What President Donald Trump has ridiculed as the “global-warming hoax” is not dead yet — at least not in the bowels of the federal bureaucracies. The latest round of climate-change alarmism by Obama appointees and left-wing bureaucrats in the federal government began last week with the release of the fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA) by the U.S. Global Change Research Program. However, scientists around the world are already ridiculing the debunked document as unhinged cherry-picking and embarrassing fear-mongering. Even President Trump, who is ostensibly in charge of the executive branch that produced the latest prophecies of climate doom, has been poking fun at the global-warming alarmists and their failed predictions.
Still, for the estimated 6 percent of Americans who still believe the establishment media, it is easy to understand why they may believe that a global-warming apocalypse is just around the corner. If they refuse to surrender more money and freedom to centralized government, the propaganda machine is arguing that certain catastrophe awaits. Citing the new federal report, the “fake news” media has been uncritically parroting the debunked claims as if they were gospel truth. CNN, among the worst offenders, headlined its “story” thus: “Climate change will shrink US economy and kill thousands, government report warns.” Of course, there have been zero mentions in CNN or the establishment press of the decades-long pattern of ludicrous “climate” predictions being debunked by reality.
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According to the new and improved climate report, created by a coalition of some 13 federal bureaucracies, man-made global-warming is real, and it is all your fault. And if you refuse to repent of your carbon emission sins by giving the government much more money and much more power over your life, the economy and the environment will be laid waste. Some 10 percent could be shaved off of GDP by the end of the century, the report claimed. Hurricanes, wildfires, droughts, tornadoes and all sorts of other disasters of biblical proportions will also supposedly increase if people continue to use reliable and cost-effective coal and oil as energy without bowing down to the climate dogma and the associated carbon taxes. Ironically, the report ignored decreasing hurricanes, record cold, and a historic drop in temperatures over the last two years.
But that should not be surprising. The federal bureaucrats who produced the report are overwhelmingly statists, with some 95 percent of campaign contributions from federal workers going to the Hillary Clinton camp in the 2016 presidential election. Still, the White House noted that this latest NCA report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario” of potential global warming. Future assessments will be more balanced, officials added. Indeed, more than a few critics seized on the fact that the report relied on the United Nations’ most alarmist scenario known as RCP8.5 — one so ludicrous that even the UN is now backing away from it — to formulate its prophecies. Even believers in the man-made warming hypothesis were shocked at the dishonesty.
University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke Jr., for example, who believes in the increasingly discredited anthropogenic global-warming hypothesis, blasted the latest federal report, saying it was so bad it would make it easier for people to dismiss future climate studies based in reality. “By presenting cherry-picked science, at odds with National Climate Assessment Volume 1 and IPCC Assessment Report 5, the authors of NCA Volume 2 have given a big fat gift to anyone who wants to dismiss climate science and policy,” the professor warned on social media after the report was released. “Embarrassing.” People are “not dumb,” he added, suggesting the public would see through the fraud.
Among other concerns, Pielke Jr. noted that the claim of 10 percent damage to U.S. GDP comes from an outlandish study funded by extremist carbon billionaire Tom Steyer, who is earning a fortune by hyping “climate change” to manipulate policy. It is based on a 15 degree temperature increase, which is two times higher than even the most extreme numbers reported elsewhere in the NCA report itself. “Shouldn’t such an outlandish, outlier conclusion been caught in the review process?” Pielke Jr. wondered. “Not a good look that sole review editor for this chapter is an alum of the [far-left] Center for American Progress … which is funded by Tom Steyer. Even rudimentary attention to COI (conflict of interest) would have avoided this.” Interestingly, the outrageous claim exposed by Pielke is one of the key talking points hyped by the establishment press.
Skeptics of the alarmism were even less impressed with the NCA’s pseudo-science. The Heartland Institute, which has been at the forefront of scientifically exposing the lies and deception in the official alarmism, said the new report was more of the same — “except for even greater exaggeration, worse science, and added interference in the political process by unelected, self-serving bureaucrats.” The Institute has published some 4,000 pages in the Climate Change Reconsidered series by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Those reports cite many hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers debunking every conclusion in the new NCA report, but which are conveniently ignored by alarmists.
“This report from the climate alarmist Deep State in our government is even more hysterical than some United Nations reports,” noted Dr. Tim Huelskamp, president and CEO of the Heartland Institute. “The idea that global temperatures could rise as much as 12 degrees in the next 80 years is absurd and not a shred of actual data and observation supports that. And as noted in Climate Change Reconsidered, sea levels have not been rising at an accelerated rate, and global temperatures have stayed largely the same for much of the last 20 years. President Trump was required by law to release this report, but he is not required to take it seriously — and he surely will not. To do so would undermine his sensible, deregulatory agenda and restart the war on fossil fuels.”
