This time of year, it’s not unusual for parents of younger elementary school kids to start having discussions of when their son or daughter will get wise to the reality of Santa Claus. At some point, one parent may say to another, “How old were you when you quit believing?”
That brings me to the same question, different myth. How old were you when you quit believing in man-made climate change? Or man-made global warming? Or man-made global cooling?
Before going any further, since we do have our share of lib readers, I want to make one thing absolutely clear to them before the fake misinterpretations happen. Conservatives don’t dispute that the client shifts day to day. That’s called “the weather.” And we don’t dispute that the planet’s climate isn’t constantly evolving. We are not Ice Age deniers.
But when you come out every presidential cycle and predict the end of the world in the next ten years (conveniently the time it takes for a run-up campaign and two presidential terms), we’re skeptical. Not because we’re scientists or science experts. Rather, it’s because we are used to being lied to, and we know how that goes. The tip-off for us, usually, is when all of your climate solutions focus on raising taxes and increasing government restrictions on American citizens. Then later, when we see all this money going to NGOs and a whole “climate change” economy, it kinda feels like a massive grift.
So excuse us if we’re nonplussed when we see that the journal Nature has had to retract a 2024 study that sought to estimate the amount of harm global warming will do to the global economy in the decades to come. I mean, the very premise of the study already raises a red flag. Did the study seek to estimate actual climate impacts on the economy, and how do you do that? Or did it seek to estimate the impact climate alarmists would have on the global economy through their own push for increased regulation and higher taxes?
That’s like when people talk about how the pandemic impacted the economy, when in fact it was government’s overreaction to a novel cold virus that actually devastated the economy.
As for Nature, here’s what happened. Researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) contributed a paper to Nature, and it was published April 17, 2024 under the title “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change.” The paper projected the economic costs of climate change by the middle of this century by relying on historical temperature, precipitation and economic data.
On Dec. 3 of this year, not even two weeks ago, Nature officially announced the paper was retracted, because “post-publication reviews” found the results were so off-target that a simple correction of the paper’s errors wouldn’t suffice.
In other words, the paper was a joke, and once it saw the light of day, some smart people caught some glaring errors, and Nature couldn’t cover for it.
Hellbound and Down 