U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright released a report challenging mainstream climate change claims, authored by five climate-skeptical experts. The report argues against the alarmist narratives surrounding greenhouse gas emissions, asserting that many extreme weather events do not show long-term trends and suggesting a downward trend in wildfires. This initiative aims to foster open debate in climate science, countering the prevailing consensus and encouraging scrutiny of established conclusions.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright delivers a speech during the Ceraweek energy conference in Houston in March. Wright, released A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate written by five experts with a history of climate skepticism.
On the first Earth Day 55 years ago — April 22, 1970 — warnings of pending environmental and climate disaster and human extinction flooded the globe. To help launch the first Earth Day, environmentalist Paul Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario: Between 1980 and 1989, some four billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the “Great Die-Off.”
For decades since 1970, green activists, scientists, politicians and their media helpers have continued to manipulate science to install their apocalyptic fears into the intellectual atmosphere. While most of the absurd 1970 claims were abandoned as the bogus science unravelled, one alarm continues to sound: climate change fuelled by greenhouse gas emissions posses an existential threat.
One of Ehrlich’s fear-mongering successors, U.S. environmentalist Bill McKibben, has in the past warned that “we now seem to be nearing tipping points past which truly cataclysmic damage would be inevitable.” More recently, however, McKibben has been warning that the climate scare movement may be tipping in the other direction. Writing in The New Yorker last year, McKibben sounded another alarm: “Is the fight against climate change losing momentum?” In the article, he said, “the signs of backsliding in recent weeks are particularly painful.”
The pain would have been even greater last week when President Donald Trump’s Energy Secretary, Chris Wright, released A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate. Written by five experts with a history of climate skepticism, the 150-page science report systematically counters many of the claims activists such as McKibben routinely deploy to fuel anti-carbon policy-making.
The draft report promises to trigger something that has long been missing from climate science, which is open, pointed and challengeable exploration — from all sides — of the scores of conclusions that are routinely taken for granted. The report’s five authors — known as The Climate Working Group — are Canadian environmental economist Ross McKitrick of Guelph University; Alabama University climatologist John Christy; former Georgia Tech earth sciences chair Judith Curry; Hoover Institution scientist Steven Koonin; and Alabama scientist Roy Spencer.
Together they take on and raise doubts about climate models, incomplete measurement techniques and exaggerations, along with specific hits on the headline-grabbing themes that follow weather patterns. “Most extreme weather events in the U.S. do not show long-term trends. Claims of increased frequency or intensity of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and droughts are not supported by U.S. historical data.” On wildfires, for example, the report cites evidence for a “downward trend.”