By Aron Ravin
Tuesday, August 17, 2021
There has been something rather ghoulish about
environmental discourse throughout the pandemic. As lockdowns forced people to
stay home, city skies cleared. Pollution went down, animals roamed urban streets, and social-media users cheered. It feels as though people were
getting a little too happy about all this. Can you imagine if
someone were to say, “Yeah, a lot of people died in the war, but at least
there’s way less traffic”? It makes you wonder whether there’s a part of these
people that secretly wishes we’d never return to normal, because that would be
what’s best for the deified Mother Nature.
Over time, “trust the science” has morphed into “fear the
science.” Activists, journalists, and politicians seem to show an interest in
news in the scientific community only when it involves something that can
induce panic. This was especially true with the models for COVID
hospitalizations. Remember how the predictions led the U.S. Navy to send
several thousand-bed hospital ships to New York City and Los Angeles? And that
they then hosted only a combined total of 35 patients? What about when state
officials and experts went into a frenzy over ventilator shortages, only for us later to discover that
there are no known documented cases of a COVID patient lacking access to
a ventilator? According to Politifact (a notorious agent of the vast
right-wing conspiracy), most states had more ventilators than they knew what to
do with.
The whole initial justification for the lockdown decrees,
to “flatten the curve” in order to prevent an overload of our health-care
system, turned out to be questionable. Yes, some hospitals were indeed overrun
by COVID patients. But there was never a serious danger of shortages, as there
was ample backup of supplies. The shortages that did occur were problems of
bureaucratic red tape. Epidemiologists at the CDC notoriously redefined the
goal: Even when we had flattened the curve, we were told, for a variety of
reasons, that we must indefinitely postpone our return to normalcy. Today, even
for the vaccinated in counties that have single-digit weekly COVID death
counts, localities and universities have reimposed testing and mask mandates.
Having been expected to blindly trust the public-health
establishment, even when much of their expert advice seems to go against common
sense and actual data, we are also asked to place our trust in the
climatologists. The problem is, their track record is no better. Last Monday,
the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that entire countries may vanish thanks to
rising sea levels within the century. They may very well be right — I don’t
claim to be an expert on greenhouse gases. What I do know, however, is that
past divinations have constantly overstated our impending doom. As an
instructive exercise, let us explore a few.
In the 1980s, NASA predicted that sea levels would rise about 20 feet by
2080 — quite a considerable increase. But according to NASA and
the EPA, in the 37 years since the initial prediction, sea
levels have risen less than four inches. It appears we have some
catching up to do. Additionally, there is a good deal of debate on whether or
not we have, on net, lost any land at all. National Geographic reports that the
earth’s total land area has actually been increasing, resulting in a land gain
of about the size of the Great Lakes over a span of 30 years. Even some
Polynesian islands have defied the expectation of land loss.
In 2008, the president of the U.N. General Assembly predicted
the displacement of 50 to 200 million environmental refugees by 2010.
In reality, the number of people “forcibly displaced” for all reasons worldwide
— 43.7 million —
was lower than his low-end prediction for just “environmental refugees.”
Many ice-melting forecasts have been appallingly wrong, as
well.
Most infuriating are the fearmongers’ ever-teleporting
goalposts. In 1989, the U.N. warned that the world had until 2000 to reduce emissions to
avoid the irreversible devastation of entire nations. In 2006, James Hansen,
the United States’ leading expert on climate change, warned we had
until 2016. Then there’s that obnoxious New York digital timer that went up in 2020,
saying “the Earth has a deadline” — with about six and a half years remaining.
Notably, the people responsible for the timer neglect to mention that the
research they’re basing that claim on says we may have until 2045. I
guess they’re saving that detail for the next inevitable readjustment of the
doomsday clock.
The stubborn insistence that we have some sort of
deadline is an unambiguous effort to spur drastic political action. It’s much
harder for politicians to win by running on a platform that targets a problem
that won’t become urgent for decades. The reality is that no one has a darn
clue when the most harmful trends of climate change will be unstoppable.
Different scientists cling to different models. According to Princeton, it may already be too late.
This is not a matter of suspecting the personal motives
of climate alarmists. I trust that most people who devote their lives to
humanitarian issues such as climate change probably have the best interest of
the public at heart. There certainly are notable cases of scandal in the world of climate science and, as with
COVID, a tendency to crush dissent. While Big Tech censors Rand Paul for saying that cloth masks are
useless, the tyrannical engineer Bill Nye demands jail time for
climate dissenters. My issue specifically lies with the clearly defective
algorithms that pandemic and climate experts keep using.
Dan
McLaughlin provides the following excellent analysis:
Consider the models under closest
scrutiny right now: weather models such as hurricane models. These are the best
kind of model, in the sense that the raw data is derived from intensive
real-time observation and the historical data is derived from a huge number of
observations and thus not dependent on a tiny and potentially unrepresentative
sample.
Yet, as you watch any storm
develop, you see its projected path change, sometimes dramatically. Why?
Because the models are highly sensitive to changes in raw data, and because
storms are dynamic systems: Their path follows a certain logic but does not
track a wholly predictable trajectory. The constant adjustments made to weather
models ought to give us a little more humility in dealing with models that
suffer from greater flaws in raw data observations, smaller sample sizes in
their bases of historical data, or that purport to explain even more complex or
dynamic systems — models such as climate modeling.
The response to COVID should be a warning to everyone.
Epidemiologists, working with many times more resources, in a field far larger
and older than that of climatologists, convinced people in the U.S. and many
other open societies that it was necessary to sacrifice an unprecedented degree
of freedom. Similarly, “science-backed” plans such as the Green New Deal seek
to solve incredibly complex problems via a complete takeover of the American
private sector.
On top of that, even if all of the United States and
Europe were to be Thanos-snapped out of existence tomorrow, developing
countries are increasing their emissions at a pace fast enough to make
the absence of our CO2 meaningless. Will South Asian and
African nations be willing to reduce consumption when, between these two
regions, there are about a billion people without access to electricity? When
there are more than twice as many without enough power to cook? Experts at the
Centre for Policy Research, a leading Indian think tank, are not so optimistic.
The late Freeman Dyson, a brilliant mathematician and
physicist, noticed the issues with the climate models over a decade ago. Like many other
pragmatists, he did not advocate for massive government programs to reduce
carbon-dioxide levels. He argued that the benefits for the global poor of
carbon-emitting activities outweigh the harms by increasing life expectancy and
access to education. I, too, would rather focus on eliminating infant mortality
than stopping climate change by shutting down animal agriculture, planes, and
shipping. I have faith that the advancement of nuclear energy, infrastructure,
and disaster-forecast technology will be able to mitigate the ills of climate
change — enough to make it unnecessary to send troops to Niger and Pakistan to
stop them from burning coal for their hospitals’ electricity.
Addressing climate change is a worthy undertaking. We
should be willing to invest in nuclear-power plants, Dutch-style flood control,
carbon capture, and more. But we should reject politicians’ use of this
supposed “existential threat” as an excuse to shove socialism and tyranny down
our throats. Climate-change predictions, just like COVID predictions, are often
terribly off the mark. Climate-change solutions, much like city lockdowns, do
not work unless the authorities can enforce obedience. During the lockdowns, we
saw a spike in deaths of despair and other costs — the
authorities seeming to have forgotten the idea of tradeoffs. Similarly, the
side effects of halting production to arrest climate change would have terrible
human costs. As we emerge from the pandemic, and with climate-change
legislation under discussion in Washington, we should remember: Fool me once,
shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
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