For many years now, our mainstream media have run regular stories about possible future horrors that just “might” arise from human-caused climate change. But they seldom tell us when these speculations later turn out to be nonsense.
A US think-tank has collected “50 years of failed eco-apocalyptic predictions”. So far, none of the forecasts which included due dates have actually come to pass – not a single one!
Polar Bears
A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed asks: what happened to polar bears? They used to be all climate campaigners could talk about, but now they’re essentially absent from headlines.
Protestors used to dress up in polar bear suits. The icon for Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” was a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to his death.
Then in the 2010s campaigners stopped talking about them. After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the plain fact that the global polar-bear population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000 now.
Dead Coral
Dr Bjorn Lomborg says the same thing has happened with activists’ outcries about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
For years, they shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures. After extensive cyclone damage, the percentage of the reef covered in coral reached a record low in 2012. The media ran endless stories about the great reef catastrophe and a group of climate scientists predicted the coral cover would be reduced by another half by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary in 2014.
The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986, with 2024 setting a new record. This good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the panicked predictions received.
Sinking Pacific Islands
Then there have been the data-free warnings that small Pacific Islands would drown as sea levels surge.
In 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres flew all the way to Tuvalu for a Time Magazine cover shot. Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the sea behind the headline “Our Sinking Planet”. The accompanying article warned the island – and others like it – would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.
This year, the New York Times (a leading climate alarmist) finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: Forty years of satellite photography show almost all atoll islands are either stable or increasing in size.
In fact, the scientific literature has been documenting this for more than a decade – with much of the research led by Auckland University’s Professor Paul Kench. While slowly rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores. Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than sea level-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu and most other small islands is increasing.
Thanks to a massive aid effort by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – the Pacific Sea Level and Geodetic Monitoring Project (PSLGM) – accurate readings of tide gauges in 14 Pacific Island countries are now published on a public website every hour of every day. These gauges employ state-of-the-art geodetic technology to measure vertical land movements at gauge sites, so scientists know that any changes genuinely relate to sea levels. They can show with full confidence that there has been no acceleration of Pacific sea level rise during the 21st century.
Cynical Deception
Just last month, Sr Guterres returned to the Pacific to help make a video of “actual sea level rise” occurring at Tutuila Island in American Samoa.
Everybody in Samoa knows that this unfortunate island has been sinking at the rate of about 1 inch per year since an 8.1 magnitude earthquake in September 2009. The absolute altitude of its coastline is steadily decreasing. So the rapid changes in its relative sea levels are entirely caused by seismic subsidence and have nothing at all to do with local climate or absolute sea levels.
Yet Guterres carefully omits any reference to these key facts in his propaganda video. The purpose of this footage is to deceive.
The Secretary-General then flew to the Pacific Forum in Tonga, where he showed his video and portentously declared:
A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed asks: what happened to polar bears? They used to be all climate campaigners could talk about, but now they’re essentially absent from headlines.
Protestors used to dress up in polar bear suits. The icon for Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” was a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to his death.
Then in the 2010s campaigners stopped talking about them. After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the plain fact that the global polar-bear population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000 now.
Dead Coral
Dr Bjorn Lomborg says the same thing has happened with activists’ outcries about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
For years, they shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures. After extensive cyclone damage, the percentage of the reef covered in coral reached a record low in 2012. The media ran endless stories about the great reef catastrophe and a group of climate scientists predicted the coral cover would be reduced by another half by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary in 2014.
The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986, with 2024 setting a new record. This good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the panicked predictions received.
Sinking Pacific Islands
Then there have been the data-free warnings that small Pacific Islands would drown as sea levels surge.
In 2019, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres flew all the way to Tuvalu for a Time Magazine cover shot. Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the sea behind the headline “Our Sinking Planet”. The accompanying article warned the island – and others like it – would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.
This year, the New York Times (a leading climate alarmist) finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: Forty years of satellite photography show almost all atoll islands are either stable or increasing in size.
In fact, the scientific literature has been documenting this for more than a decade – with much of the research led by Auckland University’s Professor Paul Kench. While slowly rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores. Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than sea level-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu and most other small islands is increasing.
Thanks to a massive aid effort by Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology – the Pacific Sea Level and Geodetic Monitoring Project (PSLGM) – accurate readings of tide gauges in 14 Pacific Island countries are now published on a public website every hour of every day. These gauges employ state-of-the-art geodetic technology to measure vertical land movements at gauge sites, so scientists know that any changes genuinely relate to sea levels. They can show with full confidence that there has been no acceleration of Pacific sea level rise during the 21st century.
