Tag Archive for: earth

Tom Harris: CO2 is the Stuff of Life

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Environmental scientist, Tom Harris gave a talk at a secret location in Ottawa in November to examine the scientism of ‘Global Warming’ and climate hysteria in general.

Tom also examined the connection between increasingly authoritarian policies being implemented and climate pseudo-science as the basis for these new restrictions on our liberties. Tom went one better.

He looked at the historical amount of CO2 in the Earth’s atmosphere, and what the minimum requirement for life on Earth to exist actually is.

If there is a climate crisis, it is the opposite to what we are being sold.

WATCH: Tom Harris Exposes Covert Threat: Unraveling Hidden Agendas Behind Climate Action

ABOUT TOM HARRIS

Tom Harris is the Executive Director of the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC), a group of climate change skeptics that has received funding from the Heartland Institute. Before starting work with ICSC, Harris was the Executive Director of the now-defunct Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP).

Prior to working with the NRSP, Harris was a Former Director of Operations at the Canadian PR and lobbying firm called the High Park Group (HPG). Previously, Harris was an Associate with APCO Worldwide, a group known for creating The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC) which worked to advance tobacco industry interests.

According to Harris’s archived profile at APCO Worldwide, “Specifically, he has worked with oil and gas, coal, nuclear, environmental and aerospace clients for whom he has conducted effective media and public relations campaigns.” His profile also highlights how he has “worked with private companies and trade associations to successfully position these entities and their interests with media and before various government committees and regulatory bodies.”

The Heartland Institute describes Harris as “perhaps the most frequently cited and interviewed critic of exaggeration and alarmism in the global warming debate, appearing thousands of times on online news forums and being regularly published in newspapers in Canada and the U.S. and occasionally in Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., and other countries.”

RELATED ARTICLE: Study determines the astronomical true cost of electric vehicle ownership

EDITORS NOTE: This Vlad Tepes Blog column with video posted by is republished with permission. ©All rights reserved.

VIDEO: Princeton Professor debunks climate change propaganda

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John Casey, author and former NASA rocket scientist, has taught me three facts about the climate:

  1. The climate changes.
  2. The changes are cyclical.
  3. There is nothing mankind can do to change these natural cycles.

As John notes the only thing that mankind can do is prepare for these changes using good science and the best climate prediction tools to warn us of the coming changes.

The New American (TNA) interviewed Princeton University Professor William Happer on the notion that CO2 is a pollutant and is the cause of climate change, formally known as global warming. TNA reports:

Physics Professor William Happer discredits the negative effects of CO2 on the planet and whether or not climate change is man-made. He also goes into detail of why the United Nation’s models are incorrect despite their overwhelming confidence that significant warming is taking place due to human activity.

Erick Erickson in a column titled The Real Reason Leftwing Groups Are Freaked Out by Trump’s EPA Pick reports:

Leftwing groups are freaking out about Scott Pruitt, Oklahoma’s Attorney General and Donald Trump’s nominee for the EPA. It is safe to say that the collective meltdown over Pruitt is greater than over any other Trump pick. You probably have no idea why and it has nothing to do with climate change.

Superficially, progressives are saying that Pruitt is a climate change denier and has no business managing the agency he sued so often. But that’s just cover.

The real reason has everything to do with money.

With the blessing of the Department of Justice, the EPA has been going after major corporations and telling those corporations that they can pay a massive fine to the federal government or pay a lesser amount to various environmentalist groups.

Read more…

Its always about the money. Radical environmentalists are being funded by the EPA. The EPA is using its power to regulate and partnering with the DOJ to harm every business in America.

Well there’s a new sheriff in town and this government theft is going to stop.

RELATED ARTICLES:

Washington Post Admits Science isn’t Settled on Climate Change of Warm Arctic, Cold Continents

The Stupidity of Mayors Fighting Climate Change

How Many People Can Planet Earth Sustain? by Robert P. Murphy

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Asked whether or not the growing world population will be a major problem, 59% of Americans agreed it will strain the planet’s natural resources, while 82% of U.S.-based members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said the same. Just 17% of AAAS scientists and 38% of Americans said population growth won’t be a problem because we will find a way to stretch natural resources.
— Pew Research Center

“If humanity is to have a long-term future,” writes James Dyke at the Conversation, “we must address all these challenges [of population growth] at the same time as reducing our impacts on the planetary processes that ultimately provide not just the food we eat, but water we drink and air we breathe. This is a challenge far greater than those that so exercised Malthus 200 years ago.”

