The UN’s Newest Climate Report Is A Woke Dumpster Fire Masquerading As Science
Like clockwork, the United Nations is out with yet another climate report, and the usual suspects are already blaring the global warming alarm sirens.
The New York Times warned the planet is on track “to cross a critical threshold for global warming within the next decade” and the only way to “hold global warming to relatively safe levels” would “require global cooperation, billions of dollars and big changes.”
The Associated Press declared the world is on “thin ice” due to warming. The BBC characterized the UN report as a “survival guide” — if we don’t follow it, we’ll see “the worst effects of climate change.”
The alarmist frenzy was joined by prominent scientists, eco-activists, Democratic politicians and even the UN chief himself, who called the report a “how-to guide to defuse the climate time-bomb.
In other words, the media, elites and the scientific establishment want you to take this report very, very seriously. The problem is no one who actually cares about sound science should give it the time of day.
Any scientific credibility the new UN report might have otherwise had is immediately called into question by its extensive use of “woke” buzzwords.
Variations of the words “equity” and “inequity” appear 31 times in the 36-page document. Variations of “inclusive” and “inclusion” appear 17 times. The document even mentions “colonialism” and repeatedly refers to climate and social “justice” for “marginalized” groups.
“Equity,” if you remember, is that word then-candidate Kamala Harris famously described as a system where “we all end up in the same place.” Sounds a lot like socialism, doesn’t it?
The UN report also contains an entire section titled “Equity and Inclusion,” which states “[e]quity remains a central element in the UN climate regime.” The report goes on to state that “[r]edistributive policies … that shield the poor and vulnerable, social safety nets, equity, inclusion and just transitions, at all scales can enable deeper societal ambitions and resolve trade-offs with sustainable development goals.”
In other words, the “woker” the policies, the better. How’s that for science?
Now, if you think “equity” is a fundamental pillar of scientific knowledge, then this is the report for you. But if you’re like most people and don’t think far left political priorities have a place in scientific documents meant to advise policymakers, this should alarm you.
No reading between the lines is necessary to decipher the real goal of this new UN report. In fact, the report’s accompanying press release is quite explicit about its goal: “Taking the right action now could result in the transformational change essential for a sustainable, equitable world.”
The release goes on to quote one of the report’s authors, who says: “Climate justice is crucial because those who have contributed least to climate change are being disproportionately affected.”
Sounds like political science, not climate science.
Another author calls for “prioritizing climate risk reduction for low-income and marginalized communities, including people living in informal settlements,” adding that “[i]nsufficient and misaligned finance is holding back progress.” (RELATED: CARLA SANDS: Biden Admin Is Dazed And Confused When It Comes To American Energy)
The report’s scientific rigor is further called into question by its insistence that warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial times represents a catastrophe. There is precisely zero verifiable, peer-reviewed science supporting a 1.5-degree climate threshold, but there’s tons of research on the staggering costs of complying with UN models.
One 2020 study in Nature found the cost of meeting the 1.5 degree goal would be “5 trillion dollars per year in 2020.” Given it’s 2023, the price tag is likely even higher.
An analysis by McKinsey & Company illustrates just how meeting the UN’s goal means more than shelling out trillions to overhaul global energy supplies. They note “a 1.5-degree pathway would imply a large dietary shift: reducing the share of ruminant animal protein in the global protein-consumption mix by half.”
Sounds like a dream for wannabe dictators. And they seem more than willing to peddle junk science in order to get it.
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UN climate study proves the fight to lower global temps won’t work
Here we go again — another climate-change doomsday warning about the world’s failure to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. In reality, though, Monday’s report from the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change just highlights the absurdity of the climate war.
“By 2030,” it asserts (with just “medium confidence”), global temps “could exceed 1.5°C relative to 1850-1900 with a probability between 40% and 60%.”
And?
Well, limiting warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F) is a key goal of climate warriors, though it’s a fundamentally arbitrary figure and past plans to achieve it were always a joke.
Naturally, the New York Times headline left no doubt: “Earth to Hit Critical Warming Threshold by Early 2030s, Climate Panel Says” — though the story did concede that a 1.5°C rise hardly spells Armageddon.
The UN folks say the world (er, wealthier nations) need to shell out three to six times as much as they are now on “climate action” to keep global warming between 1.5°C and 2°C.
Yet it’s only the West that’s chasing this goal. China, for one, last year issued 168 permits for coal-fueled power plants with a capacity equivalent to two large facilities a week, per the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air. New construction on such plants soared 50% from the year before.
Beijing is adding new emissions faster than Western nations can reduce their own, at great cost to their economies.
India, too, has continued spewing emissions apace.
Temps are already up by 1.1°C compared to the late 19th century, the UN report notes. And for all the progress reducing CO2 output, “the challenge has become even greater” than flagged in the last report in 2018.
