Global warming has become a huge industry these days, with climate-change entrepreneurs such as former Vice President Al Gore cashing in big, as Bloomberg estimated his worth several years ago at $200 million-plus, up from $1.7 million while he was running for president.
Governments are spending billions at a time. And doesn’t everyone feel the increasing costs of energy and products?
But a new estimate of what it will cost the world’s citizens to reduce the world’s temperature by the end of the century by a “grand total of three tenths of one degree” is a stunner: $100 trillion.
That’s $100,000,000,000,000.00.
Enough to make 100 million people millionaires.
The calculation comes from Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, the head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, reports Climate Depot.
Lomborg states: “We will spend at least one hundred trillion dollars in order to reduce the temperature by the end of the century by a grand total of three tenths of one degree – the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years.”
He explained the calculation is based on the U.N.’s own climate prediction model.
The total is bigger than the world’s gross domestic product.
He warned that if the U.S. “delivers for the whole century on … President Obama’s very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century.”
“But here is the biggest problem: These minuscule benefits do not come free – quite the contrary,” Lomborg said. “The cost of the U.N. Paris climate pact is like to run 1 to 2 trillion dollars every year.”
That’s compared to the U.S. annual budget of under $4 trillion.
Here’s a video with Lomborg’s full analysis and commentary:
Climate Change publisher Marc Morano reported the evaluation was provided as part of Lomborg’s criticism of the recent Paris Climate Agreement, which was much ballyhooed by the Obama administration as a major step forward.
Lomborg produced a video titled “The Paris Climate Agreement Won’t Change the Climate” for talk-radio host Dennis Prager’s PragerU.
He poked fun at the Paris result as “grand pronouncements and vague specifics,” and said the folks in Paris, France, could learn a thing or two from those in Paris, Texas.
“Using the same prediction model that the U.N. uses, I found that [Obama’s] power plan will accomplish almost nothing. Even if its cuts to carbon dioxide emissions are fully implemented – not just for the 14 years that the Paris agreement lasts, but for the rest of the century – the EPA’s Clean Power Plan would reduce the temperature increase in 2100 by just .023 degrees Fahrenheit,” Lomborg explained.
“In the unlikely event that all of these extra cuts also happen, and are adhered to throughout the rest of the century, the combined reduction in temperatures would be 0.057 degrees. To put it another way, if the U.S. delivers for the whole century on the President Obama’s very ambitious rhetoric, it would postpone global warming by about eight months at the end of the century,” Lomborg said.
He said that 99 percent of the assumed benefits of climate-change regulations would have to come after 2030, when the current plans would expire.
“If we generously assume that the promised carbon cuts for 2030 are not only met – which itself would be a U.N. first – but sustained throughout the rest of the century, temperatures in 2100 would drop 0.3 degrees – the equivalent of postponing warming by less than four years. Again, that is using the U.N.’s own climate prediction model,” Lomborg said.
At a cost of $1 trillion to $2 trillion a year.
WND reported earlier this month a posting at Real Climate Science delivered a body blow to the global-warming agenda – now called “climate change” since the globe doesn’t appear to be warming anymore.
It shows the Arctic sea ice today is about the same thickness as it was 75 years ago.
That’s despite the massive spread of SUVs, the use of coal-fired power plants to generate heat for homes and gasoline-powered lawn mowers and leaf blowers.
The posting from Steven Goddard, who blogs under the pseudonym Tony Heller, featured the image of a 1940 Townsville Daily Bulletin report that “ice measurements were on an average only 6 ½ feet,” according to a just-returned expedition of Soviet explorers.
The blogger noted that in 1940, Arctic sea ice was two meters thick.
Then, alongside a posting of a New York Times image stating the ice was “only about seven feet thick” in 1958, he wrote it was “about two meters thick” then.
And he posted an image from the Danish Meteorological Institute, dated Monday, that shows much of the Arctic sea ice cover was some two meters thick or more.
“All of the official fake news agencies and fake government agencies have been claiming that Arctic sea ice is getting thinner,” he said, citing online headlines from NOAA that “Arctic sea ice getting thinner” and the same from Scientific American.