Thomas Malthus was a pioneer in political economy who wrote a famous 1798 essay on the dangers of population growth. Nowadays, environmentalists concerned with “sustainable growth” typically invoke Malthusian concerns as they recommend government interventions.

Free-market thinkers tend to reject such “solutions” as unnecessary, but beyond the technical policy debate, there is also a strand in the free-market community that embraces population growth with optimism.

The crux of Malthus’s original essay was that unchecked populations grow exponentially, whereas food production grows — at best — linearly. The following passage sums up the bleak Malthusian view of life:

The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

The Malthusian mindset explains Paul Ehrlich’s runaway bestseller The Population Bomb and the popularity of the “zero population growth” (ZPG) movement in the 1960s. Ehrlich said, “The mother of the year should be a sterilized woman with two adopted children.” (Advocates of ZPG over the years have differed on whether their goal could be achieved purely through voluntary sterilization and restraint versus government controls.)

How does a free-market economist respond to modern-day Malthusianism?

We should first make the obvious point that people in the private sector are just as capable of extrapolating population figures as government officials. Indeed, as I explained in “Are Markets Myopic?,” market prices — particularly in futures markets — give private owners the proper incentives to balance current consumption against future uses, even for nonrenewable resources. It is, in fact, democratically elected government officials who are myopic, since their control over such resources is fleeting.

To illustrate the shortcoming of a naïve natural scientific perspective on these issues, consider an anecdote from my high school years. I remember that my biology textbook asked us to consider a petri dish with a population of bacteria that would double every day. By stipulation, the bacteria would completely fill the dish — and thus hit the ceiling of its “carrying capacity” — on the 30th day. The textbook then delivered the stunning observation that on the day before this crisis, the dish would only be half full. The textbook’s point, of course, was to warn that trends in biology were not linear, and that crises could develop rapidly out of apparent tranquility and abundance.

If my classmates and I learned this principle in high school biology, then presumably at least some traders in the Chicago agricultural commodities markets have thought about it, too. If Earth’s population will grow more rapidly than food production over the next decade, then the spot prices of wheat, soybeans, and beef will eventually skyrocket as the crunch sets in. If the crisis of population growth is “obvious” to academics the world over, then this growth would be factored into market prices and food prices would already be high in anticipation of the future disaster.

Although there are sophisticated arguments involving the “negative externalities” of climate change, generally speaking, the possible dangers of excessive population growth would manifest themselves in the form of higher prices for raising children. Couples would voluntarily reduce their (biological) family size as real estate prices, tuition, health care, and food prices rose faster than wages to reflect the impending crunch. There is nothing for government officials to do in this area except to get out of the way and let market prices do their job, as opposed to subsidizing population growth through poorly designed welfare systems, “free” government schooling, and similar programs. People in the market make horrible forecasting decisions all the time, but government policies typically reinforce those flaws in human nature rather than counteract them.

As with any serious thinker, Malthus’s real work was imbued with nuance. Rather than making him a hero of progressive interventionists, one could hold up Malthus as a pioneer in understanding the importance of market institutions in encouraging responsible decision making when it comes to family size. However, if we focus on the narrow empirical prediction that exponential population growth must outstrip food production, then Malthus was simply wrong, or at least he has been so far. The “green revolution” is the shining example in the more general history of human ingenuity overcoming obstacles, especially in the context of relatively free markets. Julian Simon famously won a bet with Ehrlich predicting that the prices of key commodities — which he let Ehrlich and his colleagues choose — would fall during the 1980s.

In his own work, Simon stressed human creativity and adaptation as the “ultimate resource.” When typical Malthusians look at humanity, they see billions of bellies that must be filled. Instead, Simon saw billions of brains that could produce a new strain of crop, discover a cure for cancer, or develop a new technique for locating oil deposits.

One of Simon’s most compelling arguments is to point out that human labor is the one resource that has consistently become relatively more scarce over the centuries. Specifically, the amount of labor time that the typical worker needs to spend in order to earn the wages for buying other resources has dropped dramatically. (Robert Bradley provides some compelling graphics on the topic.) If the Malthusians had been right, then labor would have become relatively abundant and superfluous, with commodity and energy prices rising far more than wage rates.

As the population grows, two competing forces affect living standards. On the one hand, higher population allows for a greater division of labor, as well as more inventions that can be easily scaled. (The work of J.K. Rowling and Steve Jobs would not have been nearly as valuable on a tropical island with 100 people.) On the other hand, there are finite limits on certain resources — such as standing room on Earth, for the foreseeable future — and thus at some point further population growth drives down average wages.