Anyone want to bet the IPCC’s next “assessment” likewise sees the “challenge” greater still?
Truth is, when push comes to shove, the costs of global warming don’t come anywhere close to the mind-numbing price of trying to halt it (if that’s even possible).
Climate warriors want to upend the entire global economy, reduce living standards in the developed world (though they pretend the “transition” will be a winner) and stop the developing world from developing.
China and India refuse to go along except in lip service; Western elites caught in a quasi-religious fervor are simply refusing to face facts, at huge cost to the non-elite majority. Yet if the world does nothing, climate change will slow economic growth only slightly.
That doesn’t mean we should ignore climate change, but the answer is in encouraging innovation, not sending us back to the Dark Ages. All the screaming is as useless as any other fit of hysteria.
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Eco-dread is a luxury belief we can no longer afford -- Climate-change hysteria is a menace to the lives and interests of working people.
Here we go again. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a new document – the final part of its mammoth sixth report – and we all know what that means. More doomsday porn in the papers. More shroud-waving from eco-agitators. More warnings of imminent apocalypse. The climate cult has not disappointed. Our world is on the ‘brink of catastrophic warming’, cries the Washington Post. We’re headed for ‘climate disaster’, warns the BBC. The ‘climate time bomb’ is ticking, says UN secretary general António Guterres. In short, the countdown to doom continues. Unless we repent of our eco-sins, we’ll cause the heat death of our celestial home.
It’s always like this. Every IPCC report gives rise to Revelations-style hysteria in elite circles. Its 2021 report – which gave a ‘code red’ warning to humankind – was heralded as a vision of the horrors that await humanity if we do not drastically cut our carbon emissions. The future will be ‘some kind of hell on Earth’, said an Oxford professor. Behold the ‘climate crimes’ of our species, wailed the Guardian, like a modern-day version of those potty millenarian preachers of old. The Biblical vibe was palpable. ‘With raging wildfires, floods and pandemics, it seems like End Times – and it’s our own damned fault’, said a writer for the Hill. This view of humankind as being one new coal power station away from doom has found expression in response to the latest IPCC report, too. Humanity is on ‘thin ice, and that ice is melting fast’, quipped Guterres.
It all just washes over you after a while, doesn’t it? They’re the boy who cried apocalypse. Though at least the wolf in that fable did turn up eventually. I confidently predict that the eco End Times feverishly envisioned by the likes of Extinction Rebellion – who insist ‘billions will die ’ – will never materialise. Indeed, the IPCC says nothing even remotely as apocalyptic as that. As Michael Shellenberger has pointed out, pore over the thousands of pages of IPCC analysis and nowhere will you find the claim that ‘life on Earth is dying’. ‘No credible scientific body has ever said climate change threatens the collapse of civilisation, much less the extinction of the human species’, says Shellenberger.
As to the now mainstream belief that climate change will intensify ‘weather of mass destruction’, causing more deaths in natural disasters, ‘the science’ on that is also far from clear-cut. The IPCC only says it’s ‘likely’ that human influence is driving some instances of heavy rainfall, for example. It expresses only ‘medium confidence’ that climate change has impacted on water availability in parts of the world. Confidence is ‘low’, it says, that flooding on a global scale has been shaped by man’s impact on the climate. What we can be confident of, though, is that fewer people are perishing in natural calamities. As Shellenberger says, ‘In 1931, 3.7million people died from natural disasters. In 2018, just 11,000 did.’ And that brilliant decline in death happened at a time when the human population quadrupled. Maybe that ice we’re skating on isn’t so thin after all.
Speaking of ice, recent studies suggest there has been a stabilisation and even growth in the Antarctic ice shelf, that thing we’re constantly told is disappearing thanks to dastardly mankind. The Great Barrier Reef is doing pretty well too, in defiance of the numerous obituaries eco-doomsters wrote for that natural wonder (a 2014 piece in the Guardian was literally titled ‘The Great Barrier Reef: an obituary’). The ozone layer is recovering nicely. Green hysterics are wrong about everything. The End of Days that keeps them up at night never materialises. No wonder Greta Thunberg deleted that tweet in which she shared the harebrained claim that ‘climate change will wipe out all of humanity’ if we don’t ‘stop using fossil fuels over the next five years’. A tweet she posted… five years ago.
Let’s be clear about this: nothing that resembles science says that all of humanity will be wiped out unless we stop using fossil fuels. That is delirium, a frenzy of existential fear, a medieval-style dread of terrible heavenly punishment for our hubris, which is about as far from science as you can get.
There was a line in the Guardian this week about the IPCC’s latest report that made it pretty clear that there’s a difference between what the IPCC says about climate change and what the doom-addicted media say about climate change. This vast tract ‘took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages’, said the Guardian, but it can be ‘boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late’. Call me a cynic, but I reckon a lot of things are lost in translation when thousands of pages of complex scientific discussion are ‘boiled down’ to a juvenile one-line slogan designed to panic the masses into behaviour change.
