With Build Back Better on the brink, Democrats and their environmental allies have doubled down on the disaster card, raising dire predictions about extreme weather despite growing skepticism surrounding the climate-catastrophe narrative.
The warnings of climate doom erupted shortly after Sen. Joe Manchin III, West Virginia Democrat, said Sunday that he would not support the $2 trillion bill, leaving the package laden with green-energy and electric-vehicle incentives a vote shy of passage in the Senate.
Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, sounded the alarm Tuesday with tweets about the “devastating effects of climate change” and the need to “transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to prevent future disasters.”
“The planet doesn’t have the flexibility for anyone to give up,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, Hawaii Democrat, in a Sunday statement. “The planet is heating up, and reacting in real time to increases in greenhouse gases by giving us more frequent and severe storms, drought, hurricanes in December, and 100-degree weather in the Arctic. The planet is not going to pause its warming process while we sort our politics out.”
Others drew a connection between Build Back Better and this month’s deadly tornadoes in Kentucky and the Midwest.
“The people of West Virginia don’t have to look further than their neighboring Kentucky for the deadly and devastating impacts of a climate catastrophe,” said League of Conservation Voters senior Vice President Tiernan Sittenfeld. “The imperative to support legislation to act on climate and avert future devastation should be crystal clear for their senator.”
Everybody in America must understand that the scientists are telling us we have very little time to transform our energy system away from fossil fuels to prevent future disasters. The time to address the climate crisis is NOW.
— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) December 21, 2021
Taking on the climate doomsday message are the so-called skeptics, those in the “calm down” school who argue that not only are such disasters not increasing, in some cases they’re actually declining.
Before the tornado that wreaked havoc on western Kentucky, the U.S. had experienced an eight-year powerful-tornado “drought,” exceeding the longest recorded period without an EF5 twister on the Enhanced Fujita scale of tornado damage from 1 to 5.
In addition, “the number of tornadoes has been declining for the past 50 years, and the number of strong tornadoes, F3 or higher, has dramatically declined over the past 50 years,” said H. Sterling Burnett, senior fellow at the free-market Heartland Institute, in a Dec. 16 post.
The latest U.N. International Panel on Climate Change report released in August warned of rising surface temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide without linking them to hurricanes, floods and tornadoes, said University of Colorado environmental studies professor Roger Pielke Jr.
The report indicates that it is “incorrect to claim that on climate time scales the frequency or intensity of extreme weather and climate events has increased for: flooding, drought (meteorological or hydrological), tropical cyclones, winter storms, thunderstorms, tornadoes, hail, lightning or extreme winds (so, storms of any type),” said Mr. Pielke in his Aug. 11 analysis.
What about wildfires? It turns out the area burned by global wildfires continues to decline in spite of recent devastating blazes in California and elsewhere, according to University of Swansea researchers in a 2020 Royal Society update.
James Taylor, Heartland Institute president, ripped the doomsayers, saying they should know better.
“Climate activists who point to a particularly strong tornado or other event and blame global warming — when we know for a scientific fact that there are fewer strong, deadly tornadoes than in decades past — are charlatans who deserve public scorn,” he said.
Also plummeting are deaths from climate disasters, including floods, droughts, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures, which fell by 96% to 98% in the last century, according to Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.
“Breathless climate reporting misleads us and panic makes us less likely to tackle climate smartly,” tweeted Mr. Lomborg, author of the 2020 book “False Alarm.”
Mr. Taylor added that climate change legislation “won’t make all extreme weather events go away.”
“By any objective scientific measure, however, extreme weather events are becoming less frequent and severe, bringing a dramatic long-term decline in the number of people dying from such tragic events as the planet modestly warms,” he said.
Disputing the rosier scenario was Penn State professor Michael E. Mann, the academic heavyweight on the climate-disaster side, who said Tuesday that tornado intensity is increasing.
“Make no mistake, the science here is very clear: We’re seeing an increase in the intensity of tornadoes, like that likely EF5 tornado that barreled through Kentucky costing probably more than 100 lives,” said Mr. Mann in a Tuesday press call hosted by Climate Power. “We saw this massive outbreak of nearly 60 storms. The science indicates that we do expect to see larger outbreaks and over an expanding season, increasingly during the winter months.”
He described Build Back Better as crucial to President Biden’s pledge to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 50% by 2030 from 2005 levels.
“That’s what we need to do to avert catastrophic warming of more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit of the planet. For him to do that, that pledge, those obligations, have to be codified in legislation,” said Mr. Mann. “We need Build Back Better that will indeed codify the commitments that we have made to the rest of the world so that they will join us in addressing the greatest crisis that we face today.”
Michael Shellenberger, author of the 2020 bestseller “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All,” said in a Tuesday post that Build Back Better would have made the U.S. more vulnerable to extreme weather by sinking billions into “weather-dependent renewables,” namely wind and solar.
“Adding weather-dependent energy sources can only make grids more resilient if significantly more money is spent maintaining reliable power sources to make up for their lost revenue and lost operation hours,” he said on Substack. “That’s what Germany has done, deciding to burn more coal rather than continue operating its nuclear plants, which it’s shutting down, or rely too heavily on imported natural gas.”
Mr. Manchin said Sunday that he decided to vote against the bill after months of negotiations with the White House, saying the measure would put at risk the reliability of the electricity grid and increase dependence on foreign supply chains.
“My Democratic colleagues in Washington are determined to dramatically reshape our society in a way that leaves our country even more vulnerable to the threats we face,” he said. “I cannot take that risk with a staggering debt of more than $29 trillion and inflation taxes that are real and harmful to every hard-working American at the gasoline pumps, grocery stores and utility bills with no end in sight.”
The Senate Democrats were scheduled to hold a caucus meeting Tuesday night. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer has said he will still hold a vote on the measure despite Mr. Manchin’s defection.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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