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It’s nonsense because so-called experts have also said eggs and lard are bad for you. If people take the report seriously they should just move so there’s fewer impacts. And if the propaganda actually comes true, folks ought to embrace the warm feelings of great gardening and balmy summer holiday weather without leaving home.
Did you really think yet another climate change report warning of devastating impacts was going to change anybody’s mind?
The authors of the “Climate in Svalbard 2100” report released Monday will no doubt argue, as many have done with past dire studies, that’s not the point. It’s meant to provide information to politicians and others heavily involved in making policy that will convince them of the many reasons (including, yes, economic) major changes needed to reduce impacts are urgently necessary.
But it’s the proletariat posturing in pubs and on social media that elect those policymakers. In the U.S. – by far the world’s top-polluting country besides China – the people’s pick mocked a deadly cold spell last week by calling for some of that supposedly fake “global warming” that he calls a Chinese hoax. In Norway they’ve elected a government whose just-appointed minister in charge of Svalbard policy is a longtime oil drilling fan who calls the country’s record level of Arctic exploration and aggressive future plans (regardless of the study’s findings which they’ve already heard in various bits) a positive contribution to combating climate change.
So when headlines through Norway screamed about the new report’s warnings that Svalbard has warmed 4°C during past 50 years and may warm a total of 10°C by 2100, with huge increase in rain and radical storms, readers offering comments weren’t offering much sign their climate of thinking is being affected. Here’s a roundup of some of the postings (names withheld since who knows if they’re real anyhow):
• “Yet another one-sided, uncritical propaganda script…I call this propaganda, because there are tens of thousands of scholars who are objectively disagreeing with the disaster community. Among other things, because the effect of CO2 is “used up,” so that even a doubling of CO2 from the present value will have minimal significance on the temperature. Furthermore, the temperature in higher atmospheric layers would have increased significantly if there were greenhouse effects that caused a temperature increase of about one degree C over more than 100 years. This greenhouse effect sign does not exist. I have not seen it clearly expressed, but I assume that the disaster authority was turned off by the switch for natural climate impacts around 1945, so that after this only man has influence on climate.”
• “For most people, it is probably unthinkable that many thousands of climate researchers should have been on a wrong track for over 30 years, but experience shows that this happens. For example, for over 50 years, heart researchers have been assured that we had a heart attack because the blood vessels towards the heart were blocked by cholesterol we received in our food – such as eggs and animal fats. The connection first appeared as obvious. Then it turned out that it was more complex (J. Le Fanu, The Rise & Fall of Modern Medicine, 2011). Now eggs are healthy, and animal fats are not as unhealthy as you thought.”
• A reader offering a counterargument to the above: “In the 1950s, some researchers found that tobacco smoking could lead to lung cancer, and after a quarter of many other heart and vascular diseases…The tobacco industry has worked diligently and spent billions of dollars on launching various theories to cleanse smoking as a major cause, but that should be our scientific consensus that a particular alternative cause of heart attack is nonsense.”
• “If there are going to be so many impacts on people than maybe some of the people should move.”
• “The plants will thrive much better on the Earth if the atmosphere gets more CO2. And thus the plants can absorb more C than otherwise, so this is not only negative.”
• “Forgot to specify that there is no research to conclude how much of the man-made part of total CO2 emissions and how much it has to say for the total temperature increase” (includes a citation to climate change skeptic website).
• “Many laughs about enjoying warm weather only wearing the shorts. And all year round. And not only that, but think so environment and climate friendly we will be when we don’t have to fly to southerly latitudes or travel on the cruise long enough to taste some of the sun’s life-giving heat.”
• “The climate has become religion. It is amazing how easy people get brainwashed by the climate conspiracy.”
• “It ‘may’ be that Norway should be the last country that cared about this climatic blow.” (From a reader making the very legit point that many studies predict things that “may” happen, but don’t.)
• “Everyone dies anyway, or am I wrong?”
