JASON ISAAC: The U.N.’s Crusade Against Misinformation Is Pure Climate Hypocrisy

The United Nations is preparing for its 28th climate change conference in Dubai, where world leaders will disembark from their gas-guzzling private jets to spout climate misinformation while touting the U.N.’s China-led agriculture group who lecture people to eat bugs.

They needn’t go all that way — the source of all that misinformation is right there in their bathroom mirrors. 

“There is no way we can fight climate change if we ignore the truth,” said Secretary-General António Guterres at United Nations headquarters in a recent press conference. But according to current climate science, the U.N. and its climate cartel are the ones pushing the fake news.

While the United Nations is considered the leading authority on climate change, its zealous PR efforts are a shameful abuse of science. In the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest 3,068-page report, researchers meticulously noted scientific uncertainties and potential weaknesses in the climate trends they analyzed. But the media ignored all those nuances and confounding variables — through no fault of their own. The media and policy summaries provided by the UN completely ignored findings that undermined their narrative. In many cases, they directly contradicted them.

In fact, a new study out of Norway found that climate alarmism isn’t just a misunderstanding of the science — it’s a complete falsehood. Analyzing 420,000 years of historical weather data, researchers write, “the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.” In fact, each of the four previous “interglacial periods,” which are periods of warmer average temperatures spanning 10-15,000 years, were considerably warmer than today.

Climate change poses little threat to humanity or to the ecosystems around us. While temperatures have risen slightly, human resilience has dramatically improved. You and I are 99 percent less likely to die in a severe weather event than our great grandparents were. In 1920, climate-related disasters killed almost 500,000 people every year. Today, even though the world’s population has quadrupled, around 15,000 people die from climate-related disasters. Just 0.02 percent of the world’s deaths occur at the hands of the climate. 

Interestingly, our resilience to climate-related weather events is growing at a faster rate than resilience to non-climate disasters like earthquakes and volcanoes. It’s clear the weather isn’t the culprit here.

Some environmentalists of the Malthusian depopulation wing care about the fate of the planet — as if a non-sentient ball of rock and molten metal is concerned for its future — yet here the news is also good. Studies have shown that mild increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide lead to “global greening,” stimulating plant growth and nourishing ecosystems. Climate change may actually be a good thing for the environment and for us. 

Let’s face it, even if the entire world worked together to stop climate change, frankly, we couldn’t. For example, eliminating all manmade greenhouse gas emissions nationwide would lower global average temperatures by a tiny fraction of a degree while plunging our communities back into the Dark Ages. (That’s if you trust the UN’s iffy data models, which have overestimated warming every time.) 

Even the global Paris Agreement would lower the temperature by at most 0.17 degrees — and that’s in the highly implausible scenario that every participating country suddenly decides to meet its pledges through the end of the century. Right now, zero countries are complying with the Paris Agreement, including France.

There’s a reason for this, and it’s not political inconvenience or lack of concern for the environment. It’s that access to affordable, reliable energy is essential to human flourishing. We couldn’t get to work, educate our children, access modern medicine, use the Internet, or maintain comfortable and safe homes without it. 

Instead of phony climate fights that will send trillions to China, tank industrialized economies, and ruin lives, our world leaders should focus instead on projects that improves the lives of those they serve. Ironically, one of the best ways they could do this is turning tail and proudly supporting fossil fuels and nuclear energy. Nothing fights poverty, kickstarts economies, improves health, and benefits human lives like access to affordable, reliable energy.

Instead of apologizing for needing fossil fuels while submitting to a massive transfer of wealth from America to China, we should boldly expand our oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear industries to continue eradicating poverty and promoting human flourishing here and around the world.

The Honorable Jason Isaac is CEO of the American Energy Institute and Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. He previously served four terms in the Texas House of Representatives.