AP Images

Climate panic porn: UN Secretary-General António Guterres (speaking) claims that “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” He calls on youth protesters to “ratchet up the pressure” for more global controls.

 Fires, Hurricanes: Not Caused by Climate Change

Climate alarmists are shamefully exploiting fires, hurricanes, and other natural disasters to advance their global green agenda.

By William F. Jasper

They’re ba-a-a-ack! The Climate Calamity Cult is back in mega-fright mode, prepping us for the end of the world — unless we jettison all fossil fuels, give up meat, start eating bugs, and, in general, give the Earth Saviors at the United Nations and World Economic Forum total power over all aspects of our lives. September, as usual, was a big month for climate palavers at the UN headquarters in New York City, with the SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) Summit on September 18-19 and the UN Climate Ambition Summit on September 20. And those events were warmups for the grand event: The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference, which will convene from November 30 to December 12, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Also known as COP 28 (28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties), it will be the ultimate global shakedown event, demanding $2.5-$3 trillion per year from taxpayers in the developed world to fill the “financing gap” for achieving the UN’s SDGs in developing countries.

Convincing the taxpayers of the United States, European Union, and Japan to cough up that kind of loot requires a very serious scaremongering campaign. Thus the endless (and escalating) repetition of alarms about the supposed “climate crisis,” “climate breakdown,” “climate emergency,” “climate catastrophe,” and “climate apocalypse.”

At the September 2022 SDG Summit, UN Secretary-General António Guterres decried the “climate catastrophe” that had brought us to a “moment of great peril for our world.” “And we need to save our planet,” he wailed, “which is quite literally on fire. This means addressing the triple planetary crisis of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss and pollution.” So, he declared, “Governments need to invest like never before.”

UN Chief: “Global Boiling Has Arrived”

This year Guterres was back at it again with a heated vengeance. “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived,” he claimed during a speech at the UN on July 27.

The UN chief, a former president of the Socialist International, blamed human-caused CO₂ and greenhouse gases for the heat wave then affecting North America and northern Europe. “For scientists, it is unequivocal — humans are to blame,” Guterres said. “Climate change is here. It is terrifying, and it is just the beginning.” “The evidence is everywhere: Humanity has unleashed destruction,” he warned. “This must not inspire despair, but action,” he said.

Okay, but what kind of action? Well, the kind of action that empowers and enriches governments, corporations, NGOs, and IGOs (intergovernmental organizations, i.e., the UN, UNESCO, UNICEF, WHO, WTO, etc.), and lets their “experts” take control over our lives.

Britain’s King Charles, a longtime member of the Climate Panic Choir, has been doing his part. In June he joined London Mayor Sadiq Khan in launching the giant Climate Clock that is counting down until 2030, a year the climate cultists claim will bring irreversible, catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate — unless we bestow on them the powers and cash they demand. The Climate Clock is being broadcast for display on 150 giant screens across the U.K. as a constant propaganda feed. “The Climate Clock tells us what to do and by when,” a spokesperson for London Climate Week announced. “The Deadline and Lifelines on the Climate Clock make explicit the speed and scope of action that we must take to limit the worst climate impacts.”

Wildfires, Hurricanes, “Extreme Weather”

What about the deadly Maui wildfires in Hawaii in August? Weren’t they caused by global warming? To go by the claims of the political blatherskites and media jabberers, it would certainly seem that is the case. However, as usual, they got this one spectacularly wrong. On August 11, the Los Angeles Times rushed to blame political foot-dragging on climate action for the disaster. In a piece titled “If the Maui fires don’t wake up Americans to the climate emergency, nothing will,” Times culture columnist and critic Mary McNamara averred that the lesson of the Maui fires is “the one thing that unites us all: the need to lower human-made emissions before the Earth becomes uninhabitable.”

Days later, however, the Times had to eat crow and admit that it wasn’t climate that had caused the flaming fiasco after all; it was government (and private) neglect and incompetence. The Times, which regularly dispenses climate-alarmist bilge, nevertheless ran a series of articles that contradicted the earlier McNamara blame-climate-change column. Titles of the Times articles included: “Ignored warnings, hubris, slow response fueled America’s deadliest wildfire in a century,” “Maui County officials knew the fire risks, documents show,” “Chaos and terror: Failed communications left Maui residents trapped by fire. Scores died.” Turns out it wasn’t our gas-guzzling SUVs that caused the inferno in paradise. But much of the media are sticking with their anthropogenic (human-caused) global-warming narrative anyway. (For more on the Maui fires, see page 18.)

