A recent Associated Press article posted by Martha Bellisle demonstrates how climate change propaganda can distort the facts to present a completely alternate “reality”.
Colorado’s late December 2021 wildfires that destroyed homes and neighborhoods have become the latest fodder for the Left’s quasi-religious climate agenda. In Climate change, new construction mean more ruinous fires, Bellisle “reports”
The winter grassland fire that blew up along Colorado’s Front Range was rare, experts say, but similar events will be more common in the coming years as climate change warms the planet — sucking the moisture out of plants — suburbs grow in fire-prone areas and people continue to spark destructive blazes.
I put “reports” in scare quotes because this article is really an opinion piece masquerading as news—or at the least a combination of news and opinion. First, note that the Colorado event was “rare”. Not unprecedented—none of the weather events suddenly blamed on climate change these days are unprecedented. This is true of the weather conditions that set up the fires. They were not unique. They’ve happened in the past, and will happen in the future. Yet climate change is blamed, implicitly and with no evidence whatsoever, for this fire event. This is a now-common refrain--to mindlessly label every weather event climate change. Note also that human activity—development in wildfire-prone areas and careless people—were the real reasons for the destructiveness of these fires. But the obligatory climate change has to be shoehorned in.
Next we see that “similar events will be more common in the coming years as climate change warms the planet.” “Will”, not may. That’s opinion, not fact. And how much more common? To date, despite decades of dire, hysterical predictions, extreme weather has not become more extreme to any significant extent, if at all. Yet . . .
“These fires are different from most of the fires we’ve been seeing across the West, in the sense that they’re grass fires and they’re occurring in the winter,” said Jonathan Overpeck, a professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. “Ultimately, things are going to continue to get worse unless we stop climate change.”
The assertion that these fires “are going to continue to get worse” is, as I stated, pure speculation. The assertion that “we [can] stop climate change” is pure fantasy. Climate change is a regular, ongoing feature of Earth’s atmosphere, whether humans are a contributing cause or not. If “stop climate change” means stop human influence on the climate, what Overpeck is really advocating is to stop human progress and flourishing, and make man vastly more vulnerable to climate dangers, as people were before the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—a genocidal “solution.” Where are the Associated Press fact checkers?
As Former Obama Administration science adviser Steven E. Koonan, IPCC independent Expert Reviewer and clean energy advocate Michael Shellenberger, and many other knowledgeable experts have shown, the observed facts simply do not support the view that wildfires, and weather extremes in general, are getting worse or more numerous globally. Or if they are, the change is marginal and in any event impossible to pin on a changing climate with any degree of certainty.
Note also that alternative solutions to the chimera of stopping climate change, such as what Reason science correspondent Ronald Bailey discusses in depth, gets no coverage, despite the fact that the policies being advanced by political climate hacks to stop climate change would cause an unimaginable human catastrophe, which will be documented in energy expert Alex Epstein’s next book, that would dwarf that which would occur from any increase in extreme weather.
Bellisle and the Associated Press should be ashamed of themselves for advancing such sloppy journalism, blatant misinformation, and fake news.
Related Reading:
The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels— by Alex Epstein
The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the 21st Century—by Ronald Bailey
Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us -- by Michael Shellenberger
Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters – by Steven E. Koonin
The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters & Climate Change—by Roger Pielke Jr.
Fossil Future: Why Global Human Flourishing Requires More Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas--Not Less—by Alex Epstein
False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet—by Bjorn Lomborg
4 comments:
All of this is true, once again. People need to keep being told because there are always many who've never heard, read or thought about it who can be positively influenced. But, I have one question. We use to call quotation marks quotation marks. Why does everybody, today, now call them scare quotes?
Well, I go by the definition that scare quotes are "quotation marks used around a word or phrase when they are not required, thereby eliciting attention or doubts."
However, I don't know what is so scary about scare quotes.
I see the difference between using quotation marks when required and using them when not required but using them anyway to elicit attention or doubt. I just always called them quotation marks in either case, and I never heard otherwise from anywhere or from anybody until the last few years or so. Then, all of a sudden, scare quotes, along with many others, like gaslighting, which I can't figure out. This stuff just pops up out of nowhere and it's like it's all old stuff that anybody automatically knows the meaning of. So much of such stuff popping up today I automatically (and I mean automatically, without regret) associate with leftism or wokeness, another such term which I BELIEVE means leftist. I try to ignore this stuff and talk and write in the older ways I understand. I don't mind being seen as a throwback to a more rational and human past. I like it. Good enough for those who don't like it.
I agree with your sentiment completely. However, sometimes a new term, even if Leftist in origin, can be useful. 2 new terms I think are useful, meaning identifying something in reality, are triggering and virtue signally. I use scare quotes because it distinguishes a particular use of quotation marks. And sometimes new terms backfire on the Left, such as Wokeness, which has come to be a derogatory term which stands for, among other bad things, "reverse"—which I refer to as revenge—racism.
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