Is There Really a Climate Emergency? - YouTube

Hubris is a Greek word that  means dangerously overconfident.  

Based on my research, hubris fairly describes our  current response to the issue of climate change.

Here’s what many people believe:

One: The planet is warming catastrophically  because of certain human behaviors. 

Two: Thanks to powerful computers we can  project what the climate will be like  

20, 40, or even 100 years from now.

Three: That if we eliminate just one behavior,  

the burning of fossil fuels, we can prevent  the climate from changing for as long we like.

Each of these presumptions—together, the basis  of our hubris regarding the changing climate—is  

either untrue or so far off  the mark as to be useless. 

Yes, it’s true that the globe is warming, and that  humans are exerting a warming influence upon it.  

But beyond that, to paraphrase  a line from the classic movie  

The Princess Bride, “I do not think ‘The  Science’ says what you think it says.” 

For example, government reports state  clearly that heat waves in the US  

are now no more common than they were in 1900.

Hurricane activity is no different  than it was a century ago.

Floods have not increased across the  globe over more than seventy years.

Greenland’s ice sheet isn’t shrinking any  more rapidly today than it was 80 years ago. 

Why aren’t these reassuring facts better known?

Because the public gets its climate  information almost exclusively from the media. 

And from a media perspective, fear sells. 

“Things aren’t that bad” doesn’t sell.

Very few people, and that includes  journalists who report on climate news,  

read the actual science. I have. And  what the data—the hard science—from  

the US government and UN Climate reports  say is that… “things aren’t that bad.”

Nor does the public understand the  questionable basis of all catastrophic  

climate change projections: computer modeling. 

Projecting future climate is excruciatingly  difficult. Yes, there are human influences,  

but the climate is complex. Anyone who  says that climate models are “just physics”  

either doesn’t understand them or  is being deliberately misleading.  

I should know: I wrote one of the first  textbooks on computer modeling.   

While modelers base their assumptions upon both  fundamental physical laws and observations of  

the climate, there is still considerable  judgment involved. And since different  

modelers will make different assumptions,  results vary widely among different models. 

Let’s just take one simple,  but significant assumption  

modelers must make: the impact  of clouds on the climate. 

Natural fluctuations in the height and coverage of  clouds have at least as much of an impact on the  

flows of sunlight and heat as do human influences.  But how can we possibly know global cloud coverage  

say 10, let alone 50 years from now? Obviously, we  can’t. But to create a climate model, we have to  

make assumptions. That’s a pretty shaky foundation  on which to transform the world’s economy.

By the way, creating more accurate  models isn’t getting any easier.  

In fact, the more we learn about the climate  system, the more we realize how complex it is.

Rather than admit this complexity, the media,  the politicians, and a good portion of the climate  

science community attribute every terrible storm,  every flood, every major fire to “climate change.”  

Yes, we’ve always had these weather  events in the past, the narrative goes,  

but somehow “climate change”  is making everything “worse.” 

Even if that were true,  isn’t the relevant question,  

how much worse? Not to mention that  “worse” is not exactly a scientific term. 

And how would we make it better?

For the alarmists, that’s easy:  we get rid of fossil fuels.

Not only is this impractical—we get over 80%  of the world’s energy from fossil fuels—it’s  

not scientifically possible. That’s because  CO2 doesn’t disappear from the atmosphere  

in a few days like, say, smog. It  hangs around for a really long time. 

About 60 percent of any CO2 that we emit  today will remain in the atmosphere 20  

years from now, between 30 and 55 percent  will still be there after a century,  

and between 15 and 30 percent will  remain after one thousand years.

In other words, it takes centuries for the excess  carbon dioxide to vanish from the atmosphere.  

So, any partial reductions in CO2 emissions would  only slow the increase in human influences—not  

prevent it, let alone reverse it. 

CO2 is not a knob that we can just turn down  to fix everything. We don’t have that ability.  

To think that we do is… hubris. 

Hubris leads to bad decisions. 

A little humility and a little  knowledge would lead to better ones. 

I’m Steve Koonin, former Undersecretary  for Science in the Obama Administration,  

and author of Unsettled: What  Climate Science Tells Us,  

What It Doesn't, and Why It  Matters, for Prager University.