The Real Climate Catastrophe
I recently caught the first episode of the new season of Tulsa King. The show, starring Sylvester Stallone, tells the tale of Dwight Manfredi, a high-level Mafioso who, after dutifully serving 20 years in prison rather than ratting, got relegated to Tulsa, OK by a younger generation of mobsters fearful of his abilities and intellect. In this episode, Manfredi gets briefly locked up. While in the holding cell, he meets a fellow who got arrested for scamming $12.5M of "green energy" subsidies. This inspires Manfredi, and I expect this season to delve into that bit of lucre.
The green movement was bound to evolve into the "racket" phase of the life cycle when hundreds of billions of dollars of Other People’s Money started fire-hosing into the economy. The racket phase, however, started long before the talk of "Green New Deals" or Biden's fixation on decarbonizing the American economy.
It goes decades back, when climate doomsaying became not only fashionable, it became required. We heard hundreds of "credible source" warnings of catastrophe across the past thirty-plus years. Pretty much none of those that set dates prior to 2024 came true. Over a hundred past temperature models over-predicted warming compared to observed data, and that's even after the historical record was "adjusted" (always in a direction that shows more warming, conveniently).
None of this means that anthropogenic global warming isn't happening. It does strongly suggest, however, two things: It has been substantially overstated, and the science is not settled.
The latter is affirmed by another recent failure of prediction, regarding the current hurricane season. While it isn't over yet, it was forecast to be a monster of a season, but it has been very quiet.
Hurricane prediction is an inexact science, and being wrong is common. But, if they are always wrong in one direction, i.e. over-predicting, we are justifiable in questioning whether the science is being corrupted by ideology. And, indeed, my brief survey of the past predictions shows that, when they got it wrong (which is as often as not), they predicted worse than we got.
This is a pattern. Over-predict climate catastrophes and rely on people's "whew" response to cover for the errors.
It's akin to your local TV weather personality warning you about rain that is less likely to happen than predicted. Since you didn't get wet, you're less apt to squawk than if you weren't warned and did get wet.
The down side of an over-forecast probability of rain is small. The down side of over-forecasting global warming and its negative effects (they're all negative, dontchaknow - nothing good, like longer growing seasons or more arable land, could ever come of it), now that it has infected policy and pulled trillions of dollars in public and private funds, is massive. Spectacular wastes of money, major landscape alterations, ecological impacts that are under-studied and under-reported, adversely impacted living standards... and on top of all that, a growing distrust of even good "science" by a public that keeps seeing experts lie to them (and to themselves).
The massive destruction of wealth we are currently witnessing by a coercive, ill-advised, poorly-ideated, sloppily-effectuated, and scam-ridden response to an insufficiently understood threat is the real catastrophe. Too bad so few people are onto it.
These "models" all purported to predict warming based on CO2 levels at the 95th confidence interval starting at the "scam" phase back in the mid to late 90s. The first year, observed readings missed the 95 CI, most by ridiculous margin. Well, that can happen. But it happened again the second year, then the third. So they feed the empirical observations back into the models and come up with "new" predictions, based on the same underlying assumption (CO2 levels "drive" temperature). The same thing happens as the models turn ten years old. So they tweak "feedback mechanisms" to show less warming, but then what happens? More or less, the same thing, though they are getting closer to a 95 CI, but their models now predict "warming" within the noise level of sensor data (perhaps 1.3 - 3.1C over 100 years), so are all but worthless. The underlying problem is that CO2 levels do not "drive" temperature increase, they "follow it" - and that is proven historically over hundreds of millions of years. Of course there will be localized anomalies - like the Jan 21 Hunga Tonga undersea volcano that pumped a 100 billion pounds of evenly distributed water vapor into the atmosphere, increasing stratospheric water vapor content by over 10%. That caused 18 months of significant warming, which ended in late 2023 - hence, 2023 being a very hot year indeed. And CO2, of course, had zilch to do with it.
I watch in constant irritation the NC local news showing yet another house destroyed by waves on Cape Hatteras, or a Cold War era infrastructure unearthed by wave action, both the result of Climate Change. No, really! Proof positive that to save the planet generally and the Outer Banks specifically, we need to vote for Democrats and fully support the Green New Deal. Never mind that the Outer Banks is a sand bar, formed along a passive margin, and are the result of the global fall and rise of sea levels and surplus sediment. A mere 10,000 to 12, 000 years old, they have constantly shifted, eroded and moved. Makes good news casts, as long as facts and truth aren't required. But with activists, it's rarely about truth.