Thought Piece
“Climate restoration” is even worse than “leave it in the ground,” because of its economic development implications. Luddite and primitive thinking come to mind.
It’s harder and harder to find a trustworthy voice these days. Like the evolution of “global warming,” it all depends on who is choosing the words, the “relevant facts” and who is doing the math. It simply depresses me beyond belief.
Ultimately, the best of intentions and the bad outcomes of wrong-headedness are not strangers to each other. For example, the startling claim by the IMF recently that coal emissions costs the world $5.3 trillion per year seems greatly exaggerated. I simply don’t know where to start the refutation of all of these highly politicized claims.
“Climate restoration” is the “New Coke” of climate alarmism
By Thomas Lifson at American Thinker
The increase in the atmospheric trace gas of CO2 has so far failed to deliver the catastrophic consequences predicted by the alarmists like Al Gore. The headlines about “the end of snow” are now an embarrassment after a winter of abundant frozen precipitation. At least a decade ago, the fraudsters relabeled their purported peril “climate change,” allowing any unusual weather to be blamed on mankind’s use of fossil fuels.
Now another rebranding is being proposed. Michael Walsh noticed, at PJ Media:
The Left, in the form of the think thank RAND, has gone full Luddite:
Since the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, society has organized efforts to limit the magnitude of climate change around the concept of stabilization – that is, accepting some climate change but holding it within acceptable bounds. This report offers an initial exploration of the concept of climate restoration – that is, approaches that seek to return atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases to preindustrial levels within one to two generations. Using a simple integrated assessment model, the analysis examines climate restoration through the lens of risk management under conditions of deep uncertainty, exploring the technology, economic, and policy conditions under which it might be possible to achieve various climate restoration goals and the conditions under which society might be better off with (rather than without) a climate restoration goal. This report also explores near-term actions that might help manage the risks of climate restoration.
“Luddite” is a good term, for it connotes opposition to the Industrial Revolution, which was (and remains in its “Information Age” version) dependent on the combustion of carbon-based fuels for electrical generation and transportation. The longing for some imagined paradise of living in harmony with nature is even more pervasive in modern history.
Of course, anyone even slightly familiar with the history of the Earth’s climate knows there is no one climate to be restored. We have had ice ages that covered much of the land on which Americans now live in glaciers. Is that the climate we wish to be restored?
Proponents claim they merely want to get rid of the “pollutants” – i.e., CO2, which is necessary for life and is used by plants to grow. (Higher levels of atmospheric CO2 already are increasing crop yields.) But buried in this phraseology is the hidden assumption that the atmosphere, not solar activity, controls climate. This is a ridiculous assumption on its face, since the ultimate source of our energy – atmospheric and carbon-based deposits – is the Sun.
By the way, solar activity is crashing now.
“Climate restoration” is the “New Coke” of climate alarmism.
