The White House on Tuesday unveiled the draft of the national Climate Assessment. Mr. Obama hopes to use the Assessment to shore up public support for his climate policies, which would put new regulations in place to limit emissions. The report, according to Cato Institute scholars Paul Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels, has serious implications throughout the federal regulatory process. As Mr. Michaels points out, the Assessment will provide cover for a massive regulatory intrusion. “When scientists willingly endorse sweeping governmental agendas fueled by dodgy science, bad things soon happen.”
This National Assessment is much closer to pseudoscience than it is to science. It is as explanatory as Sigmund Freud. It clearly believes that virtually everything in our society is tremendously dependent the surface temperature, and, because of that, we are headed towards certain and inescapable destruction, unless we take its advice and decarbonize our economy, pronto. Unfortunately, the Assessment can’t quite tell us how to accomplish that, because no one knows how.
In the Assessment’s 1200 horror-studded pages, almost everything that happens in our complex world — sex, birth, disease, death, hunger, and wars, to name a few — is somehow made worse by pernicious emissions of carbon dioxide and the joggling of surface average temperature by a mere two degrees.
Virtually every chapter in the Assessment perseverates on extreme weather, despite the U.N.s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change statement that:
There is medium evidence and high agreement that long-term trends in normalized losses have not been attributed to natural or anthropogenic climate change.
The Assessment is woefully ignorant of humanity’s ability to adapt and prosper in response to challenges. The quintessence of this is the truly dreadful chapter on human health and climate change.
While death, disease, poverty and injustice are all conjured by warming, there is not one mention of the fact that life expectancy in the U.S. is approximately twice what it was in the year 1900, or that per-capita income in real dollars is over ten times what it was then. It emphasizes diseases that will somehow spread because of warming, neglecting the fact that many were largely endemic when it was colder and were eradicated as we warmed a bit.
Related video:
