With exquisite timing, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has seized the opportunity of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine to warn of impending doom – not from Putin’s putting Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert, but from countries failing to reduce their carbon emissions.
“Climate change is killing people,” said Helen Adams of Kings College London, who co-authored the UN’s latest climate report, released four days after Russian tanks backed by missiles and helicopter gunships opened fire on both Ukrainian soldiers and civilians. “Today’s IPCC report is an atlas of human suffering and a damning indictment of failed climate leadership,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement. “With fact upon fact, this report reveals how people and the planet are being clobbered by climate change.”
“The cumulative scientific evidence is unequivocal: Climate change is a threat to human well-being and planetary health,” says the UN report designed to advise world leaders, including the likes of Joe Biden, Vladimir Putin, and Xi Ji Ping, develop policies to address the impending climate catastrophe. Delaying cuts in what it assures us are “heat-trapping carbon emissions” and waiting for adapting to a warmer planet the report warns “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a livable and sustainable future for us all.”
As Putin’s forces unleash mayhem on Ukrainian cities and villages in the here and now, the UN report tells us that today’s children who survive to live in 2100 are going to experience four time more climate extremes than they do now even if temperatures edge up only a few tenths of a degree. Many of these climate impacts, the report says, “are potentially irreversible.”
Or maybe not.
“There is nothing to support the false claim that climate change is causing more, and ever more severe weather events over the course of the past 100 years,” says Wisconsin-based geochemist Bill Balgord, Ph. D. “Detailed analysis by natural disaster experts like Michael Pielke Jr. et al, documents that the occurrence of hurricanes, tornadoes, drought, floods, heat waves, sea-level rise, and many other adverse events are not increasing in frequency or intensity. What the UN is threatening us with does not stand up to scrutiny.”
John Kerry Weighs In
President Biden’s climate envoy, former Secretary of State John Kerry, has his own unique take on Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. In comments made on BBC Arabic a few hours before Putin’s troop rolled into Ukraine, Kerry said he was concerned about the “massive emissions consequences to the war, but equally important, you’re going to lose people’s focus. You’re going to lose, certainly, big country attention because they will be diverted, and I think it could have a damaging impact … And so, I hope President Putin will help us stay on track with respect to what we need to do about the climate.”
It takes a lot of money to invade a country, and the Biden administration has been bankrolling Russia and China by suppressing fossil-fuel production in the U.S., thereby driving up the global price of oil and natural gas to the benefit of oil and gas exporter Russia and to the benefit of China, which has a tight grip on the materials that go into the solar panels and wind turbines Biden is determined to force-feed the country.
However inane Kerry’s remarks may be, he and his fellow climate alarmists are right to be concerned about their ambitious plans to decarbonize energy sources. European governments are now eager to break free from their dependence on Putin’s Russia for their natural gas are planning to import more liquified natural gas (LNG) from the U.S. Qatar, and Australia, although these countries alone will not be able to make up the shortfall in Russian imports.
As a result, European governments are considering putting the phase-out of coal on hold and instead actually increasing the output of coal-fired power plants to reduce dependency on Russian gas. And for all of the subsidies they have lavished on renewable energy, they know better than to make themselves dependent on wind mills and solar panels. War has a way of concentrating the mind.
But don’t look for the Biden administration to break with climate orthodoxy; it is too tied to wealthy green donors and relishes the power it exercises by citing the climate as justification for telling people how to live their lives.