Hillary Clinton Boards The Climate Crisis Train To Nowhere

Hillary Clinton Boards The Climate Crisis Train To Nowhere

GUEST POST WRITTEN BY
Roy W. Spencer
Dr. Spencer is Principal Research Scientist in Climatology at the University of Alabama–Huntsville.


Hillary Clinton’s plane passes over Manhattan October 11, 2016 as she departs New York en route to a climate change event with former Vice President Al Gore in Miami, Florida. (TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/Getty Images)

Hillary Clinton and Al Gore spoke at Miami-Dade College on October 11 about the “climate crisis” that Gore has been trying to convince us about for 20 years. Just as in Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, weather disasters that have always occurred have been repurposed to support the climate change narrative, with the claim those disasters are getting worse.

Meanwhile, Chapman University has released a survey of the top ten issues Americans fear the most.

Guess what? Climate change didn’t make the list. Instead, corruption of politicians was the No. 1 worry.

For those who don’t see the relationship between these two newsworthy events, let me connect the dots for you.

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Global warming and climate change, even if it is 100% caused by humans, is so slow that it cannot be observed by anyone in their lifetime. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts and other natural disasters have yet to show any obvious long-term change. This means that in order for politicians to advance policy goals (such as forcing expensive solar energy on the masses or creating a carbon tax), they have to turn normal weather disasters into “evidence” of climate change.

As a climate researcher, I will agree that humans have likely contributed to a portion of recent warmth. I am not a denier of either natural or human-induced climate change.

But the observed warming as monitored by satellites (our only truly global monitoring system) has been only about half of what computerized climate models say should be happening.

Furthermore, the overall increases in such things as hurricanes and tornadoes have not materialized. Drought in the western U.S. pales in comparison to the mega-droughts tree rings tell us existed in centuries past.

Lake-bottom sediments in Florida tell us that recent major hurricane activity in the Gulf of Mexico has been less frequent than in centuries past. Strong Sandy-type storms occur every year in all the major ocean basins… they just don’t happen to hit major metropolitan areas. It has now, even after Hurricane Matthew, been over 4,000 days since a major hurricane (Category 3 or stronger) has made landfall in the U.S.

Sea level rise, which was occurring long before humans could be blamed, has not accelerated and still amounts to only 1 inch every ten years. If a major hurricane is approaching with a predicted storm surge of 10-14 feet, are you really going to worry about a sea level rise of 1 inch per decade? If Hillary would have fact-checked her example of sea level rise in Norfolk, Virginia, she would have found out that the experts already know this is mostly due to the land there sinking.

To the extent that the cost of weather disasters has risen over time, that is well known to be the result of modern society building more infrastructure in areas that are prone to damage from weather—which is almost everywhere.

So, to keep the masses alarmed, politicians must claim that what is normal is actually abnormal—and getting worse. And, furthermore, that only they can fix it … and thereby save your children and grandchildren.

And it is that “fix” that really sinks any current plan politicians have to address climate change. Even the modern godfather of global warming, ex-NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies director James Hansen, has admitted that the Paris climate agreement is “a fraud really, a fake.” This is because even if the countries of the world agree to do what they promised on climate change, and that climate change is entirely our fault, and that climate change really will ultimately get bad, the promised actions will have no measurable effect on future global temperatures.

You see, many of those countries that have signed on to the Paris Agreement aren’t signing up to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. They are signing up for wealth transfers from the minority of advanced countries to the majority of poor countries.

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And you can’t even fix the problem with a new agreement. Why? Because until we develop a practical, cost-competitive alternative to fossil fuels, it is unlikely that renewable energy will ever make up more than 15-20% of global energy requirements. The amount of energy necessary for humans to do everything we do is simply too large. As that demand for energy grows, the amount of renewable energy also has to grow, just to maintain only a 15-20% fraction of the total.

So, until people actually experience climate change, and new energy technologies are developed, any claims by politicians that we are in a “climate crisis” will fall on deaf ears. And since the biggest risk to humanity is poverty, if we allow policymakers to have their way, the resulting energy poverty will indeed cause the deaths of some of our children and grandchildren.

Dr. Spencer is also an award-winning NASA scientist and U.S. Science Team Leader on NASA’s Aqua Satellite remote sensing program.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2016/10/25/hillary-clinton-boards-the-climate-crisis-train-to-nowhere/2/#281633a146d7