Dr. Jay Lehr, a hydrologist and the Institute’s science director, was even more blunt, saying he had “never seen such blatantly absurd conclusions drawn entirely from mathematical models that use only a limited number of variables.” Blasting the “shoddy science by Obama-era appointees,” Dr. Lehr said the real purpose of the report was to produce a “preordained political outcome that puts more power and money in the hands of the United Nations.” However, the physical evidence in the real world “proves conclusively” that the prophecies of climate doom are wrong: sea level is not rising at increased levels, the number and strength of hurricanes is decreasing, as are tornadoes, floods, and forest fires.
“In fact, there is no evidence that further increases in carbon dioxide emissions will have any deleterious effect on the planet or its temperature,” explained Lehr, who worked with 18 other scientists to critique the previous NCA report released last year. “This report is a scientific embarrassment. Not only does it rely on computer models to predict the climate through the end of the century, it relies on computer models from five years ago that have been laughably wrong, failing to get even close to reality since 2013. Happily, President Trump has on his advisory staff Dr. William Happer, who knows how flawed these models are and will advise the president to not base a single aspect of U.S. policy upon them.”
You can watch an interview of Dr. Happer by The New American magazine here:
Environmentalists were outraged at the NCA deception, too. Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore, for instance, was among the many prominent experts to ridicule the latest round of agenda-driven federal fear-mongering. “The science must be addressed head-on. If POTUS has his reasons for letting this Obama-era committee continue to peddle tripe I wish he would tell us what they are,” Moore told Climate Depot. “This new federal climate report even flies in the face of the UNIPCC admission that there is no evidence of a connection between AGW (anthropogenic global warming) and extreme weather. [Fringe climate alarmist] Ms. Hayhoe reigns supreme. Very worrying.”
Also blasting the new NCA report was the Science and Environmental Policy Project, or SEPP. “History is to be forgotten,” the prestigious group of scientists and experts noted in its critique of the new report, citing the report’s own outlandish summary. “In short, physical evidence cannot contradict USGCRP projections / predictions. The USGCRP created an illusory climate using complex climate models without a physical basis. As such, the entire 1100-page report can be viewed as an assembly of prophecies that may or may not occur in the next 25 to 100 years — no contradictory evidence needed. Only the evidence presented in the USGCRP report is valid…. This attitude reflects the status of science in the parts of the 13 federal government agencies that participated in the report.”
Much of the new report is simply “vague and unsubstantiated” rambling. However, SEPP noted that there are sections within the document where the prophesies can be tested against reality and hard evidence. “Probably the most glaring deficiency, which goes to the overall competence of the report, is in the Agriculture section, apparently signed-off by the Department of Agriculture,” the group said. While the report prophesies that agricultural yields will decrease as a result of “climate change,” in reality, U.S. crop yields are “growing significantly.” This is true all over the world, including in the tropics, which are significantly warmer than the United States. Ironically, some of the greatest gains in agricultural productivity have come from some of the warmest places, such as Brazil, the group found.
But the shoddy science and reliance on hype and fear over facts and evidence was to be expected, critics said. Many of the “experts” who worked on the report interviewed by the establishment media to hype its findings were actual political appointees put in place by Obama, a fervent devotee to what top scientists such as MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen have referred to as the climate “cult.” Interestingly, the first “National Climate Assessment” produced by the federal government had the dubious distinction of being the first government report to ever be considered deficient under the federal government’s own Data Quality Act. According to SEPP, the latest report similarly flunks based on the government’s own standards.
Listen to SEPP founder Dr. Fred Singer, a world-renowned scientist, speaking to The New American:
On the other hand, globalists and alarmists incessantly hyped the alleged threat from emissions of CO2, a gas exhaled by every human being that is known to real scientists as the “gas of life.” None mentioned that human emissions of this essential gas make up a fraction of one percent of all greenhouse gases present naturally in the atmosphere. Instead, they focused on fear-mongering. President Richard Haass with the global government-promoting Council on Foreign Relations, for example, claimed “climate change” could be a bigger threat to American well-being than China, terrorism, or nuclear weapons. “Those denying the science are unilaterally disarming in the face of this threat,” he said, without specifying which actual “science” he may have been referring to. Discredited alarmists who have been making failed predictions for decades were also trotted out by the press to offer more unhinged predictions of climate doom after the report.
The new NCA report comes on the heels of a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that was supposed to serve a similar purpose: Give the gullible media more fodder to whip up fear among gullible “news” consumers ahead of the UN “climate” summit in Katowice, Poland, next month. Within days of its release, that report, too, had been debunked and ridiculed by many of the world’s top experts and scientists, including some who worked with the UN! Still, the UN and the entrenched Deep State in Washington, D.C., are hoping to use the hysteria they hope to stir up to shackle the planet under a global “climate” regime. Whether they will succeed depends largely on whether Americans can be duped into surrendering their common sense, their freedom, and their money. Based on this report, the chances of that look slim — but the battle continues.
The New American will be at the UN COP24 in Katowice to bring readers the latest on the climate front.
Photo: lionvision/iStock/Getty Images Plus
Alex Newman, a foreign correspondent for The New American, was at the UN climate summit in Paris and has been at other key UN climate summits as well. He can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @ALEXNEWMAN_JOU or on Facebook.
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