By Steve Haner
So, let’s take another trip down Climate Catastrophe Memory Lane. Maybe 2020 was not such a bad year after all. It was certainly better than it was supposed to be. The pandemic might have been just a footnote to Climate Doom.
In 1987, the official Jeremiah of the movement, NASA’s James Hansen, predicted the world’s average surface temperature would be 3 degrees Celsius hotter in 2020. Remember, only 2 degrees C of added warmth is now the Line of Doom in the Paris Climate Agreement.
Instead, the 40-year increase, by satellite measurements, has been less than one half of a degree C. All other measurements fall short of the warning.
In 1978, we were warned that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere would double by 2020, but they have risen from just over 310 parts per million to over 410, up about a third. They did not drop during the COVID recession despite major drops in human energy emissions. Interesting.
The optimists at the Associated Press published a claim in 2009 that China and India would have lower CO2 emissions by 2020 then they had reported in 2005. China was supposed to go down 40% and India 205. Nope, failed again. China is up 85% and India up 150%. Both are building new coal power plants apace.
These are the first three failed predictions about 2020 climate catastrophe in a list of ten doozies compiled on JunkScience.com. Now there is a video (above). Miami was to be underwater by now (meaning Virginia Beach, too). The citations are solid, and similar examples abound in the literature.
The people fooled by the alarmists and blind to any effort to fact check include the upper reaches of world government, just about every “journalist,” captains of industry (not just in the technology sectors), and of course millions of our fellow Virginians. Which brings us to Rep. Gerald Connolly of Fairfax, who thankfully skipped service in the General Assembly in his rise to prominence and now is chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee subcommittee on environmental issues.
The committee staff has put out a report right in line with the 40-plus-year history of failed predictions and imaginative mathematical models masquerading as actual science. It earned him adulation on Blue Virginia, of course, but it deserves to be read with a deeply skeptical eye. It is intended to back up the coming Biden Administration decision to re-join the Paris Climate Agreement, but of course that agreement is 1) being widely ignored by many member states and is 2) dismissed as now inadequate by the alarmist movement. Yet Connolly is eager to get back in.
“From sea level rise in Hampton Roads to increased extreme weather events in Northern Virginia, Virginians see the effects of climate change right now. And the pandemic has demonstrated yet another environmental injustice, with frontline communities exposed to air pollution found to be at great risk to this virus. This report provides even more evidence that this is a crisis that demands bold, progressive action,” said Chairman Connolly.
The House report claims that rejoining the pact and keeping global warming below that 2° C barrier will prevent the following results over 50 years, just in Virginia:
- 160,000 premature deaths,
- 128,000 emergency room visits and hospitalizations for cardiovascular and respiratory disease, and
- 5 million lost workdays
Okay, it’s not clear. Is that 160,000 (3,200 per year) fewer deaths than occur now, or is that erasing the predicted increase of deaths blamed on global warming in the dire models? I’m betting the latter. I’m betting it is the same on the hospital trips – no actual reductions are projected, just the prevention of the projected increases.
And the flaw on the “lost workdays” claim is even more obvious – it is tied to predicted high heat emergencies. But if indeed the Virginia climate warms, one obvious result will be less snow and ice, and that is the weather that usually shuts down our economy. Shouldn’t it be net lost days? Nothing on the benefit side of the cost-benefit analysis is ever considered. Excess cold kills far more humans than excess warmth — something never mentioned.
That was another one of the failed predictions in the JunkScience.Com compilation, a 2000 prediction that snow would disappear from the British Isles by 2020, and a 2008 claim snow would disappear from Mount Kilimanjaro. Still snowing.
As the video version of the Junk Science list states, what “they” did to our economy in response to the pandemic is also “their” prescription to protect us from this other exaggerated threat. The Northam Administration in Virginia and the new Biden Administration in Washington see no reason to slow their rush to the cliff just because no actual doomsday prediction has ever come to pass.
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