Biden Says ‘In Practice’ He’s Declared a National Climate Emergency

P resident Biden told the Weather Channel this month that he has “in practice” already declared a national climate emergency.

Let’s hope he doesn’t go further and actually sign such a declaration. It would be scientifically fraudulent and invite draconian government control measures and the suppression of constitutional rights and other personal freedoms. The civil-liberties violations would probably be even worse than those we experienced during the Covid lockdowns and mandates.

It might lead Biden to use the Defense Production Act to require diversion of productive workers and resources to yet more grandiose and wasteful wind- and solar-energy projects.

It could lead to limits on the production, shipment, use, or export of fossil fuels; limits on sales or use of combustion-engine vehicles; limits on gas stoves, air conditioners, water heaters, and backup generators; and even on air travel by those whom — or whose travel — the government deems “nonessential.”

This potential massive overreach and abuse of government power would have no scientific foundation, given that global warming and increased carbon dioxide emissions do not endanger the nation or the world and that they have not been and will not be harmful.

Biden continually refers to global warming and increased carbon dioxide emissions as an “existential threat.” But as recently pointed out by Steven Koonin, New York University physicist and undersecretary for science in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers recently admitted that the warming of the planet and increased CO2 emissions will have at most “only minimal effect” on long-term economic growth.

The scientific facts instead show that global warming and increased CO2 emissions over the past century not only have not caused harm but that they have saved and will continue to save millions of lives and otherwise be beneficial.

In May 2015, the British medical journal the Lancet published a study by 22 scientists from around the world. They examined “the largest dataset ever collected to assess temperature–health associations,” over 74 million deaths in 1985–2012 in Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. They found that cooler temperatures caused over 17 times more deaths than warmer temperatures.

In July 2021, the Lancet published another study that similarly reported that cooler temperatures killed nine times more people than warmer temperatures.

Whether it’s nine times or 17 times more, these studies show that as the planet has warmed by 1.05 degrees Celsius on average since 1880 (as calculated by NASA), warmer temperatures have been saving millions of lives.

It is these kinds of facts that in 2017 led more than 300 scientists, including Richard Lindzen of MIT and William Happer of Princeton, to sign a statement attesting that a quarter century of observations “show that warming from increased atmospheric CO2 will be benign.” The CO2 that each of us exhales with every breath “is not a pollutant,” they stated. “To the contrary, there is clear evidence that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is environmentally helpful to food crops and other plants that nourish all life. It is plant food, not poison.”

The future warming and CO2 emissions that a national climate emergency supposedly would seek to prevent also are pure speculation. In his book Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters, Koonin shows that the future projected temperatures and CO2 levels in the U.N. models on which the climate authoritarians rely for their apocalyptic predictions are so speculative and unreliable that they have been unable to reproduce even the 20th century’s temperature changes.

John Clauser, a winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics, recently made this point even more emphatically. The chairman of the board of the CO2 Coalition, where Clauser sits on the board of directors, noted Clauser’s observations that “there is no climate crisis and that increasing CO2 concentrations will benefit the world”; that “prevalent climate models” are “unreliable” and “the popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”; and “misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience.”

The scientific facts also show that global warming and increased CO2 emissions do not cause more or deadlier natural disasters.

Since 1920, as the planet has warmed and CO2 emissions have increased — and as the world population has quadrupled — average deaths per year from natural disasters have decreased by more than 90 percent. That’s what the numbers compiled by the University of Oxford’s Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser for EM-DAT — The International Disaster Database — show.

“Hurricanes: A NOAA report,” updated on May 26, 2023, states:

There is essentially no long-term trend in hurricane counts. The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s. . . . We conclude that the historical Atlantic hurricane data at this stage do not provide compelling evidence for a substantial greenhouse warming-induced century-scale increase in: frequency of tropical storms, hurricanes, or major hurricanes, or in the proportion of hurricanes that become major hurricanes. [Bold in original.]

Fires: As environmental statistician Bjørn Lomberg has noted, using data from the Journal of Geophysical Research, the percentage of global land burned per year in 1905–2021 has been declining — and NASA data show that “in 2022, the last year for which there are complete data, the world hit a new record-low of 2.2% burned area.”

Ocean sea levels: An EPA report updated on July 31, 2023, shows that there also is not much to see here. “When averaged over all of the world’s oceans, absolute sea level has risen at an average rate of 0.06 inches per year from 1880 to 2013,” including a slightly increased rate since 1993 of “0.12 to 0.14 inches per year.” Even at the recent increased rate, that’s seven to eight years to rise a single inch higher.

The bottom line is that Biden should not sign a national climate emergency declaration. It would be a massive government power grab based on fraudulent science.

John Fund is National Review’s national–affairs reporter. David M. Simon is a lawyer in Chicago and a senior fellow at the Committee to Unleash Prosperity.