Laura Ingraham pushes explicit denial of settled climate science: “The science is not settled”
Published
Citation From the July 14, 2022, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle
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JOHN KERRY: Climate is a multilateral, universal, existential issue for everybody.
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SEN. EDWARD MARKEY: The health and well-being of the entire planet is in jeopardy.
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PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Climate change is increasing the pace and intensity of natural disasters.
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SEN. MAZIE HIRONO: Congress can and should provide individuals and businesses with long-term incentives to speed up the transition to cheaper, cleaner sources of power.
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LAURA INGRAHAM (HOST): Crazy Mazie, while that apocalyptic language threatens to disrupt the future of civilization – I'm not being dramatic because the current economic downturn has been worsened by countries chiefly in Europe that started moving away from proven energy sources. Now, they're desperately trying to move back to coal or nuclear, but it's kind of too late.
And instead of thoughtful pieces about the failure of that approach, we are treated to opinion masquerading as news and masquerading a science like this from Bloomberg: "Global shocks have forced Europe to turn back towards coal power. Heat waves drying out swaths of the continent show the danger of backsliding on climate goals." No. The danger would be thousands and thousands of people freezing this winter in Europe because Europe is abandoning proven energy sources.
But just like COVID, this is going to show – this show will actually look at what the actual science is telling us. And one graph, better than any that we've seen in recent years, shows this. Atmospheric science professor John Christy from the University of Alabama says that recent climate model predictions failed miserably to predict reality, making them inappropriate to use.
Now the miserable failure is displayed in this graph that you see here. The yellow line you see is what the climate models predicted in terms of temperature increases over the past fifty years. That blue line? Well, that's actually what happened. Joining me now is the man who put the data together, Dr. John Christy, climatologist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. He's also the state's official climatologist.
Doctor, let me start by playing devil's advocate. Is it really so bad to overstate temperature increases if it makes people act more responsibly?
JOHN CHRISTY (GUEST): Oh, you're ascribing motive to what someone like – might say. And what I would say is, well, let's just look at the data as they are. Let's test the claims that people make about the climate itself. And so, I'm one of those people that builds data sets to test those claims. And, as you can see from the one on the screen that was showing the models or a theory is not doing very well in describing what the climate's doing.
INGRAHAM: The one thing for our viewers that the doomsday ers consistently get wrong is the temperature increase or what is it?.
CHRISTY: Well, I think it's more the natural disasters that we hear about, whether it's hurricanes or floods or so on. But, if you took a very careful look with consistent data over long periods of time, you will find that these disasters are not increasing. In fact, the health of the world is increasing tremendously. For example, deaths from weather disasters and so on has gone down about 95% in the last hundred years. So we know how to handle the weather disasters that come along and they really aren't increasing in intensity or frequency either.
INGRAHAM: Now, speaking of which, this is what our energy secretary said recently about intense weather.
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SECRETARY JENNIFER GRANHOLM: Every month we hear the exhortations, the warnings from the UN but we don't even need the warnings from the UN. I mean, you know, the fact that Montana is seeing a "500-year flood" and that somebody is closing down for the season – there's not a 500-year flood. We have these – there's a 100-year, you know, event. It is not anymore. These are accelerating as we're all seeing.
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INGRAHAM: Doctor, the use of the air quotes doesn't make her points any more convincing. But, boy, she has a lot of emotion there, doesn't she?
CHRISTY: Yeah, I think what you see most is passion on this. And what we need in this debate is dispassionate discourse in which is brought to bear when you bring data. You will find that these floods are not increasing at some kind of strange rate or heat waves are not increasing. We've got the data show to show it.
INGRAHAM: And John, on this idea of this, you know, the fact that the science has settled, the science is not settled. Correct?
CHRISTY: Oh, my goodness. There – the – our ignorance of the climate system is enormous. If it were correct, the chart you saw would not be needed. But what it shows is that we don't even know how the fundamental heat processes of the of the atmosphere works. And so the models, the theory, the understanding is just still way off from reality at this point.
INGRAHAM: John, thank you so much. Awesome to have you on.