Opinion

Hillary Clinton’s Climate Calamity

(REUTERS/David Gray)

E. Calvin Beisner Founder, The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation
Font Size:

“Climate change is real, it’s urgent, and America can take the lead in the world in addressing it,” Hillary Clinton told her mostly young audience in a panicky speech at a rally at Miami-Dade College in Miami, FL, October 11.

Indeed, she said, “We need a President who believes in science and who has a plan to lead America in facing this threat and creating good jobs, and yes, saving our planet.”

Clinton might want to learn a bit of climate science. She could start with temperature trends.

The world warmed by perhaps 0.8–1.0˚C in the last 150 years, but that doesn’t mean human CO2 and other “greenhouse gas” emissions caused the warming. Why?

First, because the first hundred years of warming occurred before CO2 levels rose enough to blame.

Second, because even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledges the warming was intermittent, not steady (like the rise in CO2), and two periods (1860–1880 and 1910–1940) before CO2 rose enough to matter were as rapid as the one period (1980–2005) afterward, as shown in this graph exposing the statistical deceptions of the IPCC. (The IPCC provided the red, purple, and orange trend lines to depict accelerating warming periods over time; the yellow lines show that the warming occurred at the same rate in three periods, with cooling or stasis interspersed.)

ipcc

Third, because once you’ve applied the proper statistical tools to control for the normal fluctuations of Earth’s climate system to global temperature data, you find that the entire global temperature change in 1958 to 2012 occurred in a single step, in late 1977. It was driven not by CO2 but by the reversal of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation from negative (cooling the atmosphere) to positive (warming it).

Fourth, because aside from a temporary upward blip (1998) making it fractions of a degree warmer than the surrounding decades and driven by an unusually strong El Niño (which warms the atmosphere and is usually followed by a cooling La Niña), there was no statistically significant trend in global average temperature from early 1997 to late 2015, despite the fact that CO2 concentration rose even faster than alarmists had predicted. (The celebrated warmth of 2016 is analogous to that of 1998—driven by El Niño, not CO2.)

And the warming isn’t dangerous. Most of it delivered us from the ravages of the Little Ice Age (~1350–1850) and its widespread crop failures, famines, and plagues.

Besides, a change of global average temperature of about 1˚C is innocuous. The difference between low and high temperatures every day in most locations is ten to thirty times that much, and twenty to eighty times that much between mid-summer and mid-winter. The proper response is, as veteran MIT climatologist Dr. Richard Lindzen puts it, “So what?”

Clinton might also want to learn about the difference between model predictions and real-world observations.

Climate alarmists depend on model predictions for their fear mongering. But those aren’t evidence. They’re what we expect if our theory about climate is true. As such, they must be tested against real-world observations, and they don’t fare well.

First, on average, they predict two to three times the warming observed over the relevant period.

atmosphere-trends

Second, over 95 percent predict more warming than observed. If their errors were random, they’d be as frequently below as above observations. That they’re not implies that the errors are driven by bias.

Third, none predicted the absence of warming from early 1997 to late 2015—eighteen years and nine months, too long to reconcile with the models.

In short, real-world observation contradicts model output. That means the models are wrong and provide no rational basis for any predictions about global temperature or any policy.

So there’s no good reason (other than lining the pockets of the renewable-energy moguls who support her) for Clinton’s passion to:

What Clinton wants to do to fight global warming would, as climatologist Dr. David Legates and energy economist Dr. G. Cornelis van Kooten showed in a paper published by The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, slow, stop, or reverse economic growth everywhere by depriving people of abundant, affordable, reliable energy from fossil fuels. It would delay for billions of the world’s poor the conquest of extreme poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that invariably accompany it. That is morally unconscionable.

E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., is Founder and National Spokesman of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a network of over 60 scholars—scientists, economists, and theologians—educating for Biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the gospel of Jesus Christ.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel