SCARE TACTICS LOSING THEIR POWER TO FRIGHTEN AFTER COVID COMPARISON

 Climate hyperbolists are finding the pandemic stole their thunder

Editorial, The Washington Times, 26 July 2021

Americans are not naturally inclined to peer out the window in the morning to see if the sky is falling. They should, according to opinion-shapers determined to create fear of imminent global catastrophe resulting from humanity’s lively activities. Relentless climate hyperbole, though, may be losing its capacity to trigger public apprehension in an age jaded by coronavirus pestilence.
 
Few understand the power of fear better than perennial politicians. John Kerry is one, and as President Biden’s climate czar, he is leveraging the hypothetical threat from carbon dioxide by equating it with the clear and present danger of COVID-19. Speaking in London last week prior to a G-20 ministerial session on climate, energy, and the environment, Mr. Kerry warned, according to CNBC, that human suffering caused by the COVID-19 pandemic would be “magnified many times over in a world that does not grapple with, and ultimately halt, the climate crisis.”
 
Such dreadful imagery can have no other purpose than to frighten the world into reducing its greenhouse gas emissions. The United States shamefacedly cut its carbon dioxide output by nearly 15 percent before the pandemic-triggered economic collapse resulted in an additional 11 percent decline. In contrast, China discharges 28 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions and it doesn’t plan to reach peak output until 2030. Communists don’t scare as easily as democrats.

Mr. Kerry is just loathe to mention facts relevant to the climate-change discussion that evoke relief rather than despair. A few are presented in “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,” a recent book by Obama Undersecretary of Energy for Science Steven Koonin. Among them: By failing to reproduce actual temperatures readings from the past, computer models that climatologists rely upon to predict future temperature trends have proved inaccurate. That’s not “settled science.”

Moreover, the author points out that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded thus far that the economic impact of climate change has been mild rather than catastrophic. The body has yet to validate a clear link between warming and natural disasters.

There is a price to be paid for Washington’s incessant hazard klaxons sounding across the national landscape. A new ABC/Ipsos poll finds that only 45 percent of respondents hold an optimistic view of America’s future during the next 12 months. That figure has plummeted 19 points during the past three months – a gloomy assessment of President Biden’s helmsmanship.
 
It’s unsurprising, then, that Mr. Kerry and fellow sky-watchers have reportedly come to loggerheads with nations unamused by proposals to hamstring their economic future. They include China and India, which refused at the G-20 gathering to agree to phase out coal power or endorse the Paris Climate Agreement goal of limiting global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
 
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