Cynical Deception
Just last month, Sr Guterres returned to the Pacific to help make a video of “actual sea level rise” occurring at Tutuila Island in American Samoa.
Everybody in Samoa knows that this unfortunate island has been sinking at the rate of about 1 inch per year since an 8.1 magnitude earthquake in September 2009. The absolute altitude of its coastline is steadily decreasing. So the rapid changes in its relative sea levels are entirely caused by seismic subsidence and have nothing at all to do with local climate or absolute sea levels.
Yet Guterres carefully omits any reference to these key facts in his propaganda video. The purpose of this footage is to deceive.
The Secretary-General then flew to the Pacific Forum in Tonga, where he showed his video and portentously declared:
"A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril…The ocean is overflowing… This crisis will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”
The blatancy of this lie is breathtaking. The Secretary-General is one of the most visible people in the world. He was accompanied by an entourage of media, most of them specialist environmental reporters, who are well are of Tutuila’s history of instability and subsidence. They are surely aware that climate science has firmly rebutted the old canards about islands being engulfed by rising seas.
And yet, somehow, the Secretary-General, knew that he could get away with this mendacity. He was, rightly, confident that nobody would call him out.
Heat Waves
Of all the extreme weather events attributed by the media to global warming, the frequency of heat waves stands alone in being recognised by the 2021 report of the UN Climate Panel.
But this recognition takes no account of the fact that global warming is a two-edged sword. More warmth means less cold and cold is worse.
In July, President Biden claimed that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.” He was wrong by a massive margin – while heat kills 9,500 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000.
Despite rising temperatures, age-standardised extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous.
The petrified tone of heat-wave coverage twists policy illogically. Whether from heat or cold, the most sensible way to save people from temperature-related deaths would be to ensure access to cheap, reliable electricity. That way, it wouldn’t be only the rich who could afford to keep safe from blistering or frigid weather. Unfortunately, much of climate policy makes affordable energy all the harder to obtain.
The mainstream media do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview. Climate economics generally find that the costs of human-caused climate change will eventually exceed its benefits, but the net result will be nowhere near catastrophic. But the costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies aim to prevent each year.
As Dr Lomborg concludes:
Of all the extreme weather events attributed by the media to global warming, the frequency of heat waves stands alone in being recognised by the 2021 report of the UN Climate Panel.
But this recognition takes no account of the fact that global warming is a two-edged sword. More warmth means less cold and cold is worse.
In July, President Biden claimed that “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.” He was wrong by a massive margin – while heat kills 9,500 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000.
Despite rising temperatures, age-standardised extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous.
The petrified tone of heat-wave coverage twists policy illogically. Whether from heat or cold, the most sensible way to save people from temperature-related deaths would be to ensure access to cheap, reliable electricity. That way, it wouldn’t be only the rich who could afford to keep safe from blistering or frigid weather. Unfortunately, much of climate policy makes affordable energy all the harder to obtain.
The mainstream media do the world a massive disservice by refusing to acknowledge facts that challenge their intensely doom-ridden worldview. Climate economics generally find that the costs of human-caused climate change will eventually exceed its benefits, but the net result will be nowhere near catastrophic. But the costs of all the extreme policies campaigners push for are much worse. All told, politicians across the world are now spending more than $2 trillion annually—far more than the estimated cost from climate change that these policies aim to prevent each year.
As Dr Lomborg concludes:
“Telling half-truths while piously pretending to “follow the science” benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media outlets, and helps climate-concerned politicians rally their bases. But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.”
Postscript:
While no politician or journalist attending the Pacific Forum called out the duplicity of Mr Guterres, the New Zealand Foreign Minister was clearly uneasy. When asked to confirm that climate change is caused by humans, Rt Hon Winston Peters mildly suggested that natural events like volcanic activities also contributed. When he pointed out that "there are a number of Pacific islands that are actually growing”, uproar ensued throughout Oceania.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxton eventually turned down the heat with the mendacious mantra that both he and Peters believed that “climate change is an existential threat to the Pacific Islands”
Barry Brill OBE JP LL.M(Hons) M.ComLaw is a former MP and Minister of Energy, Petrocorp director, and chair of the Gas Council, Power NZ, ESANZ, and EMCO. He is presently the Chairman of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition. This article was sourced HERE
10 comments:
Another great piece Barry. Politicians both local, central and international continue to blindly promote this nonsense at great cost to we citizens. I find it incredulous that these gutless wonders refuse to allow open debate. The Truth doesn’t mind being questioned but a Lie hates being challenged. This current and previous Govts allow rich arable land to be wasted on carbon farming instead of export earning livestock. This clearly confirms that brains are not a prerequisite to enter parliament. Since 1900, NZ has recorded an average sea level rise of 1.6 mm per year. However the Christchurch city council is projecting a 7 mm per annum sea rise around some parts of the Banks Peninsula and plan to blow millions of rate payer dollars to remediate this highly improbable event in the name of climate alarmism.
