• Tag Archives climate change

  • Al Gore’s 2009 Warning on Vanishing Polar Ice and the Perils of Censoring ‘Misinformation’

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    While speaking at a climate change summit in Denmark in 2009, former Vice President Al Gore made an alarming statement.

    Citing research from Dr. Wieslaw Maslowski, a professor of oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School in California, Mr. Gore said it was likely that the north polar ice caps would soon be completely melted.

    “These figures are fresh,” Mr. Gore said. “Some of the models suggest to Dr. Maslowski that there is a 75 percent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.”

    In his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore cited studies which said “in the next 50 to 70 years” the ice caps would be completely melted. What had caused the melting to suddenly increase by a factor of ten? Well, nothing. As NPR noted, Mr. Gore was misrepresenting the data of Maslowski.

    “It’s unclear to me how this figure was arrived at,” Dr. Maslowski told The Times UK. “I would never try to estimate likelihood at anything as exact as this.”

    Gore’s office soon issued a statement saying the 75 percent figure was a “ballpark figure” Dr. Maslowski had used in a casual conversation with Gore several years earlier.

    Fortunately, both Gore and Maslowski were wrong.

    In 2021, the Arctic sea ice extent was 4.72 million square kilometers, about 11 percent more than the 4.16 million kilometers in 2007, according to NASA’s estimates.*

    As Reuters reported in a recent fact-check, Mr. Gore was guilty of misrepresenting scientific data—or “spreading “misinformation.”

    In 2009, many responded playfully to Gore’s faux pas.

    “Like most politicians, practicing and reformed, Al Gore has been known to stretch the truth on occasion,” NPR noted, adding that Gore had also claimed he’d helped create the internet.

    Today, misinformation is treated in a much different way—at least in some instances. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, many writers and scientists who questioned the government’s use of lockdowns, mask mandates, enforced social distancing, and vaccine mandates were banned from social media platforms while others lost their jobs.

    Earlier this month, San Francisco attorney Michael Senger was permanently banned from Twitter after calling the government’s pandemic response “a giant fraud.” In August, it was former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson who got the boot after questioning the efficacy of vaccines in preventing COVID-19 transmission. Months earlier it was author Naomi Wolf, a political advisor to the presidential campaigns of Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

    Twitter is hardly alone, of course. Facebook and YouTube also announced policies banning the spread of COVID misinformation, particularly information related to vaccines, which is what got Drs. Peter McCullough and Robert Malone ostracized and banned.

    Some may argue these policies are vital, since they protect readers from false information. However, there is nothing that says Big Tech can only ban information that is false. On the contrary, in court proceedings Twitter has claimed it has “the right to ban any user any time for any reason” and can discriminate “on the basis of religion, or gender, or sexual preference, or physical disability, or mental disability.”

    Facebook, meanwhile, has argued in court that the army of fact-checkers they employ to protect readers from false information are merely sharing “opinions,” and are therefore exempt from defamation claims.

    What Big Tech is doing is concerning, but the fact that this censorship is taking place in coordination with the federal government makes it doubly so.

    In July, in arguably the most anti-free speech pronouncement made at the White House in modern history, White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted the White House is “flagging problematic posts for Facebook.”

    “We are in regular touch with these social media platforms, and those engagements typically happen through members of our senior staff, but also members of our COVID-19 team,” Psaki explained.

    All of this is being done in the name of science, but let’s be clear: there’s nothing scientific about censorship.

    This week I’ll participate in an event at the Kirby Center in Washington, DC, hosted by the Academy for Science and Freedom. Led by leading scientists Scott Atlas, Jay Bhattacharya, and Martin Kulldorff, the event will explore the future of science in the face of widespread censorship, which has eroded faith in science.

    To rebuild that trust we must remember that censorship is about power, not science, and recall the wisdom of one of history’s greatest scientists: Albert Einstein.

