Updated Antidote to Climate Hysteria

This post links to a Power Point presentation I’ll be giving tomorrow to CEI’s fall 2013 interns. It is similar to a presentation I gave to our summer interns in August but includes a few more slides and references.

My thesis, then and now, is that climate change is not a “crisis” or “planetary emergency.” Here’s a quick overview:

• “Worse than we thought” is a political mantra pretending to be a scientific finding. The state of the climate is better than they told us.
• An unanticipated 17-year warming pause, the growing divergence between model predictions and observed warming, and a pile of recent studies indicate that “consensus” science overestimates the key variable: climate sensitivity. Lower sensitivity means less warming and smaller impacts.
• The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative – dire warnings about ocean circulation shutdown triggering a new ice age, ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels up to 20 feet, malaria epidemics coming to a neighborhood near you, mass extinctions from runaway warming – are science fiction, not science.
• The only card left in the alarmist deck is extreme weather. However, there has been no long term trend in the strength or frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, U.S. floods and drought.
• Heat waves have become more frequent but, paradoxically, the more common hot weather becomes, the more heat-related mortality declines: People adapt!
• There is no long-term trend in “normalized” extreme weather damages (losses adjusted for increases in wealth, population, and the consumer price index).
• Globally, mortality rates and aggregate mortality related to extreme weather have declined by 98% and 93%, respectively, since the 1920s.
• The state of the world keeps improving as CO2 emissions increase.

To view the slide show, click on Climate Change: Be Not Afraid!