Out of Climate Time … Again (failed Malthusianism rolls on)

“Climate alarmism cannot be understood outside of the long-standing, long-debunked Malthusian view of man as a market failure, a planetary failure. The last half-century’s litany of alarm marches on, with one failed prognostication morphing into another.”

“The Planet Doesn’t Have Time for This,” screams the headline of a recent New York Times Sunday Review. “President Trump is in charge at a crucial moment for dealing with the climate crisis,” the subtitle reads. “We may never recover.”

The article by Bill McKibben begins:

President Trump’s environmental onslaught will have immediate, dangerous effects. He has vowed to reopen coal mines and moved to keep the dirtiest power plants open for many years into the future. Dirty air, the kind you get around coal-fired power plants, kills people.

and ends:

We can hope other world leaders will pick up some of the slack. And we can protest. But even when we vote him out of office, Trumpism will persist, a dark stratum in the planet’s geological history. In some awful sense, his term could last forever.

Well, if things are so glum, when will we be out of time to end the war on carbon-based energy? When can we just tend to our knitting and not vote or march on climate –or at least replace mitigation strategies with adaptive ones?

Or is McKibben ready to declare game over–and then suddenly say we still have more time to reverse the climate math, a la James Hansen?

If this author is really glum and stressed, considering these questions might bring some solar into his life:

• Does coal or primitive biomass in the absence of coal kill more people?
• Why does nature have to be ‘optimal,’ making the human influence on climate bad per se?
• Why not CO2 fertilization to green planet earth (as recently documented in the New York Times)?
• Isn’t warmer and wetter better than cooler and drier?
• Are climate-related deaths going up or down?
• What if we could remove industrial wind turbines out of the hills and sky and go back to nature in the wilds?
• Imagine an energy world with less, not more, government coercion?

Climate alarmism cannot be understood outside of the long-standing, long-debunked Malthusian view of man as a market failure, a planetary failure. The last half-century’s litany of alarm marches on, with one failed prognostication morphing into another.

• The Population Bomb from too many people.
• Resource famine from growing mineral demand.
• Global cooling from sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions.
• Global warming from carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

What might be next if the latest joins the other three false alarms? There does not seem to be much, which might explain why the Climate Lobby is going apocalyptic and is desperate to shut-off debate about the science and economics of anthropogenic climate change and move to One World Coercion.

Witness the reaction to Bret Stephens’ recent column in the New York Times, Climate of Compete Certainty. Stephens hits them where it hurts:

Claiming total certainty about the science traduces the spirit of science and creates openings for doubt whenever a climate claim proves wrong. Demanding abrupt and expensive changes in public policy raises fair questions about ideological intentions. Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts.

Conclusion

Public opinion polls (cited by Stephens) confirm that climate fear is not working. Climate exaggeration is also bringing down science and Left politics with it.

Americans chose fossil fuels for a reason, and making it more expensive for a hypothetical harm with such bad mitigation math is a loser. Malthusians locked into a faulty worldview need to check their premises and, like the song says, Get Happy.