    “[F]reedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of scientific knowledge … it must be guaranteed by law,” Einstein wrote in a 1940 essay on freedom and science. “But laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man may present his views without penalty there must be a spirit of tolerance in the entire population.”

    That spirit of tolerance is missing today and must be restored. Scientists and public officials will make mistakes—just ask Al Gore—but purging ideas from the public square is a sign of a dogmatic society, not a scientific one.

    *Correction: The Arctic sea ice extent was 4.72 million square kilometers in 2021—not kilometers. We regret the error.


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune.

    Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • 4 Catastrophic Climate Predictions That Never Came True

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    If you’re under 50, there’s a good chance you’re expecting to see climate change create chaos and death in your lifetime. Scientists and pundits seem so certain we’re headed for global collapse and their predictions can be terrifying—especially if you’re young enough not to remember the last dozen times they predicted imminent collapse and were wrong. In each case, claims of impending environmental disaster were backed by allegedly irrefutable data and policymakers were encouraged to act before it was too late.

    The Prediction: Top climate specialists and environmental activists predicted that “global cooling trends” observed between WWII and 1970 would result in a world “eleven degrees colder in the year 2000 … about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” Bitter winters and floods from “delayed typhoons” would trigger massive drops in food production, followed by widespread famine.

    The Prophecies:

    • Newsweek Magazine’s “The Cooling World” Peter Gwynne April 28, 1975 
    • Time Magazine’s “A New Ice Age?” April 28, 1974
    • BBC’s Nigel Calder International Wildlife magazine, 1975
    • Betty Friedan in Harper’s magazine, 1958
    • University of California at Davis professor Kenneth Watt, Earth Day 1974

    What Actually Happened: Global cooling trends didn’t continue unabated, and temperatures stabilized. Within a few years, the same alarmists were predicting a life-threatening rise in temperatures, presaging many of the same dire effects on plant and animal life. Those new predictions were continually revised as their “near certainty” collided with the truth year after year, but prophets seem unchastened by their abysmal historical accuracy. Newsweek issued a correction to the 1975 article in 2006.

    The Prediction: More women having babies in the developing world was expected to exceed the “carrying capacity” of the earth, experts were certain. “Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supply we make,” Ehrlich said. “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years [1970-1980].” Ehrlich predicted that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.” This would lead to “an utter breakdown of the capacity of the planet to support humanity.”

    The Prophecies:

    What Actually Happened: Motivated by the urgent call for population control and fears of famine, India and China performed millions of forced abortions and sterilizations. But the number of people at risk of starvation dropped from 25 percent to 10 percent globally as genetically modified seeds and advances in irrigation improved crop yields. Far from the Great Die-Off, the global population nearly doubled while agricultural capacity soared and rates of starvation plummeted. Ehrlich’s star has continued to rise, though his signature predictions were nonsense, and now holds an endowed chair in Population Studies at Stanford. The millions scapegoated by his fear-mongering have not fared as well.

    The Prediction: Ecologists and environmentalists claimed that the buildup of nitrogen, dust, fumes, and other forms of pollution would make the air unbreathable by the mid-1980s. They predicted all urban dwellers would have to don gas masks to survive, that particle clouds would block the majority of sunlight from reaching earth, and that farm yields would drop as dust blotted out the sun.

    The Prophecies:

    What Actually Happened: When these doomsayers were pronouncing the imminent death of our atmosphere, the rate of air pollution had already been falling for most of the world, usually in the absence of dedicated policy changes. Developments like air filtration, as well as an overall decline in household pollutants (like the smoke from cooking with coal or wood) greatly reduced the health risks of the particles that remained. Increased adoption of fossil fuels and electricity grids, rather than traditional stoves, accelerated the improvements.

