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Climate expert warns against extreme ‘weather porn’ from alarmists pushing ‘draconian’ policies

Published

2 weeks ago

8 minute read

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Bjorn Lomborg, author and president of the Copenhagen Consensus, continues to call attention to the extreme measures being demanded by climate change activists and politicians.

A climate expert has taken aim against what he calls “weather porn” – images and stories meant to convey a false impression that the world is on the brink of cataclysmic climate disaster – in order to force unnecessary policy changes by governments across the globe that will destroy prosperity and kill, not save, human lives.

In a series of recent opinion pieces and social media posts, Bjorn Lomborg, author, president of the Copenhagen Consensus, and a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, continues to call attention to the extreme measures being demanded by climate change activists and politicians who seek to inflict policies that are far more harmful than helpful.

“Watching the news, you get the sense that climate change is making the planet unlivable. We are bombarded with images of floods, droughts, storms and wildfires,” wrote Lomborg in his recent newsletter. “But this impression is wildly misleading and makes it harder to get climate change policy right. Data show climate-related events like floods, droughts, storms and wildfires aren’t killing more people.”

“Quite the contrary. Over the past decade, climate-related disasters have killed 98% fewer people than a century ago,” said Lomborg. “If we want to achieve fewer disaster deaths, we should promote prosperity, adaptation, and resilience. But when we are inundated with ‘weather porn’ and miss the fact that deaths have dropped precipitously, we end up focusing on the least effective policies first.”

‘Six billion deaths in less than a year’

In an op-ed published by The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Lomborg described what would happen if climate alarmists were to suddenly get their way:

The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we rapidly ceased using fossil fuels, four billion people would suddenly be without food.

Add the billions of people dependent on fossil-fuel heating in the winter, along with our dependence on fossil fuels for steel, cement, plastics and transportation, and it is no wonder that one recent estimate by economist Neil Record showed an abrupt end to fossil fuel use would cause six billion deaths in less than a year.

Global elites have made it clear that they have judged the world to be vastly overpopulated, and have set for themselves a goal of reducing the world’s total population to just 500 million people. An “abrupt end to fossil fuel use” would come very close to achieving their utopian anti-human goal.

“Why is the environmental movement stewarded over by murderous, human-hating wackos who desire to see billions of people die?” asked James Corbett of the Corbett Report last month.

Not mincing words, Corbett continued: “Because the conservation movement (and all of the mainstream environmental organizations that grew out of that movement) was pioneered by murderous, human-hating eugenicists and funded by the eugenicist royals who wanted to keep their beautiful natural vistas clear of the riff-raff scurrying around beneath them.”

“Why do nation after nation appear to be in a race to the bottom, implementing policies that will actively hinder the productivity of their own populations and making it more and more difficult for those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder to eke out a subsistence living on the corporate-governmental fascist plantation that we call the developed world?” wondered Corbett.

‘Follow the science’ obscures truth, allows for the promotion of dangerous policies

Lomborg has said that the constant refrain of “follow the science” allows politicians to “obscure and avoid responsibility for lopsided climate-policy trade-offs.”

“More than one million people die in traffic accidents globally each year. Overnight, governments could solve this entirely man-made problem by reducing speed limits everywhere to 3 miles an hour, but we’d laugh any politician who suggested it out of office,” wrote Lomborg in his WSJ piece.

“It would be absurd to focus solely on lives saved if the cost would be economic and societal destruction,” said the climate expert. “Yet politicians widely employ the same one-sided reasoning in the name of fighting climate change. It’s simply a matter, they say, of ‘following the science.’”

Draconian net-zero climate policies are, according to Lomborg, prohibitively costly.

Recent peer-reviewed climate-economic research shows the total cost “will average $27 trillion each year across the century, reaching $60 trillion a year in 2100.”

“Net zero is more than seven times as costly as the climate problem it tries to address,” yet this is precisely what the Biden administration is hoping to achieve by 2050.

Outgoing U.S. climate chief John Kerry, one of the chief purveyors of “weather porn,” suggested recently that if climate change is not quickly addressed, we face planetary destruction “beyond comprehension.”

UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell issued a similarly ominous if not shrill warning on X this week: “We have two years to save the world,” and therefore, “starting now, we need a quantum leap in climate finance [and] Bold new national climate plans by all nations.”

Lomborg fired back on X, dismissing the UN climate honcho’s hyperbolic claims.

“UN employees have been telling the same stale story for more than half a century: Now, that is right now, we have just a few years to save the world.”

“Some of the most popular climate policies will have costs far greater than climate change itself. When politicians try to shut down discussion with claims that they’re ‘following the science,’” concluded  Lomborg in the pages of the WSJ.

“Don’t let them,” he urged.

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Great Reset

Middle school girls who refused to compete against male banned from next track meet

Published on May 1, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Doug Mainwaring

Four of the five girls filed a lawsuit against the Harrison County Board of Education protesting the ban while Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said, ‘I will do everything in my power to defend these brave young girls. ‘This is just wrong.’

Five West Virginia female middle school athletes who refused to throw the shot put against a boy after a circuit court exempted him from a state law that prevents males from competing on female sports’ teams have been banned from participating in their next competition.

On April 18, the five girls attended the 2024 Harrison County Middle School Championships track and field meet where they were scheduled to compete in shot put.

The five students stepped out of the shot-put circle without throwing, forfeiting in protest of the participation of an eighth-grade male student presenting himself as a girl during the competition.

After four of the five girls filed a lawsuit against the Harrison County Board of Education protesting the ban, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey stepped in and wrote an amicus brief on their behalf.

