Recently Phillip Muller, foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, published an op-ed commentary about climate change and the current state of affairs in his South Pacific islands. My heart goes out to Mr. Muller and the citizens of those islands; famine and disease are scourges that no population in the 21st century should have to suffer through, and I applaud the humanitarian aid provided by the U.S., Australia, and other countries and organizations to alleviate their hardship. However, the cause he assigns to this adversity — man-made climate change — perpetuates a myth that is diverting resources away from legitimate climate science and causing undue economic harm.
In the 1970’s, researchers and academicians were not reasonably observing any climate changes beyond those which were typical, though little understood. What they were observing was an inordinate disparity in the standard of living between developed countries and developing countries. There are two approaches to resolving this inequity; some may choose to work to raise the standard of living in developing countries through commercial investment, application of technology, or humanitarian aid. Many in academia, though, believed in the opposite approach — lowering the standard of living in the developed countries. Their justification for this was a belief that the developed countries were exploitive, that their consumption was excessive, that their use of energy and materials was wasteful, and that air and water pollution resulting from all of this excess was choking the life out of the planet.
There is no doubt that many pollutants are harmful to the affected ecosystems or populations, and industries, working together with government agencies, made tremendous strides in the ensuing decades to reduce harmful pollutants in the environment. However, because much of this improvement was coming about through better technology or processes, and not through reduced production or consumption, the academicians who wanted to lower the standard of living in developed countries were not achieving their goals; and so the fiction of man-made climate change was pushed to center stage.
Contrary to what the current administration and most of the mainstream media would have you believe, here are a few points to consider:
- sea levels began rising dramatically at the end of the last ice age about 15,000 years ago, but have slowed considerably in the last 7,000 years, essentially leveling off;
- there’s been no change in sea level along the U.S. Pacific Coast, and according to this paper by Professor Nils-Axel Mörner no change in sea level in the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, or at Tuvalu and Vanuatu in the Pacific Ocean;
- Arctic ice extent is at or above normal this year;
- models used to predict catastrophic man-made climate change just aren’t matching up with observations;
The current administration is determined to sustain this delusion though. Recently the National Research Council guided the development of the Next Generation Science Standards, and according to the new elementary school standards “Human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming).” In states where these standards are adopted, another generation of school children will be led to believe that man-made climate change is a fact, as sure as two plus two equals four.