While everyone was fixated on the latest pronouncement from the podium of truth, or stuck in Auckland’s traffic chaos, or attempting to translate their way through Maori Language Week, or generally thinking about the upcoming election, the NZ Herald slipped in an interesting article, sourced from the Financial Times, that could be construed as deviating, ever so slightly, from the approved climate narrative.
The article headline asked the question, “Are cooler heads needed on climate change?” Surely the use of the word ‘cooler’ was not accidental?
First up was a sharp poke which burst the balloon of the poor threatened polar bear theory.
The article actually accuses Al Gore and the US government of peddling “fake news” when stating that the polar bears were ‘threatened’.
Yet there was something wrong with this picture. There was no real evidence that polar bear numbers were collapsing. According to estimates compiled by the Polar Bear Specialist Group, part of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, bear numbers have actually been going up — from roughly 15,000 in 1970 to about 26,500 today.
Apparently, someone had the effrontery to suggest that the decline in polar bear numbers was due to hunting, not global warming melting the ice. How very dare they! Stop hunting and numbers will increase! So they did and they did.
Next up the FT article pokes a hole in the climate change causes wildfires theory:
… pointing to satellite data showing that the amount of land burnt has fallen by a quarter in the past two decades.
And the climate-change-caused flooding is getting worse theory:
US flood losses today are a tenth of what they were in 1903 — at just 0.05 per cent.
But it gets really interesting when the FT quotes the New Zealand example as utter foolishness. And the Herald reprinted it!
Take New Zealand’s 2007 promise to go carbon-free by 2020. Not only was the goal missed; the country’s emissions actually went up. Nor are its latest set of promises certain to fare much better. Lomborg estimates that it will cost New Zealand between 16 and 32 per cent of GDP annually to hit its declared net-zero target in 2050 — or $12,800 for each citizen. And all that to deliver a reduction of 0.004 degrees Fahrenheit in global temperatures in 2100, according to the standard estimate by the UN climate panel. “Sooner or later,” [Bjorn Lomborg] writes, “a politician is successfully going to argue to dump the net-zero promise that will deliver zilch in a century, and instead double spending on things like health, education and environment, and get some tax reductions.”
Will that politician please step forward?
The FT article then links to the books used as source material; however, the Herald reprint did not, so as a community service The BFD has supplied the links below.
- False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet
- Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All
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