Nonetheless, the market contains the proper incentives to allow individuals to make informed choices about procreation. Furthermore, experience to date has definitely come down on the side of the optimists. So far, free societies have proven “the more, the merrier” to be true. Wherever population growth appears to fall into a Malthusian trap, we find excessive statism, not free markets and private property rights.

Robert P. Murphy
Robert P. Murphy

Robert P. Murphy is author of Choice: Cooperation, Enterprise, and Human Action (Independent Institute, 2015).

Leaving the Church of Environmentalism

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In March 2009 while the Environmental Protection Agency was rushing to fulfill a presidential campaign pledge to document that carbon dioxide (CO2) and five other greenhouse gases endangered public health and the environment, a longtime employee, Alan Carlin, put out a 93-page report challenging the science being cited and the drift of the agency from its initial role to one captured by fanatical activists and alarmists, treating environmentalism more as a religion than based in science.

At the time Carlin was a 72-year-old analyst and economist who, as The New York Times put it, “had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.” His EPA career would span 38 years.

Cover - Environmentalism Gone MadThe website for his new book, “Environmentalism Gone Mad” says, “Dr. Alan Carlin is an economist and physical scientist with degrees from Caltech and MIT and publications in both economics and climate/energy, who became actively involved in the Sierra Club in the 1960s as an activist and Chapter Chairman. This led to a career as a manager and senior analyst at the Environmental Protection Agency.”

As he says in the preface “The purpose of this book is to explain why I changed from my lifelong support of the environmental movement to extreme skepticism concern their current primary objective of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide.”

“Although I and the many other climate skeptics are now referred to as ‘deniers’ by the climate alarmists, that does not change the science—and there is no valid scientific basis for the alarmists’ catastrophic climate predictions—or justify their fantastically expensive and useless ‘solution.’”

Carlin went from being a dedicated environmentalist, based on its initial philosophy of conservation, to an observer of the movement that was taken over and distorted to advocate falsehoods about global warming and a transition from fossil-fuels to “clean energy” meaning wind, solar and bio-fuels. As an economist he understood how absurd it was to suggest rejecting fossil-fuels, the key element of modern industry and society.

“The climate alarmists,” says Carlin, “have now been making their apocalyptic predictions for almost thirty years and it is now possible to compare their predictions with actual physical observations.” Suffice to say all the predictions of a significantly higher temperature—the warming—have been wrong.

In fact, the Earth has been in a natural cooling cycle since 1998 and shows no indication of warming

Predictions about the North and South Poles melting, a major rise in ocean levels, increased hurricanes and other climate events have been wrong along with countless other climate-related apocalyptic predictions.

Having observed how the EPA has functioned for more than three decades, Carlin warns that its current “environmental policy has been hijacked by radicals intent on imposing their ideology by government fiat on the rest of us whether we like it or not…If environmental policy is based on government fiat or ‘green’ policy prescriptions the results have been and are very likely to continue to be disastrous.”

At 625 pages, Carlin’s book takes the reader from his early days as a Sierra Club activist and chapter leader to being an EPA outcast, denounced for telling the truth about the false claims of global warming, climate change, and what is now being called extreme weather.

As an economist, Carlin is particularly upset that “the Obama Administration’s climate/energy policy is wasting very large sums on non-solutions to minor or non-problems.” The book has come along as President Obama has been flogging “climate change” as the greatest threat to the nation and the world.

“It has been long recognized that weather is chaotic,” says Carlin. While we operate within the four seasons, the weather that occurs can only be predicted in the most general terms. Suggesting that humans actually have any effect on the weather is absurd.

That is why the predictions made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and all the others based on computer models are, by definition, worthless. Computer models cannot predict anything about the vast chaotic global climate system. Even today, meteorologists are mystified by the actions of clouds which can form and disappear in minutes.

It’s useful to keep in mind that climate is measured in centuries, while the weather is reported as what is occurring today and forecast, at best, for no more than a week. Weather records are maintained for purposes of comparison and within the larger context of determining the Earth’s climate cycles. Like those in the past, the present cooling cycle is based on a comparable one of the Sun that is producing lower levels of radiation. You don’t need a Ph.D. in meteorology to understand this.

Carlin does not hesitate to excoriate the blather put forth by the alarmists; particularly their claims that the weather is affected in any significant fashion by human activity and development in particular. “There is simply no evidence thus far that the normal activities of man have or will result in catastrophic outcomes for either man or nature.”

The actions the alarmists call for do nothing to enhance and benefit our lives. They drive up the cost of energy and food. They ignore how dependent modern life is on the use of fossil fuels.

“Despite all the lavish funding by liberal foundations and the federal government on their global warming doctrine-inspired programs, the radical environmental movement has long since gone so far beyond rationality that it is counter-productive in achieving its own ends.”

