Donald Trump Rejects Environmental ‘Prophets Of Doom’ In Davos Address
The World Is Safer From Climate-Related Disasters Than Ever, New Study Shows
“To embrace the possibilities of tomorrow we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the Apocalypse. They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers, and they want to see us do badly but we won’t let that happen. They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s. These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives.” — US President Donald Trump, World Economic Forum, 21 January 20201) Donald Trump Rejects Environmental ‘Prophets Of Doom’ In Davos Address
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday lashed out at the “perennial prophets of doom” who warn that the world is in the throes of a major environmental crisis, as he addressed an audience in Davos including Swedish teenage campaigner Greta Thunberg.
Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg listens to Donald Trump. AAP
“We must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the apocalypse,” Mr Trump said, hours after Ms Thunberg told the World Economic Forum that governments had done “basically nothing” to reverse climate change.
Much of Mr Trump’s speech revolved around the success of the US economy.
He reminded the audience that when he spoke there two years ago, early in his presidency, “I told you that we had launched the great American comeback”.
“Today I’m proud to declare the United States is in the midst of an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen before,” the president said.
[….] To embrace the possibilities of tomorrow we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the Apocalypse.
They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers, and I have them, and you have them and we all have them and they want to see us do badly but we won’t let that happen. They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s.
These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives.
We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty. America will always be the proud, strong and unyielding bastion of freedom.
In America, we understand what the pessimists refused to see. That a growing and vibrant market economy, focused on the future, lifts the human spirit and excites creativity: strong enough to overcome any challenge, any challenge by far. [….]
Scholarly studies confirm that witch trials were on the upswing during the Little Ice Age. According to a 2012 Live Science article, “Historical records indicate that, worldwide, witch hunts occur more often during cold periods, possibly because people look for scapegoats to blame for crop failures and general economic hardship. Fitting the pattern, scholars argue that cold weather may have spurred the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692.” …
Princeton Professor Emeritus of Physics William Happer in 2017 drew parallels to today’s man-made climate change claims. “I don’t see a whole lot of difference between the consensus on climate change and the consensus on witches. At the witch trials in Salem the judges were educated at Harvard. This was supposedly 100 percent science. The one or two people who said there were no witches were immediately hung. Not much has changed,” Happer quipped. …
Salem State University historian Emerson Baker’s research agrees with Oster’s findings. “A harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft,” noted a Live Science analysis of Baker’s research. The bad weather may have helped stir up the population’s psychological state into a full-blown mass hysteria.
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PRESIDENT TRUMP AT DAVOS
Transcript:
Trump: To protect our security and our economy, we are also boldly embracing American energy independence.
The United States is now by far the number one producer of oil and natural gas anywhere in the world. By far. It’s not even close.
While many European countries struggle with crippling energy costs, the American energy revolution is saving American families $2,500 every year in lowering electric bills. Numbers that people said couldn’t happen and also very importantly prices at the pump.
We’ve been so successful that the United States no longer needs to import energy from hostile nations. With an abundance of American natural gas now available, our European allies no longer have to be vulnerable to unfriendly energy suppliers either. We urge our friends in Europe to use America’s vast supply and achieve true energy security.
With US companies and researchers leading the way, we are on the threshold of virtually unlimited reserves of energy, including from traditional fuels: LNG, clean coal, next generation nuclear power and gas hydrate technologies.
At the same time, I’m proud to report the United States is among the cleanest air and drinking water on earth and we’re going to keep it that way, and we just came out with a report that at this moment it’s the cleanest it’s been in the last 40 years. We’re committed to conserving the majesty of God’s creation and the natural beauty of our world.
Today I’m pleased to announce the United States will join the 1 trillion trees initiative being launched here at the World Economic Forum. 1 trillion trees, and in doing so we will continue to show strong leadership and restoring, growing, and better managing our trees and our forests.
This is not a time for pessimism, this is a time for optimism. Fear and doubt is not a good thought process because this is a time for tremendous hope, and joy and optimism and action.
But to embrace the possibilities of tomorrow, we must reject the perennial prophets of doom and their predictions of the Apocalypse.
They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune tellers, and I have them, and you have them and we all have them and they want to see us do badly but we won’t let that happen. They predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 70s, and an end of oil in the 1990s.
These alarmists always demand the same thing: absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives.
We will never let radical socialists destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty. America will always be the proud, strong and unyielding bastion of freedom.
In America, we understand what the pessimists refused to see. That a growing and vibrant market economy, focused on the future, lifts the human spirit and excites creativity: strong enough to overcome any challenge, any challenge by far.
During the last 30 years the mortality risk from climate-related disasters plunged more than six-fold and the economic loss rates went down five-fold.
click on image to enlarge
Fig. 4. Mortality rates as function of the wealth for multi and single hazards. Mortality rates are expressed as number of fatalities per 10 000 people exposed. Wealth is approximated by the GDP per capita (in US$-PPP) at the time of the event.
