As we embark on a new year, our hopes and aspirations are renewed even as the specter of a climate doomsday purportedly looms over us.

The predicted apocalypse being a falsehood, we are called upon in this season of joy and love to forgive the fear-mongers perpetrating it.  These would include policymakers, news reporters, and activists who are either ill informed or cynically manipulative.

So here’s to a fresh start for 2024.  Let’s embrace forgiveness but also resolve to resist fear engendered by misinformation and hyperbole with the truth.

We’ll start with temperature predictions generated by computer models that have long served as a basis for fabricating a scary future.  Crafted by a multitude of scientists worldwide, these numerous models — carrying the imprimatur of the United Nations — provide data that have been the source of hyperbolic headlines, hysterical protests, destructive public policies, and high energy prices.  There have even been shortages of fuel, electricity, and food.

Yet the models themselves are fundamentally flawed, exaggerating the influence of CO2 on Earth’s temperature.

Known collectively as the Climate Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP), the models fall well short of the accuracy required to guide crucial policy decisions that directly affect people’s lives.  “All model runs warmed faster than observations both globally and in the tropics, in most cases significantly,” concluded scientists who examined the data.

The models’ deception underlies a continuous stream of falsehoods permeating every level of society and widespread hostility to fossil fuels, which are among the most reliable, abundant, and affordable energy sources.

This is why politicians want to cull thousands of cows in Ireland and grab agricultural lands from farmers in the Netherlands, why insects are proposed as alternatives to meat, and why expensive and unreliable wind and solar projects are subsidized to replace perfectly good coal-fired and nuclear power plants.

What’s truly astonishing is that even if the models’ predictions were to prove true, the forecasted higher temperatures would not be a threat to mankind.  This argument was laid out in United Nations’ own special report, which showed (on page 256) that a business-as-usual approach with no actions to reduce CO2 emissions would lower global gross domestic product (GDP) by less than 3% by the year 2100.

Actually, there is no evidence to substantiate a 3% reduction of global GDP.  There has been a marked improvement in human well-being since the onset of natural warming in the 18th century following the Little Ice Age that started around 1300.  The widespread utilization of fossil fuels, coupled with industrialization and advancements in science and technology, has significantly advanced civilization.

The pending apocalypse is supposedly being prefaced by an increase in extreme weather, but no such trend is to be found in honest assessments of the data.  For example, there has been a decrease, rather than an increase, in tropical cyclone frequency in the Indian subcontinent.  Similarly, there has been a slight decrease in landfalling hurricanes in the U.S.  The incidence of wildfires has decreased both globally and in the U.S., with most wildfires globally being the result of arson rather than climate-related factors. 

Plant life has thrived in warmer temperatures and higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2, a fact supported by numerous peer-reviewed scientific studies and manifested in record crop harvests.

Notably, forest areas have expanded in both India and Europe.  There has also been a doubling in the population of Bengal tigers and an increase in the number of polar bears compared to the mid-20th century.

The bulk of the news portraying a warming catastrophe is rooted in speculation rather than scientific knowledge, ignoring altogether evidence that the planet may be cooling in coming decades.

To gain deeper insights into how the present warming trend has benefited society, delve into the pages of “A Very Convenient Warming” by Gregory Wrightstone, geologist and executive director of the scientific non-profit CO2 Coalition.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia.  He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, U.K.

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