Sounding a New Alarm on Climate Change
Get ready to have your mind blown!
“The world will end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change,” warned Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in January 2019. That was over five years ago, meaning we have less than seven years to enjoy our time on this beautiful planet. That clock is a-tick’n!
Ocasio-Cortez has no background in climate science. Many people, liberals and conservatives alike, tend to have a rather low opinion of her record in Congress. We often hear quips about her being a bartender, but the truth is she is a college graduate. And while her major in international relations and economics does not exactly make her the most qualified climate expert, it at least indicates that she is capable of processing information. Regardless, she has something of an audience that will listen to what she has to say. But, as is the case with a lot of climate alarmists, there is reason to question the substance behind the alarm she is sounding.
Here at Meet Me in the Middle, we want to see hard evidence that the world is going to end. Well, that is actually the last thing we want to see. We really just want to see people be reasonable. Be rational. Be respectful. But we live in times when the most vocal and emphatic tend to draw the spotlight. The mild-mannered climate scientist might know better, but just fails to make the splash needed to get people listening. And the deceitful media does not provide balanced news coverage that encompasses the reasonable, rational, and respectful voices of truth.
So, the alarmists get the audience. The audience hears the piercing sound of the alarm once, then twice, and then — before they even realize it, they start to believe the world is in crisis. Then that becomes the audience’s political agenda. Before they realize it, they are now stalwart supporters of the climate change agenda. It has become fashionable to be outraged by climate change. [Side note: Do you know what else is fashionable? The fashion industry, which produces a staggering 8 to 10% of global emissions, per the UN.]
Well, guess what we are going to do today? We are sounding our own alarm! We are going to be rational thought alarmists. It is not very clear how this is going to work, so bear with us. The goal here is to absolutely lose our jellybeans over things that are demonstrably true. Some readers might think we here at Meet Me in the Middle are a bunch of looney conspiracy theorists… heh, well, buckle up!! And here we goooooooooo!
Human Activity Affects the Global Climate!
You are probably thinking, “Wait just one cotton-pick’n minute! I thought you were going to be all ‘climate-denier’!” Nope. In fact, Mother Nature is our homegirl. We go way back! We love her and want to do right by her. We wish more people would actually want to do right by her. To that end, we wish people would investigate and learn for themselves from the plentitude of real information — factual information — that is available to everyone for free. Furthermore, we wish people would wake up and pay attention to the fact that we all support companies that harm her.
A few years ago, clever economic analysts predicted that the release of iPhone 12 was going to be delayed a month based on observations of air quality in four Chinese cities where iPhone manufacturing is known to take place. There was a signature spike in poor air quality, which occurred a month later than previous patterns identified during prior iPhone releases. That signal was spot on, and the iPhone 12 was indeed released a month later than anticipated. That is a stunning anecdote of how Apple products result in massive pollution increases! Successful businesses famously take advantage of cheap labor, and it does not get much cheaper than China (not to mention much more lax environmental regulations). Human activity does indeed play a role in pollution. And if you own anything that contains wood, cloth, glass, plastics, wires, microchips, or, well, pretty much anything else, guess what?! You are part of the human activity that contributes to emissions, global pollution, and of course to global warming.
But, listen… we are not judging. After all, this here article is being typed on a genuine Apple computer machine! We here at Meet Me in the Middle are hypocrites too!
Ok, so our rational thought alarmism is not off to a great start. Cut us some slack. This is an experiment! Let us try again. Here we gooooooooo!
Humanity’s Vulnerability to Extreme Weather Events is Declining!!
That’s right! You are probably freaking out now that you know you are LESS vulnerable to extreme weather than any human in history!
[Boom! Totally nailed that one!]
We have ever-improving forecasting capabilities, warning systems, evacuation routes, flood control, and robustness of building structures. As a result, the average deaths per year over the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and 2020s has “generally been flat or declining, not rising,” according to Ted Nordhaus (a rational climate researcher who recently wrote a four-part series of valuable rational-climate-thought articles, which we strongly recommend — part one is here).
Nordhaus acknowledges that there have been tragedies in recent decades that were costly in terms of human lives. But he makes the case that, when they have occurred, the lives lost have been due to failure of human institutions and/or infrastructure. Among other examples, he points to how Hurricane Katrina exploited improperly built or maintained levees that failed and cost over a thousand lives. Tragedies like this are human-caused and, as Nordhaus discusses, “Climate change was not the decisive factor.”
