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IN THIS ISSUE:
- Coalition Provides 2022 Climate Fact Check
- Podcast of the Week: Paul Ehrlich Predicts Climate Doomsday
- Climate Change Likely Not Accelerating, Human Impact Swamped By Nature
- Demographic and Economic Trends Refute Climate Doomsday Claims
- No, Global Warming Isn’t Making Winter Weather Worse
- Video of the Week: Climate Crisis Potpourri
- BONUS Video of the Week: Paul Ehrlich and the Anti-Human Agenda of the Elites
- Climate Comedy
- Recommended Sites
Coalition Provides 2022 Climate Fact Check
Editor’s Note: I was recently part of a coalition of climate analysts from a variety of organizations that examined some of the most prominent, egregiously wrong assertions made by the mainstream media in 2022 concerning climate change’s impacts on major events throughout the year. The analysis, “Climate Change Fact Check 2022,” was originally posted on JunkScience.com, and has been reposted elsewhere, including on Climate Realism. This document is similar to the types of exposés provided at Climate Realism daily. I encourage all my readers to check the sites maintained by the organizations who contributed to this Fact Check, regularly, if not daily. Fox News, among other media outlets, found the Fact Check compelling and wrote a story discussing it.
Climate alarmists and their media allies once again made a slew of claims about natural disasters being caused by man-made emissions in 2022. And once again, these claims clashed with reality and science.
Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein, for example, in his recent article “New abnormal: Climate disaster damage ‘down’ to $268 billion,” reported this about the estimated costs of damage due to climate change during 2022:
“This past year has seen a horrific flood that submerged one-third of Pakistan, one of the three costliest U.S. hurricanes on record, devastating droughts in Europe and China, a drought-triggered famine in Africa and deadly heat waves all over. … Weather disasters, many but not all of them turbocharged by human-caused climate change, are happening so frequently that this year’s onslaught, which 20 years ago would have smashed records by far, now in some financial measures seems a bit of a break from recent years.”
But are damages from those disasters really attributable to “climate change” or are climate activists and their media mouthpieces just trying to surf human tragedy to advance their very political cause?
The Associated Press, a long-time major newswire service, now accepts donations specifically to fund its climate coverage. In 2022, in fact, the Associated Press admitted to receiving $8 million in donations to cover climate. The money came from very large foundations that have been pushing climate alarmism for decades, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Quadrivium, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.
Is this money funding actual journalism or just rank political activism? Here are 10 fact checks of climate disaster claims made by the Associated Press and other media outlets in 2022. We report. You decide.
Pakistan Floods
Monsoon season brought heavy flooding to Pakistan, resulting in over 1,700 deaths between June and October. Media blamed climate change.
Fact Check: The 2022 monsoon season was within the range of natural variability and the wettest since 1961. If emissions are to blame, why was it so rainy then? Also average peak monsoonal rainfall actually has declined somewhat since the 1950s. Ongoing deforestation also may have made seasonal monsoon flooding worse.
Hurricane Ian
Striking in September, Hurricane Ian was one of the top three most damaging storms to strike the United States. Media blamed climate change for the storm’s rapid intensification.
Fact Check: Hurricane Ian struck during hurricane season, after a historically quiet first few months of hurricane season and amid a season of less storm activity than predicted. Moreover, Atlantic basin hurricane activity is within natural variability, according to NOAA.
European Drought
Europe experienced its most severe drought in 500 years, as reported by BBC News.
Fact Check: The European megadrought of 1540 occurred before coal-fired power plants, SUVs and cheeseburgers. If emissions caused the drought, what caused it in 1540?
China Drought
China experienced “record drought” in 2022.
Fact Check: While The New York Times labeled China’s drought as “record” as it was supposedly the most extreme drought since records began in 1865, research reports severe megadrought in China as far back as 1637, amid a period called the Little Ice Age.
Famine on the Horn of Africa
Drought and famine struck the Horn of Africa this year, threatening starvation for as many as, for example, 300,000 in Somalia. “Climate change underpins this continued lack of rainfall,” the media reported.
Fact Check: There is no trend in rainfall in the Horn of Africa since 1990. So while the drought may be due to lack of rainfall, droughts are natural and periodic in the region and the lack of rainfall cannot be attributed to emissions. Famine in Somalia is more properly attributed to internal politics and conflict. While Somalia’s neighbors, Ethiopia and Kenya, have also been affected by regionwide drought, political stability has nonetheless allowed crop production in those states to increase, while instability in Somalia has had the opposite result.
