President Obama is demanding immediate action on the climate front. “Those who are already feeling the effects of climate change don’t have time to deny it,” he said Tuesday in a speech touting his new climate action plan. “They’re busy dealing with it.”
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Well, no they aren’t.
Climate doomsayers mock skeptics for asking pertinent questions, but there are ample grounds for skepticism. The most inconvenient truth is that the globe stopped warming 15 years ago, a plateau that climate models did not predict and scientists cannot explain. Yet warmist activists don’t really want to talk about that. They would rather shut down debate by making skeptics out to be a bunch of anti-science buffoons. However, the “science is settled” crowd are the ones who have a problem with the scientific method, in particular its value of skeptical inquiry. If anyone is in denial, they are.
“Climate change is no longer a distant threat,” says The President’s Climate Action Plan. “We are already feeling its impacts across the country and the world.” Are we? The White House says that global warming has led to an increase in childhood asthma. This is a tenuous claim at best, and hardly the epic end-of-times that was promised. For decades people have been hearing that the planet was going to burn up, deserts would be encroaching, food would be short, disease would be rampant, and melting ice caps would inundate the shorelines. Al Gore’s science fiction movie on the subject even had a scary map showing how the oceans were set to drown major cities and displace millions of people. Yet the ice caps have not melted. The oceans rise about an inch every ten years. The worst famines the world faces are cause by civil conflicts and failed collectivistic government policies. So why the fuss? Mr. Obama wants to declare war on climate change but has established no casus belli.
Warmists have attempted to dodge the planet’s lack of cooperation by rebranding their pet crisis as “climate change” “disruption” or “global weirding.” They claim that impending doom comes not from heat but volatility; flashier floods, bigger, badder hurricanes and twistier tornadoes. “Last year alone,” the president’s plan says, “there were 11 different weather and climate disaster events with estimated losses exceeding $1 billion each across the United States.” This mindset leads to its own brand of panic. In the wake of the recent outbreak of tornadoes in the nation’s heartland, Bill Nye suggested that the country respond by passing laws “making it difficult or undesirable to build fragile houses in the path of tornadoes.” Since tornadoes are most frequent between the Appalachians and the Great Plains, Nye’s plan would mean banning all mobile homes in most of the country and necessitate building code revisions and homeowner insurance adjustments that would cost billions if not trillions. This is why Bill Nye is not known as the “public policy guy.” And in any case he and mr. Obama should brush up on their science. The data do not support the “global weirding” hypothesis. Severe weather events are declining, not increasing. But when they do hit, warmists get to exploit human misery in the wake of tragedy, which is the only appeal they have left these days.
So are we in a climate crisis? No. Is a crisis looming? Not noticeably. Is a crisis possible? Maybe, in the sense that anything is possible. Even global cooling. But no degree of climate change is likely that requires the level of government intervention the White House is promoting. Mr. Obama’s hype about a warming world comes off as retro nostalgia. His proposed solutions are simply the same old failed big-government policies: throwing billions at “green energy” firms on the way to bankruptcy; spending more billions on endless infrastructure projects to “prepare” for climate change; funding endless make-work studies, workshops, reviews and task forces; and increasing regulation of every aspect of the American economy.
Mr. Obama wants to use the global warming issue to justify making major changes in the American way of life, which will mean higher energy costs, more government spending, increased debt, fewer jobs, lower productivity, and lower economic growth. He will kill coal and Keystone. But his proposal does not meet the balancing test of sound public policy. He seeks major pain for minor gain. Mr. Obama demands far too much sacrifice in these hard economic times to fend off this maybe-kinda-sorta doomsday.
James S. Robbins is Deputy Editor of Rare and author of Native Americans: Patriotism, Exceptionalism, and the New American Identity. Follow him on Twitter @James_Robbins