This is not to let the IPCC off the hook. Its dense tomes might be free of XR-style fever dreams about billions of deaths and Greta-style warnings of all of humanity being wiped out. But the IPCC’s treatment of climate change as the gravest challenge facing mankind is a problem. It has a warping effect on our political priorities, implicitly downgrading issues like global poverty or deaths from disease by dragging our gaze, always, to climate. And it lends legitimacy to the crankier bell-tolling of the green movement. Indeed, those one-liners spun by António Guterres – ‘code red for humanity’, ‘the alarm bells are deafening’, ‘humanity is on thin ice’ – do nothing to challenge the terror-mongering of green talking heads, and a lot to inflame it.
Indeed, the latest IPCC document makes a preposterous demand of developed countries – that they should aim for Net Zero by 2040 rather than 2050. Apparently we should devote ourselves to achieving that expensive, anti-industry, anti-jobs goal of Net Zero 10 years earlier than planned. Here is the entire problem with the climate-change obsession – it’s the luxury belief we can no longer afford. This new IPCC report, like its 2021 predecessor, has landed in a time of crisis. In our post-lockdown era of soaring inflation and energy shortages, we can ill-afford to carry on indulging the late-bourgeois fantasy that modernity is a planet-killing force. We can no longer nod along to this petrified ideology that bears a great deal of responsibility for today’s energy problems and for the stalling of development in poorer parts of the world. Luxuriant apocalypticism, with its provision of a sense of mission to our lost elites, might have been just about tolerable in good times – it’s a non-starter in bad times.
The true conflict today is not between humankind and Mother Earth. It’s between the needs of ordinary people and the fantasies of a global elite that dolls up its loss of faith in industry and progress as ‘climate-change activism’. That tension will explode soon. We should hope it does, anyway.
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Hypocrite Biden blocks mineral mining his clean-energy goals require
President Joe Biden claims he wants America to lead in “clean energy” production, but he’s again blocking American producers from developing the critical, rare-earth minerals to make it happen.
The federal government owns huge chunks of America’s West, home to critical minerals like lithium essential to technologies like electric-vehicle batteries — yet Biden blocks their development beneath federal lands.
Biden banned access Tuesday to nearly 514,000 acres of public lands, including a new national park in Nevada, Avi Kwa Ame.
Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo says Biden failed to consult him before this designation, though the Silver State contains massive lithium deposits.
This is particularly frustrating because Nevada is a whopping 80% federally owned — compare that to New York, less than 1%, Pennsylvania (home to robust shale drilling) 2.2%, South Dakota 5.4% and Texas only 2%.
Blocking the critical mineral mining required to meet Biden’s “clean energy” goals denies reality — the mining infrastructure isn’t there.
China dominates, with around 80% of the market for mining these minerals, and undermines human rights to do so, through child and slave labor.
By the way, “clean energy” requires minerals mined using acid drainage, wastewater runoff and other environmentally sensitive factors, a big reason US resources have gone untapped.
“We believe it’s hypocrisy across the board. It’s illogical across the board, and it’s harming Alaska and the United States. Not everybody is buying their story that they’re really wanting to produce critical minerals,” Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy told me by phone.
“I’d be the first one to praise the Biden administration if I did see it, but all we see are a continual series of actions against Alaska’s ability to develop its resources, including minerals.”
Alaska is 61% federally owned, and Dunleavy pointed to Biden’s preemptive veto, through the Environmental Protection Agency, of the Alaskan Pebble project, which the governor said contains an estimated $1 trillion worth of copper — potentially the largest copper mine in the world. (It was blocked for supposedly endangering salmon streams.)
The governor said federal agencies stymied Alaskans trying to build a road to the Ambler mining district.
“It’s a continual fight with these guys,” Dunleavy said.
Dunleavy noted America’s energy-production regulations are more stringent than those of market leaders China and Russia.
He expressed disappointment about a Biden White House June 2021 report referencing critical minerals, a 250-page missive that mentions Australia 60 times and Canada 32 times but Alaska only once, as a footnote.
Last week, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise introduced HR 1, the Lower Energy Costs Act, which aims to revive America’s energy producers, in part through permitting reform for critical minerals.
Scalise told me he wasn’t surprised by the Biden energy report highlighting foreign countries ahead of Alaska and other US states.
“President Biden has made it clear from Day One, when he declared war on American energy, that he would rather make our country dependent on other countries for energy and critical minerals than making it here in America,” Scalise said.
“The energy costs are through the roof in part because President Biden’s made us dependent on foreign countries by shutting America down when it comes to energy production and critical minerals. It’s lunacy.
“But that’s the Biden agenda
https://nypost.com/2023/03/22/biden-blocks-mineral-mining-his-clean-energy-goals-require/
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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