Mark Landsbaum: Don't panic about global warming

2013-02-08 15:04:13

"The sky is falling!"from the folktale, "Chicken Little."

Contrary to the hysterical rant, the sky wasn't falling. But at least Chicken Little made an honest mistake. If only global warming alarmists were as sincerely mistaken. Too often it seems what's happening is something other than an honest mistake.

President Barack Obama proclaimed last month: "Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms."

But there is no "overwhelming judgment of science" connecting raging fires, crippling droughts and more powerful storms with manmade climate change. Did the president make an honest mistake?

A recent study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society examined the claim that disaster-related financial losses increased because of manmade climate change. Researcher Laurens M. Bouwer of the Institute for Environmental Studies in the Netherlands, examined 22 previous studies regarding the alleged connection.

"All 22 studies show that increases in exposure and wealth are by far the most important drivers for growing disaster losses," Bouwer said. In short, when people build more stuff in harm's way, it's more likely to be harmed.

"Most studies," Bouwer said, "show that disaster losses have remained constant after normalization, including losses from earthquakes."

"No study identified changes in extreme weather due to anthropogenic climate change as the main driver for any remaining trend," he flatly concluded. Someone should tell the president.

Scholars Chip Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels at the libertarian Cato Institute have produced an exhaustive analysis of the government's slipshod report, "Climate Change Impacts in the United States," which the EPA used to claim that carbon dioxide endangers civilization. That claim was the basis for the 2009 U.S. Supreme Court decision clearing the way for the government to regulate greenhouse gases, effectively giving carte blanche to regulate nearly everything. The Cato analysis is based on peer-reviewed scientific literature, peer-screened professional presentations and publicly available climate data.

Knappenberger and Michaels, working for Cato's Center for the Study of Public Science, found "important science that is missing from" the government's climate change document. Readers can decide whether the government accidentally left out the facts at But, remember, the government document was designed to justify regulation.

Among Cato's findings is that the period of warming before and after greenhouse gas emissions began rising dramatically in the past century "are statistically indistinguishable in magnitude." Since 1895, the "Impacts of observed climate change have little national significance."

"The slow nature of climate progression results in de facto adaptation, as can be seen with sea level changes on the East Coast," they wrote. In other words, whatever changes may occur happen so slowly that adapting to them is easy – and doesn't cost a dime in carbon taxes or renewable energy subsidies.

Likewise, a large body of evidence demonstrates crop and livestock production will adapt to climate change. Moreover, the Cato study found increasing carbon dioxide, which the government is determined to reduce in the atmosphere, is likely increasing crop yields and will continue to do so.

But the president says the government must do something.

Try this experiment. Watch a thermometer until it goes up or down one-tenth degree. Feel the difference? No, you didn't. That's what's to gain if the entire U.S. gives up all its CO2-emitting vehicles.

Headlines recently blared that 2012 was the hottest year on record for the continental United States. But as David Kreutzer, Ph.D., at the Heritage Foundation's The Foundry blog wrote, "While 2012 was the warmest year for the Lower 48 in the U.S. (not the globe, not North America, and not even the entire United States), it was only the ninth-warmest year globally in the past 34 years (the period for which accurate satellite data have been collected). The warmest year in that time period was 1998."

In an article NASA published in 1999, warmists' chief advocate, James Hansen, showed that 1998 was only the fifth-warmest year on record, after 1934, 1921, 1931 and 1953, says In fact, 1998 was 0.6 degrees C cooler than 1934.

One of the greatest embarrassments for warming alarmists is that the average global temperature even by their measure has leveled off for 15 or 16 years. The U.K.'s Met Office, Britain's keeper of global warming records, quietly conceded last month that not only has there been no statistically significant warming for 15 years, but that the office has revised its predictions for the next decade to anticipate a dramatically lower temperature increase than previously forecast. If true, that's two decades of no warming.

And the president insists we do something about this?

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