In a June 30, 2020 article in The American Thinker Charles Battig  points out that Planet of the Humans, the recent film produced by Michael Moore, shows how the reality of needing to provide 24/7 reliable electricity to consumers requires that fossil fuels remain the world’s primary energy sources. This is because of the failure of wind or solar to provide power if there is no wind or insufficient sun.  Renewables cannot displace reliable fossil-fuel power plants.  And consumers’ energy bills do not go down, but go up, when renewables are imposed.

With his recent book, False Alarm, Bjorn Lomborg continues to straddle the fence on global warming, aka “climate change.”  As the original “skeptical environmentalist,” Bjorn has argued that there are more productive ways to aid humanity than spending billions trying to influence planetary climate change. He has argued for improving sanitation, clean water supplies, basic nutrition, and providing paths out of poverty for the millions living in underdeveloped countries.  In this book, he continues to press for a concerted effort to alleviate these ills, rather than accepting the decades of panic-driven calls for “fixing the climate.”

Keeping much of the world in poverty while billions are thrown at a climate change crusade is even more unjustified because the scientific data does not support alarms of an existential climate emergency.

Climate Change CO2 Theory Failures

When all the dozens of temperature prediction models driven by CO2 levels are run with real data starting in 1979, they grossly over estimate the global temperatures.

This was presented to the Environment And Public Works Committee of the United States Senate in 2013 by Roy W. Spencer, PhD of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Buried 774 pages into the UN IPCC’s Third Assessment Report summary, is this disclaimer regarding the existence of scientific certainty. It stated:  “In research and modeling of the climate, we should be aware that we are dealing with a chaotic, nonlinear coupled system, and that long-term predictions of future climate states is not possible.”

It should also be noted that it is these grossly exaggerating temperature prediction models are the same temperature models that drive the sea level increase models.

Looking at real world data we see that glacier melting and ocean lever rise started long before our heavy use of fossil fuels started.

Looking at the “Greenhouse Layer” in the upper atmosphere we see that the models fail miserably when compared with real data from UK Hadley Center atmospheric balloon data.  Similar results are found in data from satellites.

Deceptive Use of Data

Claiming we are seeing more drought conditions by only looking at data after 1940 totally ignores the extreme drought conditions of the 1930’s.  Here is all the data from NOAA.

Then there is the claim that global warming is causing more fires.  The data runs counter to that claim, as shown by data collected by the National Interagency Fire Center. And using “acres burned” as a stand-in for fires is highly deceptive. Most forest management experts indicate that the increase in acreage burned is due to mismanagement.

Also, it should be pointed out that during the last 600 million years, there where times where global CO2 levels were as much as 10 to 20 times higher than now and times when global average temperatures were as much as 20F higher but nothing dastardly happened. 

A joint NASA and MIT research effort reported in 2019 as having identified and quantified a feedback effect in tropical cloud formations that dumps excess heat into outer space.  

NOAA Hurricane and Tornado data shows no increase in severe weather events and WHO data shows a phenomenal decrease in world-wide per capita deaths due to extreme events. 

Topping all this off, the UN IPCC 2012 Risk Assessment Report found no metrics that indicate a problem associated with the slight warming we have experienced since the 1970s.

What is Going on Here?

As my daughter once asked: “Why are the politicians lying to us?”  The answer was provided by the journalist and social commentator H. L. Mencken decades ago when he wrote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Or expanding on what President Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, “Don’t let a good crisis go to waste, even if you have to invent one.