Climate Hype From Newsweek

Sharon Begley has a bizarre article in this week's Newsweek. Amidst its hysteria, it simply can not help contradicting itself. This is the opening of the second paragraph:

Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the U.S. alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. 

This is tucked in paragraph six:

Scientists disagree about whether climate change will bring more intense or frequent tornadoes...

So, the evidence from the last year regarding tornado frequency means nothing. If that's the case, why would anyone have trouble dismissing it?

Nevertheless, climate change is here, and we are not ready for it! And, you know whose fault that is:

The game of catch-up will have to happen quickly because so much time was lost to inaction. “The Bush administration was a disaster, but the Obama administration has accomplished next to nothing either, in part because a significant part of the Democratic Party is inclined to balk on this issue as well,” says economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. “We [are] past the tipping point.” The idea of adapting to climate change was once a taboo subject. Scientists and activists feared that focusing on coping would diminish efforts to reduce carbon emissions. On the opposite side of the divide, climate-change deniers argued that since global warming is a “hoax,” there was no need to figure out how to adapt. “Climate-change adaptation was a nonstarter,” says Vicki Arroyo, executive director of the Georgetown Climate Center. “If you wanted to talk about that, you would have had to talk about climate change itself, which the Bush administration didn’t want to do.” In fact, President Bush killed what author Mark Hertsgaard in his 2011 book, Hot, calls “a key adaptation tool,” the National Climate Assessment, an analysis of the vulnerabilities in regions of the U.S. and ideas for coping with them. The legacy of that: state efforts are spotty and local action is practically nonexistent. “There are no true adaptation experts in the federal government, let alone states or cities,” says Arroyo. “They’ve just been commandeered from other departments.”

The rookies will struggle to comprehend the complex impacts of climate change.

I guess we're screwed. But, then I read this (emphasis added):

“You can no longer say that the climate of the future is going to be like the climate of today, let alone yesterday,” says Judi Greenwald, vice president of innovative solutions at the Pew Center on Global Climate Change. “In all of the plausible climate scenarios, we are going to have to change the way we do things in ways we can’t even predict.”

If that's the case, maybe we're not so far behind in our planning of how to adapt to climate change, since it's not predictable? Maybe it's a good thing that "local action is practically nonexistent"? Throwing resources into a course of action we won't need based on a faulty prediction seems foolish. A wait-and-see approach might be more sound. Also, the climate is always changing. Therefore, Greenwald's claim that we can no longer say the future will be like the past is not particularly interesting. People have always had to adapt to changing climates, and we would regardless of CO2 emissions. Alarmists insist the climate is changing but simply will not acknowledge that it is ALWAYS changing. It is NEVER static. Apparently mindful of this point, Begley writes this:

From these and other extreme-weather events, one lesson is sinking in with terrifying certainty. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven’t seen anything yet. And we are not prepared.

What is a "stable climate"? Is Begley acknowledging climate always changes, so she's added another layer by arguing there are "stable" climates and unstable climates, and we are entering the latter? Is that how to resolve the paradox of continual climate change? Sorry, no sale. I would love for someone to explain to me what a changing, but stable climate is, and how that is different from a changing & unstable climate. I have a feeling there is no meaningful distinction.

The bottom line is that the climate is always changing, and it would be changing right now if humans never emitted a single molecule of carbon dioxide. Furthermore, we would have to adapt to the changing climate - something humans have always done. Finally, climate change is unpredictable, so overly preparing for adaptations you might not need is a waste of resources.

There is no crisis here. Begley's argument that we're moving from a stable to an unstable climate is a false distinction designed to hype a crisis.