Ignorance Is Strength, Dissent Is Stalinist | Watts Up With That?

Ignorance Is Strength, Dissent Is Stalinist | Watts Up With That?:

• From the “Manntastic claims require Manntastic evidence” department.

"In an op-ed published Wednesday in the UK Guardian, Michael Mann and Bob Ward warn Americans not to be “fooled by the Stalinist tactics being used by the White House to try to discredit the findings of mainstream climate science.”

Mann and Ward are upset that “a group of hardcore climate change deniers and contrarians linked to the administration is organizing a petition in support of a new panel being set up by the National Security Council to promote an alternative official explanation for climate change.”

...Let’s sift through their mud-slinging.
Mann and Ward’s evidence that CEI preaches “denial” is an ad campaign with the slogan, “Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution; we call it life.” 

Well, in fact, so-called carbon pollution has done more to invigorate and expand the planet’s greenery than all government conservation programs combined.

Similarly, carbon-based energy has done more to improve the human condition than all other energy sources combined. 
...Contrary to Mann and Ward, the objective of the proposed President’s Commission on Climate Security is not to promote an “alternative official explanation” for climate change. Rather, the commission would examine the evidence for ranking climate change as a national security threat.
...One way to measure the sustainability of a civilization is its vulnerability to storms, droughts, floods, and other forms of extreme weather. 
Since the 1920s, about 90 percent of all fossil-fuel carbon dioxide emissions in history entered the atmosphere, atmospheric concentrations increased by about one-third, and the world warmed by about 0.8°C. 
Did fossil-fueled civilization make Earth’s climate less livable—or more?
During that period, the global annual death toll from extreme weather declined by about 95 percent, despite a four-fold increase in global population. 
Individual risk of dying from extreme weather declined by 99 percent.

As energy scholar Alex Epstein put it, human beings using fossil fuels did not take a safe climate and make it dangerous, they took a dangerous climate and made it much safer..."

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