Alarmists Play Loose With Numbers

The worst crimes are the subtle throwaway lines that alarmists and journalists tuck onto their coverage of impending doom that give a completely mistaken impression about the future of the world, says Joakim Book.

• How significant is it that Amazon rainforest equal to 3 soccer fields is destroyed each minute?
• What about using Olympic swimming pools to gauge the amount of meltwater from Antarctica or Greenland?
• Global coal fired capacity fell by an awesome 0.14 percent for 'The First Time On Record'. Is this something to really get excited about? What about future plans in China and India?
• Are wildfires really worse in recent times?

Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon forest is huge. The area of the forest itself is the size of all US states west of the Mississippi (minus Alaska); from the Gulf to the Canadian border, the Pacific to the Mississippi, all covered in forest. When the scientific journal Nature has a headline that reads: 'deforestation rate is the greatest of the decade,' they're not lying. The BBC even trumped them a little by saying 'deforestation surges to a 12 year high' on unsuspecting readers. So, we can get the impression that Brazilian deforestation is really bad. ¹ Yet, what was deforested last year, was less than 0.3% of the Brazilian forest left standing. Now does it still sound like an incredibly vast amount? It didn't take long before BBC's science editor David Shukman brought up the familiar 'football field per minute' metric. The area deforested last year was around 1,552,320 standard British football fields, or over 4,000 of them each day, for just under 3 football fields a minute. Quickly, when we scale those minutes to hours and days, we get the impression that huge areas of this important forest is melting away faster than ice cream on a hot summer's day. The Amazon forest alone is some 5,500,000 km2 large, the potion within Brazil's borders some 4,000,000 km2. Does the less than 0.3% that was deforested last year, then, still sound like an incredibly vast amount? If we estimate that farmers and loggers deforest a similar amount in the next few years, and we ignore the potential runaway feedback processes for a minute, Brazilians have enough forest for 360 years. We know enough about economic development to know that Brazilians won't mindlessly deforest the Amazon for that long, reports Joakim Book. ¹ Yet, the picture the reader carries with them is one of runaway deforestation rather than a mild return to longer term trend.

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Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheet

The world of ice isn't much better. Here we don't employ the unhelpful and unscientific metric of football fields per minute, but Olympic swimming pools to gauge the amount of meltwater—or sea meter equivalents to compare amounts of ice (mostly in Antarctica and the Green Ice Sheet, or GIS). Greenland lost about 0.02% of its ice sheet last year, but The Guardian, always ready to deliver alarmism, reported that the GIS lost a record 530 billion metric tons of ice in 2019. Again, we're faced with a number we can't relate to. Is that a lot? Enter the swimming pool. Think of seven of them, in some gigantic swimming facility, filled to the brim with Greenland ice. Then add seven more pools in the next second, and seven more, the next. Quickly we run into the same problem we did with the football fields: this is just a massive amount of ice that's melting. The images flash before our eyes: an ice-free world, the extra water in the oceans sweeping over our cities and drowning us all, day after tomorrow style. ¹ For some unfathomable reason, the journalists forgot to mention how incredibly large the GIS is- not to mention Antarctica at something like 10x its volume. The ice sheet that covers 80% of Greenland is a dome of permanent ice, 1.7 million km2 and some 2-3 km thick at its peak. Comparing it in size to the US states, it's something like the area of Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona and Montana combined, covered in kilometers of ice. Estimates put it at 2.85 million cubic kilometers of ice from which we last year lost about 530 km3. That's 0.02% of the ice sheet. ¹

Coal Excitement Fairy Tale, Then the Real Truth

Joanne Nova reports, “The global economy has been sucker punched by a world wide pandemic, but ABC propaganda writers don't miss the chance to push their ultimate fantasy, that coal has turned a magical point in a terminal decline. Global coal fired capacity fell by an awesome 0.14 percent for 'The First Time On Record'. Hyperbole knows no bounds.” ² How excited can someone get over a decline of one sixth of one percent? This much; “The world is now shutting down coal plants faster than it's opening them,” by James Purtill, ABC. “The world's combined coal power capacity has fallen for the first time on record as the closure of generators outstripped stations being commissioned. That's good news for global emissions.” The real truth is that coal consumption has actually been accelerating worldwide since the end of the 1990s. China built more than three times as much new coal capacity as all the other countries in the world combined last year. This translates to more than one large scale coal plant every week. ³ India's leaders are ramping up the country's coal production by opening a new mine every month, despite signing the Paris Agreement. In February 2021, the Indian government announced its annual budget once again makes it clear that the government is pro-fossil fuels. ⁴ Germany is building 23 new coal fire d power plants to overcome the very serious deficiencies of green energy despite bragging about their being a leader in the green energy transformation. ⁵

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Wildfires

The National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) has been the keeper of US wildfire knowledge for many years, monitoring the variety of wildfires and acreage burned to 1926. However, after making that total dataset public for many years, now, in a blatant act of cherry picking, NIFC 'disappeared' a portion of it, and solely present knowledge from 1983. ⁶ Why would they do that you ask? The reply is straightforward; knowledge previous to 1981 reveals that US wildfires had been far worse each in frequency and complete acreage burned. By disappearing all knowledge previous to 1983, which simply occurs to be the bottom level with the dataset, we get a constructive slope of worsening wildfire aligning with elevated world temperature, which is ideal for claiming 'climate change is making wildfire worse.' Clearly, wildfires had been far worse up to now, and clearly, now the information tells a completely totally different story when displaying solely knowledge post 1983. The new story informed by the sanitized knowledge is in alignment with the irrational screeching of local weather that 'wildfires are driven by climate change.' ⁶ By choosing the lowest point in the record for total fires, 1983, and making all data prior to that unavailable, NIFC ensures that any comparison between fires and climate change over the last 38 years always shows an upward trend and correlation with rising temperature. ⁷ In a similar vein, Canada doesn't use temperature records prior to 1950 and Australia quit pre-1910 records. Because if you look at their entire records since they started taking them, there's no real 'thing ' to talk about. These are some of the ways folks mislead the public by skewing the data to manufacture a crisis.

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References

1. Joakim Book, “Playing fast and loose with numbers,” aier.org, April 22, 2021
2. Joanne Nova, “China now has half of the world's coal power fleet,” joannenova.com.au
3. Dimitris Mavrokefalidis, “China built over three times as much coal plant capacity as the rest of the world in 2020,” energylivenews.org. February 4, 2021
4. Vijay Jayaraj, “Fossil fuels help India overcome air pollution illnesses, deaths,” cornwallalliance.org, February 18, 2021
5. Micheal S. Coffman, “Power down,” Range Magazine, Spring 2017
6. James Lyon, “Caught: Inconvenient US wildfire data has been disappeared by National Interagency Fire Center @NIFC_Fire,” jioforme.com, May 13, 2021
7. Anthony Watts, - “Caught: Inconvenient US wildfire data has been disappeared by National Interagency Fire Center @NIFC_Fire,” wattsupwiththat.com, May 13, 2021