Fresh on the heels of its well-attended (and well-watched online) Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change, The Heartland Institute charged into the belly of the beast at COP-26. Heartland jetted (coach—no private planes for us) across the Atlantic Ocean to host a Climate Reality Forum (CRF) in Glasgow, Scotland to challenge the dire prognostications of apocalyptic anthropogenic climate change being made at COP-26.
Inside the COP-26 main event, people experienced sleep-inducing speeches spouted by bloviating politicians and activists, on the need for government and the business community to act as one to prevent catastrophic climate change. Outside the COP-26 venue, people found a circus-like atmosphere filled with entertaining, heartfelt, but badly misinformed rantings of radical socialist climate activists.
Heartland’s CRF, by contrast, was a forum to discuss and debate the current state of knowledge about climate change and its likely effects, based on hard data instead of computer models simulations. The CRF also featured presentations on the high costs and limited benefits of various public and private initiatives to fight climate change by prematurely ending the use of fossil fuels.
The CRF hosted presentations from Harry Wilkinson, head of policy at the U.K.’s premier private climate research institute, the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He discussed the economic harm that the obsession with green energy in Europe and the U.K. has imposed on the public. Energy prices have dramatically increased, and the electric power supply has become unreliable.
Thousands of jobs in traditional industries are being lost as companies close after being made uncompetitive by the high costs of inputs, including energy, and being forced into intermittent operations. Promised green jobs are not materializing because China is dominating the supply of wind turbines and solar panels through its control of most of the critical minerals used to create them and the use of coal for cheap energy. Contrary to the green fantasies of European politicians who push renewable-energy mandates and subsidy schemes to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, emissions have risen. Why? Coal is powering China’s “green energy” manufacturing, and emissions from fossil-fuel-powered ships are rising along with shipments from China.
Wilkinson described the real-world impact of these policies on average people in Europe. Faced with a political and economic backlash, Germany has been forced to reopen previously shuttered power plants, and more such reopenings could be in the offing in Europe this winter if it is as cold as they expect and Russia continues to limit shipments of natural gas as a means of geopolitical leverage.
The youngest participants at the CRF—Naomi Seibt and Andy Singer—were unable to attend in person. In a recorded video presentation, Seibt discussed the “The Evil Motives of Climate Socialism,” describing how climate socialists are indoctrinating and radicalizing youth around the world. This coalition is censoring and intimidating people, especially youths, who disagree with their misanthropic political and ethical philosophy. It’s cancel culture meets climatism.
In a video presentation, Singer detailed his experience of climate misinformation in schools and online. Singer said climate alarmists rely on lies and his experience shows public schools, including primary, secondary education, some private schools, and universities, have drunk the climate-alarm Kool-Aid. “We’ve lost academia!” Singer said. Schools are unquestioningly not teaching the scientific method and how to examine the issue of climate change but instead arguing humans are causing catastrophic climate change. Grades and futures are being decided based on whether a student accepts and promotes the party line.
Singer offered a few reasons for hope. First, he believes we have not lost Big Tech. Although many tech giants are alarmists, others are not, Singer says. Social media platforms and technologies, even as many attempt to suppress climate realism, do provide a forum for climate realists to get their message out, as we do through The Heartland Institute’s video series. Second, the presidency of Donald Trump showed the public the corporate media is not a friend of the truth or average peoples’ needs and desires. Everyone now knows censorship exists in the corporate media, and a silent majority of people reject censorship. That means some people may be open to listening to our message simply because it is being suppressed. It gives people a reason to look beyond the surface, and education opens the door for skepticism. In addition, many counterculture influencers who self-identify as liberal reject climate alarmism and give concise, powerful explanations for their skepticism.
Also at the CRF, Marc Morano, Craig Rucker, and Lord Christopher Monkton, among others, provided cogent critiques of COP-26, its purpose, how it is functioning, the mistaken nature of the hysterical discussions taking place there, and the hypocritical lifestyles and actions taken by the elites who traveled there to impose austerity on everybody else.
Several panels at the CRF discussed climate science at length. Heartland President James Taylor, Wilkinson, and Marcel Crok, cofounder of the Netherlands-based group CLINTEL (which stands for Climate Intelligence), addressed climate science.
Crok provided a thorough analysis and critique of bias in the Intergovernmental on Climate Change’s 6th Assessment Report. Wilkinson and Taylor addressed multiple, often contradictory claims—made by the corporate media, politicians, and scientists tied to the IPCC and various governments—that climate conditions are getting worse. Wilkinson showed data does not support claims that flooding, drought, hurricanes, or wildfires are worsening because of climate change. Wilkinson rejects a one-size-fits-all approach to changing the climate. Extreme weather events and trends happen locally, not globally, and thus they must be managed through adaptation.
