On June 1, President Trump made a big announcement to the world; he had decided it was time for the U.S. to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords, which had been signed and committed to by former President Obama and 147 world leaders in 2016.
On the face of it, the announcement seemed like an alarming development — the U.S. was unilaterally declaring that it could no longer support the agreement, which would have limited greenhouse gas emissions from all the countries that were signatories. Liberals were outraged; outlets from Time magazine to CNN (whose host Reza Aslan tweeted that President Trump was “a piece of s***”) practically declared that the world as we knew it was over; doomsday was unavoidable, and we should repent before burning up in the flames of an impending hell on Earth.
There were just a few problems — not many liberals actually knew what was in the agreement that they had practically elevated to the status of the New Testament or the Magna Carta. Not many progressives knew that the commitments of China, India and Russia as compared to those of the United States were practically worthless, as they only mandated smaller cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, not by 2025, as was required for the United States and numerous other Western nations.
There were also voluntary payments developed nations were supposed to make to developing nations of up to $100 billion by 2020. But the truth of it was that the U.S. would have borne the brunt of the Accords’ economic pain via required plant closures, factory conversions, obligatory efficiency improvements and cuts in pollution levels.
In fact, the U.S.’s greenhouse gas output today is roughly half that of China’s, but that didn’t matter to the world at large. No, they said, China is a developing country, and its economy was too fragile to make such a sharp U-turn at the moment on environmental issues. The same situation in theory held true for India, despite the fact that both of these countries are some of the most toxic, polluted places on Earth, where one must actually wear a breathing mask to simply respire on many days of the year in cities such as Beijing.
Indeed, it could be fairly argued that lack of environmental regulation was largely responsible for the “miraculous” economic growth China experienced in the 1990s and 2000s, which even conservative analysts pegged at an average of 10 percent per year.
It’s quite fair to say that if the U.S.’s hands were as untied as China’s when it comes to environmental regulation (and were our leaders willing to sacrifice the respiratory health of our children in our biggest cities) that we, too, could experience some of the heady runaway growth that the Middle Kingdom has reaped.
Because the Communist government has ignored the health of its inhabitants and the pollution of its cities for so long, it’s essentially mortgaged the country’s present for the hope of a glorious future. With the Paris Accords, the country would have had another five years of a free ride on the train to world domination of global markets and trade.
India, which some analysts say is just starting to get to a point where China stood at the beginning of the 1990s, would also get a free pass. Countries like the U.S. would have to eviscerate their own industrial growth engines to satisfy the will of world leaders (mostly European) in pursuit of goals that scientists say still could not be accurately measured, even if every nation that signed the Paris Accords followed its dictates to the letter.
It’s for exactly these reasons that President Trump is 100 percent justified in removing the United States from this cumbersome treaty, which is essentially the product of globalists — many of whom (like former Vice President Al Gore) have significant investments in alternative energy companies.
Could this be why so many European and other world leaders were so quick to castigate Trump when he announced the U.S. pullout? Is this why so many press organizations blasted the Trump administration and viciously condemned it on social media?
Of course, the economic disadvantage to America is not the only reason why Trump pulled out of the agreement. The reality of the issue is that many of the “facts” the average American citizen can cite about environmental conditions are just plain wrong. Viewers of Al Gore’s overemotional film “An Inconvenient Truth” or its just-released companion piece “An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power” might believe that ice in the Arctic and Antarctic Seas is shrinking — that sea levels around the world are rising — that the cute polar bears they saw in those movies and in assorted YouTube clips are dying and that global temperatures are warming at an accelerated rate.
The truth, however, is that NONE of those things is true. First of all, the critical phenomenon in question, which for years was mislabeled by scientists, is no longer called “global warming.” It’s now referred to by the much broader and vaguer moniker of “climate change.” The reason for this is that for the last 18 years, global surface temperatures have not been rising; some places in the world such as Australia and Indonesia have been getting hotter, but others, such as Chicago and Antarctica, have actually been getting colder.