So long as it remains heavily funded and backed by the federal government, we must, like Carlin, speak out against environmental extremism. We must elect new people to govern in a more realistic, science-based fashion. We must urge our current legislators to rein in the rogue Environmental Protection Agency.

© Alan Caruba, 2015

EDITORS NOTE: Earlier this month, the Media Research Center released a report exposing the media’s cover-up of Hollywood’s hypocrisy revolving around one of the Left’s favorite pet causes: climate change. If you haven’t seen this report yet, you can download your free copy here. The featured image is by Kate Bunker.

Some Useful FACTS About Global Warming and Climate Change

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Thanks to Sunday’s Climate March in New York and Tuesday’s Climate Summit at the United Nations, Americans and others will have been deluged with the lies that have been told to sustain this greatest of all hoaxes.

Here are the known facts. Use them to protect yourself against the Green assault the truth:

  • Both the Earth and the Sun pass through natural cycles. The Sun is currently in a cycle of lower radiation as signaled by fewer sunspots representing magnetic storms.
  • There is currently no global warming. The Earth has been in a cooling cycle for 19 years. No child who has passed through K-12 classes in school has experienced a single day of “global warming.”
  • Not one computer model that predicted increased warming has been accurate.
  • Carbon dioxide, (CO2) blamed for global warming, is not a “pollutant” despite a Supreme Court decision stating this. Our exhaled breath contains about 4% of CO2.
  • How can carbon dioxide be called a “pollutant” when it is directly responsible for the growth of all vegetation on the planet? Without CO2 there would not be a single blade of grass or a redwood tree. Or the animal life that depends on vegetation; wheat and rice, for example, as food.
  • There is zero evidence that carbon dioxide generated by human activities is causing catastrophic climate change. Climate is measured in centuries or shorter periods of many decades in order to determine its cycles. The weather is what is occurring where you reside and it changes every day.
  • At 78% nitrogen is the most abundant gas in the Earth’s atmosphere. It is an essential building block of amino acids present in all proteins. It is a very stable, unreactive gas. Oxygen is the second most abundant gas-of-life in the atmosphere at 21%. Water vapor is the third most abundant gas-of-life in the atmosphere; it varies up to 5%, It reduces incoming solar radiation by day and reduces surface cooling at night. Carbon dioxide is the least abundant gas in the atmosphere at 0.04%.
  • The assertion that 97% of scientists believe that climate change is man-made and an urgent problem is a fiction. In May Joseph Bast, president of The Heartland Institute, cited the Zimmerman/Doran survey in which, out of 3,146 respondents, only 79 listed climate science as an area of expertise. Hardly 97%. “Surveys of meteorologists repeatedly find a majority oppose the alleged consensus,” noted Bast.
  • In February, Patrick Moore, a Canadian ecologist, a co-founder of Greenpeace, a militant environmental group which he left in 1986, told members of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee “There is no scientific proof that human emissions of carbon dioxide are the dominant cause of the minor warming of the Earth’s atmosphere over the past 100 years.”
  • Not only is the Earth not warming, but Heartland Institute analyst, Peter Ferrara, notes that “If you look at the record of global temperature data, you will find that the late 20th Century period of global warming actually lasted about 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. Before that, the globe was dominated by about 30 years of global cooling, giving rise in the 1970s to media discussions of the return of the Little Ice Age (circa 1450 to 1850), or worse.”
  • The cooling of the Earth has led to a dramatic increase in both Arctic and Antarctic ice, up 50% since 2012.
  • One result of the false claims about carbon dioxide has been the Obama administration’s policies such as the refusal to permit the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline to import oil from Canada to U.S. refineries. The Environmental Protection Agency’s absurd restrictions on CO2 emissions have forced the closure of many coal-fired plants that are needed to provide low cost electrical energy. The administration has long wanted to impose a “carbon tax” on all energy use in America, a punishing and needless expense.
  • The Obama administration’s climate policies are entirely political in nature. It has announced that the EPA’s process of setting new rules affecting power plants will be delayed until after the November 4 midterm elections. It is extending the public comment period until December 1. The growing discontent over similar climate and environmental policies was evident when leaders of the European Union announced it was moving away from green policies that had driven up the cost of electricity across the continent.

In a world threatened by the rise of radical Islamism, by the outbreak of diseases like Ebola, and other actual problems to be addressed, the notion that thousands would march in the belief that they and the entire rest of the Earth’s population have any effect on the climate is appalling.