And he pointed that that while a Bush administration official recently said “all the thick multi-year ice is gone,” in reality, a University of Colorado graphic reveals much of that ice is estimated at two to four years old.
“As is almost always the case with government officials and journalists, they were lying. Nearly half of the Arctic is covered with multi-year ice,” he said.
WND also reported in September that President Obama’s executive order to federal agencies to integrate into their policies and programs “behavioral-science insights” about how people make decisions and act on them has had little effect on how Americans think about “climate change,” the government-approved theory that mankind is causing irreparable damage to the planet.
The Social and Behavioral Sciences Team in the executive office of the president, part of the National and Science Technology Council, said in its annual report that part of its work is to respond to climate change.
“Climategate” exposes the global warming scam. Get it now at the WND Superstore.
The team said it started a dialogue with the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy to “identify the potential behavioral barriers underlying low take-up of clean energy, as well as a suite of behavioral tools that can be used to address these barriers.”
“For example, behavioral science research indicates that prompting consumers to select a power plan from among clean and non-clean options (rather than defaulting them into a standard electricity plan) and presenting plan options in ways that facilitate informed decision-making can improve take-up,” the report said.
It also wants to make consumers better understand what the government wants them to do about global warming.
“To help households, communities and decision-makers better understand and adapt to the effects of rising global temperatures, SBST, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the University of Maryland have worked to help the United States Global Change Research Program improve their ‘climate indicators,’ which convey important information about climate patterns to non-scientists,” the report said.
But it still said consumer adoption of “green-power plans remains low at roughly 700,000 customers nationwide.”
WND reported much of the information on which global warming projections are based is simply wrong.
Morano of Climate Depot warned the intent now is not to discuss, investigate or research, but to send “a chilling message to doubters and skeptics” to be silent.
Morano said his movie, “Climate Hustle,” shows “the climate establishment comparing climate skeptics to Holocaust deniers.”
“It’s all an attempt to silence the debate, to silence any science and go right to centralized planning,” he said. “That’s what this is all about. The U.N. has admitted their goal is wealth redistribution and it doesn’t have anything to do with environmental policy.”
The solution offered by the climate establishment, he said, is always the same: “more centralized government.”
He said the result will be tragic for large populations who are being denied access to pumped water, power and heat because of antagonism to carbon-based fuels.
“The reason we know there’s a hustle is their predictions have failed to come true, on a whole host of issues,” Morano said. “That’s why they now want to stop the debate, suppress debate.”
Famous predictions
One of the more famous predictions came from former vice president and current carbon-credit entrepreneur Al Gore, who told an audience in a 2009 speech that “the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
His 2006 documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” famously predicted increasing temperatures would cause earth’s oceans to rise by 20 feet, a claim many scientists say is utterly without rational basis.
Another came from a 2013 column by Mark Hertsgaard, which was headlined “The End of the Arctic? Ocean Could be Ice Free by 2015.”
He wrote: “Say goodbye to polar bears and a whole lot of ice. New research suggests the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2015, with devastating consequences for the world. Can it be stopped?”
Taking one more step back in time, the BBC said Arctic summers would be ice-free by 2013.
Sierra Club Canada also said in 2013 that the Arctic sea ice would vanish that year.
Tim Ball, a former University of Winnipeg climatology professor, said global temperatures have been dropping since the turn of the century, prompting the change in terminology from “global warming” to “climate change.”
Activists are also spending less time discussing temperatures and more time pointing to more extreme events such as tornadoes, droughts, cold snaps and heat waves. Ball said there’s a shred of truth there, but it’s being badly distorted.
“Yes, there’s been slightly more extremes,” he said in an interview with WND and Radio America. “That’s because the jet stream patterns are changing, because the earth is cooling down. All the arguments about sea-level rise, about Arctic ice disappearing, if you recall it’s not that long ago that our friend Al Gore was saying that there would be no summer ice in the Arctic. I think the year he set for it was 2014. That proved to be completely wrong.”
Another came from a 2013 column by Mark Hertsgaard, which was headlined “The End of the Arctic? Ocean Could be Ice Free by 2015.”
