How to be a climate and COVID denier by calling warnings, “panicked fearmongering.”

If you were in a burning building and people yelled at you, “Get out, the building is on fire,” I assume Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan B. Peterson would call that “panicked fearmongering.”

It is the only conclusion I can draw from the ridiculous Trumpian article published under their names.

Stop the panicked fearmongering if we want to make the world better By Bjorn Lomborg and Jordan B. Peterson August 4, 2023, 6:31pm Updated

The meaningful exchange of truly diverse ideas and perspectives has withered over recent decades.

Unorthodox thinking is increasingly trashed or disregarded, even as the chattering class’s fear- and force-predicated approaches repeatedly prove inadequate to cope with the true complexities and crises of the modern world.

We need instead to foster and promote critical thinking and constructive discussion.

Here is an example of the “unorthodox thinking, ” “critical thinking,” and “constructive discussion” the authors seem to promote: Unorthodox, yes. Critical, huh? Constructive, no. Thinking. Absolutely no.

We are making every effort to ensure that our new Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), an international coalition of politicians, business leaders, public intellectuals and cultural commentators, will help ensure that a broader range of perspectives can be heard globally.

It’s not the “range of perspectives” that is the problem. It’s the unscientific perspectives that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Consider the world’s response to the pandemic.

A panic-stricken lockdown orthodoxy far too soon took hold, and those whose policy proposals deviated quickly were labeled “COVID deniers.”

Governments that went the farthest were feted by public intellectuals and in newspaper opinion pages.

Thus, we saw increases of inequality in income distribution and wealth, widespread loss of employment, substantive declines in spending and general deterioration in economic conditions; serious declines in mental health and wellbeing, delayed and diminished access to healthcare, and record high levels of domestic violence.

The problems mentioned in the previous paragraph were due to people sickening and dying from COVID, not to “panicked fearmongering.”

There seems to have been insufficient “fearmongering.”

Too many people, especially Republicans, agreed with Lomborg and Peterson and did not take “orthodox” vaccine, mask, and crowd avoidance information seriously.

“Many experiments and facts have proven that masks are lifesavers for confined spaces with high population density and less ventilation.“

The education of children was particularly affected: School closures, on average, robbed children of more than seven months of education.

The huge impact on kids’ knowledge could end up costing $17 trillion in lifetime earnings, per research by the World Bank, UNESCO, and UNICEF.

Poor children, girls, and children with disabilities suffered the largest losses.

Sadly, school classrooms are the “confined spaces with high population density and less ventilation that have proved to cost lives.

The question became, Would you risk your children’s lives for seven months of education?

We need to have a serious conversation about our manner of response before the next crisis (pandemic or otherwise) to ensure that the cure is not much worse than the disease.

Consider, too, the alarmist treatment of climate change.

Campaigners and news organizations play up fear in the form of floods, storms, and droughts while neglecting to mention that reductions in poverty and increases in resiliency mean that climate-related disasters kill ever fewer people: Over the past century, such deaths have dropped 97%.

Heatwaves capture the headlines. Globally, however, cold kills nine times more people.

The higher temperatures arguably characterizing this century have resulted in 166,000 fewer temperature-related deaths.

Fear-mongering and the suppression of truly inconvenient truths are pushing us dangerously toward the wrong solutions: Politicians and pundits call en masse for net-zero policies that will cost far beyond $100 trillion while producing benefits a fraction as large.

We need to be able to have an honest discussion of costs and benefits — a true reckoning with the facts to find the best solutions.

The “honest discussion” already has been, and is being, held, and the consensus is that global warming can be an extinction event for millions of species, including ours.

The disingenuous, highly misleading comment that more people die from cold than heat does not recognize what is happening to the world.

Consider just one effect, the melting of Antarctic ice: The chart shows that if all the ice in the Antarctic were to melt, sea levels would rise by 187 feet (57 meters).

Do you live 187 feet above sea level?

Well, you may say not ALL the ice will melt. Maybe only 10% will melt, raising sea levels by “only” 18 feet.

Then again, we haven’t considered Arctic and Greenland ice.

Melting from the Arctic — and the Greenland ice sheet in particular — is the largest contributor to global sea level rise. 

“If you look at where humanity lives, a great proportion of humanity lives at the coastlines worldwide.

“The megacities are along coastlines: New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco.”

And that’s just sea-level rise. What about other problems?

The environmental conditions in the Arctic affect weather systems across the world.

The North and South poles act as the “freezers of the global system,” helping to circulate ocean waters around the planet in a way that helps to maintain the climates felt on land, Moon said.

“What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic.”

The jet stream, a band of strong winds moving west to the east created by cold air meeting warmer air, helps regulate global weather.

In the continental U.S., the jet stream forms where generally colder and drier Arctic air meets warmer and more humid air from the Gulf.

But as temperatures in the Arctic warm, the jet stream, fueled by the temperature differences, weakens.

Rather than a steady stream of winds, the jet stream has become more “wavy,” allowing hot temperatures to extend usually far into the Arctic and frigid temperatures further south than usual.

The variability in the climate in the Arctic, specifically the weakening of the polar vortex, keeps cold air closer to the poles,

It likely led to the Texas freeze in February that led to millions without power and hundreds of deaths.

The study cited an “increasingly frequent number of episodes of extremely cold winter weather over the past four decades” in the U.S., despite temperatures rising overall.

As though sea level rise, species extinction, and more extreme weather aren’t bad enough, we also should look at disease:

Mosquitoes and other biting insects transmit many of the most important, devastating, and neglected human infectious diseases, including malaria, dengue fever, chikungunya, and West Nile virus.

Economic development and cooler temperatures have kept mosquito-borne diseases out of wealthier Northern Hemisphere countries, but climate change promises to tip the scales in the other direction.

As temperatures rise, malaria could be coming to your neighborhood.

And then there’s food:

Recent research suggests that adverse weather has canceled up to 30% of the expected increase in European crop growth.

But it is worrying that the most pronounced changes tend to be in countries, such as those in sub-Saharan Africa, including South Africa, that are at high risk of climate impacts on food availability and affordability.

This is particularly clear in the case of barley, maize, millet, pulses, rice, and wheat.

The countries most at risk of food shortages are also worst affected by rising temperatures.

This seems to bear out the finding from the world’s premier climate science advisers, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that the higher average global temperatures and more extreme weather events associated with climate change will reduce the reliability of food production.

No, Messrs. Lomborg and Peterson, the warnings about COVID and global warming should not be written off as simply “panicked fearmongering.”

When you disseminate false information from such right-wing sources as Fox News, Breitbart, QAnon, Donald Trump, and the GOP, you not only stain whatever reputations you may have, but you endanger lives.

If you prefer to follow the anti-science, right-wing, unorthodox voices,, you have my permission to inject yourself with ivermectin, bleach, and hydroxychloroquine, and by all means, avoid vaccination.

But please stop writing harmful nonsense.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell Monetary Sovereignty

Twitter: @rodgermitchell Search #monetarysovereignty

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