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https://nypost.com/2024/09/15/opinion/shrinking-island-vanishing-polar- bears-the-climate-scare-stories-that-turn-out-to-be-false/
Looking back on more than 20 years of climate agitation, two themes
emerge: a stubborn unwillingness by campaigners to acknowledge any
inconvenient science, and ever-shifting favorite stories, first elevated
and then dropped by the wayside.
The one constant: a fixation on scaring the public, which has in turn
shaped bad climate policies.
At the start of this century, the polar bear was the emblem of climate apocalypse.
Protesters dressed as polar bears, while Al Gore�s hit 2006 film �An Inconvenient Truth� showed us a sad, animated polar bear floating away to
its death.
The Washington Post warned that polar bears faced extinction, and the
World Wildlife Fund�s chief scientist even claimed some polar bear
populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.
And then in the 2010s, campaigners just stopped talking about polar bears.
Why? Because after years of misrepresentation, it finally became
impossible for them to ignore a mountain of evidence showing that the
global polar bear population has increased substantially from around
12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 in the present day. (The main reason? People are hunting a lot less polar bears).
The same thing has happened with depictions of Australia�s Great Barrier
Reef.
For decades, campaigners shouted that the reef was being killed off by
rising sea temperatures.
After extensive damage from a hurricane in 2009, official Australian
estimates of coral cover reached a low in 2012.
The media was flooded with claims of the �Great Reef Catastrophe� and scientists predicted the reef would be decimated by 2022. The Guardian
even published an obituary.
The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For
the past three years, the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than
at any point since records began in 1985, with 2024 setting a new record.
The good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the scare stories did.
An often-recurrent climate story has been the alleged drowning of small
Pacific islands due to sea level rise.
In 2019, United Nations Secretary General Ant�nio Guterres flew all the
way to Tuvalu for a Time magazine cover-shot.
Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water, demonstrating �our sinking planet.� The accompanying article warned the island � and others
like it � would be struck �off the map entirely� by rising sea levels.
This summer, the New York Times finally shared what it called �surprising� climate news: almost all atoll islands are increasing in size. In fact,
the scientific literature has documented this trend for more than a
decade.
While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is
washed up on low-lying shores.
Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than climate- caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu is increasing.
Climate change is real. It is manmade. It is a challenge that needs
sensible policies.
But campaigners do the cause a massive disservice by refusing to
acknowledge evidence that challenges their intensely doom-ridden
worldview.
All these misguided claims add up, and have shaped the climate panic that
has led to politicians passing climate legislation that now costs the
world more than $2 trillion annually, for a tiny benefit.
Today, killer heat waves are the new scare story � and the latest example
of willful blindness of the bigger picture.
Recently, President Biden claimed �extreme heat is the number one weather- related killer in the United States.�
He is wrong by a factor of 25. While extreme heat annually kills nearly
6,000 people, cold kills 152,000 Americans each year, of which 12,000 die
from extreme cold.
Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme heat deaths have
actually declined in the US by almost 10% per decade and globally by even
more, largely because people who are more prosperous are better able to
afford air conditioners.
If 6,000 heatwave deaths are a genuine priority, a sensible response would
be to ensure American electricity remains cheap so it�s not just the rich
who can afford to keep air conditioning running.
The same policy prescription would hold if President Biden were to pay attention to the 152,000 Americans dying each year from the cold.
Strokes and heart attacks spike when older people can�t afford to heat
their homes through winter.
Sadly, rather than keeping energy costs low, a lot of climate policy does
the opposite.
It is hard not to see a pattern of climate-alarmed campaigners scaring
people witless and choosing to ignore inconvenient science for as long as
they can � before simply switching to a new climate fright when it becomes
too awkward not to.
But scare campaigns have consequences. They leave everyone � and
especially young people � distressed and despondent.
Fear leads to poor policy choices, like western governments spendin
And they erode the public trust, like when emphasizing heat deaths,
because they fit the narrative, while ignoring much greater numbers of
cold deaths.
Telling half-truths whilst piously purporting to be following the science benefits activists with their fundraising, generates clicks for media
outlets, and helps politicians rally voters.
But it leaves all of us poorly informed and worse off.
Bjorn Lomborg is President of the Copenhagen Consensus, Visiting Fellow at Stanford University�s Hoover Institution, and author of �False Alarm� and
�Best Things First.�
--
November 5, 2024 - Congratulations President Donald Trump. We look
forward to America being great again.
The disease known as Kamala Harris has been effectively treated and
eradicated.
We live in a time where intelligent people are being silenced so that
stupid people won't be offended.
Durham Report: The FBI has an integrity problem. It has none.
Thank you for cleaning up the disaster of the 2008-2017 Obama / Biden
fiasco, President Trump.
Under Barack Obama's leadership, the United States of America became the
The World According To Garp. Obama sold out heterosexuals for Hollywood
queer liberal democrat donors.
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