Tim Nerenz:

Very few Americans understand the magnitude of the energy transition that politicians and activists demand, largely because the demanders have no clue and no curiosity when it comes to feasibility and practical limitations of their goals.

$10 trillion has been invested in renewable energy generation (solar, wind, biofuel) since 1990 and it has displaced 3% of fossil fuel dependence in the global energy mix.

Another $333 trillion would do the trick, but with world GDP of $85 trillion and energy investments (all sources) at $2 trillion per year, utopia is a more than a century away, best case.

The first doomsday prediction of man-made global warming catastrophe appeared in newspapers in 1924, with a dire warning of extinction within 40 years if something was not urgently done.

New extinction dates, tipping points, and points of no return have come and gone as each international conference, committee, commission, panel, and accord yields to the next one and the planet stubbornly refuses to comply.

Climate science is not “settled”; it has never been settled and never will be settled. There are more pieces missing in the puzzle than pieces which have been fitted.

To acknowledge this does not make us science deniers, it makes us science rememberers:

Dec 1973 – 20 years to ice age catastrophe, U.S. population will drop to 22 million by 2000.
May 1982 – final extinction in 20 years (UNEP Mostafa Tolba)
July 1989 – ten years to tipping point (UNEP Noel Brown)
May 1995 – twenty years to tipping point (Irish PM Robinson)
Jan 2006 – ten years to save the planet (Al Gore)
June 2007 – five years to tipping point (UN IPCC chief Pauchhari)
Jan 2009 – four years to save the world (NASA James Hansen)
July 2009 – eight years to save the world (Prince Charles)
Oct 2009 – 50 days to save the world (UK P.M. Gordon Brown)
Nov 2009 – ten years to tipping point (UK Telegraph)
n.d. 2009 – five years to save the world (AUS chief scientist)
Feb 2012 – four years to save the world (UN Foundation Wirth)
Sept 2012 – 100 million will die by 2030 (Reuters)
Jan 2013 – Greta Thunberg is born
April 2014 – 15 years to take action (Boston Globe)
May 2014 – 500 days to save the world (French FM Fabius)
n.d. 2019 – point of no return 2030 (AOC’s GND)
June 2022 – “less than a decade” to avoid catastrophe (UPenn Prof. Mann).

Nuclear power and carbon capture technologies offer the most promising solutions to the problem of AGW, but the former is off limits and the latter’s R&D is woefully underfunded.

The Climate Lobby depends on a renewable resource of young and impressionables to replace the rememberers as we gain perspective over the years and dire predictions fail to materialize.

Climate alarmists warned that food shortages and starvation could come by the end of this century; the war in Ukraine and Western sanction response have cut in the front of the line. South Sudan is in crisis this summer – the canary in the coal mine.

There are many problems in the world, and AGW is one of them, but is not the most urgent.

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