UK Heat Wave
Britain experienced several brief heatwaves in the summer, which were worsened by climate change, per The New York Times.
Fact Check: Heat waves have dramatically declined in frequency and duration in the United States over the past 90 years, per the National Climate Assessment. So, it is unlikely emissions are increasing heat waves in Britain. Moreover, during the UK heatwaves, average global warming remained fairly constant at 0.2°C to 0.3°C (0.36°F to 0.54°F) over the 1979-2000 average global temperature, an amount of warming that is not even really measurable. So, it may have been hot in the UK, but that was offset by cooling elsewhere. As pointed out by meteorologist Cliff Mass, heat waves may bring temperatures 30°–40°F above normal, but global warming is within the noise level at 1°–2°F.
Yellowstone River Flooding
Few in the media went so far as to say last summer’s Yellowstone River flooding was climate change, but they did the next best thing: “Experts say Yellowstone Flooding is a sign of things to come.”
Fact Check: The New York Times correctly prefaced its version of the above-captioned statement with: “It is difficult to directly connect the damage in Yellowstone to a rapidly warming climate — rivers have flooded for millenniums…” This year’s flood was related to an above-average snow pack that thawed just as massive rains came through. Cold weather + bad luck ≠ “climate change.”
Lake Mead
Scientists blamed historically low water levels in Nevada’s Lake Mead on climate change in The Wall Street Journal.
Fact Check: Data show no trend in natural water flows into Lake Mead since 1930. Since 2000, drawdowns of water from Lake Mead have been greater than natural inflows. The El Niño phenomenon, which is not emissions related, may also play a lesser role in Lake Mead water levels.
World Cup Skiing
“In this World Cup season, climate change is winning,” blared a Washington Post headline in November. Shorter winters were blamed for it being cold enough to hold only one of eight races as of mid-November.
Fact Check: First, winter doesn’t begin until December 21. Next, when World Cup skiing started in the 1960s, the season began in January. Now it begins in October, which is early- to mid-autumn. If the competition began in the winter everything would likely be okay because wintertime snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere has been increasing since the 1960s.
The Bottom Line: There is not a single natural disaster, nor trend in any type of natural disaster, that can be credibly linked with emissions or whatever gradual “climate change” may be occurring for whatever reason, including natural climate change. Attributing natural disaster damages to emissions and climate change is without a factual or scientific basis. And that certainly goes for 2022.
Regardless of one’s view of what passes as “climate science,” the good news is that even researchers who believe that “climate change” is a problem acknowledge the number of weather-related deaths and the cost of weather-related damage are actually on the decline—despite ever-increasing emissions and whatever slight warming may be occurring.
Presented by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), The Heartland Institute, Energy & Environment Legal Institute, Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), and the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC).
SOURCES: JunkScience.com; Fox News
Podcast of the Week
Recently, noted climate change doomsayer Paul Ehrlich appeared on 60 Minutes this week to add to his growing tally of false predictions. Aged 90, Ehrlich has built a career around being wrong about environmentalist catastrophes, from mass famine in the 1970s to cannibalism today. Heartland’s H. Sterling Burnett appeared on The John Steigerwald show to talk about Ehrlich’s dangerous dystopia.
Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!
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Climate Change Likely Not Accelerating, Human Impact Swamped By Nature
Recent research published in the peer reviewed Journal of Climate suggests factors other than human carbon dioxide emissions are responsible for recent warming—warming that, by the way, is much less than projected by climate models and estimates of climate sensitivity.
A team of researchers from Oxford University and the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, find recent increases in radiative forcing are due not to higher carbon dioxide concentrations but rather the result of aerosol emission reductions as industrial emissions are declining due to technological improvements and to comply with regulations.
The researchers suggest the reduction in aerosols combined with natural factors which drive temperature changes could account for the entirety of the warming experienced in recent decades. If this research is correct, humans are contributing to warming, just not via the emission of greenhouse gases. Rather “anthropogenic” warming is due primarily to the reduction of pollution allowing more solar radiation to reach the surface. On this theory, the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on temperatures is greatly overstated, which may explain why climate models, in which greenhouse gases are assumed to be the driving force behind temperature trends, consistently overstate the amount of warming the Earth has, in fact, experienced.
