Stop Appeasing Biden and the Other Climate Authoritarians

The Department of Energy's recent step to begin the process of banning gas stoves, taken directly against strongly expressed contrary public sentiment, again shows that President Biden, climate czar John Kerry and their climate policy allies are authoritarians.

The climate authoritarians have made vast progress in regulatorily strangling American fossil fuel production, transport and use because opponents with power and influence too often have appeased them instead of directly challenging them.

This appeasement has helped make far too many of their assertions about global warming and CO2 emissions widely accepted.

A critical and mostly ignored fact, however, is that Biden and other climate authoritarians are climate science deniers.

Biden, for example, recently repeated his favorite assertion regarding global warming, stating that it “is the single most existential threat to humanity we have ever faced, including nuclear weapons.”

Climate science data show just the opposite – global warming has been saving millions of lives.

A May 2015 study published in the British medical journal The Lancet, by 22 scientists from around the world, found – after examining “the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature-health associations,” over 74 million deaths in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1985-2012 – that cooler temperatures caused over 17 times more deaths than warmer temperatures.

A similar July 2021 study, also published in The Lancet, reported that cooler temperatures killed 9 times more people than warmer temperatures.

This means that as the planet has warmed by 1.05 degree Celsius on average since 1880 (as calculated by NASA), warmer temperatures have been saving millions of lives.

Consistent with these studies, a 2017 statement signed by over 300 scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT and William Happer of Princeton, states that a quarter century of observations “show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign.”

The scientists' statement also makes the fundamental point regarding CO2, which each of us exhales with every breath: “carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison.”

Instead of following climate science data, the climate authoritarians rely on UN climate models that Obama Department of Energy Under Secretary for Science Steven Koonin shows in his book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters,” are so speculative and unreliable that they have been unable even to reproduce the 20^th century's temperature changes.

Reams of scientific data also eviscerate the climate authoritarians' repeated declarations that global warming and increased CO2 emissions cause more and deadlier natural disasters.

Data from EM-DAT – The International Disaster Database presented by The University of Oxford's Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser show that since 1920, as the planet has warmed and CO2 emissions have increased – and as world population has quadrupled – average deaths per year from natural disasters have decreased by over 90 percent.

What about hurricanes? Read this NOAA report, updated on December 29, 2022: “there is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s.”

The NOAA report goes further and states in bold: “We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes.”

Fire data make a similar point. Data from the Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences, Remote Sensing of Environment, and Earth's Future, environmental statistician Bjorn Lomberg has noted, show that the percentage of global land burned per year in 1905-2021 has been declining.

And let's not forget Al Gore's famous claims about vastly higher ocean sea levels. “When averaged over all of the world's oceans, absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.06 inches per year from 1880 to 2013,” an EPA report updated on August 1, 2022 states, including a slightly increased rate since 1993 of “0.12 to 0.14 inches per year.” Note that even the recent increased rate requires 7 to 8 years to reach a single inch higher.

This and so much more climate data show that the climate authoritarians' claims and their dangerous and damaging policies are scientifically wrong. It is late, but not yet too late, to stop them – but stopping them requires rejecting appeasement and instead directly confronting them about the fundamental facts of climate science.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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