What is perhaps most sad and most reprehensible are the host of world leaders who continue to maintain the lie of global warming or the misrepresentation of climate change to impose a tax on an essential element of the Earth’s atmosphere.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

Common Core: The Bullying of Parents and Public School Children

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“A lie told often enough becomes the truth,” said Vladimir Lenin who led the revolution that imposed Communism on Russia.

When he wrote, Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler said “whoever has the youth has the future.” In his vision for the Nazi Party, education would be the key that ensured that he had ‘the youth’ of Germany fully indoctrinated.

All dictators and authoritarian regimes know that what is taught in their schools offers the greatest opportunity to maintain control over their societies.

That is what has been occurring since the introduction of the Common Core standards that the Obama regime has imposed on our national education system and the good news is that protests against it from concerned parents and others are beginning to increase and gain momentum.

Teachers will tell you that “one size fits all” does not apply in the classroom and never has. Children learn at a different pace with some doing so rapidly while others need extra help and attention. Learning that is entirely dependent on ceaseless testing puts stress on every child and that is the most common complaint about Common Core.

Education in America has been in decline since the 1960s when the teachers unions gained control over the process, putting themselves between the local boards of education and parents. Would it surprise anyone to learn that the Department of Education was established by President Jimmy Carter who signed it into law in 1979? It began operation on May 4, 1980. You will find no reference, no mention of education in the U.S. Constitution and it should not be a function of the federal government.

In a recent commentary by Joy Pullmann in The Daily Caller, she said, “The latest scheme is the field testing of Common Core assessments. This spring more than four million kids will be required to spend hours on tests that have little connection to what they learned in class this year and will provide their teachers and schools no information about what the kids know.”

“Parents who object to this scheme,” said Pullman, “face bullying and harassment from public officials. From New York to Denver to California, some schools are responding by forcing kids who opt out to sit at their desks and do nothing during the several-hour tests. Normal people call that a ‘time out’ and it is a punishment.”

Wyoming has become the first State to block a new set of national science standards that address climate change. In Michigan last year a group of protesters stopped the State from adopting the science standards.

Here are some excerpts of what the science standards teach as “The Essential Principles of Climate Science.”

  • “The impacts of climate change may affect the security of nations. Reduced availability of water, food, and land can lead to competition and conflict among humans, potentially resulting in large groups of climate refugees.”
  • “Humans may be able to mitigate climate change or lessens its severity by reducing greenhouse gas concentrations through processes that move carbon out of the atmosphere or reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”
  • “The most immediate strategy is conservation of oil, gas, and coal, which we rely on as fuels for most of our transportation, heating, cooling, agriculture, and electricity. Short-term strategies involve switching from carbon-intensive to renewable energy sources, which also requires building new infrastructure for alternative energy sources.”

From “A Framework for K-12 Science Education” children are to be taught that “If Earth’s global mean temperature continues to rise, the lives of humans and other organisms will be affected in many different ways.” Only the Earth’s mean temperature is not rising! The planet is in a natural cooling cycle that is now seventeen years old, meaning that none of the students in today’s schools have ever experienced a single day of “global warming.”

By the end of grade 8, the Framework teaches that “Human activities have significantly altered the biosphere, sometimes damaging or destroying natural habitats and causing the extinction of many other species.” This, too, is untrue. The U.S. Endangered Species Act, despite listing thousands of species, has not officially “saved” more than a handful at best and this assertion is questionable.

By the end of grade 12, students are expected to believe that “Changes in the atmosphere due to human activity have increased carbon dioxide concentrations and thus affect climate.” While it is true that there has been an increase in the amount of carbon dioxide this is a good thing because it is an essential factor in the increase of all vegetation that includes food crops and healthier forests. Moreover, this increase does not play any role in the Earth’s climate.

The central theme of these “science standards” is to teach that we should be reducing our use of fossil fuels, the primary energy sources our nation and the world requires. What these standards do in reality is repeat and reinforce federal government laws and regulations to justify its CO2 emissions regulations based on the current method of computing the Social Cost of Carbon, but these “costs” are pure fiction.

None of the computer models that have predicted global warming over the past four decades have been accurate. None are capable of representing the state of the Earth’s vastly complex climate.

The sooner Common Core is removed from the nation’s education system, the better.

Editor’s Note: To learn more or follow the debate on Common Core, visit The Heartland Institute’s “Education Weekly” newsletter that provides data via Common Core Watch.

© Alan Caruba, 2014

RELATED STORY: Common Core’s Validation: A Weak Foundation for a Crooked House

Earth ‘Serially Doomed’: UN Issues New 15 Year Climate Tipping Point – But UN Issued Tipping Points in 1982 & 1989!

