Biden’s climate fraud

OPINION:

If you want to know why President Joe Biden’s entire climate agenda is a fraud, read the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Buried inside both papers were news stories reporting that despite the unprecedented shutdown of worldwide economies because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere remained unchanged or increased slightly.

The news reports were not based on information on a right-wing website. Instead, they reported on readings from the official U.S. government source for carbon dioxide measurements in the atmosphere.

“Economies worldwide nearly ground to a halt over the 15 months of the coronavirus pandemic, leading to a startling drop in global greenhouse gas emissions,” the Washington Post’s story last June 7 said.

“But the idle airplanes, boarded-up stores and quiet highways barely made a dent in the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which scientists from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said Monday had reached the highest levels since accurate measurements began 63 years ago,” the Washington Post story said.

Similarly, the New York Times reported last June 4, “Despite the economic collapse resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, which has led to sharp declines in carbon dioxide emissions, the amount of the greenhouse gas has continued to climb.”

Indeed, “Scientific instruments atop the Mauna Loa volcano in Hawaii showed that levels of carbon dioxide in the air averaged 419 parts per million in May, the annual peak, according to two separate analyses from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,” the New York Times story said. “Those readings are about half a percent higher than the previous high of 417 parts per million, set in May 2020.”

Even National Public Radio, in a more recent story on Oct. 25, reported the startling findings.

In other words, even though automobile traffic ground almost to a halt, airlines canceled flights, train schedules were curtailed, and offices, schools, and factories were shut down during the pandemic, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was not affected.

Of course, climate scientists have tried to explain away the failure to see a change in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is the main component of greenhouse gases that are believed to trap heat from the planet’s surface that would otherwise escape into space.
“People may be surprised to hear that the response to the coronavirus outbreak hasn’t done more to influence CO2 levels,” said Ralph Keeling, a geochemist who runs the Scripps Oceanography CO2 program, according to the New York Times story. “But the buildup of CO2 is a bit like trash in a landfill,” he said. “As we keep emitting, it keeps piling up. The crisis has slowed emissions, but not enough to show up perceptibly at Mauna Loa.”

Yet, in a news release, Scripps scientists offered an entirely different explanation: that even a sharp drop in emissions from human activity “is overshadowed by natural variability in carbon emissions from vegetation and soil in response to seasonal changes in temperature and soil moisture.”

So the main culprit allegedly causing global warming is not human activity, as we have been told by Mr. Biden and almost every media outlet, but rather our vegetation and soil.

The fact is that while average global temperatures have increased 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century, the idea that human activity is responsible for global warming has always been merely a theory. Now we know the answer.

When carbon emissions declined drastically during the pandemic, carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere remained unchanged or actually increased, demonstrating that human activity has nothing to do with carbon dioxide levels that according to the dogma cause climate change. 

The corollary to that is that all the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on electric cars, charging stations, solar panels, and retrofitting homes and offices to combat global warming will be a colossal waste of money.

As Mr. Biden himself said in unscripted remarks that few in the media picked up during his State of the Union address, “The United States accounts, as all of you know, for less than 15 percent of carbon emissions. The rest of the world accounts for 85%. That’s why I kept my commitment to rejoin the Paris Accord because if we do everything perfectly, it’s not going to matter.”

If ever there was a need for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes, this is it.

• Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter, is the author of “The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game.”