Climate alarmists like to make individuals feel guilty about not doing enough to affect climate change. But it is the institutions, like the local and state governments in New Orleans and Louisiana in the case of Katrina, whose failures are truly costly. Nordhaus comments on how the media’s climate change narrative influences the public:
“The capture of the media by a catastrophist climate narrative has directed public attention away from straightforward measures that policymakers can take to reduce our vulnerability to the climate’s extremes. It has allowed politicians, in the wake of climate-related disasters, to divert attention from their own failures by pointing the finger at fossil fuel companies. It has amplified the claims of an increasingly unhinged climate movement that has consistently polarized public sentiment on the issue and undermined practical efforts to reduce emissions and transition the world toward cleaner energy. And it has left many people gripped by a terror about the future that solves nothing and isn’t justified to begin with.”
Forecasts of Hurricane Katrina offered government officials ample time to be proactive. Leadership of government appointees lacked the experience to handle the ensuing crisis. A year earlier, a simulation of a hurricane of similar strength to Katrina provided insight into the threat, but the officials failed to capitalize on the lessons learned. A communications breakdown “paralyzed command and control and made situational awareness murky at best,” according to a House report. There were costly failures to prepare and deliver adequate supplies to places of need. These and other examples of human failures abound, but can they be blamed on climate change? Of course not. Yet the climate alarmists manage to do just that, and so do the government officials who wish to deflect blame from their own missteps. Much of the naïve public continues to buy into it.
Regardless of the prevailing narrative, it is actually true that we are less vulnerable than ever before. It is true that our actual vulnerability comes in the form of our leadership. And that actually is kind of scary since our leaders are failing to prioritize Americans and are making such a mess of things these days.
You are probably becoming a bit unhinged with the knowledge that humankind is less vulnerable to natural disasters than ever before. Well, we are just ‘warming up,’ so prepare yourself for the next shocking revelation!
Climate Change is Disconnected from the Cost of Weather Disasters!!
The end-of-the-world alarmists like to point out that the cost of weather-related disasters is higher than ever before. Their narrative neglects the inconvenient truth that you will be hard pressed to find anything that does not have a higher cost than ever before (perhaps not disconnected from the decisions of our past three presidential administrations to solve major problems by printing money). In Part II, Nordhaus points out that the big driver for increased costs of damage due to weather events has everything to do with the economy and population growth. Meanwhile, weather extremes play a negligible role in the increased costs.
Nordhaus takes a look at Miami-Dade County, which he explains has grown from half a million residents in 1950 to 2.8 million today. More people equate to more exposure, right? Nordhaus notes that the per capita income data has risen from $4K in 1969 (the earliest available data) to $68K today. More wealth equates to more exposure as well. When you combine these two factors, the economic impact of weather gets washed away like a grain of sand in a voracious hurricane. Exposing more people with more property of greater value is what drives the high price tag of weather events. Not climate change. It seems obvious, does it not? But the efforts to deceive us are so widespread that this intuitive concept gets overwhelmed by the alarmism.
How can we disconnect the cost of weather events from climate change? Nordhaus helps with that. He makes the point that, “if climate change is behind the increasing cost of natural disasters, then you would expect the cost of disasters related to weather would be rising faster than that of disasters not related to weather.” He goes on to point out that nobody “suggests that climate change is resulting in more severe earthquakes or more frequent volcanic eruptions.” He takes it a step further with the statistic that the “cost of disasters unrelated to weather increased 182 percent between 1990 and 2017, more than twice as fast as for weather-related disasters.” So, despite increased exposure of population and property value, the world is more hardened and less vulnerable to weather events than to other disasters.
Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., another rational climate scientist, recently discredited the government’s dataset that is often cited to make a connection between climate change and the cost of disasters that are supposedly caused or worsened by climate change. Dr. Pielke details how this dataset “fails to meet the agency’s standards for information quality and scientific integrity. He explains that this data is not “suitable… for the detection and attribution of trends in extreme weather.” Yet, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration uses this dataset to claim that “Climate change is supercharging many of these extremes that can lead to billion-dollar disasters.” Dr. Pielke explains how this dataset came to be and points out examples of how it is misused — one example is President Biden’s 2023 claim that “climate change related extreme weather events still pose a rapidly intensifying threat… This year set a record for the number of climate disasters that cost the United States over $1 billion. The United States now experiences a billion-dollar disaster approximately every three weeks on average, compared to once every four months during the 1980s.” By now, you surely see that this is climate alarmism at its weakest.
The argument that climate change is increasing the cost of weather disasters is weak, if not nonexistent. The data supporting such an argument is subject to widespread misuse. The media and government entities and officials that report such unsubstantiated claims are either dishonest, misinformed, unqualified to report on anything scientific, or all of the above.
