Walter Williams: Is This the True Agenda of ‘Climate Change’ Alarmists Like Ocasio-Cortez?

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.” The people at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agree, saying that to avoid some of the most devastating impacts of climate change, the world must slash carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 and completely decarbonize by 2050.

Such dire warnings are not new. In 1970, Harvard University biology professor George Wald, a Nobel laureate, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist, predicted in an article for The Progressive, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” The year before, he had warned, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” Despite such harebrained predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Leftists constantly preach such nonsense as “The world that we live in is beautiful but fragile.” “The 3rd rock from the sun is a fragile oasis.” “Remember that Earth needs to be saved every single day.” These and many other statements, along with apocalyptic predictions, are stock in trade for environmentalists. Worse yet, this fragile-earth indoctrination is fed to the nation’s youth from kindergarten through college. That’s why many millennials support Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.

Let’s examine just a few cataclysmic events that exceed any destructive power of mankind and then ask how our purportedly fragile planet could survive. The 1883 eruption of the Krakatoa volcano, in present-day Indonesia, had the force of 200 megatons of TNT. That’s the equivalent of 13,300 15-kiloton atomic bombs, the kind that destroyed Hiroshima in World War II. Before that was the 1815 Tambora eruption, the largest known volcanic eruption. It spewed so much debris into the atmosphere that 1816 became known as the “Year Without a Summer.” It led to crop failures and livestock death in the Northern Hemisphere, producing the worst famine of the 19th century. The A.D. 535 Krakatoa eruption had such force that it blotted out much of the light and heat of the sun for 18 months and is said to have led to the Dark Ages. Geophysicists estimate that just three volcanic eruptions — Indonesia (1883), Alaska (1912) and Iceland (1947) — spewed more carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere than all of mankind’s activities during our entire history.

Our so-called fragile earth survived other catastrophic events, such as the floods in China in 1887, which took an estimated 1 million to 2 million lives, followed by floods there in 1931, which took an estimated 1 million to 4 million lives. What about the impact of earthquakes on our fragile earth? Chile’s 1960 Valdivia earthquake was 9.5 on the Richter scale. It created a force equivalent to 1,000 atomic bombs going off at the same time. The deadly 1556 earthquake in China’s Shaanxi province devastated an area of 520 miles.

Our so-called fragile earth faces outer space terror. Two billion years ago, an asteroid hit earth, creating the Vredefort crater in South Africa, which has a diameter of 190 miles. In Ontario, there’s the Sudbury Basin, resulting from a meteor strike 1.8 billion years ago. At 39 miles long, 19 miles wide and 9 miles deep, it’s the second-largest impact structure on earth. Virginia’s Chesapeake Bay crater is a bit smaller, about 53 miles wide. Then there’s the famous but puny Meteor Crater in Arizona, which is not even a mile wide.

My question is: Which of these powers of nature could be duplicated by mankind? For example, could mankind even come close to duplicating the polluting effects of the 1815 Tambora volcanic eruption? It is the height of arrogance to think that mankind can make significant parametric changes in the earth or can match nature’s destructive forces. Our planet is not fragile.

Occasionally, environmentalists spill the beans and reveal their true agenda. Barry Commoner said, “Capitalism is the earth’s number one enemy.” Amherst College professor Leo Marx said, “On ecological grounds, the case for world government is beyond argument.”

COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

WalterWilliamsWalter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University.

The views expressed in opinion articles are solely those of the author and are not necessarily either shared or endorsed by Black Community News.

Do you like this post? Sign up for our daily newsletter to see more!



Check Also

Larry Elder: The NPR-Listening ‘Elite 1%’

Consider this proposition: “Suppose that your favorite candidate loses a close election. However, people on …