“We quantified the dynamics of socio-economic vulnerability to climate-related hazards. A decreasing trend in both human and economic vulnerability is evident. Global average mortality and loss rates have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980 to 1989 to 2007–2016. Results also show a clear negative relation between vulnerability and wealth.”
In even plainer language, the world is getting way less vulnerable to climate-related hazards over time, thanks largely to economic growth. So let’s not embrace climate policies that destroy economic growth in a mistaken belief that it will somehow make us less vulnerable to climate disasters.
The authors gathered data from 1980 to 2016 on the global incidence of general floods, flash floods, coastal floods, cold-related hazards, heatwaves, droughts, and wind-related hazards. The number of people affected and the value of the damage has, of course, gone up, because there are more people and more things in the path of the events. But re-expressing the same data in terms of percentages (of population and size of the economy) the trends are very different. Comparing the 1980s to the decade from 2007-2016, the mortality risk from all these disasters plunged more than six-fold and the economic loss rates went down five-fold.
Those are huge reductions by any standard. Poor countries are still more vulnerable to climate hazards than wealthy ones. But as the income gap shrinks, so does the vulnerability gap. So any policy that slows down economic growth in poor countries in the name of climate change, such as the decision by the African Development Bank to stop funding fossil-powered electricity generating plants even though Africa is seriously under-powered, will make that continent’s citizens more vulnerable to climate hazards over the long term, not less.
Last year was the second, third or fourth warmest depending on whom you speak to, with by far most of the warming occurring in one region of the planet, the Arctic.
We’ve just lived through the warmest decade in at least 170 years, probably longer. The past five years have been the warmest, dominating the statistics of the past decade. What does it mean? Will it go on this way? There is no shortage of comment and certainty from many scientists and commentators, but the lesson drawn from experience is that, in the short-term, nobody knows.
While the debate goes on isn’t it about time for some common standards in the temperature reports? A standard baseline for comparison would be good. Is there any good reason for not having one? Also, the inclusion of error bars in graphs would seem to be an obvious thing to do, after all if a science student presented a report on an experiment without error bars they would be failed!
Including error bars would show the temperature changes in a different light. It would stop the scientific nonsense of claiming a year’s rank by a margin far less than the size of the error. Indeed, spurious accuracy – sometimes quoting temperatures to a thousandth of a degree with an error of a tenth of a degree – is ridiculous. If an agreed protocol was observed (it can be found almost everywhere in science) the global temperature would be rounded to the nearest 0.1° C then the temperature changes of the past few decades would give a different impression.
El Nino vs global warming
Interannual changes are not important for climate change. They show weather especially the effects of El Nino and La Nina events. The temperature of the past decade – the warmest since accurate records began – is the story of the 2016 El Nino. It’s influence spans many years.
It is nonsense to say that 2016 was a very warm year because of an El Nino — but a year or two later was climatically important because it didn’t have a strong El Nino and has a temperature independent of what happened in 2016. El Nino’s are not confined to an arbitrary definition of the start and end of the year. After all, the warmth of 2019 was heavily influenced by El Nino conditions that lasted nearly half of last year.
It’s obvious from the way the temperature has behaved that there was a thermal build-up to the El Nino and a relaxation after it (remember what was being said in 2015 about seeing the start of runaway global warming). The temperatures over the warm last five years are because of the 2015/16 El Nino, not despite of it. We need to look at annual temperatures over a longer period to see what’s really going on.
The last decade was the warmest mainly because of what happened in the latter part of it. This has been driven by El Nino conditions, not climate, and it does not tell us much about what may happen in the future. If anything, it tells us once again that El Nino effects are currently much stronger than long-term global warming.
As for the global temperature of 2020, the UK Met Office foresees no El Nino and says that the rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will continue to drive global temperatures upwards. I predict that the global temperature of 2020 will be well within the error bars of the previous years.
As for what carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been doing this century and the global temperature is shown in this indicative graph below. Where do you think the global temperature will go in 2020? Why not enter our competition and place a bet.
PS. Last year we published a similar graph to the one below and faced comments that its axies had been rigged to make it difficult to see any correlation between carbon dioxide and global temperature. We responded by plotting it several other ways. In none of them is the correlation seen any better. I wonder from those that claim it is a “denier” tactic, how would they plot such a graph?
The IMF has trimmed its forecasts for global economic growth this year, casting a shadow over the opening of the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort of Davos.
Organisers of the annual gathering of the rich and powerful had wanted this year’s event to promote a more cohesive and sustainable world, hoping to urge companies to embrace stakeholder capitalism rather than simply pursue profits.
But the latest signs of economic fragility will force global leaders and chief executives to tackle the more immediate challenges of restoring growth and confidence, rather than focusing on how to address climate change.
