STUART VARNEY (HOST): Last week the government issued a 1,600 page report on the future impact of climate change. The conclusion? We're going to suffer. The report forecasts a 10 percent cut in economic growth by the end of the century. Oh, that was a dramatic headline, a climate scare. Another climate scare.
I'm not going to take sides here. This is not a climate debate. But I am going to quote Holman Jenkins in The Wall Street Journal today. He read the report. He's done the work. The rest of the media, apparently, did not.
Jenkins points that, to arrive at this damning, scary conclusion, government researchers made all kinds of assumptions. For example, there will be rapid population growth for the rest of the century. Really? That's not what demographers forecast. There's also the assumption that technological change will be minimal. Really? Science will stand still in the face of the climate challenge? Here's another one: Improvements in energy efficiency will be minimal. Again, really? One more: It is assumed that the world is going to take more carbon out of the ground in the next century than is known to be there. Or, as the report puts it, quote, “Extraction of large amounts of unconventional hydrocarbon resources well beyond presently extractable reserves.” Sorry, folks, that's how these reports are written.
My point here is that the climate report is a scare, and that's what the media picked up on. But it's not so scary if you check the assumptions on which the scare is based.
One last point, and for this we are indebted to Investors Business Daily. The official NASA temperature figures show that from February '16 to February 2018, quote, "Global average temperatures dropped a half degree Celsius. That is the biggest two year drop in the last century. A stunner totally ignored by the media.