Taylor discussed various claims refuted, each multiple times, by authors at Climate Realism and Climate at a Glance. Taylor pointed out the media and many scientists simply lie when they claim hurricanes are worsening or that various crops (such as cranberries, maple syrup, coffee, etc,) are failing. Taylor cited data from government sources, data that can be accessed with a modicum of effort, showing these crops and most others have experienced significant increases in yields and production, regularly setting records, during the period of recent warming, instead of declining as asserted by alarmists. Taylor provided evidence the crop increase and general greening of the Earth are being caused largely by the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
In the end, despite all the hype surrounding COP-26, the famous elitists participating in it, and the critical nature of the messages delivered there, it was not where the most important, truthful discussions about climate change took place in Glasgow this week. That occurred at The Heartland Institute’s Climate Realism Forum. I invite you to watch the videos from CRF and decide for yourself. I doubt you’ll nod off like Sleepy Joe and the conference’s host, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, did at COP-26.
— H. Sterling Burnett
SOURCES: Climate Reality Forum; The Heartland Institute; The Heartland Institute
IN THIS ISSUE …
BIDEN ARRIVES AT COP-26 WITH ZERO, NOT NET-ZERO, IN HAND … MODELS ASSUMING LOW CLIMATE SENSITIVITY OUTPERFORM OTHERS
BIDEN ARRIVES AT COP-26 WITH ZERO, NOT NET-ZERO, IN HAND
President Joe Biden demonstrated a lot of nerve when he arrived in Glasgow, Scotland for the 26th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-26) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. Biden spouted a lot of blustery rhetoric, wagged an accusing finger, and lectured China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia for their supposed climate-commitment failings. Yet he came to the party empty-handed.
Biden is doing everything he can administratively, through his control of various cabinet departments and agencies, to impose climate-related restrictions on the U.S. economy. However, to meet the U.S. Paris climate commitments from 2015 or promises of net-zero by any date in the future, he will need legislation. The administration can’t get to net-zero without Congress passing laws to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. Tinkering around the edges through regulations won’t do.
Just days before Biden jetted off to Glasgow, he was forced to strip his signature climate proposal from the giant reconciliation bill after it was rejected by some members of his own party in the Senate. As reported in The Hill, on October 28 Biden revealed a revised reconciliation framework to House progressives. Although it includes more than $500 billion in spending on climate change, critically the deal strips the bill of its Clean Electricity Performance Program (CEPP) financial incentives for electrical utilities to transition away from fossil fuels and penalties on them for not doing so. The reconciliation bill also now includes no fee on methane emissions or the Democratic caucus’s long-sought carbon-dioxide tax. Some Democrats had indicated the bill would be dead on arrival in the Senate if it contained any of these provisions, as they would raise energy prices and subvert states’ traditional role as the primary regulators of their electric power markets.
Shortly after those provisions were removed from the reconciliation bill, radical progressive (that is socialist) Democrat lawmakers in the House of Representatives forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to pull an infrastructure bill previously passed by the Senate, preventing a vote. Biden had been in negotiations all day on Thursday the 28th with the Democratic caucus membership, hoping to craft a compromise that would allow a vote on the infrastructure and reconciliation bills before he left for Glasgow. Passage of the bills could have bolstered Biden’s bona fides as a shrewd climate negotiator, a leader who could get things done and set an example for the rest of the world.
Instead, Biden looked tired, befuddled, and ineffectual on the world stage. Even though Biden couldn’t get his own House (of Representatives) in order behind his climate initiatives, immediately after landing in Scotland he lectured other world leaders on what they should do to fight climate change.
SOURCES: Fox News; The Daily Beast; The Hill
MODELS ASSUMING LOW CLIMATE SENSITIVITY OUTPERFORM OTHERS
Research published in the journal Climate finds climate models that use low equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) in response to additional units of greenhouse gases conform to measured temperatures better than models assuming high ECS do.
Physicist Nicola Scafetta, a research scientist at the University of Napoli Federico II, compared the the performance of 38 Sixth Generation Coupled Intercomparison Project climate models (CMIP6) used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its sixth assessment report to three sets of surface temperature data. The models assumed a range of ECS estimates, varying from a low of 1.83℃ increase for a doubling of CO2 to 5.67°C.
Scafetta found the vast majority of CMIP6 models overestimate the warming observed during the last 40 years, with the overestimate of ocean temperatures being greater than the overestimate of land-based temperatures. This is important because 71 percent of the Earth’s surface is water. Scafetta found CMIP6 models also overestimate temperatures in critical regions that affect large-scale oceanic cycles such as El Niño/La Niña.
Scafetta found “the models with low ECS values (for example, 3°C or less) perform significantly better than those with larger ECS” when tracking global average temperature changes over the past couple of decades. Scafetta found even models using a low ECS estimate displayed significant differences from recorded temperature measurements over large portions of the Earth. Scafetta suggests this fact calls into question whether climate models should be used to forecast future temperatures or the effects of policy responses to climate concerns.
SOURCE: Climate
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
