In “Using the Climate Change Scare to Promote Abortion,“ my March 21st America Out Loud article, I described how climate alarmists are promoting abortion to lessen our population to supposedly help stop climate change. I also showed that the abortion industry is now citing climate change concerns to promote their agenda as well.
But both of these arguments utterly fail if pro-life activists demonstrate clearly that there is no climate emergency—not now, nor at any time in the foreseeable future. And that is exactly the case.
To show this, pro-lifers need not delve deeply into the complex science of climate change, such as the findings of Dr. William A. van Wijngaarden of Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Canada, and Dr. William Happer of the Department of Physics, Princeton University, that at current concentrations, increasing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases have a very little effect on temperatures (see their paper “Dependence of Earth’s Thermal Radiation on Five Most Abundant Greenhouse Gases”). That work is both important and fascinating, but for someone not trained in science, it is not easy to decipher.
Instead, pro-lifers should take the approach of The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS), a group of retired and highly experienced engineers and scientists, many of whom took America to the Moon in the Apollo program. Their motto is:
“In God we trust, all others bring data.”
After analyzing the best empirical data available, the TRCS team concluded that there is no climate crisis and increasing carbon dioxide and rising temperatures will be highly beneficial to our civilization and the biosphere. To learn more about TRCS and their work, I direct readers to my articles and podcast about this outstanding team:
- “Steely-Eyed Missile Men” Demolish the Climate Scare, January 25, 2023
- Space Engineers Beat Hundred Million Dollar UN Climate Models… (for FREE), February 2, 2023
- Podcast: Real World Data Demolishes Climate Scare: Space Engineers, February 13, 2023
Over the next couple of weeks, I will demonstrate how pro-lifers can follow TRCS’s lead and use real world data to fight back against the climate change myths threatening their movement.
Let’s start with the rise in so-called “global average temperature*.”
[*Strictly speaking, a “global temperature” does not exist. Temperature, like density, pressure, viscosity or any intrinsic property of a substance, is not something that can be averaged. Global temperature is merely a statistic that may, or may not, be useful in different circumstances. For more on this topic, see “Does a Global Temperature Exist?” by Essex, McKitrick and Andresen in the Journal of Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics.]
As can be seen in the graph below, this average has risen only just over 1º Celsius since 1875. This slight warming has been beneficial as we recovered from the centuries-long Little Ice Age during which cold conditions caused widespread crop failures and other serious hardships across the world.
While discussing temperature findings from Greenland ice cores, Dr. Jørgen Peder Steffensen, Professor of Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth at the University of Copenhagen explained:
“Around 1875, we have the lowest point in the last 10,000 years, and that matches exactly the time when meteorological observations started… I agree completely that we have had global temperature increase in the 20th century. But an increase from what? Probably an increase from the lowest point we’ve had for the last 10,000 years. This means that it would be very hard indeed to prove whether the increase of temperature in the 20th century was man-made or it’s a natural variation. That would be very hard because we made ourselves an extremely poor experiment. We started to observe meteorology at the coldest spot in the last 10,000 years!”
Pro-life activists presenting this information will likely be called “climate change deniers” by activists attempting to discredit them by equating their position with that of Holocaust deniers. They can simply reply that no knowledgeable person doubts that Earth’s climate has been changing since the planet’s formation 4.5 billion years ago. Testifying before the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development on February 10, 2005, Professor Tim Patterson, now Chairman of the Department of Earth Science at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada put it well (watch his whole testimony here):
“Based on the paleoclimatic data I and others have collected, it’s obvious that climate is and always has been variable. In fact, the only constant about climate is change; it changes continually. We certainly have no chance of stopping this natural phenomenon.”
Then pro-lifers can tell their attackers that the changes that we witness today are minimal compared to what has occurred throughout geologic history. Consider, for example, the most recent glacial maximum that ended about 20,000 years ago. Glaciers covered most of North America all the way down to just south of the present-day border between Canada and the U.S. There was about 3.3 km of ice over the land where Montreal now sits. That’s almost 5 and a half times the height of the CN Tower. Apart from a small area in the Yukon where there was little snow and ice cover due to low moisture levels in the atmosphere, practically no life survived in Canada.
Next, Patterson explained, “Ten thousand years ago . . . temperatures rose as much as 6 degrees C in a decade.” This is about 50 times faster than what we have seen over the past century.
Pro-life activists can also cite Dr. Craig Idso, a lead author for Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports. Speaking at a panel held in Katowice, Poland while the UN’s 2018 climate conference (COP24) was being held, Idso said:
“Given what is compiled in those reports and the thousands of peer-reviewed scientific references therein, I can tell you with complete confidence that there is absolutely no observational evidence that provides any compelling support for the contention that there is something unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about Earth’s current warmth.”
Yes, some regions will set new temperature records now and then. For example, the polar darkness period from April to September 2021 set a record for the coldest time near the South Pole (-61ºC according to the U.S. National Snow & Ice Data Center). But Fritz Vahrenholt, CEO of the German Wildlife Foundation, and the former CEO of a wind turbine company, was correct when he said in the 2019 documentary film “Global Warning,”
“… what we could show [in published in peer reviewed journals] is that the medieval warm period from 950 to twelve hundred fifty was as warm as today. The IPCC said, yes, it is only in Northern Europe. So, what we did is we investigated South America, we investigated Africa, Antarctica, Oceania and could show in all continents of the Earth it was as warm as today, 1,000 years ago… And if you go further to the Roman period, you have the same thing every thousand year you have a warm period.”
Pro-lifers will undoubtedly be attacked for denying the impact of climate change on the most vulnerable people in our society. Here is how to answer that charge:
There is no question that climate change has had a huge impact on human affairs. The following plot of temperature versus time for Central Greenland is a good illustration of the natural climate change we have seen over the past four thousand years and the related societal impacts. Note how cold periods coincided with hardships for humanity while, in most cases, warm periods were beneficial. Contrary to the proclamations of global warming activists, every year more people die from the cold than from the heat. A study in the British Medical journal The Lancet found that,
“Cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather, according to an international study analyzing over 74 million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries.”
If one goes back further in geologic times, you have even more evidence that today’s temperatures are normal. Note that in the following plot of temperature and carbon dioxide (CO2) over the past 600 million years, the estimated range in temperatures of Earth is from 12ºC to 22ºC, with the mean of 17ºC. Clearly, we are at the low-end today at 15º C as we are still warming from the last glacial period, which ended over 10,000 years ago.
The modest, beneficial warming that has been experienced across the world since the end of the Little Ice Age, slightly more than 1º Celsius, has essentially stopped, as can be seen in the following satellite-based temperature record. Indeed, the February 2023 “average temperature” was about the same as the 1991 – 2020 average
No informed person would call this temperature record “fast-rising” or a “climate emergency,” as proclaimed by the UN, mainstream media and climate activists.
To be continued next week:
What causes climate change?