The Five Best Arguments Against Climate Alarmism
James Delingpole
Tony Heller, aka Steven Goddard of the Deplorable Climate Science Blog, has compiled a must-read list of the five top arguments against climate alarmism.
This was in response to a challenge by Scott Adams, who is unsure what position to take on this issue and needs persuasion.
On one of his Periscopes, Adams — creator of the Dilbert cartoons, now with a flourishing side-career as an internet seeker-after-truth — said that if Heller could produce five unassailable arguments then he would become a climate sceptic; but that if Heller failed, then he (Adams) would “come down hard on the opinion that there’s something big to worry about.”
So how has Heller fared?
I think he has done a great job. The five arguments, which I’ll rephrase slightly, are as follows:
Climate alarmism is just a modern version of man’s primal superstitions about cataclysmic natural events. But these fears are baseless for there is no legitimate evidence to show that “extreme weather is increasing or sea level rise is accelerating.”Climate alarmism is a form of Groupthink — or, as Heller puts it, the Emperor’s New Clothes. This Groupthink requires ignoring the evidence and instead deferring to the opinions of a very small body of parti pris “experts”.If the case for the “global warming” were as strong as these experts say, the debate would be over by now. Instead, all of their “apocalyptic predictions” have failed miserably. What reason do we have to believe them after all this time?Climate alarmism is entirely dependent on graphs and computer models which rely on cherry-picked or corrupt data. Few if any of these models have come close to forecasting real world outcomes.The proposed solutions to “climate change” are “unworkable, dangerous and useless.”
In my view the last argument is the clincher. It’s the one that ought to unite all of us, sceptics and true believers alike. After all, even those who fully subscribe to the theory that climate change is dangerous, unprecedented and man-made ought surely to agree that there’s no point chucking money at the problem if it’s going to do more harm than good.
Yet this is exactly what is happening.
Taxpayer-subsidised wind and solar are doing huge damage to the environment, to wildlife, and to the economy.
Biofuels are destroying rainforest and agricultural land, driving up food prices, needlessly hurting nature.
Rent-seekers in crony capitalist Potemkin industries like renewables are being subsidised to produce inefficient, intermittent, unnecessarily costly power, misallocating scarce resources and driving the indigent deeper into fuel poverty.
Science in universities and schools is being corrupted by a Climate Industrial Complex which rewards science, however flawed, which promotes the alarmist narrative and which punishes science that defies the so-called “Consensus”.
Vast sums of public money — in excess of $1.5 trillion per year — are being squandered on the chimaera of “climate change.” Yet despite all this spending, using the alarmists’ own calculations, it will offset “global warming” by the end of the century by 0.048°C (0.086°F).
The activists, shyster politicians, rent-seekers, dodgy scientists, media second-raters and other useful idiots who are pushing for more climate action are demanding the impossible. If ever they achieved their ambitions, western industrial civilisation would collapse.
As Heller puts it:
The reason winter is cold, is because of a lack of solar energy. The sun is low in the sky, days are short, and it is cloudy much of the time. Yet climate alarmists want people to be dependent on solar energy for their survival. They imagine that there is some storage technology which can store huge amounts of energy for long periods of time when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing. But as Bill Gates pointed out, that technology doesn’t exist.I have degrees in science and engineering, and have worked for most of the last 45 years as both. The job of scientists is to come up with ideas. By contrast, the primary job of engineers is to make things that work. If a bridge or a microprocessor, doesn’t work – very bad things will happen. Bad engineering is fatal to humans, companies and civilizations.
This is what I find so puzzling about self-proclaimed “environmental” campaigners. They keep telling us that they want to save the planet, that they are concerned about “future generations”, that the people who “deny” climate change are selfish, greedy, and anti-science.
Yet everything these “environmental” campaigners do achieves an effect diametrically opposite to their alleged good intentions.
These greenies are hurting the poor, they’re damaging the planet, they’re hampering the economic growth that historically has enabled us to overcome or limit such environmental problems as pollution, they’re killing birds and bats and orangutans. Yet still, somehow, they keep telling us that they have the moral high ground.
Think about this next time you read some scare story about the coming climate apocalypse or about kids bunking off school in order to protest that more needs to be done: it’s not science you’re seeing here but hard left politics.
That’s the main reason, Scott Adams, why you shouldn’t allow yourself to be troubled by the great climate scare: because even if the greenies are right about the science — which they’re not, by the way — they are completely wrong about the solutions.
Their claimed intentions may sound good; the outcomes they inflict on us are evil.
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