BEN KRITZ

THE so-called World Climate Declaration that is supposed to be such a “savage blow” against the “political orthodoxy” of anthropogenic climate change is more like a wet noodle than a whip when it comes to the actual arguments it presents. It bases its assertion that “there is no climate emergency” on five claims, all of which have been repeatedly debunked for years as they are either misrepresentations of scientific findings, outright lies, and in one case, lunacy of a depth that would make Velikovsky look sane.

As I said in my previous column, there is no debate about climate change; the basic premise has already been accepted and made part of the governing policy of the entire world because there is a vast amount of evidence to support it. There may be debate, and there probably should be, about the best ways to respond to the climate crisis, but the question of whether or not there is a crisis has long since been answered. That raises another question, however: Why should anyone continue to try to convince a tiny, malcontented minority that refuses to even read the scientific data lest it threaten their ideology with uncertainty?

It is a fair question, and one that I mentally review every time I take up this subject, especially after reading, and in a few cases responding to the flood of offended comments from climate deniers that inevitably follows. Honestly, I do not expect to “convert” anyone, because I do not believe that it is within the power of human argument to actually do that, at least when it comes to the topic of climate change — it is a bit like trying to convince a deeply religious person that his God doesn’t exist.

Fortunately, Earth itself will — in that Darwinian way nature works — sort out the climate deniers without help from me or anyone else. There will inevitably come a time when every climate denier will experience the effects of what Man has wrought on the environment firsthand, and that experience will either compel them to get with the program, or remove them from the human equation entirely. In the meantime, the real point of taking them to ask for creating and spreading disinformation is to prevent them from encouraging people to harm themselves and their communities. Practices and policies that lead to a cleaner, healthier environment are good and improve our quality of life, whether there’s a specific reason for them or not; exhorting people to resist those practices and policies is simply malicious, sociopathic demagogy.

So, not for the first time and almost certainly not the last, let us take a closer look at the spurious arguments made in defense of the assertion that “there is no climate emergency”:

Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming

This is certainly true, and no climate scientist has ever suggested otherwise; in fact, a large part of what makes climate research so complex is the challenge of accurately identifying natural cycles so that the human impact on them can be likewise accurately determined. Over Earth’s long history, there have been periods of global warming and cooling, many of which were characterized by significant increases or decreases in greenhouse gases. What the climate deniers leave out, however, is that those historic increases in CO2 and methane led to serious environmental disruptions, including mass extinctions. Far from being evidence that human emissions are inconsequential, the environmental record is even more proof that massive increases in greenhouse gases are lethal to life on Earth.

Warming is far slower than predicted

This assertion is simply a lie. Several research studies already published over the past couple of years, along with ongoing research — which is being continuously conducted for the very purpose of determining whether climate models are accurate or not — show that the warming of the planet has tightly tracked model predictions, dating all the way back to even the comparatively crude models of the 1970s.

Climate policy relies on inadequate models

As the previous assertion is false, so is this one. Climate policy may differ from place to place, and thus be more or less effective, but it is all based on the same set of accurate data.

More CO2 is favorable for nature, greening our planet

This is the most ridiculous of the claims made in the so-called World Climate Declaration. Plants do indeed need CO2, but more CO2 in the atmosphere does not create more plants. As the world’s forest cover disappears at an accelerating rate, the amount of CO2 that plant life can absorb from the atmosphere is constantly decreasing, while the amount of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere by human activity increases — to the point that there is now more CO2 in the atmosphere than at any time in the past 800,000 years, with far less plant life to absorb it.

Global warming has not increased natural disasters

The best answer to this assertion is “yes and no” because this is the aspect of climate science that is the most complicated and bears the largest degree of uncertainty. While scientists have nailed down broad climate trends — increasing CO2 levels, increasing sea and atmospheric temperatures — and certain broad effects, such as overall increase in the global average temperature and sea level, the models are not as accurate for predicting short-term, regional effects. It is a matter of scale; a model built on a dataset that encompasses the entire globe over a timescale of millennia has limitations if applied to a specific country or region for a period of decades or years.

Nonetheless, some specific, real-time effects have been accurately connected to the warming of the planet over the past 250 to 300 years since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Global warming has established a hotter baseline for summer temperatures, which dramatically increases the odds of more frequent, more extreme, and longer-lasting heat waves, which in turn increase the likelihood of more frequent and extreme weather events — including more extreme winter weather, due to the pole-ward shift of warmer sea and atmospheric temperatures altering weather patterns.

ben.kritz@manilatimes.net