[Guest post by Aaron Worthing; if you have tips, please send them here. Or by Twitter @AaronWorthing.]
It feels like it’s been a while since I have done one of these posts, so it is worth taking a moment to start with first principles. The subject of the environment is one of those areas where I respectfully disagree with Patrick. As I wrote in December:
My default is that the government cannot take away our freedom until and unless they prove that it is justified. Environmental laws inevitably take away our freedom. So the government as a matter of practice should not impose such regulations unless it can prove that the dangers it is guarding against are real.
And when it comes to “climate change,” the scientific process is so broken we cannot trust the doom-mongers. And the proof of that is how they continually and spectacularly get their predictions wrong:
I wouldn’t fault them from staying out of the prediction game. But they make that prediction and turn out to be wrong, time and again. They claim to know what the future will be, and are proven wrong, again and again. They can’t predict two weeks from now. They can’t predict the climate one year from now. But we are supposed to trust their predictions into the next century?
Further, the fact that no other scientist contradicts them is damning, too. For instance, the other day NASA unveiled a claim that they discovered a new form of bacteria that uses arsenic in its DNA. This was a tremendous deal, if true. And now we are seeing that assertion questioned, as scientists come out questioning the science behind the claims. Now I won’t pretend to know who is right in that food fight, but this is what you expect to see when science is operating properly—that when scientists hold a press conference and start getting things wrong, that other scientists speak up and tell us this. The fact that these climate scientists very publicly make a string of clearly erroneous predictions, and no one contradicts them (except the so-called deniers) says to me that the scientific process has been corrupted.
So this is familiar ground and the only question is what prediction is proven wrong today. And it’s a doozy:
In 2005, the United Nations Environment Programme predicted that climate change would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010. These people, it was said, would flee a range of disasters including sea level rise, increases in the numbers and severity of hurricanes, and disruption to food production.
The UNEP even provided a handy map. The map shows us the places most at risk including the very sensitive low lying islands of the Pacific and Caribbean.
It so happens that just a few of these islands and other places most at risk have since had censuses, so it should be possible for us now to get some idea of the devastating impact climate change is having on their populations.
Read the whole thing, but the short version is this: the reports of an impending wave of climate refugees was greatly exaggerated. I mean there was New Orleans and… that’s pretty much it. Everywhere else people were supposed to flee from as the ocean would come crashing into their cities… well, the ocean didn’t come in and thus there was no need to flee.
Which brings up another point. Al “Crazed Sex Poodle” Gore and the IPCC both won a Nobel Prize in 2007 “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The theory went something like this. Global warming will cause things like refugee crises, which will somehow lead to war. So given that these crises have never materialized… shouldn’t they give their awards back?
[Posted and authored by Aaron Worthing.]