The Sky Is Falling…Maybe

On April 6th, Issues & Insights posted an article about the latest alarm about climate change.

The article reports:

We’ve heard so many declarations that our “last chance” to avoid global warming has arrived that we’ve lost count of the number of times the world has ended. But the sirens continue to wail, the latest from a United Nations grandee who says humanity has to act “now or never” to avoid overheating its host planet. Pardon us while we yawn.

According to Jim Skea, a European academic who co-chairs the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group III, “it’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming” to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Keeping Earth’s temperatures in check “will be impossible,” he said, “without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors.”

Skea’s comment arrived wrapped up in Working Group III’s just-released report on global warming mitigation, part of the IPCC’s sixth climate assessment. The media, which loves to breathlessly report the demise of the world caused by human carbon dioxide emissions, says the 1.5-degree limit “is recognized as a crucial global target because beyond this level, so-called tipping points become more likely. These are thresholds at which small changes can lead to dramatic shifts in Earth’s entire life support system.”

OK, then. But let’s back up a moment. Or maybe 13 years. That’s when Prince Charles said, with a deep, trust-me earnestness, that our world had only “100 months to act” before we had done so much damage that the effects of global warming would become irreversible.

Then last year, about 150 months after his previous doomsday prediction, the prince said that the upcoming climate summit in Glasgow was “quite literally … the last chance saloon” to stop the scourge of warming.

None of the people who continually yell that the sky is falling are willing to note that there was an extended period of global warming during the Middle Ages. During that time crops flourished, and people survived. It should also be noted that plant fossils have been found under the Greenland ice cap. At some point, green things grew in Greenland. The earth’s climate is continually changing. Man’s impact on that change, if at all, is minimal. I support clean air and clean water. I don’t support authoritative governments trying to steal the wealth of successful democratic countries and give it to poorer countries ruled by tyrants.