Climate change alarmists are using increasingly strident rhetoric and confrontational tactics in an effort to accelerate an end to the fossil fuel industry. The climate change alarmists believe that the disruptive methods of “civil disobedience” they employ are necessary in order to call attention to what they claim is an imminent existential threat to humanity caused by continued dependence on fossil fuels. These activists accuse the fossil fuel industry of profiting from the suffering of everyday people caused by fossil fuel emissions that are said to be wreaking havoc with the global climate. And they accuse government officials of complicity by not doing enough to force a very rapid transition to total reliance on renewable sources of clean energy, whatever the resulting huge costs and disastrous economic fallout turn out to be.
The doomsday prophesies are sounding more and more like a broken record. Take former Vice President Al Gore’s pronouncements, for example. In 2008, before teaming up with former President Barack Obama, Gore predicted an ice-free Arctic by 2013, which he pushed out a year further in his updated 2009 prophecy. President Biden’s climate czar John Kerry made a similarly dire prediction back in 2009, citing the projections of “scientists.” Gore and Kerry were way off the mark as usual.
According to data compiled by the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC), as of mid-July 2022 there is still plenty of sea ice in the Arctic – extending 3.25 million square miles. “The decline rate of the extent through the first half of July was near the 1981 to 2010 average,” NSIDC reported, adding that the sea ice extent on July 17th was the highest since 2015.
Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect in testimony before Congress, was quoted as saying back then to a reporter that the West Side Highway in New York City “will be under water” in twenty years. I live in Manhattan and can attest to the fact that the West Side Highway is still very much above water and in use in 2022.