Claiming that they have a “moral obligation” to warn humanity of the threat posed by man-made climate change and “tell it like it is,” more than 15,000 scientists from all sorts of disciplines have signed a declaration claiming that Earth is now in the midst of a “climate emergency.”
Ironically, the warning was published just after speculation began that President Trump would move to pull the United States out of the Paris Climate Accord.
The scientists’ warning was published in the journal BioScience on November 5 and contains all the usual fearful omens about sea level rise, ocean acidity, and wildfires. It points to various items that are cause for alarm, according to them:
Profoundly troubling signs from human activities include sustained increases in both human and ruminant livestock populations, per capita meat production, world gross domestic product, global tree cover loss, fossil fuel consumption, the number of air passengers carried, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and per capita CO2.
So we’re supposed to cut out or cut back eating meat, buy and produce less stuff (and get rid of all the jobs involved in production and buying), grow more trees (which wealthier countries are already doing), use less electricity, drive less, and fly less — in other words, say goodbye to a First World lifestyle.
The document also lays the blame for all of these potential problems at the feet of Western nations, the United States in particular. “The climate crisis is closely linked to excessive consumption of the wealthy lifestyle. The most affluent countries are mainly responsible for the historical GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions and generally have the greatest per capita emissions” — though China’s emissions now dwarf those of the United States, and India’s emissions are increasing dramatically.
The scientists used the 40th anniversary of the First World Climate Conference in 1979 as the excuse to issue this new warning. They cited mankind’s insufficient response to the alleged coming climate catastrophe and issued a call-to-action.
“Since then, similar alarms have been made through the 1992 Rio Summit, the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as scores of other global assemblies and scientists’ explicit warnings of insufficient progress. Yet, greenhouse gas emissions are still rapidly rising, with increasingly damaging effects on the Earth’s climate. An immense increase in scale of endeavors to conserve our biosphere is needed to avoid untold suffering due to the climate crisis.”
The document then goes on to use cherry-picked data (going back only to 1979) to support its claim that increases in population, GDP, meat consumption, and use of fossil fuels somehow are problematic for Earth’s climate and cause extreme weather events.
And now, the climate crisis is no longer coming to us at some nebulous future, decades away. The scientists who wrote the essay claim it is already here. “The climate crisis has arrived and is accelerating faster than most scientists expected. It is more severe than anticipated, threatening natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity. Especially worrisome are potential irreversible climate tipping points and nature’s reinforcing feedbacks (atmospheric, marine and terrestrial) that could lead to a catastrophic ‘hot-house Earth,’ well beyond the control of humans” — this despite the fact that Earth’s temperatures have stalled for about 20 years and increasing evidence that the warming we have seen is completely normal. (As glaciers recede, the remains of forests and human settlement have been found that tell us that in the recent past Earth was warmer than it is now, even though CO2 levels were significantly lower.)
The authors of the essay are listed as William J. Ripple and Christopher Wolf, both from the Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society at Oregon State University. Their conclusions and recommendations read as though they were written at the United Nations. “To secure a sustainable future, we must change how we live, in ways that improve the vital signs summarized by our graphs. [Emphasis added.] Economic and population growth are among the most important drivers of increases in CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion; therefore, we need bold and drastic transformations regarding economic and population policies.”
The essay goes on to rehash the same goals of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We must quickly transition away from efficient fossil fuels into less efficient substitutes such as wind and solar. We have to reduce emissions from short-lived pollutants such as methane, black carbon, and hydrofluorocarbons. We must switch to a plant-based diet and eat far less meat. We must change our economic goals from acquiring wealth to creating a sustainable ecosystem for the planet.
In short, we need to adopt a world socialist government.
And of course, among their recommendations to combat this “climate emergency” is to ultimately have fewer people in the world.
“The world population must be stabilized — and, ideally, gradually reduced — within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss.”
Do they mean like China’s one-child policy? Those types of “proven and effective policies?” Forced abortions? Forced sterilization? And just how are human rights “strengthened” by telling people how many children they can have? Frankly, that sounds like the polar opposite of human rights.
Whipple and Wolf might be very fine scientists in their chosen discipline, but the document they’ve created is a political one, not a scientific one. Although they sound some hopeful notes at the end of their piece, those notes are about climate lawsuits, schoolchildren striking for the climate, and governmental declarations of climate emergencies, and have nothing to do with science. They end by claiming: “The good news is that such transformative change, with social and economic justice for all, promises far greater human well-being than does business as usual.” So in their minds, getting rid of capitalism, which has produced almost all of the benefits enjoyed by mankind today, including technology and medicines, will create a utopia on Earth, even though socialism fails everywhere it is tried, and succeeds only to the extent that capitalism and free markets are allowed to exist.
The climate-hysteria movement shows more and more each day that it’s not about science at its core. It’s an anti-human movement based on Malthusian philosophy that posits that mankind is a type of cancer on the Earth and not a special creation of God.
It’s not science; it’s science fiction.
Photo: Thomas Northcut / DigitalVision / Getty Images Plus
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects with a primary focus on the ongoing anthropogenic climate-change hoax and cultural issues. He can be reached at [email protected].