Climageddon countdown? Britain’s King Charles joins London Mayor Sadiq Khan on June 28, 2023, to launch the giant Climate Clock that is counting down until 2030, a year the climate cultists claim will bring irreversible, catastrophic consequences for the world’s climate — unless we give them massive powers. (AP Images)

But what about all the other wildfires ravaging large swaths of Canada, the United States, and Europe? “The media and climate activists are again weaponizing wildfires and linking them to climate change,” Climate Depot’s Marc Morano commented in June, as smoke from Canada’s fires was enveloping much of the northeast portion of the United States. “Wildfires, both globally and in Canada, have been declining significantly” in recent years, he noted. “Despite these facts,” he continued, “climate activists now want to use Canada’s wildfires as another excuse to take away even more of our freedoms and raise the price of electricity. Better forest management, cracking down on arson, and improved fire suppression practices are what is needed, not the Green New Deal.”

The data back Morano up. The Canadian National Fire Database (CNFD) for 2023 provides facts to dispute the idea that fires in Canada have increased due to climate. According to the CNFD, there has been a significant and continuing decline in the number of fires, and no discernible upward trend in the area burned.

Furthermore, Dr. Roger Pielke, Jr., a former chairman of the American Meteorological Society Committee on Weather Forecasting, points out that even the UN’s alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) “has not detected or attributed fire occurrence or area burned to human-caused climate change.”

Wildfire infernos make for dramatic TV coverage, but Dr. Bjørn Lomborg points out, “As for the amount of burned area due to fire on a global level, satellite data shows a dramatic decline over the past 25 years.”

Patrick Brown, a Ph.D. climate scientist, lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and co-director of the Climate and Energy Team at the Breakthrough Institute, has thrown more cold water on the wildfire climate-change story. He wrote an article published in The Free Press in which he reveals that he censored himself to get published in Nature,the prestigious (but highly biased) science journal.

His Free Press piece is titled, “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published.” It carries this subtitle: “I just got published in Nature because I stuck to a narrative I knew the editors would like. That’s not the way science should work.”

Dr. Brown says that he and his co-authors “focused narrowly on the influence of climate change on extreme wildfire behavior” even though “there are also other factors that can be just as or more important, such as poor forest management and the increasing number of people who start wildfires either accidentally or purposely. (A startling fact: over 80 percent of wildfires in the US are ignited by humans.)” However, he knew that including these factors would “decrease the odds that the paper would pass muster with Nature’s editors and reviewers.”

Dr. Brown is confirming what other scientists have been charging for years: The “science” journals have been commandeered by editors who demand propaganda, not science. Repeat the mantra: “climate change, climate change, climate change.”

Hurricanes Hilary and Idalia

Every year we hear more claims from the Al Gores of the world that hurricanes and tropical storms are growing in number and intensity. Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida and Georgia in August, and Tropical Storm Hilary, which hit California at about the same time, provided the excuses for an orgy of media fright-peddling about the coming climate apocalypse. Britain’s BBC, ever ready to push the climate panic button, found a University of California professor who proclaimed that Hilary was a 100-year event and the result of human-caused climate change.

Climate researcher Paul Homewood takes the BBC and other media outlets to task in a posting at Climate Depot titled “No, BBC, Hurricane Hilary Was Not Unprecedented.” Hilary did indeed drop a lot of rain on Southern California, but it was hardly the record-breaker BBC made it out to be. Homewood points out that hurricanes/tropical storms in 1926, 1939, and 1976 matched or exceeded Hilary’s precipitation. “Hilary is a very similar event to the 1939 tropical storm, El Cordonazo, which followed a similar path and dumped similar amounts of rain,” he notes. The BBC report made much, for instance, of the one-day total of 2.48 inches of rain that Hilary unleashed on Los Angeles. But the 1939 storm was much more devastating, dropping 5.24 inches on Los Angeles in 24 hours. Hurricane Kathleen dropped as much as 14.75 inches in Southern California’s mountains, far surpassing the 11+ inches from Hilary.

Hurricane Idalia was likewise heralded as “unprecedented.” This is “nonsense,” says Homewood, pointing out that it was “no different than dozens of other hurricanes” which have hit the United States in the past.” Idalia, a Category 3 hurricane, made landfall at 125 mph. “But that was nothing,” Homewood says, compared to the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane, which is “by far the strongest to hit the US.” That hurricane, a Category 5, came with winds of 185 mph.

Dr. Lomborg makes the point that “The annual number of hurricanes that make landfall in the U.S. since 1900 is slightly declining, not increasing.” And Dr. Pielke notes that even the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the UN’s IPCC (both of which are notoriously climate alarmist) both admit there is not sufficient data to link anthropogenic global warming to hurricane activity.

So, take a deep breath and relax. The Climate Apocalypse is not coming.

William F. Jasper

Senior editor William F. Jasper is an author/journalist/commentator/documentary producer with a well-earned reputation as one of America’s top investigative reporters, most renowned for his in-depth, years-long investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath. For more than three decades he served as an accredited correspondent at the United Nations in New York and UN summits around the world.

Published with permission of thenewamerican.com