Category: Climate alarmism
Climate hucksters wrong again: Study claiming climate change would make you poorer retracted over major flaws
German climate alarmists claimed in a study published last year in the journal Nature that even if carbon dioxide emissions were radically cut down, so-called climate change would still drive the world economy toward a global GDP reduction of 19%.
The alarmists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research suggested further that not only would global annual climate-change damages hit $38 trillion by 2049, but that under a high-emissions scenario, global GDP would be lowered around 60% relative to the baseline in 75 years — an impact reportedly three times larger than previous estimates.
‘Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number. So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.’
According to the U.K.-based Carbon Brief, this was one of the most-cited climate papers by the media, including the Associated Press, CNN, Deutsche Welle, and Reuters.
Just the News highlighted that numerous activists and institutions also cited it, including Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (R.I.) and the World Bank.
The problem for the climate alarmists and those who believed them was that the study’s conclusions were bogus.
A team of American economists pointed out in a commentary published by Nature in August that “data anomalies arising from one country in [the German researchers’] underlying GDP dataset, Uzbekistan, substantially bias their predicted impacts of climate change.”
The economists revealed that if the questionable data pertaining to Uzbekistan were excluded, projected global losses in 2100 would be 23% as opposed to 60%, which is more in line with previous estimates.
RELATED: Al Gore wrong again: Study delivers good news for Arctic ice trends, bad news for climate hucksters
Photo by ALEX KENT/AFP via Getty Images
The economists noted further that the Germans underestimated “statistical uncertainty in their future projections of climate impacts.”
“Most people for the last decade have thought that a 20% reduction in 2100 was an insanely large number,” Solomon Hsiang, a Stanford University professor who co-authored the August commentary, told the New York Times. “So the fact that this paper is coming out saying 60% is off the chart.”
‘We have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger.’
The paper, which was originally published on April 17, 2024, was retracted on Wednesday.
The retraction notice indicates that “the results were found to be sensitive to the removal of one country, Uzbekistan, where inaccuracies were noted in the underlying economic data for the period 1995-1999.”
While the German alarmists attempted to correct the data for Uzbekistan and make other adjustments, they found that “these changes led to discrepancies in the estimates for climate damages by mid-century, with an increased uncertainty range (from 11-29% to 6-31%) and a lower probability of damages diverging across emission scenarios by 2050 (from 99% to 90%).”
In other words, the original conclusions hyped by the liberal media were worthless.
When the now-retracted paper was first published in April 2024, the German researchers made no secret of the point of the exercise: justifying societal and industrial upheaval coded as “adaptation.”
“Our analysis shows that climate change will cause massive economic damages within the next 25 years in almost all countries around the world, also in highly developed ones such as Germany, France, and the United States,” Leonie Wenz, lead scientist on the study, said in a release.
“These near-term damages are a result of our past emissions. We will need more adaptation efforts if we want to avoid at least some of them,” Wenz continued. “And we have to cut down our emissions drastically and immediately — if not, economic losses will become even bigger in the second half of the century, amounting to up to 60% on global average by 2100.”
Wenz and her team are hardly the first climate alarmists to have their conclusions proven to be as incorrect as they are outlandish.
Failed presidential candidate Al Gore, for instance, concern-mongered in 2009 that in addition to the significant rise in the global sea level that was supposed to happen “in the near future” but never did, the entire polar ice cap was likely going to be seasonally ice-free, perhaps by as early as 2014.
Gore told the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference that then-new research indicated there was “a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap during some of the summer months could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years.”
In September, a paper published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters revealed that Gore was dead wrong — that over the past 20 years, “Arctic sea ice loss has slowed considerably, with no statistically significant decline in September sea ice area since 2005.”
Rather than wait to be proven horribly wrong, Bill Gates — who has spent years fear-mongering about the calamities that would supposedly visit humanity unless governments neutralized certain industries and regulated into extinction certain behaviors — admitted in October that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
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Fire breaks out at UN climate alarmist conference reportedly plagued by flood, toilet, ‘inadequate air-conditioning’ problems
Over 50,000 climate alarmists from across the globe climbed aboard fuel-guzzling planes, boats, and automobiles and traveled to Belém, Brazil, this month to attend the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference.
On the second-last day of anti-American diatribes and globalist pearl-clutching over the supposed crisis that Bill Gates recently admitted “will not lead to humanity’s demise,” the conference went up in smoke, at least partly.
‘The world is watching Belem.’
