


âȘ Later this month, private and public sector âleadersâ will meet in Glasgow, Scotland. Nearly all will fly to the conference, many in private jets. And what will they talk about? Saving the climate from greenhouse gas emissions, of course…
The United Nations Conference of Parties on ââclimate change, the 26th version of this long-running clown show, starts Oct. 31 and will run through Nov. 12. Media coverage will be both intense and obsequious; attendees, especially the ever-smug John Kerry, âspecialâ climate envoy to the president, will speak in somber tones due to the seriousness at hand; warnings of impending doom will be issued; and absolutely nothing will be accomplished.
This is because thereâs nothing to accomplish.
Despite the incessant screeching demands that we must save our planet by severely cutting our greenhouse gas emissions, itâs obvious that manâs impact on the climate is not creating an existential crisis. Every harsh weather event is blamed by activists, politicians, reporters, editors, and celebrities as evidence that anthropogenic global warming is going to destroy Earth.
Of course these are often the same people who tell us we cannot take a single weather event, such as a cold snap or an unusually heavy snow, and extrapolate from that there is no man-made warming. They want manâs greenhouse gas emissions to be an existential crisis.
But they canât have it no matter how much they want it.
âAn existential threat is one that threatens the very existence of mankind. Something that is simply a challenge or an inconvenience is not an existential threat,â explains University of Washington atmospheric sciences professor Cliff Mass. âAn existential threat must have the potential to undermine the very viability of human civilization.â
Mass believes âglobal warming is a serious problemâ that will have âsubstantial impacts,â but he says âin no way does it seriously threaten our species or human civilization.â
âWith reasonable mitigation and adaptation, mankind will continue to move forward â reducing poverty, living healthier lives, and stabilizing our population.â
For those who havenât noticed, humanity has been enormously successful at adapting to, and in many cases, overcoming an environment that is hostile to its existence.
Thereâs every reason to believe that the warming that Mass believes to be a âserious problemâ is not driven by manâs greenhouse gas emissions but is merely part of the natural cycle on a planet where the climate is always changing, with human activity playing only a minimal role. This isnât a denial of science â itâs a view held by climate scientists such as Harvard-educated Richard Lindzen, the retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology astrophysicist and U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report contributor, as well as Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama-Huntsville.
Of course this will never be mentioned in Glasgow. Instead, attendees will clap each other on the back, tell the world that thereâs no hope without them, and celebrate progress in their glorious fight against a nonexistent threat in front of a fawning media. It will be a âsophisticated, vaccinated crowdâ we should all be in awe of.
It will also be a gathering of hypocrites. Attendees of the 2008 climate meeting in Copenhagen needed 140 private jets and 1,200 limousines to get the âjobâ done. Travel to and from the 2015 climate talks in Paris emitted about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide. Nearly 1,500 private jets were flown to Davos, Switzerland, in 2019 for the World Economic Forum, where climate was one of the chief topics.
Thatâs a lot of fossil fuel burned in the name of cutting fossil fuel emissions.
Every day we have less confidence in world elected leaders than we did the day before. Thereâs no greater evidence of the eliteâs capacity to make poor decisions, nor a more compelling indication of the depth of their ignorance, than their panicked response to the coronavirus pandemic. It is the greatest public policy mistake of all time.
Now many of these same officials will descend on Scotland to discuss policies that will not affect them, but will cause hardships for the poorest while hooking an anchor to the world economy. Itâs possible that calling them useless is actually an understatement. âȘ













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