Do You Fear Global Warming? Do Some Homework

The National Institute of Health describes anxiety as a pathology, a mental state of exaggerated fear “in which hyperexcitability…is expressed as hypervigilance and increased behavioral responsivity to fearful stimuli.”

Some people seem to have a pathological need to be frightened, especially by the “fearful stimuli” of “global warming,” “climate change,” “extreme weather” (or substitute the “apocalyptic descriptor du jour”) predictions – frequently revised but never realized – promulgated and perpetuated by society’s major institutions.

Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” writes: “As surely as temperatures rise during the summer, climate alarmism serves up more stories of life-threatening heat domes, apocalyptic fires and biblical floods, all blamed squarely on global warming. Yet, the data to prove this link is often cherry-picked…”

…Or worse…

“Data” are often exaggerated, misrepresented or invented by academics and scientists who profit from sponsored “climate studies,” profiteers peddling “solutions,” and “progressive” government officials seeking to gather and consolidate power and control, all of whom insist that scientific “consensus” proves global warming to be “anthropogenic” – caused by human activity.

But consensus is merely an illusion driven by cynical, self-interested people who depend 1) on the full-throated support of corporate media to amplify their alarmist allegations and 2) the credulity of pathologically anxious laymen to sustain their grift.

There is just too much money and political power at stake to permit objective, data-driven public discussion. Highly-credible sources who dispute the notion that climate change is anthropogenic are ignored, ridiculed, censored, and/or drowned out by institutions that claim consensus.

In 2015, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change formed an international panel of scientists and scholars who delivered a comprehensive, authoritative, realistic assessment of the science – and economics – of global warming in a publication entitled “Why Scientists Disagree about Global Warming.”

In it, the authors specifically rebut the surveys and studies used to support consensus claims, summarize evidence gathered by dissenters, identify reasons why scientists disagree about global warming, and provide a detailed account of the physical science of global warming.

Additionally, in September, the Norwegian government agency that produces official statistics released a report entitled “To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?” that considers 400,000+ years of Earth’s climate history, and concludes: “[T]he results imply that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be sufficiently strong to cause systematic changes in the pattern of the temperature fluctuations.”

The Norwegian report also criticizes the models on which climate alarmism is based: “In the global climate models…most of the warming that has taken place since 1950 is attributed to human activity. Historically, however, there have been large climatic variations. Temperature reconstructions indicate that there is a ‘warming’ trend that seems to have been going on for as long as approximately 400 years. Prior to the last 250 years or so, such a trend could only be due to natural causes. The length of the observed time series is consequently of crucial importance for analyzing empirically the pattern of temperature fluctuations and to have any hope of distinguishing natural variations in temperatures from man-made ones.”

In fact, scientists have documented that, throughout most of human history, temperatures were warmer than today, and that temperatures would have to warm at the present rate for another century, probably longer, before Earth reaches temperatures common during early human habitation. The Heartland Institute posits that “there can be no climate crisis – based on the notion of dangerously high temperatures – when humans have thrived in temperatures much warmer than today for most of the last 12,000 years.”

Closer to home, University of Alabama/Huntsville climate scientists issued a report entitled “Urban Heat Island [UHI] Effects in U.S. Summer Surface Temperature Data, 1880-2015.”

They conclude that “…an estimated 22% of the U.S. warming trend, 1895 to 2023, is due to localized UHI effects,” and that “the effect is much larger in urban locations.”

Furthermore, the alarmists’ “…homogenized (‘adjusted’) dataset [does] not correct for the effect of [UHI] on temperature trends, the adjusted data appear to have even stronger UHI signatures than in the raw (unadjusted) data.”

In other words, urban areas are hotter, so invested alarmists’ “data” deliberately over-represent urban temperatures.

Still stressed? Do some homework. Volumes of credible arguments and massive amounts of data undercut the prevailing global warming narrative for anyone willing to search for and read them.

https://www.pottsmerc.com/2023/11/06/jerry-shenk-do-you-fear-global-warming-do-some-homework/