Ok, so you now understand that we are less vulnerable and that the rising costs of natural disasters are not due to more intense weather. With that, it is time to really hammer the alarm button…
There Are Almost NO Signs of Climate Change Effects
That is a big one! Pretty alarming, is it not? We should all be shocked that there are almost no signs that climate change is affecting any of the following:
River floods, coastal floods, flash floods, or surface floods caused by heavy rainfall
Heavy precipitation
Landslides
Drought (hydrological, meteorological, ecological, and agricultural)
Severe wind storms, including tropical cyclones
Heavy snowfall, ice storms, and hail
Snow avalanche
Marine heat waves
What is the basis for making such an alarming claim? It comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Dr. Pielke provides a breakdown of, in his words, “what research actually says on the relationship of extreme weather and climate change.” Dr. Pielke explains the concept of “emergence,” which the IPCC defines as “when a change in climate (the ‘signal’) becomes larger than the amplitude of natural or internal variations (defining the ‘noise’).” This concept is important in the context of the IPCC report, because the Panel frames their significant findings using this metric. Those findings include the following:
Increases in heat extremes have “emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions.”
The scientific data provides “low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation” and flooding due to climate change.
Data provides “low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.”
While trends associated with wind speeds were observed, they have not emerged from the “noise” of natural variability and the Panel has low confidence that such trends can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
A relationship between wind extremes and climate change cannot be established, including for severe storms, tropical cyclones, or sand and dust storms.
So, the actual science says that there are no climate change signals emerging for any extreme weather aside from increases in heat extremes — which Nordhaus points out is only a couple of degrees on the hottest days of the year, rather than extreme heat year-round.
The IPCC report also discusses the most extreme warming scenario based on the most extreme emissions scenario with assumptions of high population growth, slow technological progress, and no policy-driven mitigation whatsoever — this scenario is known as RCP8.5 (note that rational climate change researchers recognize and acknowledge that RCP8.5 is implausible, but deceitful climate science uses this scenario to over-inflate the crisis that they intend to depict). Even under the extreme RCP8.5 scenario, the IPCC report does not predict the emergence of any climate change signal by the year 2100, except for heavy precipitation and associated flooding (with only medium confidence).
Let’s take a moment to catch our breath here. You doing ok? It is a lot to realize that you are less vulnerable to extreme weather than any human being that has ever walked the earth. It can be overwhelming to achieve the clarity to understand that rising natural disaster costs has nothing to do with more extreme weather. And now you find out that the world’s preeminent organization for the compilation and comprehensive analysis of the world’s climate research has concluded in an open and transparent review that there are nearly zero signs of climate change effects on major measurable natural phenomena?? You have been through a lot today! Wowzers! That’s a lot of rational thought!
But we have a bit of a rhythm going with our rational thought alarmism, so we are going to keep it coming with a real mind-bender…
Climate Change Can Be Beneficial
The IPCC discusses impacts and risks in the context of what they refer to as “climatic impact-drivers,” which they define as “a climate condition that directly affects elements of society or ecosystems.” The IPCC report explains that changes in climatic impact-drivers “can lead to positive, negative, or inconsequential outcomes.” For illustration, the IPCC report provides the example of a regional climate change: seasonal snow cover. An increase in seasonal snow cover can be hazardous for planting crops, beneficial for ski resorts, and inconsequential for coastal aquaculture. A decrease can be negative for snow-camouflaged species while benefitting certain predators. This is a very regional or localized example, but it highlights the fact that what is negative for one species can be positive for another.
This is a very glass-half-full take on things, but this conversation brings us to a key point: humankind is resilient and adaptive. Currently, humans live in the climatic extremes that Mother Earth has to offer. We use the resources that are available to us and make the most of them, adapting them to deploy amazing and beneficial technologies. But here is the thing we really need to concern ourselves with if we want to maximize our adaptability: promotion of solutions that enable us to best respond to changing conditions.
We have previously discussed in our Spotlight article about the agenda-driven nature of climate science that scientific rigor and honest reporting of scientific studies takes a backseat to the the climate alarmism agenda. In that Spotlight, we included a quote from Dr. Patrick Brown, who said of his publication on the impact of climate warming on wildfire growth risks, “I sacrificed contributing the most valuable knowledge for society in order for the research to be compatible with the confirmation bias of the editors and reviewers of the journals I was targeting.” What he sacrificed in that example was that reforms “could completely negate the detrimental impacts of climate change on wildfires.”
That point needs to be emphasized. A climate scientist concluded that there is a path to COMPLETELY NEGATE THE DETRIMENTAL IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE on wildfires but could not publish that information in one of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world. That is messed up! That is a form of censorship. And we need to be awake enough to understand that this is happening!
