"The UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe" [updated]

"A recent story on PBS NewsHour, 'UN says world must jointly tackle issues of climate change, pollution, biodiversity and land loss,' by Tammy Webber of the Associated Press (AP), reports on a new UN 'Global Environment Outlook' that repeats the false assertion that the Earth is nearing a global tipping point that can only be avoided through “unprecedented change” and trillions of dollars in new spending to phase out fossil fuels. These assertions are bogus, lacking any basis in data or observable evidence. In fact, the UN has a long track record of failed disaster predictions tied to climate change, going all the way back to 1989 ...

"A history lesson is in order. This is not the first time the UN has announced that 'we’re running out of time.' In 1989, 36 years of global warming ago, the UN Environment Programme’s Noel Brown told the Associated Press that 'entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels' if global warming was not reversed by the year 2000, predicting up to three feet of sea-level rise by then, massive coastal inundation of Bangladesh and Egypt, and a wave of 'eco-refugees.'

"More than three decades later, each of these predictions have proven, not just false, but wildly inaccurate. The 'Climate at a Glance' website’s 'Sea Level Rise' page documents long-term tide-gauge records and NASA satellite data showing global sea level rising at about 1.2 inches per decade, with, at best, a modest acceleration since the nineteenth century. Nor have we seen the millions of 'climate refugees' that the UN forecast. The Maldives are still above water, Bangladesh has more people than ever, and the “10-year window” to avert disaster has been rolled over so many times it could qualify as a wrecked vehicle.

"PBS/AP never mentions this failed track record. Nor does it acknowledge that the UN has now presided over 30 Conferences of the Parties (COPs) without changing the basic trajectory of global emissions or global temperature ...

"The entries at 'Climate at a Glance'’s on 'Deaths from Extreme Weather' and 'Temperature-Related Deaths' highlight a crucial fact PBS never mentions: over the past century, climate-related deaths have plummeted by more than 95 percent, even as global population has quadrupled and temperatures have risen. Independent analyses, such as HumanProgress’ review of disaster mortality, show climate-related deaths falling from about 485,000 per year in the 1920s to fewer than 20,000 per year in the 2010s, a drop of more than 99 percent on a per-capita basis, as seen in their graph below.

"Th[is] is not what 'running out of time' looks like.

"What the article and the UN report completely ignore is the role that affordable, reliable energy, overwhelmingly fossil fuels, has played in making human societies more resilient to environmental hazards. Mechanised agriculture, synthetic fertilisers, modern flood defences, air conditioning, and rapid disaster response all depend on dense, on-demand energy. That is why climate-related deaths as documented by 'Climate at a Glance' have collapsed over the past century. Yet the UN prescription, uncritically endorsed by PBS/AP, is to rapidly phase out the very energy sources that lifted billions from abject poverty, based on a track record of predictions that have repeatedly failed to materialize.

"'Climate Realism' has chronicled this pattern for years. 'UNFCCC Climate Report Lies About Its Own Science' points out how UN political bodies routinely make sweeping claims about 'intensifying destruction' that are not supported by the UN’s own scientific assessments, which identify little or no change in most types of extreme weather events and trends in natural disasters. In 'The IPCC’s 1990 Predictions Were Even Worse Than We Thought,' 'Climate Realism' reviews the early IPCC forecasts of rapid warming and sea-level rise and shows how they overshot reality. Despite this, every new report is marketed as the 'most comprehensive ever' and used to justify more urgent demands for unprecedented, wrenching, transformational remaking of the world’s economy and governing institutions.

"PBS/AP could have told its audience that the UN has now spent more than three decades issuing countdowns to catastrophe ...

"By omitting the long trail of failed UN climate pronouncements, ignoring the dramatic decline in climate-related deaths, and treating speculative model outputs as inevitable futures, PBS and the Associated Press badly mislead their audience concerning the true state of the Earth. A truly public-minded broadcaster would carefully scrutinise the UN’s record and available data rather than uncritically regurgitate its latest false alarm report."

