Bob Cohen’s letter of March 21, attempting to refute Sue Lempert’s column on the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, uses the standard climate change-denier tactic of cherry picking some conclusions about which there might be disagreement among climate scientists and uses that as a basis for discrediting the entire 4,000-page report. He uses derogatory terms such as “foxes guarding the hen house” and “bullied” to further cast doubt on this extremely important effort to alert the world to the dangers of climate change. Of course, the IPCC is not a “government agency” but rather a group of 195 independent climate scientists from around the world, working under the auspices of the U.N. It reviews thousands of scientific papers and its conclusions are actually fairly conservatively and carefully drawn, as would be expected from a large group of independent-minded scientists. But the IPPC is not the only source of climate change information. For example, the U.S. National Climate Assessments arrived at similar conclusions.
Cohen’s assertion that “economic losses from extreme weather are down significantly over the past four decades” is certainly not true. Munich Re, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, has tracked damages from weather disasters for over 30 years. Its data show that worldwide extreme weather catastrophes (its terminology) increased fairly regularly from 222 in 1980 to 798 in 2019. Economic damages increased accordingly, from an inflation-adjusted average of $43 billion per year in 1980-1989 to $208 billion per year in 2010-2019.
Mr. Steele – what about the fact that there have been numerous ice ages in Earth’s history, yet no “steam” ages? What about the fact that three million years ago, temperatures and CO2 levels were higher, yet there were no humans driving cars, no plastic, no air conditioning and no aerosols, and yet we’re still here? Just because the global temperature goes up a few years doesn’t mean the global temperature will go up forever. History has shown that we need to worry more about the global temperature going down than up.
The UN cherry picks the climate scientist because most member counties are autocracies lobbying for money from the US for climate change. Like most foreign aid, it'd end up in the wrong hands. The UN’s highest temperature projection is for media consumption and was recently so unrealistic that they had to reduce it last year. According to most non-government scientists man is responsible for about 50% of climate warming. But the UN can't admit this because it’d undermine "climate catastrophe" pronouncements.
The UN has acknowledges that it can’t model the effects of cloud cover which is controlled by Sun’s cycles. Without this, the UN can’t predict whether we’re going into a warming or cooling phase. The UN is silent about that our current warming phase being little different from 11 other past warming and cooling phases since a 2 mile thick ice sheet melted over North America 10,000 years ago. They never mention the Little Ice Age that ended in 1850 after starving millions of people to death due to dangerously low levels of CO2 that severely lowered plant growth. Also ignored is that the earth is much greener now than in satilite photos in 1960.
We are not in a climate crisis. Technology is well on its way to producing low cost green energy that will drive fossil fuel use down in plenty of time. It makes on sense for the world to spend $100s of trillions on costly wind and solar energy until we develop as way to store it at prices that won’t devastate average people. Making hydrogen with solar and wind energy would provide low cost storage but Sacramento politicians would rather have the issue to raise money on than a solution. And even in the worst case the worlds temperatures could be inexpensively lowered as UN studies show.
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Mr. Steele – what about the fact that there have been numerous ice ages in Earth’s history, yet no “steam” ages? What about the fact that three million years ago, temperatures and CO2 levels were higher, yet there were no humans driving cars, no plastic, no air conditioning and no aerosols, and yet we’re still here? Just because the global temperature goes up a few years doesn’t mean the global temperature will go up forever. History has shown that we need to worry more about the global temperature going down than up.
The UN cherry picks the climate scientist because most member counties are autocracies lobbying for money from the US for climate change. Like most foreign aid, it'd end up in the wrong hands. The UN’s highest temperature projection is for media consumption and was recently so unrealistic that they had to reduce it last year. According to most non-government scientists man is responsible for about 50% of climate warming. But the UN can't admit this because it’d undermine "climate catastrophe" pronouncements.
The UN has acknowledges that it can’t model the effects of cloud cover which is controlled by Sun’s cycles. Without this, the UN can’t predict whether we’re going into a warming or cooling phase. The UN is silent about that our current warming phase being little different from 11 other past warming and cooling phases since a 2 mile thick ice sheet melted over North America 10,000 years ago. They never mention the Little Ice Age that ended in 1850 after starving millions of people to death due to dangerously low levels of CO2 that severely lowered plant growth. Also ignored is that the earth is much greener now than in satilite photos in 1960.
We are not in a climate crisis. Technology is well on its way to producing low cost green energy that will drive fossil fuel use down in plenty of time. It makes on sense for the world to spend $100s of trillions on costly wind and solar energy until we develop as way to store it at prices that won’t devastate average people. Making hydrogen with solar and wind energy would provide low cost storage but Sacramento politicians would rather have the issue to raise money on than a solution. And even in the worst case the worlds temperatures could be inexpensively lowered as UN studies show.
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