As COVID Hysteria Fades, Climate Hysteria Rises

Written by Robert Knight

Run for your lives. Again.

The U.N. has issued yet another global warming report that essentially says we’re doomed unless we revert to mud huts, subsistence farming, veganism and rickshaws.

In fact, we may be doomed anyway, even if we drive all our gasoline-powered Fords into the ocean and walk home.

The latest panic comes courtesy of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which issued a voluminous report on Monday warning us that it’s all over but the crying. We haven’t seen this much panic since COVID-19 was concocted in China and used to justify government overreach and shocking suppression of civil liberties.

Predicted weather catastrophes have little to do with nature’s cycles or sun activity, the U.N. says. It’s our fault. Humans have selfishly exploited fossil fuels to give ourselves indoor plumbing, electricity, cars, modern medicine and dentistry, air conditioning, prosperity, higher life expectancy, the internet, space exploration and Kelly Clarkson livestreaming from Japan.

More importantly, billions of people have been lifted from poverty the world over because of plentiful, cheap fossil fuels such as oil, natural gas and coal. But that must end, we’re told, along with carbon dioxide emissions. That’s the stuff we breathe out that helps plants grow.

Despite dramatically increased CO2 levels, the atmosphere cooled slightly from 1950 to 1985 and again slightly from 1997 to 2015. This is not contested by scientists on either side, notes James T. Moodey, who owned a Weights and Measures gas-physics test and repair facility.

A condensed version of Mr. Moodey’s paper “Three Proofs Carbon Dioxide Causes No Warming in the Atmosphere — No Gas Causes Warming” can be found in his book “The Ladder Out of Poverty.”

He used data and experiments, not theory or computer models, to test the idea that CO2 causes atmospheric warming.

“The simplest of our three proofs is easy to comprehend,” he wrote. “We tested carbon dioxide’s ability to retain heat. It cools 22 degrees in 3 minutes and 45 seconds. It cannot possibly retain heat from day to day.”

But forget this and listen to The Washington Post’s dire summary: “Human activities have already transformed the planet at a pace and scale unmatched in recorded history, the IPCC said, causing irreversible damage to communities and ecosystems. Yet global emissions continue to rise, and current carbon-cutting efforts are wildly insufficient to ward off climate catastrophe.”

In other words, if we don’t do whatever former Vice President Al Gore (net worth $300 million) wants us to do in the next 10 years, we are doomed.

“Climate disasters will become so extreme that people will not be able to adapt. Basic components of the Earth system will be fundamentally, irrevocably altered. Heat waves, famines and infectious diseases could claim millions of additional lives by century’s end,” Post reporter Sarah Kaplan wrote while clutching her heart.

So, even though windmills and solar panels can provide only a fraction of the energy we need, nations must “drastically transform their economies and immediately transition away from fossil fuels, according to one of the most definitive reports ever published about climate change” Ms. Kaplan scribbled before fainting into Mr. Gore’s arms.

Not really. Mr. Gore was more likely sipping a mint julep in his 20-room energy-hog Tennessee mansion or jetting around the globe.

Speaking of the globe, if anyone is making it warmer via emissions, it’s China.

“Beijing is currently bringing more coal-fired power plants online just between now, and 2025 than the United States has in total,” Alex Newman wrote in The Epoch Times. Mr. Newman added that China has about half of the world’s coal power capacity and “already emits more than twice as much CO2 as the United States, according to the Global Carbon Project.” Meanwhile, China is spending a comparative pittance on alternative energy.

On March 10, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm praised China’s climate change efforts, saying, “I think China has done — has been very sensitive, and has actually invested a lot in their solutions, to achieve their goals. … We’re hopeful that, you know, we can all learn from what China is doing.”

Remember when Democrats emulated China’s COVID-19 lockdowns and vaccination mandates, and how well that went?

Meanwhile, we’re the ones who are supposed to “drastically transform” our fossil-fuel-powered market economy. So far, all this has done under President Biden is trigger pain at the pump and ruinous inflation.

As for Ms. Granholm, she’s a true believer in climate hysteria. She made a cameo appearance in a 2018 music video, “Gasoline, Gasoline (The World’s Aflame),” produced by Coltura, a leftist group backed by the Tides Foundation, whose sugar daddy is America-hating George Soros.

When he’s not spending $40 million to install crime-loving Democratic district attorneys in American cities, Mr. Soros is campaigning for the Great Reset, in which America goes socialist, abandons energy independence and is reduced to Third World status under global governance.

This mindset can be seen in the rhetoric pouring out of Davos, corporate America’s reckless embrace of ESG activism and the sudden collapse of “woke” institutions such as Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

Climate change may pose no real threat to our children’s future, but the same can’t be said for climate change hysteria.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.