~ Anthony Watts from his post 'Wrong Again PBS, UN Is Pushing Another False Climate Crisis Report'

UPDATE: Bjorn Lomborg writes in the New York Post:

"The main UN model shows that even if all rich countries were to cut their carbon emissions to zero, it would avert less than 0.2°F of projected warming by the end of the century, while imposing massive hits of up to 18% on rich-world GDP by 2050.

"The ever-increasing cost of climate policy is one reason the rich world is cutting back in many other areas, including aid to the world's poorest.

"That, in part, is why philanthropist Bill Gates has called for a strategic pivot on climate.

"He has laid out three tough truths: Climate change is serious but 'will not lead to humanity's demise'; temperature is not the best progress metric; and we should instead focus on boosting human welfare. [bold added; hat tip Gus Van Horn]

'Why Rising Disaster Costs Aren’t Proof of Climate Chaos'

"Following the news, one might get the impression that the increase in extreme weather events is an undeniable fact. The fact that the damage caused by natural disasters, measured in monetary terms, has increased significantly is often offered as proof of this. ...
    "However ... this is a little misleading. Of course, weather events such as hurricanes or floods caused by heavy precipitation are a major problem for a society experiencing them. However, it is misleading to attribute the associated material losses, which have increased over time, necessarily to climate change. 'There’s two separate issues in that. There’s the geophysical event, and then there’s the social impact ..., or the financial damage associated with these events, which increases over time. [This] is importantly linked to the state of the society as a whole ... how many houses are there ... or how many cars would be damaged by extreme weather conditions? What kind of property is there in those houses and cars that could potentially be destroyed? It is logical that if extreme weather destroys property in, say, the United States, the amount of property destroyed and hence the financial cost of the event would be significantly greater than in a poorer country. ...
    "If we ... take these things into account, can we say that extreme weather events have become more frequent, and more powerful and that the associated losses are increasing? 'If you adjust disaster losses or economic losses from these events for changes in inflation over time, changes in population and changes in wealth, the trend is minimised. There’s no trend afterwards,' [says Jessica Weinkle, Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington]. In fact, she adds, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) does not detect increasing trends in the types of extreme weather events that are the leading causes of disaster losses. 
    "But at the same time, Weinkle argues, it doesn’t even matter if climate change is causing slightly more heatwaves in some regions and a bit more rainfall in others. She says that linking problems to climate change does not help to create any practical solutions needed to deal with extreme weather events. [When we have flooding, for instance, ... it can be very bad. Very big. But there are all sorts of reasons for them because of the policy choices that we’ve had in the past ... So climate change makes it perhaps a bit wettter here, perhaps a bit hotter there. But the floods would be an issue still. They're not necessarily more of an issue because of the overall warming.] What would probably help best are practical steps, and the wealthier the society is, the easier it would be to take them."

~ Hannes Sarv from his article 'Why Rising Disaster Costs Aren’t Proof of Climate Chaos'

"The IPCC has clearly departed from its role as a scientific assessment and is now much more deeply engaged in political advocacy."

"So what is the political agenda of the [UN's] IPCC in-group? Transformational change.  
When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeIPCC released its Synthesis Report in March, it announced: '

Taking the right action now could result in the transformational change essential for a sustainable, equitable world.'

    "It would be easy to write this sentence off as containing consultant-like and empty buzzwords. But the notion of 'transformational change' has been widely employed ...

    "In its AR6 Working Group 3 report the IPCC explains that transformation involves more than simply transitioning from one type of technology to another (emphasis added):

'While transitions involve ‘processes that shift development pathways and reorient energy, transport, urban and other subsystems’ ... transformation is the resulting ‘fundamental reorganisation of large-scale socio-economic systems’ ...'

    "[And in its AR6 Working Group 2 report, t]he IPCC discusses the importance of 'de-growth' [i.e., de-economic-growth] to its vision of transformation ... 'both voluntary and policy-induced' ...
    "[W]hy are [these political positions' being used to frame a scientific assessment? ...
    "The adoption of transformational change as an overriding political objective in the IPCC AR6 ... The IPCC – or to be more precise, influential elements of the IPCC – appears to have been captured by an in-group with shared political views related to climate. These views embrace concepts like de-growth and planetary boundaries and turn climate policy on its head such that ends become means.
    "Transformational change views climate policy as a lever through which to 'change everything'.... The IPCC has clearly departed from its role as a scientific assessment and is now much more deeply engaged in political advocacy."

