Image: cartoonsbyjosh.co.uk
President Joe Biden was out on the stump making an Earth Day speech in Virginia on April 22, and as Fox News reports he was blaming humans for climate change, and the “devastating toll,” he claimed it was wreaking across the nation. He also said anyone who denies this is endangering peoples’ lives. Biden is wrong. Data refutes claims that the weather extremes are worsening amid the modest warming of the past half century. Also those who “believe the science,” as Democrats constantly admonish people to do, know this fact and are trying to prevent climate policies that pose a bigger threat to human welfare than climate change itself.
The Fox News article, “Biden warns climate change deniers are ‘condemning’ Americans to ‘dangerous future’ during Earth Day event,” quotes Biden saying:
But folks, despite the overwhelming devastation in red and blue states, there’s still those who deny climate is in crisis. My MAGA Republican friends don’t seem to think it’s a crisis ….I’m not going to go into it now, but I’m not making it up. It’s real. Just listen to what they say. Anyone in or out of government who willfully denies the impacts of climate change is condemning the American people to a very dangerous future, and the world, I might add.
Biden’s mistargeted harangue came shortly after he went through a litany of recent damaging extreme-weather events which he blamed on climate change, including recent wildfires, hurricanes, and floods.
However, a single year’s weather is not climate, which is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as a 30-year trend in weather for a location. And, as discussed in numerous Climate Realism posts, data shows no increasing trend of hurricanes, wildfires, or floods. Nor is there evidence that any of these three types of natural disasters have become more severe or stronger amid the recent slight warming. In fact, what the data for hurricanes shows that there has been a modest decline in tropical cyclone frequency during the recent period of warming and significant decline in global wildfires. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent assessment report confirms these facts. That’s the science. Biden should believe it.
The President evidently fails to grasp the fact that because climate change isn’t making severe weather more frequent or more powerful, it can’t be causing more harm to people.
Indeed, the data clearly show that fewer people are dying as a result of extreme weather events or extreme temperatures than at any time in history—deaths have declined dramatically even as the Earth has modestly warmed.
While the harm from climate change is declining, by comparison Biden’s climate policies are wreaking havoc with the U.S. economy and peoples lives, jacking up food and energy prices and making it hard for average American’s to get by.
Biden’s pointing his finger at climate realists, who try to publicize these facts, shows him to be nothing more than a befuddled shill for his misguided, tremendously expensive climate policies, pandering to the radical progressive wing of his party, who want to end capitalism and America’s constitutional republic in favor of an oligarchy or kleptocracy, run by political elites. If Biden can’t speak accurately concerning what the science actually shows about climate change, perhaps he should, in the words of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, “remain silent.”