Have you noticed harsher winters where you live? Certainly, in New York City in 2016, there were record snowfalls, and in Boston in 2015, residents of that metropolitan area experienced record snow accumulations of up to nine feet over the course of the winter, a far cry from the tropical temperatures once predicted for that region as soon as the year 2400. But in fact, the idea that it will stop snowing in New England, New York and any of the northern United States anytime soon is absolutely ludicrous; if one thinks they could earn a fortune by building tropical beach bungalows on the coast of Maine, they might want to have another look at temperature reports.
It’s true that there have been variations in temperature throughout the world, but the fact of the matter is that there always have been. The idea that this year or that year will be the “hottest year on record” has very little to do with global warming and more to do with natural weather processes such as El Niño, which is cyclical. It’s been predicted by many scientists on both sides of the climate change debate that 2017 will NOT be “the hottest year on record,” unlike 2016, 2015 and 2014 because of atmospheric conditions such as this.
In fact, the era of “the hottest year on record” may be over completely for some time, according to some researchers. This is due to El Niño, La Niña (which is the opposite of El Niño, cooling the air instead of warming it) and a few other environmental factors.
Contrasting with the notions of progressive student “snowflakes” in colleges across the country, the total population of polar bears in the world has been increasing, not declining. There are now 25,000 polar bears estimated to be roaming the Arctic — at least four times the population that was thought by scientists to exist in the 1970s.
As for sea ice in the Arctic, recent data from NASA has shown that the amount of area covered by the material remains stable; it hasn’t shrunk in the last year and is not predicted to anytime soon. In the Antarctic, NASA has reported that sea ice has actually expanded, rather than shrunk, dampening the enthusiasm of many solar energy and wind farm investors. It was reported recently that all of the routes taken by Antarctic explorers from more than 100 years ago, such as Ernest Shackleton and Robert Falcon Scott, are completely intact; their extent and topography hasn’t changed at all since those intrepid adventurers first set foot on the continent in the early 1900s.
Recently, on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight program, Mayor of Miami Beach Philip Levine was caught stammering about rising sea levels flooding parts of his coastline and threatening other coastal cities of the world. He lay the blame squarely at President Trump’s feet, despite host Carlson asking him over and over again exactly what was in the Paris Accords that could have been responsible for this catastrophe.
Levine could not answer Carlson’s specific questions — not just once, but an astounding three times, proving that for many politicians, this issue is closer to a medieval religion than a science — complete with its own catechism, followers and heretics that obviously must be burnt at the stake. What Levine apparently doesn’t know is that sea levels have been rising continuously for the last 20,000 years, and no amount of fluctuation in the Arctic or Antarctic — in either direction — is going to change that.
What Levine and numerous other politicians are ignoring is that for many scientists, climate change has been a chief source of research funding for some time now. If these scientists cry out “Emergency!”, they often receive copious grants from their universities, corporations or state and federal sponsors. If they say nothing is wrong, most of them get the equivalent in funds — nothing. Which is the more attractive option?
In the 1970s, there was a scare about “global cooling” that for a spell had people worried about an impending “ice age.” People rushed to make investments and write articles about this supposedly imminent fate the planet was doomed to, only for fears to rapidly evaporate like dry ice in water.
For the better part of 15 years, we’ve been hearing terrible predictions for our planet. But the fact of the matter is that the Earth has been both hotter and colder than it is today (scientists recently discovered evidence of palm trees in the Antarctic from 50 million years ago), and life on Earth has still survived.
It’s true that some species have disappeared in the past, and new animals and plants have taken their place. But even if “climate change” is as catastrophic as the doomsayers project, we will not be around to experience it, nor will our children (or their children) be. With so much contradictory evidence, it’s impossible to say with any authority whatsoever what weather conditions will be like in another 100 years — or even 25.
This is not to say that pollution of the planet isn’t a problem or isn’t unhealthy for citizens of countries like China and the U.S. But these quandaries likely have to be taken up by governments of the countries themselves rather than by blocs of nations ganging up on individual states like bunches of masked robbers.