~ Roger Pielke Jr., from his post 'The Political Agenda of the IPCC' [emphases in the original]

 

"Last Week’s Climate Report 'landed … with a gentle plop'"

"[American climate activist Bill] McKibben believes the reason the IPCC’s increasingly frantic climate warnings are being ignored is people don’t believe they can make a difference.

'The brutal truth [he claims] is that last week’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report didn’t have the effect it should have had, or that its authors clearly intended.... [I]t landed in the world with a gentle plop, not the resounding thud that’s required.
    'In China, the world’s biggest emitter, official attention was focused instead on Moscow, where Xi Jinping was off to do a little male bonding with fellow autocrat Vladimir Putin, incidentally the world’s second largest producer of hydrocarbons. In America, the historical emissions champ, we were riveted by the possibility that would-be autocrat Donald Trump might be indicted. In the New York Times, our planet’s closest thing to a paper of record, the IPCC report was the fourth story on the website.
    'The reason, [he concludes] is a disconnection between the dire words of the report and the actions most people feel they can effectively take.

"The problem is not the 'disconnection between the words of the report and the actions people feel they can take'. The problem is the disconnection between the IPCC and their credibility.
    "For more than 30 years we’ve been listening to the United Nations and other tax money guzzling organisations try to scare us with imaginary climate hobgoblins, ozone holes, acid rain, it’s a long list of utter nonsense."

~ Eric Worrall, from his post 'McKibben: Last Week’s Climate Report “landed … with a gentle plop”'

Scientists deliver final ‘final warning’ on 'climate crisis'

"UN climate warnings are like the village communist predicting the imminent demise of capitalism every week – and about as likely to happen.... 

    "In 2021 it was a 'Code Red for Humanity'...
    "2020 it was Yale’s turn to issue the ... ‘final warning’ on climate: ‘It’s all on us, here, now,’ says reviewer....
    "You can find final warnings and last chances stretching all the way back to 1989 if you can find them using one of our woke search engines:

U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked
PETER JAMES SPIELMANN June 30, 1989
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000....

"Before anyone tries to claim the 1989 claim was not a real UN warning, even Snopes's fact checkers admit this was a real UN warning;...
    "My only concern in this ridiculous charade, is for the naive younger people who take these warnings seriously, and feel distressed that older people are not acting, are not showing any sense of urgency about preventing the imminent end of the world.
    "But for some people at least, that distress doesn’t last forever. As you get older, you get wiser, at least in terms of learning how to judge the credibility of others. How many times can a rational person watch the UN and other alleged authority figures get it dead wrong, and still give unquestioning acceptance to their latest wild predictions of imminent disaster."

~ Eric Worrall, from his post 'IPCC Issues their Annual Final Climate Warning'

"How would we know if disasters are becoming more costly due to climate change?"

Source: Pielke 2018

"To show that disasters have become more costly because of human-caused climate change, several criteria must be met. First, there must be an actual increase in the costs of disasters. Second, there must be a detectable increase in either the frequency or intensity of weather events which are associated with the disasters. Such an increase must be on time scales of decades or longer. Third, the detected increase in frequency or intensity must be attributed to human causes, typically defined narrowly in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but other causes are also possible.

    "This framework of detection and attribution comes directly from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ...
    "[S]ome researchers have decided to abandon the IPCC framework of detection and attribution in favour of an alternative approach, called single-event attribution.... While such studies are intellectually interesting, they are also deeply problematic.... The abandonment of the IPCC framework for detection and attribution with respect to extreme events can also look like a political strategy ...
    "The rise of 'event attribution' studies offers science-like support to those focused on climate advocacy, but it is not clear that they offer much in the way of empirical rigour, particularly as compared to the IPCC detection and attribution framework."

~ Roger Pielke Jr, from his post 'How would we know if disasters are becoming more costly due to climate change?'