Los Angeles Times Urges Biden to Declare “Climate Emergency”

Los Angeles Times Urges Biden to Declare “Climate Emergency”

It may be a sign that the Democrats feel they will not be retaining power after the November election, so they are doubling down on their progressive, economy-crushing, liberty-destroying agenda.

After celebrating the Democrats in the Senate passing the ironically named “Inflation Reduction Act,” the progressives on the Los Angeles Editorial Board are now pressing Biden to declare a “climate emergency.”

Dozens of national emergencies have been declared since the 1970s and used against an array of threats, including weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, disaster and disease, and some remain in effect decades later. They’ve been declared by President George W. Bush in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks and in response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, by President Trump in 2020 against the COVID-19 pandemic and, controversially, in 2019 to divert funding for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

But unlike Trump’s misuse of that authority for his wall, there is actually a legitimate legal basis for calling climate change a national emergency, as Dan Farber, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Law, wrote recently. The U.S. would join nearly two dozen other national governments, and the European Union, which have declared a climate emergency in recent years, along with a growing list of cities and other local governments.

I will simply point out that “expert” predictions about future climate conditions have failed to pan-out time and time again.

Perhaps the most glaring of failed predictions involved vanishing snow and ice in the north. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2009 on a government ecologist’s prediction that all of Montana’s glaciers would be gone in 2020.

The reality? As recently as January, Montana’s Glacier National Park was reportedly replacing signs with that very warning.

CNN reported: “In 2017, the park was told by the agency that the complete melting off of the glaciers was no longer expected to take place so quickly due to changes in the forecast model, [park spokeswoman Gina] Kurzmen said. But tight maintenance budgets made it impossible for the park to immediately change the signs.”

Other reports relayed predictions that “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” (The Independent in 2000), “Snows of Kilimanjaro to Vanish by 2020” (The Vancouver Sun in 2008), and “Arctic summers may be ice free by 2020” (Lancaster Eagle-Gazette in 2013).

Furthermore, the proposed policies are based on hysteria over insufficient data. A new study has found approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” placement for meaningful data.

The report, published by The Heartland Institute, was compiled via satellite and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations that contribute to the “official” land temperature data in the United States. The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link), and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.

“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”

..“If you look at the unperturbed stations that adhere to NOAA’s published standard – ones that are correctly located and free of localized urban heat biases – they display about half the rate of warming compared to perturbed stations that have such biases,” Watts said. “Yet, NOAA continues to use the data from their warm-biased century-old surface temperature networks to produce monthly and yearly reports to the U.S. public on the state of the climate.”

Incorrect projections, garbage data, and politicians abusing their power are a mixture deadly to a healthy economy and a prosperous, stable middle class.

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