On Sunday morning, December 30, ‘Meet the Press’ had a gala service preaching the climate-change religion. Famous climate preachers like Michael Bloomberg and Jerry Brown were featured speakers. they missed some opportunities and some old themes were nowhere to be found. They neglected to link the supposed, increasing pollution of the oceans with plastic to climate change. They forgot to mention the polar bear tragedy, and for some reason we don’t hear any more about malaria spreading to the temperate zones.

According to “Meet the Press,” “the science of climate doom is absolutely and completely settled science.” For that reason they determined that no time would be given to “climate deniers.” But seemingly they broke their own rule when a clip by the Secretary of Energy, Rick Perry, was played. The foremost climate skeptic in the U.S. Senate, James Inhofe, was also given air time.

Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York and one of the world’s richest men, was given extensive air time. There was even a plug for his book: Climate of Hope. The book, written with the former president of the Sierra Club, is hilariously ignorant. Bloomberg is considering running for president as a Democrat. Formerly, he was a Republican. His embrace of global warming alarmism may be a bid for votes in the Democratic primaries where the voters are typically believers in loony climate change theories.

The one scientist on the show, Kate Marvel, has evidently given up science for a career promoting climate alarmism. She is contradicting herself by going along with climate alarmist fantasies -- in earlier public talks she was highly critical of the climate computer models that are the only basis for climate extremism.

The big theme of the “Meet the Press” presentation was that climate change is here and it is very bad. This completely mistaken claim was supported by various anecdotes from people that experienced floods, fires, or hurricanes. Floods are not new. For example, it is instructive to read the Wikipedia entry “Floods in California”. The great flood of 1861-1862 was far worse than anything since. Compared to the Great New England Hurricane of 1938, the 2012 superstorm Sandy was minor. The Great Prestigo fire in 1871, in Wisconsin, killed 1500 people. In comparison, the recent Camp Fire in California killed 89 people and burned less land. A major factor in forest fires is the suppression of fires, allowing fuel to build to the point where the fire becomes so violent that it can’t be easily suppressed.

Floods, droughts, heat waves, and tornados have been around forever and they aren’t getting any worse. But people’s memories fade with time, so the most recent weather outrage always seem to be worse than past outrages. So, it is clever to claim that carbon dioxide is causing extreme weather. It seems plausible because yesteryear’s bad weather has faded in our memories, or perhaps we only know about previous extreme weather because our parents or grandparents told us about it. Climate scientist John Christy provided written testimony to the House Energy and Power Subcommittee that demolishes the extreme weather thesis.

Craig Fugate, Obama’s Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) administrator, was a member of the “Meet the Press” panel of experts. His educational background is paramedic school in Florida. He suggested that if only we had a carbon tax, $100 billion of disasters last year could have been avoided. A fallacy, since most carbon emissions come from Asia and having a carbon tax would not affect Asian emissions at all. Serious carbon dioxide emission reduction would be a long process that would require substituting nuclear electricity generation for fossil fuel electricity. But the environmental groups that are promoting fear of carbon dioxide are also afraid of nuclear energy. Wind and solar are not a solution that is effective for reducing carbon dioxide emissions because they are not remotely cost-effective for that purpose and they are always accompanied by backup fossil fuel plants emitting carbon dioxide. That point is explained in detail in my book Dumb Energy.

Carbon dioxide emissions in the U.S. have been declining mainly because natural gas has been substituted for coal. Cheap natural gas is the result of fracking, bitterly opposed by the environmental left. The bigger fallacy is the claim that weather disasters are the result of carbon emissions. The scientific evidence for that popular idea is extremely weak science.

The mayor of Georgetown, Texas, a small city near Austin, touted his city’s conversion to 100% renewable energy. The city agreed to long-term contracts with a wind farm and a solar farm to take a portion of the electricity generated. The amount of electricity contracted for is considerably greater than the amount of electricity needed. The city sells the excess electricity into the market. That has turned out to be a losing proposition. To be clear, the city is not actually using the electricity from the wind and solar plants located hundreds of miles away. The electricity generated by the plants is fed into the Texas grid and distributed throughout the state. The claim of being 100% renewable is a bookkeeping claim based on buying more renewable electricity than is actually used. Obviously, the solar farm is not generating electricity at night or on cloudy days. The wind farm generates electricity to the extent wind happens to be blowing.

The staff of “Meet the Press” is either incredibly ignorant or pursuing an agenda of left-wing propaganda, or probably both. No quarter was given to “climate deniers”, a deliberate slur that equates anyone who questions climate alarmism with Holocaust deniers. The truth is that there are many serious and distinguished scientists that express skepticism concerning predictions of climate doom from carbon dioxide. The alarmist predictions by the computer climate models have failed repeatedly.

Global warming  is a scheme for getting money and attention. It is fiercely defended because if the fraud was exposed, a lot of people would lose their jobs and be discredited. There is a kernel of truth in the idea that greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide may exercise a warming influence. That truth has been used as a springboard to making doomsday predictions that are almost certainly wrong. The fact that increased CO2 in the atmosphere has major positive effects on agriculture is not mentioned by the proselytizers for global warming doom.

Norman Rogers is the author of the book: Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Energy.