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Monty Python's Flying Climate Alarmism

16 Oct 2024 | News Roundup

It’s a bad sign if you take a position long since lampooned by a Monty Python sketch. Which we say with specific reference to Michael Palin’s exasperated line in the “Argument” sketch that “An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a definite proposition.” It’s not just a set of disconnected dogmatic claims without an if-then structure or serious evidence. As for instance when The Economist reports on Hurricane Milton that “Climate change has made such storms more destructive.” Not to mention the New York Times writer who breathlessly asserted that “The United States has pumped the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of any country since the Industrial Revolution, and that makes the next president’s energy choices enormously consequential” as if anyone elected in 2024 could do a single thing about Rutherford B. Hayes’ climate policy.

We realize there’s such a thing as disagreement, and we don’t expect everyone to discard their contrary opinion as soon as they hear ours. But when, for instance, Canada’s Minister of Environment and Climate Change simply keeps repeating a simplistic mantra about the carbon tax rebate giving people more than it takes from them in the face of detailed Parliamentary Budget Office studies that when you take into account the tax’s economic harm most Canadians are worse off, you’re not facing argument.

If he were to take detailed exception to the notion of economic harm from a measure that deliberately makes energy less abundant and less affordable, there’d be an argument we don’t agree with. But at least it would be an argument. Instead, to quote Monty Python again, “Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes.” “That’s not what this report says,” which was Guilbeault’s dazzling retort although it actually is, barely ahead of John Cleese’s “No it isn’t” in the original.

To its credit, The Economist gets a few points for connected statements because they do admit that hurricanes are not getting more frequent while insisting that they are getting more destructive. But as we point out below, having already discussed Roger Pielke Jr.’s detailed warning that when examining naturally fluctuating phenomena you need a long baseline to detect trends, possibly one extending over centuries, it’s cherry-picking to look only at a short period in which hurricane intensity seems to have risen rather than going back far enough to get a sense of how much it fluctuates naturally.

It's not as though it’s hard to go through the archives and find ample evidence of wicked hurricanes hitting a century ago or more, learn that Milton is only 19th on the list of intense hurricanes to hit Florida since 1851 or discover that no major hurricane has made landfall on Florida’s Atlantic coast since 2004, hardly a massive trend. Or to discern that based on normalized losses, that is, dollar damages adjusted for economic growth, population growth and inflation, the notion of storms and other climate phenomena getting more destructive doesn’t hold water. Not 30 per cent more. Not 60 per cent. Not any.

As to the claim that it matters what the next American President does because of what Presidents did who have been so long dead they barely even haunt history students any more, well, good luck trying to connect that up logically to anything except a decision to cancel your subscription to the publication with the gall to print it.

5 comments on “Monty Python's Flying Climate Alarmism”

  1. It was amusing to watch the climate doomsters angst at the lack of hurricanes and the joy when a storm actually came on shore.

  2. The statement that hurricanes are more damaging is the same as the statement that COVID-19 will make you sicker if you are not vaccinated. These are subjective conclusions based on someone, or some group, stating an unsubstantiated opinion. There is no scientific integrity.

  3. I’m ahead of the curve as I cancelled my 25 year Economist subscription a few years ago and when I did I told them it was specifically because of the climate nonsense and their complete abdication of economic common sense. If I wanted to subscribe to the Tyee I would do so.

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