“Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”
John Adams
“Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but they are not entitled to their own facts.
Daniel P. Moynihan, four term US Senator
I couldn’t decide between the two above wise quotes so I put them both in. I thought it was appropriate because facts seem to be in short supply on the AGW, climate change side.
Wildfires, or forest fires in the older parlance, are widely touted as dramatically increasing as a result of climate change. Of course, the bad ones are extensively covered by the news media and it’s easy for people to conclude that they are happening with increasing frequency and magnitude.
In Canada where this idea is widely touted the facts show otherwise. According to the Canadian National Fire Database “The data shows a decline in the number of fires and the size of the areas destroyed”. They further say, “Changing temperature and precipitation extremes can be expected to lead to a change in the likelihood of events such as wildfires, droughts and floods.” In other words…….the weather! Last summer was hot and dry and we had a bunch of wildfires. More were predicted for this summer but Ma Nature decided to move the jet stream around a touch and we’ve had a wet summer so far.
I wrote a blog post a couple of years ago about the “expert” who predicted we’d have another drought year after the previous dry summer. He warned we’d need to start conserving water immediately. He made a full front page in the Vancouver newspaper. Wrong. We had a very wet summer and no shortage of water. The newspaper was uninterested in my letter reminding them of the erroneous and frightening prediction.
So too, are the breathless reports on annual heat waves. The US Environmental Protection Agency report on heat waves in the US going back to 1895 shows no trend during that period. A big spike happened in the 1920s and especially 1930s (think Dust Bowl) but reverted to the trend line thereafter. Meanwhile, the global CO2 level rose steeply since the 1950s.
Back a few years ago it was widely reported that climate change caused a rapid rise in the number of hurricane landfalls, tornados and wildfires. University of Colorado scientist, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. decided to go back the record books and check the facts. He published a paper and then a book (Climate Fix) reporting that there was no increase in hurricane landfalls, tornados or wild fires in the US over the historical average.
For this heresy he was excommunicated from the polite climate fraternity of scientists, widely vilified and threatened. Confronted with the facts evoked anger. Fortunately for him, burning at the stake is no longer legal.
Facts don’t seem to trouble anyone and the screams about the end on Earth as we know it is imminent unless we change our way of life. In Canada the politicians all are signed up to the idea that we need to eliminate all CO2 by 2050. In the US it’s even more ambitious. AOC and the Democrats are spouting the idea of getting rid of all CO2 by 2030. None of these folks has spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how much alternative sources of energy we would need for this wonderful all electric society.
Vancouver energy consultant, Aldyen Donnelly, has given it a shot. To replace all the fossil fuel with no carbon energy would require building 2.5 hydro power dams the size of the $13 billion Site C dam in BC every year for the foreseeable future! Using solar and wind is equally daunting. It takes one million solar panels to produce one gigawatt of electricity.
To achieve the global goal by 2050 could be done by nuclear. Sure. You would only need to build one 1.5 gigawatt nuclear plant every day for the next 30 years. Achieving this goal by any method borders on insanity.
First coal was the enemy, at least in North America. Of course, China and India blew off that idea with a wave. As a substitute coal fired power plants were converted to natural gas and we have plenty of that. But, pipelines are also evil in the minds of the environmentalists so they obstruct a method of getting the gas from the wells to the power plants. In the recent heat wave in New York City this lack of pipeline capacity resulted in power outages as cityfolk cranked up the A/C.
This shortage of pipeline capacity will only get worse as more and more we convert to electricity with insufficient ways to make the stuff. The radicals can’t have it both ways.
There is no correlation between the increase in atmospheric CO2 and warming, or anything else really. So does it really make sense to destroy our economy and way of life to get rid of the stuff? Somebody needs to get the facts to the voters and especially the politicians.
Note: A lot of the info for this article comes from “Green World War III” by Terrance Corcoran in the Financial Post on June 21, 2019. Also and article by Ross McKitrick on the same page.