He wrote: “Say goodbye to polar bears and a whole lot of ice. New research suggests the Arctic Ocean could be ice-free by 2015, with devastating consequences for the world. Can it be stopped?”
Taking one more step back in time, the BBC said Arctic summers would be ice-free by 2013.
Sierra Club Canada also said in 2013 that the Arctic sea ice would vanish that year.
Tim Ball, a former University of Winnipeg climatology professor, said global temperatures have been dropping since the turn of the century, prompting the change in terminology from “global warming” to “climate change.”
Activists are also spending less time discussing temperatures and more time pointing to more extreme events such as tornadoes, droughts, cold snaps and heat waves. Ball said there’s a shred of truth there, but it’s being badly distorted.
“Yes, there’s been slightly more extremes,” he said in an interview with WND and Radio America. “That’s because the jet stream patterns are changing, because the earth is cooling down. All the arguments about sea-level rise, about Arctic ice disappearing, if you recall it’s not that long ago that our friend Al Gore was saying that there would be no summer ice in the Arctic. I think the year he set for it was 2014. That proved to be completely wrong.”
At the Ron Paul Liberty Report, Chris Rossini said the “alarmism” about “climate change” is reaching “levels of desperation.”
“The arguments go from ridiculous to hysterical. We’re told by many politicians that ‘climate change’ is the #1 threat to Americans. This is of course a favorite of the swindling class. Others tell us that the #1 threat is ISIS, and some are now saying that it’s Donald Trump. Some say it’s North Korea, Russia, or Iran. The carousel of #1 threats is always in motion.”
Rossini continued: “In the media you’ll find stories that free birth control is needed in order to battle climate change, and that climate change will turn women into prostitutes. Non-believers of this ridiculous propaganda are branded as ‘deniers’.
“Even appeals to religion and the afterlife have been showered on Americans. Whether it be comments from the pope, or from Nobel Prize winning ‘economist’ Paul Krugman, who says: ‘You can deny global warming (and may you be punished in the afterlife for doing so – this kind of denial for petty personal or political reasons is an almost inconceivable sin).'”
Rossini wrote, “Boy, do these characters really want Americans to believe the climate change religion.”
Scientist Art Robinson has spearheaded The Petition Project, which has gathered the signatures of at least 31,487 scientists who agree that there is “no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.”
They say, “Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
Robinson, who has a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California-San Diego, where he served on the faculty, co-founded the Linus Pauling Institute with Nobel-recipient Linus Pauling, where he was president and research professor. He later founded the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine. His son, Noah Robinson, was a key figure in the petition work and has a Ph.D. in chemistry from Caltech.
Heresy hunters
Many advocates have declared that it’s heresy not to agree that man is the cause of cataclysmic climate change. Some attorneys general, for example, have banded together to target any companies that challenge the climate “consensus.”
When the Daily Caller reported the story it cited the Spanish Inquisition, which “systematically silenced any citizen who held views that did not align with the king’s.”
WND also reported when some two-dozen scientists with major U.S. universities urged President Obama to use racketeering laws to prosecute opponents who deny mankind is causing catastrophic changes in the climate.
In a letter addressed to Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren, the scientists said they “appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress.”
“One additional tool – recently proposed by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse – is a RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change,” they wrote, according to Politico.
Two years ago, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said legal punishment was the appropriate response to global-warming dissenters.
“I wish there were a law you could punish them with,” he said, launching into a diatribe against philanthropists Charles and David Koch, known for their support of conservative causes.
“I think it’s treason. Do I think the Koch brothers are treasonous – yes, I do. They are enjoying making themselves billionaire[s] by impoverishing the rest of us. Do I think they should be in jail – I think they should be [enduring] three hots and a cot at the Hague with all the other war criminals. Do I think the Koch brothers should be tried for reckless endangerment? Absolutely, that is [a] criminal offense and they ought to be serving time for it.”
President Obama has demanded action on climate change, even though the top climate scientist for the U.N. at that time, Rajendra Pachauri, admitted: “The protection of planet Earth, the survival of all species and sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.”