SOURCES: Net Zero Watch; Journal of Climate
Demographic and Economic Trends Refute Climate Doomsday Claims
A recent paper by Vijay Jayaraj, a research associate with the CO2 Coalition, examines the demographic and economic trends since the end of the Little Ice Age—the period during which the Earth has modestly warmed—and finds they refute claims commonly made by government funded researchers and the mainstream media that human-caused climate change is making it harder for humans to survive and modern civilizations to flourish.
Jayaraj writes that human societies have flourished during the last three centuries as the Little Ice Age began to wane in the later part of the 17th century. Jayaraj writes:
The Little Ice Age disrupted global plant growth and fostered periods of famine, disease and mass depopulation. However, since the advent of modern warming there has been an overall greening of the planet, more bountiful crop harvests and an eight-fold increase in humanity’s numbers. Contributing to the bounty has been the fertilization effect of carbon dioxide, whose atmospheric concentration has increased in recent decades.
Among the trends Jayaraj lists which evince the fact humans are greatly benefiting from the modest warming of the Earth are:
- Global maize (corn) production was approximately 205 million tons in 1961. Today the world produces five times more maize—1.16 billion tons—with similar results for all other major food crops, like rice, wheat, soybeans, cereals, nuts, and vegetables, as discussed in dozens of posts on Climate Realism.
- Captures of marine fish during 1961–2018 increased from 34 million tons to 84 million tons. During the period, aquaculture production increased from two million tons to 82 million tons.
- Malnourishment in developing countries fell drastically from 34 percent in 1970 to 13 percent in 2015, despite a rapidly growing population.
Other evidence of human progress amid climate change during the past century Jayaraj discusses are the facts that humans are living longer than ever before, infant and childhood mortality have declined dramatically, transportation has become more affordable and readily available to billions of people, billions of people have access to electricity (which has powered industrial development to a degree not seen before), and fewer people die as a result of weather related events than ever before.
SOURCE: Real Clear Energy
Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites
No, Global Warming Isn’t Making Winter Weather Worse
However, as Ross Clark detailed in a recent article in The Spectator, since there is no evidence weather trends are worsening, or that extreme weather events are becoming more common or severe, climate change can’t be making the weather worse in any measurable sense. Indeed, as Clark writes, “there is compelling evidence to the contrary.”
Clark points out, on cold spells, “the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC’s sixth assessment report, published in 2021, cited a number of analyses showing that ‘cold spells have undergone a reduction in magnitude and intensity in all regions of North America.’”
Nor has the polar vortex been altered due to climate change. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) debunked that claim in February 2021, showing that since the 1950s, polar vortex incursions into the continental United States have become less frequent and severe. And the jet stream has “wobbled,” waxing and waning, with no consistent relation to changing climate conditions.
The reporting on recent severe winter weather events says more about the mainstream media’s commitment to pushing the narrative humans are causing a climate catastrophe than it does about climate change itself or the facts about it. As Clark sums up:
In other words, this week’s weather in the US is just that: weather. But that will never do when you are trying to tell a morality tale about humans fouling their own nest through their own arrogance and stupidity: every adverse weather event must be blamed. (emphasis added).
SOURCES: The Spectator; Nature Climate Change
Climate Crisis Potpourri
On this episode of Climate Change Roundtable, Anthony Watts, H. Sterling Burnett, and Linnea Lueken cover a variety of topics. These include the energy shortage lump of coal Biden is trying to give us with his energy restrictions and plans, violation the law by not offering lease sales, helping Venezuela produce oil, which we will then import, how we’re offering high cost offshore wind leases, thus killing whales in the process, and rising blackouts as demand on the grid become greater due to the push to electrify everything. Plus, the panel looks into the AOC Megaflop documentary movie “To the End” that only earned $81 per theater on opening weekend. Finally, the Climate Change Roundtable crew field questions about anything climate or energy related.
Tune in LIVE every Friday at noon CT on YouTube to catch the show and participate with other fans in the chat.
Paul Ehrlich and the Anti-Human Agenda of the Elites
In this excerpt from the January 5, 2023 episode of the In the Tank podcast, The Heartland Institute’s Donald Kendal, Jim Lakely, Justin Haskins, and Chris Talgo discuss how “60 Minutes” gave doomsayer Paul Ehrlich a huge audience to push the evil and anti-human idea that there are way too many people on the planet with ZERO skepticism or push-back.
The In the Tank Podcast is now broadcast LIVE every Thursday at Noon CT at Heartland’s Stopping Socialism TV channel. Go on over and subscribe so you won’t miss any upcoming episodes.
