AOC Gets Blasted by Legendary Environmentalist for Her Lies About Hurricanes & Global Warming
Bjorn Lomborg has been an environmentalist for decades. He’s also been fighting environmentalists for decades.
The Danish writer and academic has been putting environmentalists’ claims to the twin tests of reason and mathematics for over 20 years, and while the results have been overwhelmingly positive for the truth, they have been downright brutal for uninformed, emotional and often extreme green activists.
Over the weekend, New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez found herself in the dead center of Lomborg’s sights, a place no thinking person would ever want to be.
In response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Dorian, the Democratic wunderkind wrote, “This is what climate change looks like.”
The only problem is that that is decidedly not what climate change looks like. AOC’s postulation was wrong. Very wrong. And Lomborg was ready for her.
This is what climate change looks like: it hits vulnerable communities first.
I can already hear climate deniers screeching: “It’s always been like this! You’re dim,” etc.
No. This is about science & leadership. We either decarbonize&cut emissions, or we don’t & let people die. https://t.co/paUHKAp03e
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) September 3, 2019
In response to AOC’s silliness, Lomborg wrote in the New York Post that “[there were] only three major hurricanes greater than a Category 3 to hit the continental US in the last 13 years. That’s a record low since 1900. For comparison, the average over the same timeframe has been nearly eight major hurricanes.”
If AOC actually wanted to show what alleged climate change looks like, she could have shown a picture of the Bahamas but also included pictures of other coastal locations that are flourishing, because we’re actually down five massive hurricanes from average.
Want to really blow a leftist environmentalist’s mind? Tell him he’s right about climate change but that it’s also producing fewer destructive hurricanes.
That poor leftist will melt down faster than if you had asked him to explain why homosexuality is hard-coded by biology but sex isn’t.
Want to take that even further? Accuse him of wanting more hurricanes. Because if he’s right that today’s climate is less desirable than yesterday’s, then he’s necessarily arguing that a world with more hurricanes is more desirable than a world with fewer.
Environmentalists might argue that a world with more but less damaging hurricanes would be better than a world with fewer but more damaging hurricanes.
The only problem is that that’s not likely to be true either.
Lomborg cedes the point that climate change — which he believes is happening — will likely make hurricanes stronger. But he follows that up by saying that “a major study in Nature showed hurricane damage today runs the world about 0.04 percent of GDP. Accounting for growth in prosperity (which means more resilience), by 2100 this would drop to 0.01 percent. And the effect of global warming making storms fewer but stronger will see damage end up around 0.02 percent.”
The point here that Lomborg doesn’t make (though to be fair it’s not the point he set out to make) is that Ocasio-Cortez and her ilk aren’t just wrong about climate change. They’re very wrong. They’re radically wrong.
Things are better now than they have ever been in the entire history of the planet.
Every day 100,000 people are lifted out of the grinding poverty that has defined nearly all of human history.
Those people will nurture new ideas, invent new technologies, produce new products and increase global wealth.
Things will get better and things will continue getting better. The question isn’t how we’ll deal with an impending climate disaster. The question is why in the world we are talking about crippling the capitalist system that’s rescuing people from poverty so that we can protect them from environmental disasters that will never happen.
If AOC actually wanted to help those suffering from deprivation and devastation, she would push for as purely capitalist a society as possible, because capitalism results in wealth and increased charity. It was during the 19th century — the time when America came as close as ever to pure free-market capitalism — that the greatest development of charity ever occurred, as Thomas Sowell has written.
But Ocasio-Cortez doesn’t actually care about lifting people out of poverty. She cares about sinking people into poverty — equally. That is the defining real-life attribute of socialism.
Its proponents may suggest socialism will result in wealth for all, but in practice, it results in brutal poverty for all, save a minute ruling elite. Yes, there’s equality, but it’s not equality in prosperity. It’s equality in poverty — every time.
Climate change somehow fueling killer hurricanes is a complete and utter fraud — just like AOC.
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