Don't Dive Into AOC's Empty Pool

Don’t Dive Into AOC’s Empty Pool
The View from the Middle

We have 11 years before entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed. Coastal flooding and crop failures will create an exodus of “eco-refugees” threatening political chaos. As the warming melts the polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations. Coastal regions will be inundated. One-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta will be flooded, cutting off its food supply. Shifting climate patterns will bring back the 1930’s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheat-lands, while the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in time.

Sounds pretty ominous, doesn’t it. This Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez really knows what she’s talking about. She’s not fear-mongering. These are FACTS, even though all of these FACTS will occur in the future. Sell everything and party hard, because the world looks like it’s going to end by 2030.

Wait just a minute. All of these predictions were not made by AOC. They were made by Noel Brown, the Director of the New York office of the U.N. Environmental Program or UNEP – in 1989. So, all of these apocalyptic events were supposed to happen by the year 2000. Let’s take a look at the accuracy of Mr. Brown’s predictions. The Maldives Islands are still there and have the same extremely low average elevation of six feet as they did in 1989. In fact, you can still play golf there at the Kuredu Golf Club where the only water hazards are the local pools and not flooding from Global Warming (sorry, Climate Change).

Bangladesh is still, well, Bangladesh, and I can’t find a single report of even one “eco-refugee” let alone the 23 million predicted by Mr. Brown. The Nile Delta in Egypt has not been flooded and their food supply has not been cut off, and a return of Dust Bowl conditions has not decimated the wheat-lands in the U.S. or Canada. None of Doctor Brown’s prophesies were realized by the year 2000 and have still not been borne out today – 30 years later. Not only have they not been fulfilled, there is zero evidence that there has been any headway at all towards these existential forecasts.

Do you remember in 2008 when Al Gore predicted that the polar ice caps would be gone in five years? That means they should have been gone by 2013. The problem for Al is, they’re still there and as large as ever (many argue they are bigger). Back in 2014 a group of science purists from the Journal of Nature Climate Change took a look at 117 of the latest predictions of the Climate Change community and found that 114 or 97.4% were wrong, overestimating global temperature changes. With that track record, is it OK for me to be a little skeptical about your future forecasts?

This all means nothing to AOC and the other climate fortune-tellers. They just restate the old predictions with a new end date. AOC now says the world will end in 2031 if we don’t reconstruct every building in America, eliminate all gas driven cars and planes and de-flatulate our country’s cows by then. There is more, of course. This is just the tip of the Green New Deal iceberg. Others have said that the earth will be uninhabitable by 2100, by which time they and we will all conveniently be dead. The fact checkers will have long forgotten this promise.

I have always agreed with the late Charles Krauthammer on this and described myself as a Climate Change agnostic. Climate (not weather) is such a complex system that it is impossible to predict. It’s OK to be skeptical, for as Niels Bohr, brilliant Danish Physicist of the early 20th century, said, “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”

Now, all of this is not to say that I am in favor of trashing our planet. I believe that God made us stewards of his world and as part of that responsibility we should conserve, preserve and recycle in order to take care of the planet He entrusted to us. Should we be exploring renewable sources of energy? Of course. To quote Thomas Edison, “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power. I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.”

Now, before you jump off the fatalistic, climate change ledge, here are some facts. Scientists now are saying that even if the U.S. was wiped off the face of the earth it would only change global temperatures by half of a degree in the next 100 years. And that's a forecast, not a fact. We could be fighting global cooling in the next 100 years for all we know. Mother Nature is impossible to predict and full of surprises. No one really knows what is going to happen in the next 100 years. Don’t fall for the snake oil selling, doomsday promising charlatans who promise utopia in the future if you just give them all of your money and freedoms today.

We have more than a hundred years of oil and coal left on this planet to utilize. We should be working hard to develop solar and other forms of energy right now, but those sources are not adequate to satisfy our needs today. It is impossible to just turn off the spicket of our current energy sources. Total renewable energy sources only supply 11% of our total energy requirements and that is dominated by hydro-electric and biofuels (ethanol). Solar only accounts for a little over 1% of our energy requirements today. How do we convert the sun’s awesome power into useable energy here on earth is a question that needs to be answered? And we will answer it. But we can’t jump off the high dive into an empty pool on the promise that it will be full of water before we hit bottom. And that is exactly what AOC and the other maniacal Climate Change fanatics are asking our country to do.