OPINION:
Climate change is such a powerful force that it may soon trigger a dramatic narrative shift. Over the past century and a half, the end-of-days tale spun by the climate Cassandras has alternated between global warming and global cooling.
A few presenters at this week’s climate gabfest in Belem, Brazil, presaged the possibility that it’s time once again to reverse the hype. The Nordic Council of Ministers set up a pavilion at COP30, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, to draw extra attention to the chilly, northern nations of Finland, Greenland, Norway and Sweden. They even found a way to make themselves the focus of worldwide concern.
They issued dire warnings about “the ocean’s conveyor belt ceasing to convey heat from the tropics to the north.” This refers to speculation about the collapse of a complex weather phenomenon known as the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation.
In simplified terms, toasty southern waters naturally flow northward, taming the winters in the highest latitudes. Without it, the far north would become so frigid that a miniature ice age would ensue. An August report in the journal Environmental Research Letters and a paper from Chinese researchers published last month in Nature explored the prospect.
The fine print in these publications acknowledges that the climatic implosion isn’t likely, but even a remote chance is enough for fundraising purposes. Nordic nongovernmental organizations wasted no time soliciting grants from climate-obsessed attendees at the confab while dispensing left-wing public policy nostrums as “climate solutions.”
“We definitely have a need to phase out fossil fuels because that’s the No. 1 driver of the crisis we’re in,” Johan Rockstrom, a Swedish scientist from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said at COP30 on Monday.
It’s also a great excuse to raise taxes. “We cannot magically have a transformation of the global economic paradigm. I think the first step is we need to start setting a price on carbon, and that also has to include nature … not only the carbon price in the energy system,” Mr. Rockstrom added.
Like all the ballyhooed environmental disaster scenarios, this one rests on opaque models and unrealistic assumptions, such as a quadrupling of global carbon dioxide output.
“This is circular reasoning guised as rigorous scientific ‘experiment,’ just like a lot of other climate ‘science.’ At the outset of the paper, they assume what they are trying to prove. That’s not science,” meteorologist Chris Martz wrote on X in response to the latest Nature claim.
As evidence, he offered four recent studies that arrived at the opposite conclusion, that the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation is more resilient than the fatalists suggest.
Sen. James M. Inhofe documented that the supposed universal agreement among scientists has blown hot and cold for more than 125 years. From 1895 to 1930, newspapers carried banner headlines about a coming ice age. This transitioned into a planetary melting scare from the 1930s to the 1960s, which cooled off in the 1960s and 1970s.
“This makes modern global warming the Fourth Estate’s fourth attempt to promote opposing climate change fears during the last 100 years,” the Oklahoma Republican said.
It’s a shame that he didn’t live to see Earth had reached a fifth “tipping point” that forces the climate charlatans to trade in their stale warming talking points for a fresh package of cooling cautions. Or maybe the “consensus” will decide another about-face would be too obvious. The public might catch on.
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