How to Change Minds About Our Changing Climate

This is a must read for anyone interested in what is happening to our planet. If we could get any of our leaders to actually read this book, they may better understand the need to take action. The discussions are all well on point and clearly explained.

The book ignores the actual scientific method and is a great example of what the AGW debate (now climate change debate) is all about. Below is a copy of the review I wrote in Amazon.

“But even if we were to pretend for a moment (for Brad’s sake) that there’s uncertainty on the big points (which there’s not), the fact is that we make decisions based on incomplete information all the time.”

Here we go, boys and girls. This sentence tells you what you need to know about this book. The authors claim that there is no uncertainty on the big points even though the models that they created based on the certainty have overestimated the observed effects or the fact that the effects have been POSITIVE and not alarmist.

Let us get back to that ‘certainty’ for a moment. The simple fact is that the authors and the alarmist community cannot tell us what the annual global average temperature (whatever that means) is yet they want us to believe that they can tell us with certainty that a minor gas in the atmosphere is the lever that controls our climate. Step back and think about that for a moment before doing some digging to expose the fact that the emperors have no clothes. Remember the recent claims that we now are at a record temperature of 14.8°C? But in the mid-1990s, James Hansen was telling anyone willing to listen that the average temperature was 15.4°C. How does a decline from 15.4°C to 14.8°C get sold as warming? And if they can’t get something that simple correct, why do we believe that the promoters of global warming are right.

Let us move on and complete the quote found at the beginning of the book and see what else the authors believe

“And the ramifications of not acting in this case could be catastrophic. Are we 100 percent sure it’ll be catastrophic? No. Are you 100 percent sure your house won’t burn to the ground? No. You have home insurance. We probably don’t expect to die young, but we buy life insurance. And the likelihood of climate change wreaking untold havoc is far higher than the likelihood of either of those things happening to you. Consider mitigation of climate change like a global insurance policy, and it’s a pretty sure bet that it’s the best way to avoid the worst effects of our warming planet.”

Note the phrase, ‘COULD BE CATASTROPHIC’? This is just a hedge that covers the authors when time reveals their position to have no social or economic value for society or ordinary individuals trying to navigate the complexity of existence in the real world. We need to stand back and analyze this position. Since when is it catastrophic to have a warmer planet that has a far more productive biosphere? The time of the dinosaurs was certainly much warmer and had a great deal more diversity because of that warmth. A few acres in the Amazon have more species living there than we can find in the 6.4 million square miles of Boreal forests that cover much of Canada and the Eurasia. The warming since the depths of the Little Ice age has brought tremendous benefits to humanity and the biosphere. So why is warming considered catastrophic by those that get paid to spread the alarmist narrative?

The passage also shows that the authors do not understand economic concepts. Of course, we buy insurance. But none of us pays $100 to insure $50 worth of assets, which is what is being pushed by the alarmists. If the protection costs more than the asset being protected it isn’t insurance but redistribution from the people who pay the premiums to those that receive them. Take the Paris Accord. The American target was to cut carbon emissions to 26% below 2005 levels by 2025. Think of the economic damage such a transition would create. But it does not stop there. The Paris Accord required the signatory countries to hike their carbon-cutting goals every five years. Eventually, that would have meant that the US would have to look like North Korea and abandon any hope of a first-world standard of living. While the Americans have to cut back, the Accord allows China and India to keep hiking carbon emissions because they pegged emissions to GDP growth. That means that China and India get to keep building coal plants and not even begin to consider reducing CO2 emissions until after 2030.

I hate to be precise and bring facts to this review but it is important to see where the authors go wrong. Agreements like the Paris Accord would cost the American economy around $2.5 trillion in GDP by 2100 but the effect would only be a reduction of 0.031°C out of a total reduction of 0.17°C. Note the last part. Current taxpayers will shell out trillions in costs to live up to the terms of the agreement. The impact of all of that money would not be measurable by the current state of the instruments being used to measure temperatures and would leave people a great deal poorer. But not the alarmists who are making money by selling this narrative. They avoid discussing practical issues and do not consider the impact of what they are proposing, mostly because they benefit from the costs paid to act even if the outcomes are negative for the rest of us.

Let me go on to something else. I find it ironic that people who want to change the minds of the public by pretending to follow science are ignoring the real world observations and hyping models that have been falsified by those observations. The authors can’t deal with the science effectively so they resort to strawmen such as the claim that skeptics are denying climate change. It is actually the other way around. It is the alarmists who are suggesting that the change is unusual even when the data shows that there is nothing particularly warm about current temperatures.

It is also interesting to see how the alarmists twist knowledge to support a narrative that is not supported by logic or physical laws. For example, the weather is driven by differences in energy. A warmer world would have fewer extreme weather events because most of the alarmist models predict that the polar regions would warm up faster than equatorial regions. Even the authors admit that as we read, “As we’ve mentioned a number of times in this book, the effects of climate change often show up first and/or most strongly in the polar regions,..” Warmer polar regions would lead to fewer strong hurricanes and less damage due to severe weather events. That is a POSITIVE for human beings and the biosphere. Note that the warmer polar regions would mean fewer killing frosts that reduce agricultural yields and lead to the premature deaths of many poor people who are exposed to excess cold. That is also a positive outcome that the authors conveniently ignore.

This book is written to help teachers indoctrinate kids in the public school systems. It is written to give more exposure to people who ignore the actual science but hide behind a veil of respectability and modern mythology. But myths that are not life-affirming tend to die rather quickly and the global warming narrative will soon suffer the same faith. For my fellow Canadians think about a few simple questions. When you retire do you want to live in a place like Memphis or Winnipeg? Would you rather live in Scotland in December or in Spain? Were the much higher average temperatures during the Triassic, harmful to life on this planet or were they beneficial. Your answers will clarify what you really know and think about the subject of global warming?