Of course our politicians know the truth of the matter. But it appears that they follow the mantra; you will never convince a man of the truth if his salary depends on believing the lie. They are just too well rewarded to go with the narrative. Our system is rotten to the core.
Again, the perpetual lie that miraculously, after 4.5 billion years, in the early 1800s, that the climate on Earth had stabilized into perfect Goldilocks conditions for humans, and was never going to change.
There are a lot of very gullible people out there who don't think for themselves, allowing others to spread their climate propaganda.
The bottom line is that climate and evolution will continue to change over the expected lifetime of several billion years of Earth.
I believe most of us are interested in improving the environment . Every time I turn on my iPad someone is telling me all about the alarming plastic pollution. in the oceans . There is also the problem of polluted rivers .This is what the environmental conscious should be concerned about Also all the building waste going to landfills.
Instead we have our minds filled up with made up stuff about global warning.
Just imagine if all the billions $ spent ( wasted) on supposed climate change was directed instead into real pollution problems using good research to discover solutions to these .
Excellent piece, Barry.
Another fiction here is the drive to achieve "net zero" in New Zealand. So the question that raises is "Just what difference to the Global atmosphere would NZ's net zero target make?"
Well...
Using the IPCC data:-
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is 400ppm.
Human emissions (fossil fuels etc) only produce 3% of this.
New Zealand only produces 0.17% of Human emissions.
SO! New Zealand’s total contribution of CO2 in the atmosphere is
400ppm x 3% x 0.17% = 0.02 ppm which = 2 parts per HUNDRED million.
This is ONE part per 50 MILLION.
The other 49,999,999 parts are other sources – NOT New Zealand.
Now – let’s illustrate just how much ONE part in FIFTY million is:-
Think of a road 50 kilometers long – say the drive from Wellington to Paraparaumu. It takes about 40 minutes steady driving to traverse this distance, along Transmission gully past Paekak etc.
Well this road is 50 km, i.e, 50,000 meters. Imagine that this is a display of the contents of our atmosphere.
Of the 50 kilometers of atmosphere:-
Nitrogen (78%) would be 39 kilometers.
Oxygen (21%) would be 10.5 kilometers.
Argon (0.9%) would be 450 meters
Co2 (400ppm, 0.04%) would be 2 meters.
New Zealand’s contribution (0.02 ppm) is ONE Millimeter on this road
That’s approximately the thickness of my thumbnail.
ONE millimeter in FIFTY KILOMETERS of Road.
That’s how much NZ’s CO2 emissions are in the atmosphere of Planet Earth.
To add to my post above, one might ask "Just how much would it cost us in real dollars for New Zealand to achieve it's "Net Zero" dream as per the Climate Control Commission's demands?"
COSTING IT OUT FOR NZ
The Climate Control Commission’s recommendations have been costed out by NZIER.
Full compliance has been costed out. The cost to NZ’s economy will be $86b per year.
That is 86 BILLION DOLLARS per year – EVERY year. $86,000,000,000 per year.
That works out to $17,000 per year per head of population.
This is fast track economic suicide.
Translated – a typical four person family will be paying 4 x $17,000 = $68,000 per year, EVERY year just to meet the dreamland CCC’s recommendations. This is a THOUSAND DOLLARS A WEEK !! This is economic train wreck suicide.
Bear in mind that this is only to stop NZ’s CO2 emissions, which are only 0.17% (= 1/600th) of total global emissions and only ONE part per 50 MILLION in the atmosphere overall.
i.e. NZ emissions right now are basically zero.
Doug Longmire, you have articulated this madness so succinctly . If you asked these political proponents of the so called Climate Emergency to “please provide empirical evidence that anthropogenic co2 causes dangerous climate change” they would look at you with a dumb expressions. Mark Twain has supposedly quipped that: What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that ain’t so.
Meanwhile the zealots think that, Canute like, they can alter the natural patterns of global climate change
How on earth do we bring these traitors down
I was just wondering if someone with the stroke of a pen include our SI Forest and our overall grasslands. (UNI of California state that grass could well be be a better sink than Trees.)
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