3 comments

  1. The Climate Change Hoax Continues

    The country finds itself in the throes of a mediocre bartender turned climate “expert”. it may well be that her comments on climate changes require another look. Doing her nest Al Gore imitation she has declared that the Earth has only twelve years left. No questions on how she decided on twelve years and no evidence has shown that she even knows what she is talking about. Of course, she has the answer, a Green New Deal that would take our country back to the Stone Age. Not well thought out, the Green New Deal is nothing more than using the climate as a reason to control everything on the planet in the manner of progressive socialist agendas.
    Now while there are those that do nothing more than nod with glassy eyes and parrot what she claims, they loudly spew forth that the Associated Press and the IPCC have both proclaimed that it has now become (again) a “life or death” matter. The rest of us, the sane people would appreciate a little evidence of what she proclaims we all must follow. The radical policies of the global warming Nazis continue in the attempt to force these policies on everyone, even going so far as influencing our children and teaching them how to confront those who disagree. The use fears to warn of mass starvations, the collapse of farming overpopulation, and an ecological disaster to cause our children to fall in line with radical policies that follow the agenda of lies that they spew forth. They have taken to pressuring scientific journals not to publish dissenting views and have even caused the resignations of many editors who disagree with them through government coercion. As we see now with our Bartending climate “expert”, anyone can parrot the climate change lie. She and many like her are willing to sacrifice millions of people for the radical environmental agenda based on falsehoods and lies.
    The agenda has been around for quite a long time. After the Second World War, and with France in ruins, General Charles de Gaulle envisioned using the environment as a way to bring France back on the world stage. In 1968 he formed the French Federation of Nature Protection Societies (FFPSN) to assist in bring France to the pinnacle of the environmental movement. Russia was also an enthusiast of the government constraints imposed in the name of the environment. They are assuming that this could be used as a way to undermine the United States and make it easier to expand into Western Europe. The constraints on industry and its effect of the environment was not a concern to the Soviet Union as they had no intention of following the constraints themselves.
    Now we have the progressive socialists in the Democrat party using this same agenda to push for renewable energy to alleviate the environmental impact on the planet. They will not and cannot understand that a massive economy like ours will never survive being powered by windmills. They refuse to acknowledge that oil is one of the largest industries worldwide, second only to IT, and the engine that promotes progress economically and strategically. The environmentalists and global warming Nazis refuse to admit that civilization is solidly based on oil, and other forms of carbon-based energy and that the agenda they have laid out will return the world to the 1500s.
    The newest agenda-driven fear is the scare of crop failures in India, Bangladesh, Syria, and Honduras. The Climate Change Nazis claim that millions of Indian farmers have been displaced and devastation over the Indian subcontinent is being caused by, of course, global warming. Actual numbers show that as the frost season slows, soil moisture improves and atmospheric carbon helps to fertilize crops, farm yields have increased. The Indian government has demonstrated that food grains increased in 2016, 2017 and 2018 with wheat at an all-time high of 99.70 metric tons and rice at 112,91 metric tons. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has shown that Indian Farmers have set new records almost every year this decade.
    Bangladesh, another country mentioned in the study, also has enjoyed increasing crop yields and grain production over the same period. Crop production in Bangladesh has risen by a third in the past ten years. The World Bank reported that agricultural production had been the driving force in poverty reduction in the country since 2000.
    In Honduras, another country mentioned in the report, the production of coffee, rice, wheat, and maize have continually moved higher every year since 2013 as documented by the International Food Policy Research Institute.
    There are a few questions that honest people would appreciate answered. Climate data researcher Dr. John McLean performed an audit on the HadCRUT4 data that records global temperature data and has found multiple major problems that have made the dataset used for the basis of the global warming hysteria “not fit for global studies.” Since March 2016 Dr. McLean has advised that Hadley Center, which is the originator of the HadCRUT4 data of errors that they have since corrected. This is the first time that this audit has been performed after all these years of fear-mongering that has been thrown out as fact to the international community. In his words, Dr. McLean has found:
    “a sparsity of data, obviously erroneous data, significant but questionable assumptions and temperature data that has been incorrectly adjusted in a way that exaggerates warming.”
    Some examples of data that is proven faulty includes a Caribbean temperature station that recorded average temperature of 32 degrees F for the month of December, a station in Columbia with average temperatures of 176 degrees F for three months, and a station in Romania that recorded an average temperature of -45 degrees in September. Stations at sea and aboard ships recorded locations that were more than 50 miles inland. It was also found that the temperatures of locations that were moved were manipulated by subtracting a fixed number of degrees from the recorded values every time a location was moved, causing the recorded temperatures to appear cooler than actual readings. This lead to assumptions about the actual recordings that showed rapid global warming that had not occurred.
    There are more than enough myths about the environment that are being debunked every day. The tales of the melting on the Antarctic ice shelf using cherry-picked data. The western Ice shelf is decreasing in size while the eastern side has amassed enough ice to offset the melting of the west. The polar bears starving, reported hysterically by media has been shown to be false. In fact, the number of polar bears has substantially increased. Even the National Geographic photographer who took the original picture splashed across the front pages on the print media and shown on television with wringing hands and doomsday countenances has questioned the use of the photograph for the climate change agenda.
    Coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, another hysterical bleating from the global warming Nazis has been shown to be a phenomenon that has been going on for almost 400 years. This is long before the arrival of European civilization and even before the advent of the industrial revolution.
    There are more, more myths, more lies, more breathless reporting with only one agenda. The more they can indoctrinate the low information voter, along with the indoctrination of our children will lead to giving control of our lives to the progressive socialist agenda. They want to control the energy use throughout the planet in a simple power grab.

    Related Articles:
    http://www.intellectualconservative.com/the-totalitarianism-
    of-climate-change/
    http://www.intellectualconservative.com/climate-control-nazis/
    http://www.intellectualconservative.com/the-global-socialist-agenda-of-the-new-green-deal/
    John Veliseks’ new book “One Patriots Opinion- for the Forgotten Men and Women of America” is now available on Kindle. 330 pages that any conservative would consider a must read and enjoy. Go to Kindle Book Search and type in “One Patriots Opinion”

    • Thanks for the info. I agree – it’s all about socialism and ever-expanding government control, and always has been. AOC is just the latest (and possibly the dumbest) manifestation of it. Here’s hoping that she’s so overreached herself that she’s sunk her own ship, a la Hillary – and maybe the not-so-good ship “Global Warming” while she’s at it.

  2. LOL! Facts are the ‘missing link’ with all these pseudo climatologists dressed as Chicken Little. I often have a cartoon like vision in my less than spectacularly creative mind. I see this spectacular experiment in humanity as being watched by one someone much like a human might watch an ant hill. All the ants scurrying about on their daily grind, dealing with disasters, repelling invaders, surviving and doing it all over again. Most of the common sense ants know they can’t control Nature, although I’m sure some illogically think they can.

    As ole George (the president, not Gobel) stated, there can be no reasoning without coming to the conclusion of a ‘higher power,’ or words to that effect.