If we want to be able to maximize the benefits of ever-changing climate conditions, both regionally and globally, we must demand that the “most valuable knowledge” be promoted, even if it does not jive with the prevailing narrative that the only solution is mitigating emissions. How do we get there? That is a tough one, since the forces that control the information that the public has access to is intent on promoting that prevailing narrative. The most direct path surely involves using our votes to put rational, non-climate-alarmists into public office and to support news sources and platforms that are proponents of free speech. Climate alarmists do not promote (or do not understand) the whole story. Individuals, platforms, and agencies that suppress free speech also prohibit access to the whole story.
Okay. We have bombarded you with some pretty alarming information in this article. Now, we will tie a bow on this subject with a little rational thinking…
Shortfalls in Scientific Integrity
Like the period of U.S. history marred by McCarthyism, it seems unlikely that historians will be kind to the propagandists of the current era of apocalyptic climate alarmism. Similar to the practices of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950’s, the climate change alarmists offer up a consistent flow of indiscriminate claims of the problems to which climate change may or may not be contributing. Like the days of McCarthyism, today’s climate alarmists denounce the voices of reason and effectively censor the most valuable scientific contributions of modern science. Why is that? Because we are dealing with shortfalls in scientific integrity.
It has become routine at this point for news outlets to blame just about everything on climate change. If the wind blows, if rain falls, or if the sun shines, it is sure to be blamed on human-related climate change. In the ultimate conflation of issues that continue to keep the general public polarized, some researchers are even blaming the spread of COVID-19 on climate change — or vice versa — it is hard to say, as the science behind the claims seems pretty nonsensical.
Obviously, this rational thought alarmism kind of clashes with AOC’s “the world is going to end” comment. But a clash with the narrative is exactly what you are going to get when you are educated, informed, and rational. So, let us sound one more alarm before we bring things on home…
The world is NOT going to end!
But why even worry about this? After all, anything we do to mitigate the potential causes of climate change is a net good, right? Even if it is based on false reports? Well, it is not a net good if it takes resources away from more pressing issues, is it? The U.S. government alone spends tens of billions annually on “climate change” initiatives. And there is shockingly little to show for it. Of course we want to see better conservation, less pollution, and reforms that make us more resilient to the effects of climate change. But imagine the benefits of investing a portion of those billions into soil-based carbon sequestration! Or one of the many other challenges that our nation desperately needs to address (such as protecting our children, battling the opioid epidemic, reforming our education system, to name a few). So, instead of allowing climate change misinformation to drive policy that wastes our tax dollars on problems that have been overstated, we should be addressing problems that are actually urgent and harming Americans.
Bringing It On Home
Climate is considered to be the long-term pattern of weather in a region. Climates have always changed in a very natural way. Local and global climate systems are inherently variable. While humanity can certainly affect climates, just as any other living organism can, data suggests that the degree to which humanity influences the global climate continues to be grossly exaggerated.
Watching the observations of climate researchers get screened by scientific journal reviewers, then misunderstood by the media, and then misreported to the nonscientific layperson is a lot like watching a game of telephone among a group of silly, giggling kids. By the time it reaches the general public, the scientific observations have typically been passed through so many filters — political, cultural, and propagandist in nature — that the actual science has been manipulated into something completely misrepresentative of reality. But it is still passed off as “science.” Those with evidence contrary to the prevailing narrative are labeled “deniers” of some sort. These trends have made it more difficult for people to meet in the middle and, sadly, it is because so many have been misinformed in a very deliberate way.
The fracturing of modern society permeates every facet of our lives. And it all has real impacts on the individuals of the world. From the food we eat and the air we breathe to the cars we drive and the institutions we embrace, the messages we have consumed for decades is that catastrophe awaits us. That catastrophe, we are to believe, is well-earned. Humankind created this catastrophe, we are told.
There is a political expedience to playing the climate change card. Politicians join the activist journalists in playing the climate change card to take advantage of every tragedy or circumstance that they can exploit. It is the exploitation of human suffering, and it neglects the failures of human leadership that turned a dangerous event into a disaster.
It is too late for us, we are told. The damage is irreversible, we are told. The world is going to end!! The media and the climate extremists are hammering us with that apocalyptic message. That message continues to terrify our youth, contributing to ever-increasing anxieties. That message funnels our tax dollars to wasteful projects. That message keeps us from learning. That message promotes policies that force people to transition to costly energy alternatives that are not actually beneficial to the environment. That message is a lie.
Hopefully, you are not too alarmed by the rationale thought we offered you in this article. The truth is far less alarming than we were led to believe. So, next time you fill up your gas tank, do so without the guilt that the apocalyptic climate change alarmists would like you to permanently experience. You are not as evil as they would have you believe! Continue to do your part, but do so with the comfort that alarmists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez do not have a leg to stand on. The world is not going to end!