Footage circulating online shows a hectic scene: of flames erupting in the pavilion area of the Hangar Convention and Fair Center of the Amazon, where nations and various NGOs had set up their public-facing stands; of security guards blowing whistles and shooing panicked delegates and observers away; and of some individuals attempting to extinguish the growing inferno as it ate a hole in the roof.
One person in the office of the summit presidency confirmed that the blaze had been contained within about 30 minutes, the New York Times noted.
“Firefighters and security teams responded promptly and continue to monitor the site,” Cop30 organizers said in a statement obtained by Le Monde.
It’s presently unclear what started the fire. No injuries have been reported.
RELATED: Bill Gates does stunning about-face on climate ‘doomsday’ claims: ‘This view is wrong’
Photo by PABLO PORCIUNCULA/AFP via Getty Images
The fire proved to be the latest of several issues affecting the conference.
For instance, torrential rainfall at the outset of the conference flooded the entrances to the venue and left certain meeting areas soaked. There were reportedly also complaints of non-functional restrooms and oppressive heat.
In addition to complaining about “inadequate air-conditioning in venue areas” and the “poor condition of the delegation offices provided,” Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, whined in a Nov. 12 letter to Andre Correa do Lago, the president of COP30, that the conference’s security was substandard. According to Stiell, hundreds of protesters had damaged property and injured staffers.
COP30 was embroiled in scandal even before it began as the result of the local government’s decision to cut a four-lane highway through tens of thousands of acres of protected Amazon rainforest to ensure that COP30’s participants would enjoy easy motorized transit in and out of the hosting city.
Hours before the fire began, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres urged negotiators to reach an “ambitious compromise” on an anti-fossil-fuel agenda, stating, “The world is watching Belem.”
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Report: Foreign Charities Have Pumped $2 Billion Into U.S.-Based Leftist Groups
‘Congress needs to address these serious shortfalls in our laws to protect American interests and keep foreign influence out of our politics.’
Bill Gates does stunning about-face on climate ‘doomsday’ claims: ‘This view is wrong’
Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates alleged in a 2021 work of climate alarmist agitprop that if humanity failed to eliminate so-called greenhouse gas emissions, “climate change will keep getting worse, and the impact on humans will in all likelihood be catastrophic.”
In addition to championing a radical upheaval of modern life — advocating for major changes to the way people travel, grow their food, and manufacture goods — in the interest of staving off some prophesied disaster, the billionaire backed the development of an aerosol technology that would dim the sun and trigger a global cooling effect.
‘Using more energy is a good thing.’
After spending years fear-mongering about the calamities that would supposedly visit humanity unless governments kneecapped certain industries, regulated into extinction certain behaviors, and redistributed wealth to the right places, Gates has acknowledged that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise.”
In a Monday memo titled “Three tough truths about climate,” Gates rejected the “doomsday view of climate change that goes like this: In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us — just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.”
“Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong,” Gates wrote just weeks ahead of the 2025 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Brazil, where participants will enjoy easy access to the venue thanks to the government’s decision to flatten over 8 miles of rainforest.
Gates suggested that if the world takes “moderate action” to curb climate change — doing what it’s presently doing or just slightly more — the Earth’s average temperature 75 years from now will be only 2-3 degrees higher than it was in 1850.
RELATED: Al Gore wrong again: Study delivers good news for Arctic ice trends, bad news for climate hucksters
Photo by BAY ISMOYO/AFP via Getty Images
During a 2021 online Harvard Science Book Talk, Gates spoke of dying corals, acidifying oceans, forest fires, and disappearing beaches. He further claimed that unless various changes in global practices were undertaken, “It’s going to be essentially unlivable at the Equator by the end of the century.”
He has since adopted a more optimistic outlook, suggesting that warming might make Iowa eventually feel more like Texas, and Texas more like northern Mexico, and that life in countries near the equator may require governments “to invest in cooling centers and better early warning systems for extreme heat and weather events” — but that “people will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future.”
In addition to admitting that climate doomsday isn’t coming and that the global temperature that radicals frequently cite as a metric for universal well-being “doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of people’s lives,” the billionaire stated that “using more energy is a good thing,” as “more energy use is a key part of prosperity.”
Gates indicated that his newfound optimism about so-called climate change is the result, in part, of recent policy changes, innovation-driven emission cuts, and corresponding readjustments in emissions projections, but his change in tune appears to primarily come down to priorities.
“The doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world,” Gates wrote, stressing later in the document that “the biggest problems are poverty and disease, just as they always have been.”
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