Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

by Michael Shellenberger

mitigate

What the IPCC had actually written in its 2018 report and press release was that in order to have a good chance of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial times, carbon emissions needed to decline 45 percent by 2030. The IPCC did not say the world would end,

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deaths of three to

five million people, mostly because of disease and starvation.

Did we hear about this

Climate change, noted a large team of researchers in 2019, “has affected organized armed conflict within countries. However, other drivers, such as low socioeconomic development and low capabilities of the state, are judged to be substantially more influential.”47

Like all things ... There is a number of contributing factors

“There is robust evidence of disasters displacing people worldwide, but limited evidence that climate change or sea level rise is the direct cause.”49

The wording here is tricky.. it seems the authour is hedging his bets

show that resource scarcity affects the risk of conflict less in low-income states than in wealthier

Duh. Of course it does... This has been going on for century's

money that should flow to the people is being stolen.

Or rampant corruption

“It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that”

Again key words have been removed

“I don’t see scientific evidence that a four degree Celsius planet can host eight billion people,” he said. “This is, in my assessment, a scientifically justified statement, as we don’t have evidence that we can provide freshwater or feed or shelter today’s world population of eight billion in a four degree world. My expert judgment, furthermore, is that it may even be doubtful if we can host half of that, meaning four billion.”

So it is half the worlds populTion?

agronomist.

And, again, technical improvements, such as fertilizer, irrigation, and mechanization, mattered more than climate change.

So, his own collegues are suggezting that it is actually possible

Sustainable Practices

Which is what?

The experts agreed in their unanimous Hohenkammer Statement that climate change is real and humans are contributing to it significantly.69 But they also agreed that more people and property in harm’s way explained the rising cost of natural disasters, not worsening disasters.

This is what people should be talking about… but it too moderste

Pielke then shows normalized hurricane losses for the same period. Normalized means that Pielke and his coauthors adjusted the damage data to account for the massive development of America’s coastlines, like Miami’s, since 1900. Once this is done there is no trend of rising costs.

I don't get it but i know i need to find out

“There is scant evidence to indicate that hurricanes, floods, tornadoes or drought have become more frequent or intense in the U.S. or globally,”

How can that be? Is this linked to normalized adjusted approach?

1940 in the United States 3,322 people have died in 118 hurricanes that made landfall,” Pielke wrote. But when the “Boxing Day Tsunami struck Southeast Asia in 2004, more than 225,000 people died.”81

Great comparison

Heavily armed militias roam the countryside robbing, raping, kidnapping, and murdering. Understandably, then, climate change is not on her list of things to worry about.

part to the accumulation of wood fuel. One scientist estimates that there is ten times more wood fuel in Australia’s forests today than when Europeans arrived. The main reason is that the government of Australia, as in California, refused to do controlled burns, for both environmental and human health reasons. As such, the fires would have occurred even had Australia’s climate not warmed.

This is what we hace only found out about a little too late

animus

Australia, California, and Brazil far greater control over their future than the apocalyptic news media suggested.

So what is the answer then

Studies find that climate alarmism is contributing to rising anxiety and depression, particularly among children.100 In 2017, the American Psychological Association diagnosed rising eco-anxiety and called it “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”101 In September 2019, British psychologists warned of the impact on children of apocalyptic discussions of climate change. In 2020, a large national survey found that one out of five British children was having nightmares about climate change.102

Is thiz because they have a name for their anxiety

Extinction Rebellion, “your persistent exaggeration of the facts has the potential to do more harm than good to the scientific credibility of your cause as well as to the psychological well-being of my generation.”106

So what is the adjenda of extinction rebelion

“The scientific community produces carefully caveated scenarios of the future, ranging from the unrealistically optimistic to the highly pessimistic,” Pielke wrote. By contrast, “Media coverage tends to emphasize the most pessimistic scenarios and in the process somehow converts them from worst-case scenarios to our most likely futures.”

Nd perhaps they do tht to sell papers

our goal should be to reduce emissions and keep temperatures as low as possible without undermining economic development.

A delicTe balance

I decided to call Dan Nepstad, a lead author of a recent IPCC report on the Amazon. I asked him whether it was true that the Amazon was a major source of Earth’s oxygen supply. “It’s bullshit,” he told me. “There’s no science behind that. The Amazon produces a

lot of oxygen, but it uses the same amount of oxygen through respiration, so it’s a wash.”

Great arguement

“So, in all practical terms, the net contribution of the Amazon ECOSYSTEM (not just the plants alone) to the world’s oxygen is effectively zero,”

Many weren’t even of the Amazon.14 The photo Ronaldo shared was taken in southern Brazil, far from the Amazon—and it was taken in 2013, not 2019.15 The photo Madonna shared was more than thirty years old.16

So was this by accident on the celebrity part or not?

But is it really so shocking? After all, agricultural expansion in Brazil is happening

Short memory

nearly identically to how it occurred in Europe hundreds of years ago.

made communities more secure from human and nonhuman predators, allowed them to expand all over the world, and required new behaviors around eating, organizing societies, and procreating. Hunting with fire became a crucial milestone in the creation of both what we think of as nation-states and markets, through the demarcation of control by individuals and groups competing for food. Indeed, fire was used differently in different zones, for security, agriculture, and hunting.44 Fire allowed for the creation of sexually monogamous family units. And it allowed for the hearth as a place for reflection and discussion and widening social and group intelligence.

Never thought of the sheer importance of fire like that

nineteenth century had viewed the Amazon as “jungle,” a place of danger and disorder, came to see it in the late twentieth century as “rainforest,” a place of harmony and enchantment.

Language here is important

“When soy farming comes into a landscape, the number of fires goes down. Little towns get money for schools, GDP rises, and inequality declines. This is not a sector to beat up on, it’s one to find common ground with.”

conflate

conflating

hubris,”

dogmatism,”

of the European Commission, the attacks on Brazil by France and Ireland “raised eyebrows,” noted Forbes business reporter Dave Keating. “These also happen to be the two countries who have been most vocally opposed to the Mercosur deal on protectionist grounds.”64 According to Keating, “They are worried that their farmers will be overwhelmed by competition from South American beef, sugar, ethanol, and chicken. Beef, a staple of Argentinian and Brazilian agricultural exports,

issue in these trade negotiations. Irish farmers in particular are expected to have a tough time competing with the influx.”65

Hence the real reason, protecting national interests

scale restoration of the Atlantic Forest, the ‘hottest of hotspots,’ ” wrote a group of scientists, “where up to eighteen million hectares [an area twice the size of Portugal] could be restored without impeding national agricultural expansion. This would more than double the remaining area of this biome, slow the massive species extinctions, and sequester 7.5 billion tonnes of CO2.”

Who would be even able to find this forest on a map?

fertilizer.

What kind of fertfilzer and what ARE thes ramifications

agrarian

As for the myth that the Amazon provides “20 percent of the world’s oxygen,” it appears to have evolved out of a 1966 article by a Cornell University scientist.

No wonder my generation believedit

But when you consider that just 0.03 percent of the nine million tons of plastic waste that ends up in oceans every year is composed of straws, banning them seems like a profoundly small thing,

True but it is an easy fix

great first step and conversation starter, but

A good acknowledgment

13 percent of green turtle deaths that were studied off the coast of Brazil.

China, Indonesia, Philippines, and Vietnam, produce half of all mismanaged plastic waste at risk of entering the ocean. One-quarter came from China alone.

Shouldn.t China know better

gyres,

“The global weight of plastic pollution on the sea surface, from all size classes combined, is only 0.1 percent of the world annual production.”

This needs to be ezplained