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According to the Boston Globe, the United Nations has issued a new climate “tipping point” by which the world must act to avoid dangerous global warming.

The Boston Globe noted on April 16, 2014: “The world now has a rough deadline for action on climate change. Nations need to take aggressive action in the next 15 years to cut carbon emissions, in order to forestall the worst effects of global warming, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”

Once again, the world is being warned of an ecological or climate “tipping point” by the UN.

In 1982, the UN issued a two decade tipping point. UN official Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the UN Environment Program (UNEP), warned on May 11, 1982, the “world faces an ecological disaster as final as nuclear war within a couple of decades unless governments act now.” According to Tolba in 1982, lack of action would bring “by the turn of the century, an environmental catastrophe which will witness devastation as complete, as irreversible as any nuclear holocaust.”

For a larger view click on the image.

As early as 1989, the UN was already trying to sell their “tipping point” rhetoric on the public. See: U.N. Warning of 10-Year ‘Climate Tipping Point’ Began in 1989 – Excerpt: According to July 5, 1989, article in the Miami Herald, the then-director of the New York office of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), Noel Brown, warned of a “10-year window of opportunity to solve” global warming. According to the 1989 article, “A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000. Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” (LINK) & (LINK)

It’s all so confusing. In 2007, UN IPCC chief Pachauri declared 2012 as the climate deadline to act or it would be “too late.” See: Celebrate! UN IPCC Chairman Pachauri: It’s Too Late to Fight Climate Change! – Pachauri in 2007: ‘If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment’

Not to be outdone by the UN, Former Irish President Mary Robinson weighed in this week, issuing a more generous 20 year tipping point. “Former president says we have 20 years to save the world from climate change effects…Robinson calls for climate agreement by 2015.” Robinson noted that global leaders have “at most two decades to save the world”.

Not to be left out, NASA got in the climate tipping point act in 2009. See: NASA’s James Hansen Declared Obama Only First Term to Save The Planet! — ‘On Jan. 17, 2009 Hansen declared Obama only ‘has four years to save Earth’

For a larger view click on the image.

Watch Now: Morano rips NASA’s James Hansen: ‘Hansen said we only have 4 years left to save the planet in Jan.2009, We passed another Mayan calendar deadline’

But in 2012, the UN gave Obama and planet Earth another four year reprieve. See: Tipping points extended again: UN Foundation Pres. Warmist Tim Wirth: 2012 is Obama’s ‘last window of opportunity’ to get it right on climate change

Former Vice President Al Gore also created a 10 year climate tipping point in 2006: See: Climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer Mocks Gore for issuing 10-year tipping point in 2006: Al Gore’s 10-year climate warning – Only 2 years left & still no global warming – Spencer: ‘Gore told us in January 2006 that we had only 10 years left to solve the global warming problem’ – ‘In the grand tradition of prophets of doom, his prognostication is not shaping up too well…still no statistically significant warming’

Then, Michael Mann weighed in with his 2036 Mayan calendar type deadline. See: 2036 is the new 2012?! UN Scientist Michael Mann starts his own Mayan Calendar deadline: ‘Global Warming Will Cross a Dangerous Threshold in 2036′

Other global warming activists chose 2047 as the key date. See: Global warming activist scientists may not be the first to proclaim a doomsday year of 2047 as the end of time! — 2047 is the new 2012 — but global warming activists were beaten to Armageddon! – A Climate Depot analysis has uncovered that 2047 has long been seen as a successor to 2012 as an apocalyptic date.

Finding no date agreement, 20 governments chose 2030 as the scary deadline: See: Skeptics Repent! We are all doomed! Report: More than 100 million people will die by 2030 if world fails to act on climate — Reuters: ‘More than 100 million people will die and global economic growth will be cut by 3.2% of GDP by 2030 if the world fails to tackle climate change, a report commissioned by 20 governments said on Wednesday. As global avg. temps rise due to ghg emissions, the effects on planet, such as melting ice caps, extreme weather, drought and rising sea levels, will threaten populations and livelihoods, said the report conducted by humanitarian organisation DARA’

The tipping point rhetoric seems to have exploded after 2002. See: Tipping Points In Env. Rhetoric: An Unscientific Survey of Nexis: After June 2002, news media’s use of tipping point in the context of global warming and climate change exploded’ — ‘Between June 2002 and June 2005 – CC: 262; GW: 303. Between June 2005 and June 2008 – CC: more than 3,000; GW: more than 3,000* Between June 2008 and June 2011 – CC: more than 3,000; GW: 2903 Between June 2011 and June 2012 – CC: 1,348; GW; 637 Of course, the problem with tipping points is that they can never be proven wrong; only right in retrospect. And that, of course, makes citing them a wonderful rhetorical device for doomsayers’

UNEP Warns of New ‘Tipping Points’ Being Reached — ’20-30 years into future…far enough away that it can be forgotten when date approaches & Armageddon hasn’t yet arrived on schedule’

Perhaps the best explanation of tipping points comes from UK scientist Philip Stott.

