Shrinking islands, vanishing polar bears, collapsing coral reefs — the media loves a good climate scare story. There’s just one problem, says Bjorn Lomborg in the New York Post: all of these have turned out to be false. Here’s an excerpt.
At the start of this century, the polar bear was the emblem of climate apocalypse.
Protesters dressed as polar bears, while Al Gore’s hit 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth showed us a sad, animated polar bear floating away to its death.
The Washington Post warned that polar bears faced extinction, and the World Wildlife Fund’s Chief Scientist even claimed some polar bear populations would be unable to reproduce by 2012.
And then in the 2010s, campaigners just stopped talking about polar bears.
Why? Because after years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible for them to ignore a mountain of evidence showing that the global polar bear population has increased substantially from around 12,000 in the 1960s to around 26,000 in the present day. (The main reason? People are hunting a lot less polar bears.)
The same thing has happened with depictions of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.
For decades, campaigners shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures.
After extensive damage from a hurricane in 2009, official Australian estimates of coral cover reached a low in 2012.
The media were flooded with claims of the “Great Reef Catastrophe” and scientists predicted the reef would be decimated by 2022. The Guardian even published an obituary.
The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years, the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1985, with 2024 setting a new record.
The good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the scare stories did.
An often-recurrent climate story has been the alleged drowning of small Pacific islands due to sea level rise. …
This summer, the New York Times finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: almost all atoll islands are increasing in size. In fact, the scientific literature has documented this trend for more than a decade.
While rising sea levels do erode land, additional sand from old coral is washed up on low-lying shores.
Extensive studies have long shown this accretion is stronger than climate-caused erosion, meaning the land area of Tuvalu is increasing.
Lomborg also picks up on President Biden’s recent assertion that “extreme heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States”. In fact, says Lomborg, “while extreme heat annually kills nearly 6,000 people, cold kills 152,000 Americans each year, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold”.
Where’s a media fact checker when you need one?
Worth reading in full.
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I don’t know how Chris keeps going in the face of the msm lie machine and the dishonest scientists on the other side. Well done though I do notice climate scepticism becoming more mainstream especially on the right.
Scepticism in science is essential. Otherwise it isn’t science, it is activism.
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”
Richard P. Feynman
“It does not matter who you are, or how smart you are, or what title you have, or how many of you there are, and certainly not how many papers your side has published, if your prediction is wrong then your hypothesis is wrong. Period.”
Richard P. Feynman
An incredibly smart man, he knew that he didn’t know. This is how scientists should think.
$cientists on the other hand…
nod———-Or “Ah yes, science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact”——Mark Twain.
Scepticism = science; consensus = religion.
One of the main controllers of climate is El Nino and El Nina events. But data regarding these huge weather changing oscillations only goes back to 1989. ——It is worth pointing out to people who have already decided what is true about climate that there is actually nothing unusual about current temperatures or climate. To those people who are always saying things like “Climate Change is real and is happening now” what are you talking about? These kind of statements are about as scientific as a monkey with a test tube.
I’d say that climate change is normal; the climate is not normally stable at all. The real scam is manipulating the language, and perhaps the lack of understanding, so as to promote a campaign.
Remember when you say that “climate change is normal”, that the term “climate change” has come to mean changes allegedly caused by humans. It does not mean changes that occur naturally.
And Malenkevich cycles. The wobbles and orbits of the earth are not stable and affect hownclose we are to the sun.
And sunspot activity. Climate change and global warming are lies by green communists
I still worry about the polar bears.
“When Al Gore was born there were about 5,000 polar bears, today only 25,000 remain.”
Someone forgot to tell them bears they are supposed to be in deep sh.t
“The arctic will be ice free by 2015”
– John Kerry 2009
A true visionary.
It must be catastrophic. There are no penguins left in the Arctic and the polar bears obviously can’t cope with the lack of ice in Antarctica.
I was about to politely correct you and then saw what you did there, faffor
…and the fish population of Mt Everest has been utterly devastated.
I don’t see anything soaring. What I see is an incredibly stable pattern which confirms to me the absolutely staggering and amazing predictability of our weather.
The seasons come and go almost like clockwork. Temperatures move within the narrowest of bands.
How something so vast and complex works so elegantly is really a thing of beauty. Much like the human body or any living organism.
Which is what makes the idea that you can just control the weather by fiddling with CO2 so comical and preposterous.
Thanks beautifully expressed post.
Played for Fools
Great article, as ever. It seems to me that the western world are being played for a bunch of fools on climate change;
China has announced its new climate envoy;
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202401/1305432.shtml
Whilst at the same time China continues to burn coal as if butter would not melt in their mouths!
”There are a total of 3,092 operating coal-fired power plant units in China. As of January 2023, the province of Shandong, which lies to the south of Beijing, houses the greatest number of coal power plants, at over 400 units.3 Jan 2024”
As I say, it seems to me that we are being played for a bunch of fools, while China, Russia etc. plan the demise of the western world.
We are being played for fools? ——-But the western world is complaint with this. To understand why, you need to realise what the politics are all about. Then to realise that the Sustainable Development Politics isn’t really about the climate. The climate is simply the excuse given to the public for the politics.
Western world is compliant. Exactly. Fat, lazy and stupid we have become.
Lucky you realised I meant compliant rather than complaint.
Club of Rome 1972.
China and Russia don’t have to play us for fools we are doing OK just destroying ourselves.
nod——–Then you have to figure out why. Once you do, it will explain why there really isn’t a climate crisis and why a crisis is essential for putting political agenda’s in place and government never want to let a good crisis go to waste.
Excellent article as always, Chris. I wish there was some mechanism within the DS software to give articles ‘likes’ (as on FB) or…stars? (As on Off Guardian.)
There used to be, but what works better for ranking is activity, i.e. comments BTL.
Seconded
There was a large increase but November was rather low so it doesn’t take the level to anything extraordinary. As you can see from this chart, if you look at the whole of 2023 ice extents followed the the 2010-20 average pretty closely.
Tony Heller you are emphatically not; is there no end to the Diversity of your Expertise?
Yeah I saw this story on the BBC