NJ in the Cross-Hairs of Climate Alarmists

Like most of the Left, the New Jersey Star-Ledger jumped on the Obama Administration's recently released National Climate Assessment (NCA). The editors focused on its projected effects in New Jersey. In Climate disruption and Christie inaction are a hazardous combination, the editors highlighted some of the doom and gloom catastrophes that the report says awaits us. 

Of course, they also lambasted NJ Republican Governor Chris Christie:

    Since the climate assessment, there has been no response from the governor. Actually, he hasn't said much of anything about climate change since his national political ambitions became clear.
    Doug O’Malley, the director of Environment New Jersey, interprets the deafening silence this way: “It’s blatantly political – he’s thinking nationally, and not thinking about what needs to happen in his own state,” he said. “But this is going to be hard to perpetuate, given this staggering report.”

I left these comments:

If you want "blatantly political", start with the "National Climate Assessment" report. Government funded studies are by definition political, as are all government funded projects.

The real threat comes from environmentalists. Their stated goal is to hamper productive work, commerce, and trade that actual individual human beings must engage in to support and advance their lives and enable them to adjust to and protect themselves from the inevitable weather extremes that have always happened and always will. How will making clean, reliable, affordable industrial-scale energy more scarce and more expensive be good for man?

It won't. It will make it harder. But environmentalists and their minions don't care, because for all of their concern for "pristine" nature, the one part of nature that they find expendable is man and man's requirements; as witness, the nat-gas pipeline through the Pinelands that they stopped, and the I287 oil pipeline between Albany and Linden that they are fighting to stop. In stopping such projects, they are stopping human beings from productively working and trading in support of their lives.

The benefits of fossil fuels are enormous and everywhere apparent. Did the NCA recognize those benefits? Did the NCA weight the human costs of its anti-fossil fuel policy recommendations? Nuclear and hydro-electric plants have no emissions. Does the NCA call for a crash program to build more of those? Not to my knowledge, because a reliable energy supply, not emissions, is environmentalists ultimate target.

CO2 emissions are a natural by-product of economic progress and human well-being, just as CO2 emissions are a natural by-product of all animal life. To curb CO2 emissions in pursuit of the chimera of better weather is insane because it is inimical to economic progress, human well-being. The NCA is full of hysterical gloom and doom predictions—Who's going to believe such an absurd weather forecast that predicts a quadrupling of annual 90 degree days, from 20 to 80, 35 years from now? But, even if those predictions are even close to accurate, the last thing we should do is forcibly curb fossil fuel energy production, which we rely on for 80% of our power.

Christie is right not to say "much of anything about climate change"; the sooner the power-seeking climate hysterics are trivialized into insignificance—where they belong—the better.

I have not read the NCA report. But from what I've read about it—including from report sympathizers—the report basically tells us that weather extremes have always happened, and always will. Not much has changed yet. 

But as to the future? WATCH OUT! The report contains predictions, based on computer models, of drastic changes. These doomsday changes include rising sea levels, which have also been occurring for thousands of years. There is plenty of evidence for this, including a recent discovery that once again confirms that the first humans migrated to the Americas about 17,000 years ago via a Bering Strait land bridge connecting Alaska to Asia—a land bridge that has long since disappeared under rising sea levels. 

Through most of history, humans were at the mercy of weather and climate-related extremes. Then came the industrial revolution—and a vast improvement in man's ability to cope with and adjust to these extremes. What is the environmentalists' solution to a predicted increase in weather severity and rising sea levels? Make it harder to deal with the extremes—a regression toward primitive human subservience to nature's harshness. It's insane.

Related Reading:

King Obama's Carbon Emission Mandate


Climate Depot on Obama's Climate Report 2014

Climate Change Alarmists Ignore Life-Giving Fossil fuel Contributions