“I will do everything in my power to defend these brave young girls,” Morrisey wrote Monday on X. “This is just wrong. We must stand for what’s right and oppose these radical trans policies.”

“The only thing this decision does is teach these children to keep their mouths shut and not disagree with what they saw as unfairness,” said Morrisey, according to a statement from his office. “That is outrageous and it tramples these students’ rights to freedom of speech and expression.”

“Their actions at the earlier track meet were not disruptive or aggrandizing. They were the quiet demonstration of the student-athletes’ evident unhappiness with the competitive consequences of a federal appellate court’s decision,” said Morrisey, a Republican candidate for governor.

“Rather than being punished for their conduct or being sidelined in an effort to score points, all should commend these young athletes for putting their personal performances aside to demonstrate their discontent with an unjust result that affects them personally and within that event,” he said.

Other conservatives took to X to express support for the banned girls.

“Girls banned from girls’ sports instead of a male being banned from girls’ sports,” wrote Greg Scott, vice president of policy for the Center for Arizona Policy’s, noting, “and this isn’t California or New York. This is Wild and Abominable West Virginia.”

“You can’t participate in this meet until you admit girls don’t exist,” said the Redheaded Libertarian, “unless you want abortions, because it’s your rights as girls.”

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WEF panelist suggests COVID response accustomed people to the idea of CBDCs

Published on May 1, 2024

By

Central Bank of Bahrain governor Khalid Humaidan

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

When asked how he would convince people that CBDCs would be a trusted medium of exchange, Bahrain’s central bank governor said that COVID made the digital transformation ‘something of a requirement’ that had ‘very little resistance.’

Central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) will hopefully replace physical cash and become fully digital, a central banker tells the World Economic Forum (WEF).

Speaking at the WEF Special Meeting on Global Collaboration, Growth and Energy Development on Sunday, Central Bank of Bahrain governor Khalid Humaidan told the panel “Open Forum: The Digital Currencies’ Opportunity in the Middle East” that one of the goals of CBDC was to replace cash, at least in Bahrain, and to go “one hundred percent digital.”

Humaidan likened physical cash to being an antiquated “analogue” technology and that CBDC was the digital solution that would hopefully replace cash:

“I thank this panel and this opportunity. It forced me to refine my thoughts and opinions where I’m at a place comfortably now that I’m ready to verbalize what I think about CBDC,” said Humaidan.

If we think cash is the analogue and digital currency is the form of digital – CBDC is the digital form of cash – today, clearly we’re in a hybrid situation; we’re using both.

We know in the past when it comes to cash, central bankers were very much in control with all aspects of cash, and now we’re comfortable to the point where the private sector plays a big role in the printing of the cash, in the distribution of the cash, and with the private sector we use interest rates to manage the supply of cash.

The same thing is likely to happen with CBDC. Yes, the central bank will have a role, but at some point in time – the same way we don’t call it ‘central bank cash’ – we’re probably going to stop calling it central bank digital currency.

“It’s going to be a digital form of the cash, and at some point in time hopefully we will be able to be one hundred percent digital,” he added.

When asked how he would convince people that CBDC would be a trusted medium of exchange, Bahrain’s central bank governor said that people were already used to it and that COVID made the digital transformation “necessary” and “something of a requirement” that had “very little resistance.”

“Right now, many of our payments are digital. The truth is, I said that we’re in a hybrid model; there’s less and less use of cash,” said Humaidan.

I think from predominantly digital with a little physical, I think the transition to fully digital is not going to be a stretch.

People are used to it, people have engaged in it and certain circumstances did help. Its adoption rates increased because of COVID.

“This is where contactless started to become something of a necessity, something of safety, something of a requirement, and because of that there is very little resistance; trust is already there,” he added.

Meanwhile, European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde has been going around the world telling people that the digital euro CBDC would not eliminate cash, and that cash would always be an option.

Speaking at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) Innovation Summit in March 2023, Lagarde said that a digital currency will never be as anonymous as cash, and for that reason, cash will always be around.

“Is it [digital euro] going to be as private as cash? No,” she said.

A digital currency will never be as anonymous and as protecting of privacy in many respects as cash, which is why cash will always be around.

If people want to use cash in some countries or in some transactions, cash should be available.

“A digital currency is an alternative, is another means of payment and will not provide exactly the same level of privacy and anonymity as cash, but will be pretty close in terms of complete neutrality in relation to the data,” she added.

A WEF Agenda blog post from September, 2017, lists the “gradual obsolescence of paper currency” as being “characteristic of a well-designed CBDC.”

Last year at the WEF’s 14th Annual Meeting of the New Champions, aka “Summer Davos,” in Tianjing, China, Cornell University professor Eswar Prasad said that “we are at the cusp of physical currency essentially disappearing,” and that programmable CBDCs could take us to either a better or much darker place.

“If you think about the benefits of digital money, there are huge potential gains,” said Prasad, adding, “It’s not just about digital forms of digital currency; you can have programmability – units of central bank currency with expiry dates.

You could have […] a potentially better – or some people might say a darker world – where the government decides that units of central bank money can be used to purchase some things, but not other things that it deems less desirable like say ammunition, or drugs, or pornography, or something of the sort, and that is very powerful in terms of the use of a CBDC, and I think also extremely dangerous to central banks.

The WEF’s Special Meeting on Global Collaboration, Growth and Energy Development took place from April 27-29 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

“Saudi Arabia’s absolute monarchy restricts almost all political rights and civil liberties,” according to D.C.-based NGO Freedom House.

In the kingdom, “No officials at the national level are elected,” and “the regime relies on pervasive surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, appeals to sectarianism and ethnicity, and public spending supported by oil revenues to maintain power.”

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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