Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series on climate change and the controversial environmental report recently released by the U.S. government. It is based on an interview on LN Radio with environmental expert Dr. Bonner Cohen.
“Climate change will shrink U.S. economy and kill thousands, government report warns.”
So read the breathless, screaming headlines on CNN - and throughout the establishment media - following the release of a government environmental document, the “fourth climate assessment report.”
Separating fact from fiction on climate change has become increasingly difficult...
Are we approaching the eve of destruction, as environmental activists would have us believe? Is the report exaggerated or imprecise? Is the whole climate change issue, so vital to the left, in fact a hoax, as some conservatives believe?
Separating fact from fiction on climate change has become increasingly difficult in a culture driven by political correctness. On LN Radio, we turned to Dr. Bonner Cohen, senior fellow and environmental expert at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
Tim Donner: Please assess the predictions in this environmental report that climate change over the next several decades will cause the economy to lose hundreds of billions of dollars or, in the worst case scenario, more than 10% of its GDP by the end of the century. To which you say?
Dr. Bonner Cohen: After having read the report, I believe that the people who wrote it have a very limited understanding of the many variables that go into our ever-changing climate. The report, and I think it's important to understand this, is being portrayed in the media as a Trump administration report. It is nothing of the sort.
It is a report mandated by Congress to be updated and released every few years. This report has been in the works for years. It began, actually, under the Obama administration and is almost entirely the product of career officials. We will call these the climate deep state, embedded in federal agencies from NOAA, the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, and many others. These are the people who put the report together. And they did so to produce a document that was an embarrassment to the Trump administration.
Dr. Bonner Cohen
Why did the Trump administration allow this to happen? Well, actually, it's his own fault. During the time that the document was being put together, there weren't enough political appointees in the Trump administration to put a stop to this. About the only thing they got right was releasing the report the day after Thanksgiving.
All that said, the document is exactly what one would expect. It is scare propaganda; it assumes the legitimacy of the argument that man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are artificially and dangerously warming the plant. If we do not take urgent action, and take it now, all sorts of disasters will occur, such as the usual litany, rising sea levels, soaring temperatures, and the like.
The language in this is purposely designed to scare people to death and to provide an excuse for all sorts of groups to sue the government to take action on climate change and to do away with Trump deregulatory actions.
Tim: This talk of climate change is not new. We've heard this for many years. Have the environmental activists, foremost among them Al Gore, who basically brought this issue to the public consciousness with his Inconvenient Truth book and movie, been held accountable for the predictions they made over a decade ago? And how accurate were those predictions?
Dr. Cohen: Those predictions were way off. They weren't close to being accurate. That's why something that used to be called global warming was relabeled climate change. That gave them a little cover. So, just in case we have an unusually cold winter, as we have had, contrary to all their predictions, well, that's climate change. Too much rain, too little rain -- that, we are told, is a reflection of climate change, as are hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, and what have you.
These dire predictions have not come to pass. Under their theory, man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, which we are told are heat-trapping gases, should lead to a rise in temperature in a linear fashion. Well, it has not. In fact, there has been absolutely no rise in temperatures over the last 20 years.
They've adopted a term, climate change, which is actually redundant because climates always change.
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In the final part of this series tomorrow, Dr. Bonner Cohen discusses the many ice ages this planet has experienced, how they tie into the current debate, and what reasonable steps should be taken to mitigate the effects of a changing climate.
