No, Richard, Climate Change is still not an existential threat

 Vincent J. Curtis

2 Sept 20

Today's Spectator published a letter from a climate alarmist.  The gist of it can be ascertained from the rebuttal below.

This year, the Farmer’s Almanac released its 202nd annual edition.  It, of course, contains the famous weather forecasts for the coming year.  That the Almanac has been published for 202 years in a row is an empirical acknowledgement that climate is always changing.  If climate didn’t change, then weather patterns would be predictable year after year, and there would be no need for the Almanac.  Yet it continues.

Hence, the Spectator wasted space publishing the diatribe by Richard MacKinnon.  No climate scientist has gone out on a limb and declared that a particular weather event was caused by climate change.  The effect of increasing carbon dioxide content from 280 ppm to 408 ppm is like adding two people to a capacity crowd at the Air Canada Centre.  It’s just not that significant.  And it simply isn’t true that warmer air leads to stronger winds and more persistent rain, as the Sahara and Arabian Deserts prove.  Wind is caused by differences in atmospheric pressure, not temperature.  Annual rainfall in southern Alberta is also quite variable from one year to the next, and so it ought to be in South Asia.

Wildfires aren’t caused by climate change, they’re caused in nature by lightning strikes in dry vegetation, and drought conditions combined with poor forest management can make the destruction worse than some say it should be.  The “record” heat in Death Valley simply wasn’t a record, only in the limited time frame considered.  The actual record occurred earlier, when carbon dioxide level was low.  Droughts in Africa are not unusual, any more than in California.  Hurricane Laura was especially intense because it passed over the famously warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico, source of the Gulf stream.  Ten children killed in Uganda by a lightning strike were killed - by a lightning strike, not climate change.  The Amazon losing 17 percent of its original area may have something to do with Brazilian logging and farming practices, not climate change.

One could refute point by point, not that it would change any minds.  The modelling failures around COVID-19 ought to make the public wary of modelling forecasts generally, but that’s all the climate fearmongers have got.  They have models, not data, and backcasting the models show that they overestimate actual temperature change by a lot.  The models are incapable of forecasting a reversal in trends, as occurred in the 1940s from warmer to cooler, and the late 1970s, when we went from the coming ice ahr to global warming.  Many temperature records of the 1930s remain records to this day.

Climate is always changing, and that’s why the Farmer’s Almanac has been in business for over two hundred years.

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