    The Prediction: Alleged experts in biology and zoology predicted that of all species of animals alive in 1970, at least 75 percent would be extinct by 1995. They blamed human activities like hunting and farming for shrinking wild habitats and cited pollution and climate change as key drivers of the new extinctions. Paul Ehrlich claimed “[By 1985] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

    The Prophecies:

    What Actually Happened: You may have noticed that earth has not lost three-quarters of its 8.7 million species, and indeed total biomass continues to grow. 99 percent of all species that have ever existed are already extinct, and natural rates of extinction predict we might lose anywhere from 200 to 2,000 species per year without any human intervention. Since 2000, we’ve identified fewer than 20.

    The language surrounding these various environmental disasters sounds much like Wednesday night’s town hall, and yet each thesis has faded from public consciousness, and the fear-mongers faced no accountability for their misplaced alarmism. Before we make unprecedented sacrifices to fight a climate phantom, let’s review the credibility of claims that the end is near—but really, this time.

    Laura Williams


    Laura Williams

    Dr. Laura Williams  teaches communication strategy to undergraduates and executives. She is a passionate advocate for critical thinking, individual liberties, and the Oxford Comma.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • Could the Green New Deal Create More Climate Victims Than It Saves?

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    Today, CNN is televising a “climate crisis town hall” for Democratic presidential candidates. Meanwhile, Hurricane Dorian, after tearing through the Bahamas, is menacing Florida and the East Coast.

    The candidates will surely point to the hurricane as they call for drastic measures against climate change. Tweeting about Dorian, Bernie Sanders has already offered his own recently released Green New Deal as a solution.

     

    It certainly qualifies as drastic, calling for the complete decarbonization (no more fossil fuel use) of the economy by 2050. But, if desperate times call for desperate measures, perhaps extreme weather calls for extreme measures, especially when our own fellow Americans facing Dorian are at risk of becoming climate victims.

    But what if the Green New Deal creates more climate victims than it saves?

    Such a notion might seem ridiculous, if not for a striking fact. As Alex Epstein says in a popular video:

    The International Disaster Database, a nonpartisan organization that tracks deaths from climate-related causes— such as extreme heat, floods, storms, and drought —shows that such deaths have been plummeting as CO2 emissions have been rising.

    How is this possible? Because of the fossil fuel energy that emitted the CO2, which has empowered us to climate-proof our environment with heating, air-conditioning, sturdy buildings, mass irrigation, and weather warning systems.

    Deadly exposure to the elements has been with us since before the dawn of humanity. Protection from the dangerous side of Mother Nature has always been one of our most vital challenges. That is why shelter is up there with food, water, and clothing among our most basic needs.

    And as we produce more and get wealthier, one of the chief things we’ve purchased ever more of is security from the elements: including from climate-related dangers.

    And the world has been getting richer at an incredible rate. Millions have been lifted out of abject poverty. It only makes sense then that humanity has simultaneously become less vulnerable to inclement weather.

    But here’s the thing: That unprecedented rise in production and human security has only been possible thanks to harnessing the unprecedented energy abundance and reliability of fossil fuels. That’s why climate-caused deaths have plummeted as CO2 emissions have risen. As Epstein puts it:

    Fossil fuel energy has not taken a naturally safe climate and made it unnaturally dangerous; it’s taken our naturally dangerous climate and made it unnaturally safe. Fossil fuels are not an existential threat. They are an existential resource because they increase something much more important than the level of CO2 in the atmosphere: the level of human empowerment. Increased life expectancy, income, health, leisure time, and education are all tightly linked to increased access to fossil fuels.

    So what would happen if we “decarbonized” our economy as the Green New Deal would have us do? If legislation forced us to switch to far less abundant, less reliable sources of energy (which is what most “green” energy sources are), then production and wealth could decline dramatically. And impoverished people are less climate-durable.

    Would decarbonization mitigate climate threats? Even if so, the question then becomes: would that mitigation offset the simultaneous rise in human climate-vulnerability?

    Economic prosperity and climate security cannot be considered in isolated compartments. And we must not let alarm drive us to desperate measures that could create the desperate times they are supposed to prevent.


    Dan Sanchez

    Dan Sanchez is the Director of Content at the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) and the editor of FEE.org.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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