See: UK Scientist Philip Stott ridiculed “tipping point” claims in 2007. “In essence, the Earth has been given a 10-year survival warning regularly for the last fifty or so years. We have been serially doomed. […] Our post-modern period of climate change angst can probably be traced back to the late-1960s, if not earlier. By 1973, and the ‘global cooling’ scare, it was in full swing, with predictions of the imminent collapse of the world within ten to twenty years, exacerbated by the impacts of a nuclear winter. Environmentalists were warning that, by the year 2000, the population of the US would have fallen to only 22 million [the 2007 population estimate is 302,824,000]. […] In 1987, the scare abruptly changed to ‘global warming’, and the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was established (1988), issuing its first assessment report in 1990, which served as the basis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).”

Inconvenient History of Climate ‘Tipping Point’ Warnings

UK’s Top Scientist Sir David King in 2004: ‘Antarctica is likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remains unchecked’

NASA scientist James Hansen has been warning of a “tipping point” for years now. See: Earth’s Climate Approaches Dangerous Tipping Point – June 1, 2007 – Excerpt: A stern warning that global warming is nearing an irreversible tipping point was issued today” by James Hansen.

Former Vice President Al Gore invented his own “tipping point” clock a few years ago. Excerpt: Former Vice-President Al Gore came to Washington on July 17, 2008, to deliver yet another speech warning of the “climate crisis.” “The leading experts predict that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose our ability to ever recover from this environmental crisis,” Gore stated.

Prince Charles claimed a 96-month tipping point in July 2009. Excerpt: The heir to the throne told an audience of industrialists and environmentalists at St James’s Palace last night that he had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world. And in a searing indictment on capitalist society, Charles said we can no longer afford consumerism and that the “age of convenience” was over.

Get ready, we only have 190 years! Scientists ‘expect climate tipping point’ by 2200 – UK Independent – June 28, 2010 – Excerpt: “13 of the 14 experts said that the probability of reaching a tipping point (by 2200) was greater than 50 per cent, and 10 said that the chances were 75 per cent or more.”

‘World has only ten years to control global warming, warns Met Office – UK Telegraph – November 15, 2009 – Excerpt: Pollution needs to be brought under control within ten years to stop runaway climate change, according to the latest Met Office predictions. […] “To limit global mean temperature [increases] to below 2C, implied emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere at the end of the century fall close to zero in most cases.”

In 2013, the UN extended the deadline again. See: Earth Gets 15 Year Reprieve From Climate Doom?!: UN in 1989: World has a ’10-year window of opportunity to solve’ global warming — Now in 2013: ‘UN needs global warming answer by 2015′ – New date is the latest in a long history of flexible global warming deadlines

The UN chief Ban Ki-moon further shortened the “tipping point” in August 2009, when he warned of ‘incalculable’ suffering without climate deal in December 2009!

Newsweek magazine waded into the tipping point claims as well. Newsweek wrote: “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” But, Newsweek’s “tipping point” quote appeared in a April 28, 1975 article about global cooling! Same rhetoric, different eco-scare.

For an explanation of why climate fear promoters are failing to convince the public, see: MIT Climate Scientist: ‘Ordinary people see through man-made climate fears — but educated people are very vulnerable’ – July 6, 2009]

More Related Links:

Warmists Prep for UN Summit: ‘World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns’: ‘The world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change’ — ‘The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, chief economist at the International Energy Agency…Every month now counts: if the world is to stay below 2C of warming’

UK greenie George Monbiot 2002 warned we only had 10 years! ‘Famine can only be avoided if the rich give up meat, fish and dairy’– Monbiot on December 24, 2002: ‘Within as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both’

1924: Top Scientists Say That Earth Is Doomed (April 16, 1924) – ‘It is the firmest conviction of a group of serious scientists of established reputation, who have devoted their lives to a dispassionate and careful examination of geological and astronomical evidence. This group includes such investigators as Dr. Max Valier, of Munich. Engineer Hanne Hoerbiger, of Vienna, Dr. Voigt, of Berlin; and Professor F. Queisser. of Prague’

