Not As Close To The Global Warming Target For Disaster As We Thought, In Part Because It’s An Arbitrary Level

The last couple of days have not been good for the climate-change doomsayers.

On Friday, Jeff Berardelli, a meteorologist for CBS News and apparently also a “climate specialist,” suggested that one of the key “scientific” metrics for evaluating how closely we’ve crept to the environmental abyss was plucked from thin air.

For background, three years ago, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the supposed experts on documenting climate change, warned that catastrophe loomed if global temperatures reached 1.5 degrees Celsius – or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — above the understood pre-industrial age levels.

Berardelli, on-air Friday, predicted the world would hit that level temporarily within five years, but by 2030 or 2035 we would permanently cross that threshold unless we “really rein in” global carbon emissions.

“At 1.5 degrees Celsius, it’s not like we’re gonna fall off a cliff where things are all of the sudden get catastrophic. But things will progressively get worse at a much faster pace. The intensity of these extreme weather events will pick up. We will see compounded events: heat waves on top of sea-level rise on top of large hurricanes and impactful hurricanes. And so things will just get worse and worse if we breach: the 1.5-degree mark.

When the program’s anchor noted that Berardelli had referred to the 1.5-degree level as a “symbolic marker,” and asked why, CBS’s climate specialist replied, “Yeah, because, I mean, humans chose it. We chose 1.5, we chose 2 degrees. So, again, it’s not a tipping point. It’s not like we’re gonna fall off a cliff.”

Except we’ve been told that we will fall off the cliff – for years.

In January 2019, less than three weeks after she took office, Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of her party’s foremost advocates for the ridiculous Green New Deal,  noted, Millennials and Gen Z and all these folks that come after us are looking up, and we’re like, ‘The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change, and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it?'”

Speaking of those pre-industrial levels, The Daily Mail of London reported on Friday of a new Harvard study that indicates we’ve overstated the threat.

“Antarctic ice has revealed that pre-industrial air pollution was worse than thought, suggesting climate models have overstated the warming from greenhouse gases,” the Daily Mail noted.

The paper said scientists have considered how “temperatures responded to known changes in the past.” The problem, however, is that greenhouse gases are not the only thing that affects climate.

Aerosols released by volcanoes and fires – including soot – have a cooling effect, and as the Daily Mail reported, “their levels before the Industrial era are poorly understood.”

So researchers from Harvard University studied Antarctic ice that encased soot particles from Africa, Australia, and South America that date to 1750. It seems they found four times the soot than was previously known.

“While the world is ‘clearly’ warming, as the team put it, the new findings suggest that it might not be heating up at quite the rate that was previously feared,” the Daily Mail reported.

One reason for that is attributable to wildfires – which reportedly are caused by more global warming – and the prescribed burning activities of indigenous people. 

“Climate scientists have known that the most recent generation of climate models have been over-estimating surface temperature sensitivity to greenhouse gasses, but we haven’t known why or by how much,” Dr. Pengfei Liu, an atmospheric chemist and one of the authors of the Harvard study, told the Daily Mail.

“This research offers a possible explanation.”

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