The U.N. Is Holding Its 25th Climate Conference — Please Don’t Let There Be A 26th

I&I Editorial

Has there ever been a bigger assembly of scolds and nattering nabobs of nonsense than those gathered at the United Nations Conference Of The Parties 25 this week in Madrid? Spare us another of these hootenannies of insufferable elitism.

Before the party even started, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres showed up in Spain to tell us “the point of no return is no longer over the horizon,” and “is in sight and hurtling toward us.”

How long have we been hearing this? Prince Charles has been predicting imminent doomsday for more than a decade, as has Al Gore. Before the conference began, Vice was trying to convince the world that “The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun,” while Extinction Rebellion has been barking madly that “billions will die” and “life on Earth is dying” because of man’s use of fossil fuels.

Despite decades of warnings that the end “is in sight,” as the Competitive Enterprise Institute recently assured us, “none of the apocalyptic predictions” of environmental disaster “with due dates as of today have come true.”

As the conference’s nominal host, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez took up the cudgel because there can be no meeting of the climate clan without an othering of the “deniers.” “Luckily,” said Sánchez, “only a handful of fanatics deny the evidence.” What evidence would that be, Sr. Prime Minister?

Of course he can’t point to any evidence, because there is none.

A warming planet? Nothing in the record before 1979, when satellites began measuring thermal emissions in the atmosphere, is reliable. The satellite data show some warming, but nothing outside natural variations.

Receding glaciers and melting ice? “Polar ice sheets have not declined at all since NASA satellite instruments began precisely measuring them 35 years ago,” says James Taylor, who has written extensively about climate over the years. Meanwhile, “the Antarctic Ice Sheet has been growing at a steady and substantial pace ever since NASA satellites first began measuring the Antarctic ice sheet in 1979.” So about those glaciers? The global retreat that the alarmists can’t stop talking about is not new. It began before the Civil War was fought, “at the end of the Little Ice Age.” 

Increasing sea level? The oceans have been rising for 10,000 years. NASA says the rate of increase has been about 3.3 millimeters a year, not quite 0.13 of inch, for decades. Hardly cause for alarm.

More hurricanes? We repeat ourselves: “Global major hurricane frequency has been trending downward since 1980, while cyclone energy is roughly the same as it was in 1972.”

Growing wildfires? The media have been fixated on California’s fires, so let’s look there. And what do we find? Cal Fire, a government agency, has compiled data which show a steep drop-off in acres burned since 2008. The claim goes up in smoke.

It’s obvious the alarmists will say anything to further their agenda. Their evidence is nothing more than fevered imaginations and a perverted hope for catastrophe. But it must be evidence because they say it is.

Despite their assurances of having gained a superior knowledge, the alarmists cannot draw a straight line from the emissions of carbon dioxide from combusted fossil fuels to whatever it is they’re saying this week is a consequence of man-made global warming. If they could, they would have already done so. Instead, they rely on assumptions, a correlation of unreliable data, and incessant screeching.

By the way, did we mention that Sanchez is an open socialist? He’s member of the Spanish Workers’ Socialist Party, a fact that brings us around to the real agenda behind the global warming alarmists shock campaign: stepping on capitalism and seizing the world economy.

We’ve listed examples of the climate alarmists acknowledging their hidden agenda before, but just recently, we realized we missed one. More than 20 years ago, when global warming hysterics were beginning to rage, then Canadian Minister of the Environment Christine Stewart told the Calgary Herald that “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony … climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

The COP25 attendees, smug, insulting, and spectacularly dishonest, are not meeting to save us from ourselves. They’ll be there through Dec. 13 preening, posing, and hectoring, and scheming a path to political domination. Anyone who doubts they’re coming after the free economies of the West needs to ask themselves one question: Why are the proposed climate solutions exactly the same policies the political left would enact even without carbon dioxide playing the role of villain?

It’s not a coincidence. It’s a plan.

— Written by J. Frank Bullitt

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