 of which have occurred in the last 2.6 million years. We don’t have details, but we know that the Earth is a dynamic, ever-changing entity when it comes to temperatures.
Speaking of NOAA, the next bit of climate nonsense comes from NOAA. According to Just the News, a study reveals that NOAA has been less than honest in reporting about “billion-dollar disasters”:
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Tuesday released its final tally for 2023 of disasters exceeding $1 billion in damages. According to NOAA, there were 28 such disasters in 2023, which set the highest record since 1980 when the agency began keeping track of the figure.
[snip]
However, a new study finds that NOAA’s methodology is lacking in scientific integrity and goes against the agency’s own standards.
The study also explains that the trend in billion-dollar disasters is attributed to trends in climate, which is not a proper use of disaster loss figures.
The study’s author, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, has done extensive research over nearly three decades into the trends of disaster costs over time, which show the trends are actually declining.
Pielke explains that NOAA’s report was anything but transparent and violated its own scientific integrity guidelines.
I believe that humans are the Earth’s stewards. We have a responsibility to keep it a clean, viable place for ourselves and our descendants.
The anti-pollution measures of the early 1970s, when rivers were burning, and the skies over American cities looked like those over Beijing (where the smog is so bad you can see it inside the airport) were sensible.
Climate change madness, though, is another Marxist farce built on lies dressed up as “science.”
It’s intended only to push through damaging policies that will eventually see us revert to a premodern world where transportation was limited to how far a person could walk, people routinely died from extreme heat and cold, and famine was omnipresent.