Waving a rhetorical banner of doom and trashing former President Donald Trump, Biden administration climate czar John Kerry proclaimed Friday that looming climate disaster is only nine years away.
Kerry spoke to the Munich Security Conference as part of the hoopla surrounding the formal readmission of the United States to the Paris climate accords, which seeks to reduce global emissions.
“Three years ago, scientists warned that if we want to prevent the worst consequences of the climate crisis, we have to limit the planet’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s the magic number by consensus among most scientists,” Kerry said Friday, according to a transcript of his remarks posted by Yahoo.
“The same group of scientists told us that we had, three years ago, about 12 years. So now, three years later — three years wasted, sadly, largely because of our president in the United States — around 2030 is the date in which we have to get the world now on the right path in order to cap the warming at that level of 1.5. So we are absolutely, clearly, without question now inside the decisive decade.”
Kerry made similar comments in an interview with CBS News.
“Well, the scientists told us three years ago we had 12 years to avert the worst consequences of climate crisis. We are now three years gone, so we have nine years left,” he said.
“Even if we did everything that we said we were going to do when we signed up in Paris we would see a rise in the earth’s temperature to somewhere around 3.7 degrees or more, which is catastrophic,” the climate czar added.
“There is no room for B.S. anymore. There’s no faking it on this one.”
Kerry claimed that the storms that set records in Texas for cold and snow are part of what he wants to stop.
“I think it’s a very appropriate way to think of it, so it is directly related to the warming, even though your instinct is to say, wait a minute, this is the new Ice Age. But it’s not,” he said. “It is coming from the global warming and it threatens all the normal weather patterns.”
Not everyone had the same opinion.
“He’s not entirely correct,” Texas State climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon told Fox News. “In Texas, when we get cold we get it from the Arctic, it doesn’t form here, it has to move here. The direct temperature effect [of climate change] on cold weather would make extreme cold weather in Texas milder.”
Kerry’s warning is reminiscent of past claims that set a date for catastrophe.
In 2017, The Wall Street Journal took a look at how far from the mark former Vice President Al Gore’s 2006 film “An Inconvenient Truth” was.
“The former vice president has a poor record,” The Journal reported. “Over the past 11 years Mr. Gore has suggested that global warming had caused an increase in tornadoes, that Mount Kilimanjaro’s glacier would disappear by 2016, and that the Arctic summers could be ice-free as soon as 2014. These predictions and claims all proved wrong.”
Alarming claims about the environment are nothing new.
“Back in the late 1980s, the UN claimed that if global warming were not checked by 2000, rising sea levels would wash entire countries away,” Robert Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research wrote in 2018.
“There is some levity in the charade. In 2009, then-British Prime Minister Gordon Brown predicted that the world had only 50 days to save the planet from global warming. But fifty days, six months, and eight years later, the earth seems fine.”
Story cited here.
