All of us nice people enthusiastically support educating and encouraging children about the importance of environmental stewardship. It's quite a different matter, however, to fill their precious minds with fearful fantasies that global survival depends upon solving a mythical climate crisis with magical energy solutions.
That, sadly, is what we witnessed as millions of young people — including ideologically indoctrinated middle-schoolers — joined global protests in advance of the opening of the Sept. 23 U.N. General Assembly and Climate Action Summit to demand "an end to the age of fossil fuels."
Featured 16-year-old Swedish rally leader Greta Thunberg, joined by an estimated 250,000 New York City protesters, asked the crowd, "How we can get more young people involved — I think to just tell them the truth, tell them how it is."
Emma Lim, an 18-year-old student from London, Ontario, Canada, launched a pledge signed by more than 2,600 young people (so far) not to have children until they are sure governments are doing everything they can to curb the effects of climate change.
While no doubt sincere in their concerns, a particularly tragic case of such climate paranoia involving an Argentine family occurred in March 2010.
Francisco Lotero and Miriam Coletti shot two of their children before killing themselves after making an apparent suicide pact over fears about effects of global warming.
Although their two-year-old son, Francisco died instantly, their unnamed 7-month-old infant daughter remarkably survived.
Thousands joined in fossil energy protest marches last week in Chicago, Denver, and other major American cities. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti thanked hundreds that appeared in his city for "supporting the Green New Deal, right here."
"It is time to have our 100% zero emission buildings, our 100% zero emission electricity and our 100% zero emission transportation . . . That is our goal. Nothing less," Garcetti said.
Yet as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff and socialist handler Saikat Chakarabarti who masterminded that Green New Deal told Washington Gov. Jay Inslee’s climate director Sam Rickerts, that "wasn’t originally a climate thing at all."
According to a Washington Post reporter who attended the meeting, Chakarabarti then clarified, "Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing."
Whatever sort of "thing" it is, that "deal" certainly wouldn’t be any bargain. The American Action Forum (americanactionforum.org) has estimated that the proposal will cost $93 trillion in new government spending over 10 years.
Nor would the plan strategy deal from the top of the deck from either climate or energy benefit representations.
First, whereas the world has warmed about 1 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) since before the Industrial Revolution, let’s recognize that this began occurring in fits-and-starts following blessed recovery from the Little Ice Age around 1870.
As for alarm over rising sea levels, NOAA’s last updated 2016 coastal sea level data show no evidence of any accelerated trend over many decades.
They continue to rise at about seven inches per century.
And more frequent and severe extreme weather? Not according to page 235 of the U.N. IPCC’s 2013 Summary report section titled "The Physical Basis."
It specifically states, "There is limited evidence of changes in extremes associated with other climate variables since the mid-20th century."
In fact, U.S. hurricane records dating back to 1851 show that for nearly 12 consecutive years — from Oct. 24, 2005 (after Wilma) until Aug. 25, 2017 (Harvey) — represented the longest period when no moderate or major (Category 3-5) hurricane made landfall in the continental United States.
And incidentally, last year set a record as the first when no "violent" (F4-5) tornado touched down in the United States.
With regard to scary projections, let’s heed salient advice offered in IPCC’s March 2018 report, TR14: "In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible."
Nevertheless, we are somehow expected to base insanely costly and disruptive anti-fossil energy policies entirely on their demonstrably failed model projections.
Consider Germany, for example, which installed a 15-fold increase in wind and solar capacities between 1999 and 2012 — by 2013 the country had more solar than any other nation. Simultaneously, 40 million of their households and industries witnessed an estimated 50 percent increase in electricity costs. German residents pay nearly three times more for electricity than we do in the United States.
Adding that intermittent wind and solar capacity has disrupted electrical power reliability. Up until 2008, Germany’s grid had never been interrupted.
In 2012 there were 1,000 brownouts, followed by more than 2,500 in 2013.
It’s very elementary to understand that replacing any significant share of total U.S. fossil-fueled energy (80%) with intermittent and unreliable wind and solar (slightly more than 2% total combined) is disastrously implausible.
Our children should be educated to know better.
So should we.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA) and the graduate program in space architecture. He is the author of several books, including “The Weaponization of AI and the Internet: How Global Networks of Infotech Overlords are Expanding Their Control Over Our Lives” (2019), "Reinventing Ourselves: How Technology is Rapidly and Radically Transforming Humanity" (2019), "Thinking Whole: Rejecting Half-Witted Left & Right Brain Limitations" (2018), "Reflections on Oceans and Puddles: One Hundred Reasons to be Enthusiastic, Grateful and Hopeful” (2017), "Cosmic Musings: Contemplating Life Beyond Self" (2016), "Scared Witless: Prophets and Profits of Climate Doom" (2015) and “Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power Behind the Global Warming Hoax” (2011). He is currently working on a new book with Buzz Aldrin, "Beyond Footprints and Flagpoles." To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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