New Ecology Paper Challenges ‘Tipping Point’ Meme

Analysis: ‘Al Gore’s 10-Year ‘Scorching’ Prophesy Emerging As A Grand Hoax…Global Temperatures Declined Over Last Decade’

Gore Losing: No cause for alarm at 5-year mid-point of Armstrong-Gore climate ‘bet’ — ‘Gore should be pleased to find concerns about a ‘tipping point’ have turned out to be unfounded’ – ‘The latest global temperature is exactly where it was at the beginning of the ‘bet’ — ‘The IPCC’s forecasting procedures have been found to violate 72 of the 89 relevant principles’

ALERT: Obama (& Planet Earth) Granted Last Minute Reprieve! Four years ago, the world’s greatest climatologist James Hansen gave Obama until Jan. 17, 2013 to save the planet’

Doomster Paul Ehrlich is back and just as wrong as ever! Remember when we all starved to death in the 1980s, just as I predicted? It might happen AGAIN! – Ehrlich: ‘We risk a global collapse of our civilization as we know it. Climate change is just one of our problems. We cannot avert calamity without tackling it and other pressing ecological concerns’

Flashback: ‘Accurate Tribute to Paul Ehrlich: ‘Mad…Kook…Lunatic…Disgraced…Worse than Hitler…fear-monger…parasite on Academic system’

UK Guardian: ’50 months to avoid climate disaster’ — ‘On a very conservative estimate, 50 months from now, the dice become loaded against us in terms of keeping under a 2C temp rise’

Forty Year Cycle Of Scientific Psychosis Discovered: ‘There appears to be a forty year cycle of mental illness in the scientific community’ — ‘This is what they were saying in 1970′: ‘Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind; — George Wald, Harvard Biologist — ‘We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.’ — Barry Commoner, Wash. U biologist’

MIT to Obama: Only 4 years left to stop global warming: ‘It is quite possible that if this is not done over the next four years, it will be too late’ — MIT to Obama: ‘We can no longer pretend that addressing climate change will be without real costs’ — ‘You have the power and the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a new clean-energy policy that will help us avoid the worst consequences of climate change,” said the letter, published in the MITTechnology Review’

Flashback 2007: Climatologist Dr. Michaels mocks ‘tipping points’: ’We have to do something in 10 years — they have been saying that for two years. Why don’t they at least subtract 2 and make it 8?’

Another Atmospheric Scientist Dissents: Calls fears of CO2 tipping point ‘alarmist, ludicrous, and totally without foundation’ – July 13, 2009 – ‘Over geologic time there has been 15 to 25 times more CO2 than current concentrations’

Media Tipping Point! Houston Chronicle Reporter Reconsiders Science is ‘Settled’ Claims! ‘I am confused. 4 years ago this all seemed like a fait accompli’ – September 6, 2009

Antarctic Tipping Point? ‘If we don’t act soon, the planet will become a barren ball of ice and snow’ – October 2, 2009 – ’5 of the 6 years with the greatest Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent have occurred in just the last decade’

2007 – GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISM REACHES A TIPPING POINT – October 26, 2007

Climate Depot’s Morano on new alarmist National Academy of Sciences’ climate ‘tipping point’ study: It ‘openly shills for more climate funding for its members’ — Morano: ‘The organization [NAS] is virtually 100% dependent on government funding. So when they do a study like this – and they’ve done other studies in the past – you know the outcome of these studies before they do them. The actual funding quote from new study is: ‘The sudden changes in the climate is full of uncertainties. The world can prepare by better monitoring,’ Morano offers. ‘And it goes on [to say that] because of budget cuts and aging satellites, we have fewer measurements than we did a few years ago.’ – ‘When the NAS is advocating for a carbon tax, it’s not too surprising that all [their] reports are going to fall in line.’

Former Greenpeace co-founder turned climate skeptic Dr. Patrick Moore calls NAS ‘tipping point’ study ‘pure junk’: ‘Low point for US National Academy of Science. Warns of ‘tipping points’ in climate like ‘drunk drivers’

AP’s Seth Borenstein: ‘FEDERAL STUDY WARNS OF SUDDEN CLIMATE CHANGE WOES’

See: NAS Corrupted Warmist Ralph Cicerone: Turned Org. into political advocacy group: $6 million NAS study used to lobby for climate bill

Flashback: MIT’s Lindzen Slams: ‘Ralph Cicerone of NAS/NRC is saying that regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If gov’t wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide’

Cicerone’s Shame: NAS Urges Carbon Tax, Becomes Advocacy Group — ‘political appointees heading politicized scientific institutions that are virtually 100% dependent on gov’t funding’