'Climate Anger:' Last Refuge Of The Alarmists

For purveyors of climate alarm, emotional displays of intolerance are increasingly crowding out reasoned argument. But such narrow-mindedness toward the loyal opposition — and its dedication to improving the state of the world — is a recipe for further marginalization and frustration. Remember the adage: “Hate hurts the hater more than the hated.”

Consider President Obama, who has so little to crow about these days. At the White House Correspondents Dinner last month, the president used the (otherwise) lighthearted occasion to shout at those who doubt his climate-change narrative. “It is crazy! What about our kids? What kind of stupid, short-sided irresponsible bull… ” said the president before comedian Keegan-Michael Key jokingly cut him off.

That kind of anger was also on display when the Lexington Herald-Leader‘s editorial board equated Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to an apologist for slavery. His crime? Forcefully fighting back against President Obama’s emissions plan for the nation’s stressed electric generation fleet.

Overheated rhetoric has been getting worse for some time now. As I complained last year in Doubling Down on Climate Alarmism: ”In the intellectual/government/pundit sphere, a witch’s brew of bad science andGruber salesmanship has turned an intellectual cause into a fringe religion — and self-defeating politics.”

Getting Desperate

The impatience and intolerance of the doom-and-gloom crowd must be understood historically and in terms of today’s politics.

The neo-Malthusians have been errant re the “population bomb” in the 1960s, the running-out-of-resources and global cooling scares in the 1970s, and catastrophic global warming in the late 1980s and 1990s. The genetically modified foods scare is also an example of hype overtaking science, as a recent New York Times opinion-page editorial explained.

The current elephant-in-the-room for climate alarmists is the “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming.

Green activists have preached that the Earth’s temperature would continue to rise steadily into a global crisis. For most of the 1990s, their model predictions appeared plausible. But global temperatures have slowed considerably since 1998, despite steadily rising levels of carbon-dioxide emissions (the alleged cause of warming).

This was not supposed to happen. “Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations,” wrote Sciencemagazine scribe Richard Kerr. “Researchers … agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer.” That was six years ago.

“[W]here the heck is global warming,” wrote Kevin Trenberth in 2009.  “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

The pause is now the ever greater pause. And even if global temperature sets new record highs, it will be by hundredths of a degree, well below the model-predicted increase. The “pause” is even more the climate-model discrepancy. “95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong,” one climatologist humorously wrote.

Humility Not

Yet the President of the United States hypes and attempts to shame. “There’s no greater threat to our planet than climate change,” Obama asserted in his weekly address.

Joe Romm, the founder of the alarmist website Climate Progress, seconded, the hyperbole: “Climate change is certainly the greatest preventable (environmental) threat to the health and well-being of Americans and indeed all of homo sapiens.”

Romm’s certainty flies in the face of unsettled science, and contrary temperature data reflects his own close-mindedness. His recent how-to blogpost shared his “time-saving secrets” for determining which climate writing to avoid: “Skip articles written by [skeptic] George Will and his ilk.”

Vilification of those deviating from the alarmist gospel is not unique to career activists like Romm. On the political side, Senators Edward Markey (D-MA), Barbara Boxer (D-CA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) began investigating 100 fossil fuel organizations suspected of “funding scientific studies designed to confuse the public and avoid taking action to cut carbon pollution.”

By “confuse the public,” they mean question the sacred view that climate change will soon compromise the planet. Just as Sen. McConnell is little better than a slave-owner, scientists who contradict the doom-and-gloom climate narrative are a threat to the public and must be discredited as shills of industry. (Never mind that Big Wind and Big Solar and Big Ethanol are industries too.)

Gina … or Judith?

What happens when close-minded alarmists get in the hot seat? Consider this recent exchange between Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy in a recent Congressional hearing.

Sessions asked McCarthy a simple question: “if you take the average of the models predicting how fast the temperature would increase, is the temperature in fact increasing less than that or more than that?” In other words, is the Earth getting warmer as expected?

The nation’s chief environmental regulator, presumably familiar with the climate models and temperature data, answered, “I cannot answer that question specifically.” A month after the hearing, the Senate was still waitingfor a requested written answer to that embarrassing (to alarmists) question.

Then there is the real expert. At another Congressional hearing, distinguished climatologist and professor Judith Curry testified that recent data “calls into question the conclusion that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change.”

Perhaps a future hearing can have McCarthy and Curry on the same panel — or better yet, have President Obama’s chief science advisor, John Holdren, go toe-to-toe with Madam Curry. Let the best science win under oath.

Stretching into the Ridiculous

Another specie of climate desperation leading to anger is exaggerated scientific speculation. According to some of these theories, climate change is influencing the kinds of pop music we listen to and may soon put an end to fish and chips in the UK.

And in a remarkable display of illogic, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) has managed to link global warming to prostitution — citing, of course, some study. She claimsthat global warming harms women in developing nations, forcing many into “situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage.”

(Note: opponents of hydraulic fracturing argue that the process has sexist repercussions, since it only creates good jobs for men. According to biologist Sandra Steingraber of New Yorkers Against Fracking, “the jobs for women are ‘hotel maid’ and ‘prostitute.’”)

Back to Energy Reality

It’s time for green activists et al., to come back to Earth. Fossil fuels aren’t going anywhere. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2015 Annual Energy Outlook, the United States will depend on fossil fuels to supply 80 percent of its energy needs in 2040. That’s not far off last year’s 82 percent.

As for the world, a robust three-fourths of primary energy consumption will come from fossil fuels in 2040, the International Energy Agency predicts.

The EIA’s recent report noted specifically that oil and natural gas production would continue to grow. By 2017, the United States will be a net exporter of natural gas. In another three years, the EIA predicts that oil production will crest to 10.6 million barrels per day and hover above 9 million bbl/d for the next 20 years. Right now, U.S. production of 9.4 million bbl/d is close to record levels.

Conclusion

Consumers are content filling their gas tanks with petroleum and flipping the switch to gas-generated electricity. Americans are less worried about the environment than at any time since the 1980s, according to Gallup. Concern over global warming, the same poll found, has waned measurably since last year.

Voters are rejecting climate alarmism. Remember the paltry results when climate alarmist Tom Steyer spent $74 million to make his issue respectable in the last election?

And so, frustrated climate alarmists are at war with the public, not only the facts. They are crying wolf and preaching disdain in the ignoble quest to raise energy prices, hamper our economy, and make life more difficult for average Americans. All to “save” the climate that doesn’t appear to need saving — and cannot be “saved” by the 196 nations of the world.

The devout parishioners of climate calamity may label the rest of us as moral degenerates. To this we must respond. There are real here-and-now problems that need your time and dollars. And to the angry: a new cause might bring peace of mind — and spare the household budgets of the rest of us.

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Robert L. Bradley Jr. is the founder and CEO of the Institute for Energy Research.