First word

PRIMARILY because the global climate debate has become wholly a matter of belief (whether you believe or doubt the gospel of climate change and imminent climate catastrophe), the church of climate change has promoted its theology by falsifying and suppressing facts about the climate in the world we live in.

This is reminiscent of the tactics of the old religions, which incorporated into their teachings discredited representations of the universe such as belief in a flat earth.

It requires religious fervor to believe that the climate debate is closed and settled in favor of their theology.

It's time to describe as 'obscurantism' the tactic of climate change fanatics to proclaim to the world that the climate debate is closed and then, in the same breath, suppress facts and opinions that suggest the contrary.

In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers applied the term obscurantist to any enemy of intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of knowledge. In the 19th century, in distinguishing the varieties of obscurantism found in metaphysics and theology and modern philosophical skepticism, Friedrich Nietzsche said: 'The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to blacken our picture of the world and darken our idea of existence.'

Climate alarmism, it is now clear, has been doing its utmost to blacken our picture of the world and darken our idea of existence.

I want to discuss here today the articles of several journalists and publications that report on how the public is failing to secure and understand vital facts about the climate and climate change.

Six facts about climate change

First is an article by David Simon in the Real Clear Politics website on July 12, 2021, entitled: 'Six facts the left doesn't want you to know about global warming.'

I quote below key passages from Simon's most informative article:

'President Biden implores us that climate change is an 'existential threat' to humanity. Special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry preaches to us that '[t]he climate crisis as a whole is a national security threat because it is disruptive to the daily lives of human beings all over the world.' Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez warns us that in 2030, 'the world is going to end ... if we don't address climate change.'

'Hold on to your wallet. The Left's global warming Chicken Littles insist that the sky is falling but don't want you to know six key facts.

'First, in his new book Unsettled, the Obama administration Department of Energy chief scientist Steven Koonin shows that the models relied upon by the Left to predict future global warming are so poor that they cannot even reproduce the temperature changes in the 20th century.

'If these models cannot reproduce past temperatures already known when the models were developed, how can they possibly reliably predict temperatures decades into the future?

'Second, Koonin's book also documents that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) own analysis indicates that any negative economic impact that global warming eventually may have will be so modest that it warrants no action.

'Third, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the IPPC do not claim that a link has been established between global warming and natural disasters.

'In 2020, the NOAA stated: 'It is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity, and 'changes in tropical cyclone activity ... are not yet detectable.'

'The UN IPPC, the Wall Street Journal reported, 'says that it too lacks evidence to show that warming is making storms and flooding worse.'

'Fourth, as the earth's temperature has risen, natural disasters have become far less deadly.

'Since 1920, the planet's temperature has risen by 1.29 degrees Celsius and world population has quadrupled from less than two billion to over seven and half billion - yet EM-DAT, The International Disaster Database, reports that the number of people killed by natural disasters has declined by over 80 percent, from almost 55,000 per year to less than 10,000 per year.

'Fifth, some of the world's best scientists believe that global warming will be beneficial rather than harmful.

'In 2017, a group of eminent scientists - such as Richard Lindzen of MIT, William Happer of Princeton, and Judith Curry of Georgia Tech – wrote that 'observations [over the last] 25 years ... show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign.'

'Carbon dioxide, they noted, 'is not a pollutant but a major benefit to agriculture and other life on Earth.'

'Sixth, global warming saves lives. A study published in 2015 by the British medical journal The Lancet found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat.

'This study by 22 scientists from around the world - which examined over 74 million deaths in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1985-2012, 'the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature-health associations' - reported that cold caused 7.29 percent of these deaths, while heat caused only 0.42 percent.

'We must not let the Left bully us into draconian action with unfounded claims of a looming climate catastrophe. Know the facts. Global warming is not a problem.'

Two more facts the public should know

To Mr. Simon's six facts, I want to add two more facts from other recent articles in US journals.

An editorial in the Issues and Insights website titled 'Another Global Warming Fact Alarmists Want Buried,' published on July 15, 2021, says:

'The entire climate change movement has been shady from its beginnings. Data have been hidden, truth has been sacrificed to politics, and hypocrisy and personal interests among its 'leaders' have produced a giant credibility deficit. The more we learn, the worse the alarmists look.

'Take, for instance, a new report that shows greenhouse gas emissions are not an American or Western problem. They are primarily a Chinese problem. A study from Sun Yat-sen University in China found that more than half of the world's urban greenhouse gas emissions are generated in only 25 big cities, and 23 of them are located in China.

'In other words, if the entire developed world cut its greenhouse gas emissions as activists, politicians, journalists and celebrities have demanded, nothing would change regarding the climate.'

In an article in this month's issue of The Atlantic magazine, 'The green new deal, strictly speaking, does not exist,' the author Robinson Meyer wrote:

'Since its ascension in 2018, the Green New Deal has defined the terms of the global climate debate. Perhaps no other climate policy in history has been as successful. Democrats and Republicans alike have been judged by how closely they seem to hew to it. Abroad, the European Union has dubbed its 1-trillion-euro attempt to decarbonize its economy 'the European Green Deal.' And on the histrionic fields of social media, progressives ask how society can afford flooded subways, horrific droughts, deadly heat waves, and uncontrollable wildfires but not pay for a Green New Deal.

'With so much ballyhoo, it's become easy to miss the central, implacable fact about the Green New Deal: It does not exist.

'Nobody has written it down. Three years after the idea of a Green New Deal broke into the mainstream, you can't find an authoritative and detailed list of Green New Deal policies anywhere. There is no handbook, no draft legislation, no official report that articulates what belongs in a Green New Deal and what doesn't.

'This is more than just an academic point. It means that tens of thousands of Americans want very badly to see Congress adopt a political program that definitionally cannot pass, because there is no 'it' for lawmakers to vote on. It means that at a moment of historic possibility, American climate politics still has one leg stuck in the spectral and symbolic, when it should be knee-deep in the real.'

All this shows that Philippine immersion today in talk about climate change and green energy is misplaced. Proponents, local as well as foreign agents, have a lot of work to do to persuade our people that it is sensible to enlist in the climate change movement. We should all support and take part in a Senate public inquiry into the substance or the lie of a climate crisis.

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