Questioning the climate science orthodoxy in Glasgow

True, there is no dispute that the climate is changing; it has never been static. While many scientists say the world is warming, even this is not certain. The real question, however, is whether climate change is catastrophic for mankind. Happily, there is no indication it is.

Average global temperatures rose about 0.6 degrees Celsius during the 20th century. Over the same period, life expectancy doubled. Per capita income, meanwhile, increased by almost an order of magnitude, to $6,500. Agriculture flourished. The last century was not alone in human flourishing accompanying warming. The end of the “little ice age” did not cause a decline in global health. Indeed, the Environmental Protection Agency’s integrated assessment models have shown net benefits of warming through the middle of this century.

While the climate summit’s headliners say that human activity and carbon emissions cause climate change, they cherry-pick evidence. The failure of models to predict accurately suggests a major problem in the theories that Biden and his team embrace as fact.

This should not surprise anyone. Politicians simplify. Few understand the science about which they opine. While at Yale, neither climate envoy John Kerry nor national security adviser Jake Sullivan took a serious science course beyond the box-checking gut courses that history and political science majors flocked to. Yet they now purport to deem the climate debate closed.

Here is the problem: Physicists pursue knowledge by designing experiments in which they isolate single variables. Meteorologists and other climate scientists have difficulty doing this when the atmosphere is their laboratory. They may believe they are looking at a single variable, but a dozen other factors may be at play about which they have no knowledge. What looks definitive in the laboratory seldom is in the real world. Computer models are only as good as the data upon which they are based.

Politicians in Glasgow seek two outcomes: First, they promote alternative energy while reducing carbon emissions and the use of fossil fuels. The problem here, however, is that whether nuclear, solar, hydroelectric, or geothermal, alternative energy also has practical and environmental drawbacks. Environmental awareness and willingness to act increases with affluence — to raise the price of energy and undercut economies may do the environment more harm than good. As for alternatives, each has an environmental cost, be it in terms of the mining and metals needed to construct efficient panels or batteries, the impact on migratory animals, or the problem of nuclear waste.

Biden, Kerry, the pope, and the U.N. secretary-general may mean well, but constant exaggerations and crying wolf do more harm than good. It is illogical to blame extreme weather events on warming, and then blame their absence on warming as well. Likewise, attributing horrific storms, heat waves, and cold snaps to climate change fails when many records for extreme weather are more than a century old. Take Scotland: Less than two months ago, the BBC headlined that Scotland had seen its “hottest September day in 115 years.” If climate change is responsible, then why was it more than 3 degrees Celsius warmer in 1906? Many alarmist headlines about coral reef death and wildfires, meanwhile, are equally unsupported by fact.

While Biden declares, “We must listen to science,” he and other grandstanding politicians now appear deaf. True science questions every assumption; it does not seek to shut down debate. The Glasgow conference’s approach to science has more to do with a Dark Age approach in which assumption became religious truth, rather than the Enlightenment’s more genuine approach to knowledge.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential. He is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.