by MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
The World Economic Forum in Davos just heard from Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Rockström claimed that there are “16 biophysical systems… that regulate the entire climate system on Earth” and that “nine of these 16 are showing signs of instability. Push them too far, and they will shift over from supporting humanity to starting to undermine humanity.”
Rockström is referring to something called the “planetary boundaries hypothesis,” which I debunked with a team of others over 10 years ago. While the United Nations, Oxfam, and WWF embraced the hypothesis, it is so scientifically flawed and misleading to be junk science.
There are, to be sure, real biophysical thresholds in the global climate system, and partly also for ocean acidification, ozone depletion, and phosphorous levels. But six of the “planetary boundaries” are not actually “boundaries” in any meaningful sense. They are biodiversity loss, nitrogen levels, land-use change, aerosol loading, freshwater use, and chemical pollution.
As such, there are no “global tipping points” at which point various ecological processes stop functioning, or function in fundamentally different ways. Setting boundaries for those mechanisms is thus a wholly political and Malthusian exercise. “A lax boundary may result in more degradation,” we noted. “A strict boundary less. But there is no evidence that exceeding the boundary will result in a fundamentally different magnitude of impacts associated with human activities.”
And there is little evidence, we noted, to support Rockström’s claim that transgressing the boundaries would have an overall negative impact on humankind
Again, there are good reasons to limit human development to protect ecosystems. But doing so usually has positive and negative and impacts, and the net benefit varies. And the claim that there are hard limits and “tipping points” is an abuse of science and power.
What’s more, Rockström isn’t just wrong about “planetary boundaries,” he’s also wrong about climate change’s impact on food supply.
As it turns out, I debunked him a second time in 2020. Here’s what happened.
Wrongström Again
On BBC Two’s Newsnight, in October 2019, the journalist Emma Barnett asked Extinction Rebellion’s sympathetic and empathic spokesperson, Sarah Lunnon, how her organization could justify disrupting life in London the way it had.
“To be the cause of that happening is really very, very upsetting,” said Lunnon, touching her heart, “and it makes me feel really bad to know that I’m disrupting people’s lives. And it makes me really cross and angry that the lack of action over thirty years has meant that the only way I can get the climate on the agenda is to take actions such as this; if we don’t act and protest in this way nobody takes any notice.”
Barnett turned to the man sitting next to Lunnon, Myles Allen, a climate scientist and IPCC report author.
“The name Extinction Rebellion is inherently pointing towards ‘we’re going to be extinct,’ ” said Barnett. “Roger Hallam, one of the three founders [of Extinction Rebellion], said in August . . . ‘Slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century.’ There’s no science to back that up, is there?”
Said Allen, “There’s a lot of science that backs up the very considerable risks we run if we carry on on a path to—”
“—but not six billion people. There’s no science that calculates it to that level, is there?” asked Barnett.
Extinction Rebellion’s Lunnon didn’t let him answer.
“There are a number of scientists who’ve said if we get to four degrees of warming, which is where we’re heading at the moment, they cannot see how the earth can support not one billion people, a half a billion people,” she said. “That’s six and a half billion people dying!”
Barnett appeared annoyed, and interrupted. “Sorry,” she said, turning back to Myles. “So you’re going to stand by, scientifically, a projection that says within this century we’ll have the slaughter, death, and starvation of six billion people? It’s just good for us to know.”
“No,” he said. “Because what we can do as scientists is tell you about the risks we face. The easy risks to predict, to be honest, are the ones that I do, how the climate system reacts to rising greenhouse gases. The harder risks are how people are going to respond to losing the weather they knew as kids. . . . So I imagine what they’re talking about there is the risk of the human response to climate change as much as the risk of climate change itself.”
“But I suppose the point is,” pressed Barnett, “if there’s no science that says that, do you understand why some people who are sympathetic to your cause also feel like you have fear-mongered? For instance, [Extinction Rebellion co-founder] Roger Hallam has also said our kids will be dead in ten to fifteen years.”
“We are losing the weather we know!” Lunnon interrupted. “All of our agriculture and our food is based on weather that has been around for the last ten thousand years! If we don’t have predictable weather, we don’t have predictable food sources. We run the risk of multiple losses of harvest in the world’s global breadbasket. That’s no food!”
“Roger Hallam did say,” replied Barnett, “our kids would be dead in ten or fifteen years.”
“There’s a distinct possibility that we lose not only our food supplies but our energy supplies,” said Lunnon. “In California, at the moment, millions of people do not have electricity.”
In late November 2019, I interviewed Lunnon. We talked for an hour, and we exchanged emails where she clarified her views.
Nope.
That’s the world’s NEW breadbaskets making all the money instead of the world’s old (current) breadbaskets.
And that’s IF any of this even happens.
All of the food shortages we are seeing currently are manmade, not because of “climate change.”
Egg ranchers and chicken growers say the gov’t comes in and OVER-PCR tests their chickens then kills them all.
We learned from covid tests that, if you over run the PCR tests you can “find” covid in everyone.
Same with bird flu.
Manmade.
When agra-business takes over family farms (like Bill Gates) biodiversity goes out the window.
When his crop gets attacked by a fungus or bug, it hits all of it….hard.
Manmade.
Family farmers would only have a small portion of their crops destroyed.
And when have we ever had predictable weather or, at least, the ability to accurately predict the weather? I guess that would go all the way back to… NEVER.
The entire climate scam business relies on false existential threat claims that never come to pass. I think they get a kick out of it.
The World Economic Forum just another globalists group like the Council on Forgein Relations Globalists behind the invasion with backing and support from Soros and the United nations