The Week’s Most Absurd Climate Stories (Drinking Water Shifts Earth’s Poles?)

Scientism knows no bounds.

This week, ten billion crabs disappear due to a heat wave at the bottom of the ocean, the Biden Barbie House goes pink and green, your drinking water causes the earth to wobble too much, and the peak oil alarmists resurface years after their ideas got debunked. The climate cultists seem particularly desperate this week, and their faith in computer-model-dictated Scientism has taken hit after hit. They’re still at it, though. Got to admire their persistence, at least.

Don’t miss last week’s wackiest climate stories

Oh—and we have one item of good news this week, as the science ministry of an influential European country completely debunked the theory of global warming man-made climate change.

But first, to the crazymobile!

1. According to a New Pole…

In a, er, groundbreaking new study, pumping groundwater for drinking and irrigation has caused Earth’s poles to shift 31.5 inches and increased our planet’s “wobble.” Between 1993 and 2010, the new study claims, humanity pumped 2,150 gigatons of water from aquifers, “corresponding” to the shift in the axis. Since nobody knows how much 2,150 gigatons is (or how much total water is on the planet), they helpfully describe it as 860 million Olympic-sized pools. That much weight distribution, as the claim goes, leads to more wobbling. This was proven, of course, by computer modeling. Displacing that much water, because every drain leads to the ocean, supposedly led to 6 millimeters of sea level rise in that time period. And, of course, the water displacement occurred mostly in the northern hemisphere.

The conclusions drawn by the authors of the paper fail on a number of levels, the most basic of which—that correlation does not imply causation—forms the basis of statistical analysis (or should, anyway). They also ignore the hydrological cycle, in which Earth is a closed system where virtually no water escapes our globe. After irrigation, water seeps back into the aquifer, or gets converted to rain, or flows via streams and rivers into the ocean, whereby it fuels more rain, which refills aquifers. Those oceans, by the way, cover 71 percent of the globe. The total volume of water of all types on Earth is 1.35 million gigatons. The entire planet weighs about 5.9 billion gigatons. It strains credulity to think redistributing a couple thousand gigatons of matter of any type would have that profound an effect on the motion of our planet.

2. Bidenomics + Green New Deal = $9,100 in New Home Expenses

The consumer watchdog Alliance for Consumers took all the new mandates for “green” updates to household appliances dictated by the Biden administration, added up their costs, and came up with a price tag of $9,166 extra over currently available appliances. New mandates will jack up the price of everything from light bulbs, to cars, to gas stoves, to ceiling fans, and lots of other stuff in between.

Of course, this particular consumer watchdog reports directly to Big Oil and disseminates their propaganda, as one internet rando points below out:

And anyway, don’t you want to spend more money to save Mother Earth?

3. Deep Sea Crab Bake

When a study purportedly showed a heavy decline in snow crab populations off the Alaskan coast over a three year period, the authors came to the only obvious conclusion: climate change!

The actual (likely) cause is less gripping: The decline followed the crabs’ record population growth in 2018 and corresponded to a heat wave in the eastern Bering Sea. Of course, the authors note they could not conduct the population survey in 2020 due to the outbreak of Chinese coronavirus, so no data that year. Nevertheless, by 2021 the survey showed more than 10 billion snow crabs disappeared from the area—down from a population of 11 billion in 2018, to half that number in 2019, to 1 billion in 2021. The authors conclude mortality was more likely than migration, despite missing an entire year of data. They note a heat wave occurred in that part of the world in 2018 and 2019. Using computer models, they simulated mortality models in previous years to understand current populations, et voila, the climate killed them all!

Now, snow crabs can live in water up to 12° Celsius, but they prefer it down near 2°. The authors note they could not validate the migration theory so settled instead on a mass die-off of unknown origins. This despite glossing over two rather important data points: they do not provide data on the bottom temperature in the Bering Sea, and they provide only circumstantial observational data to rule out that the crabs just went somewhere else.

Key quote from the study: “Climate change is the next existential crisis for fisheries, and snow crab are a prime example for how quickly the outlook can change for a population.” This despite a lack of key data to arrive at that conclusion.

Scientism at work, folks.

4. Peak Oil Strikes Back

The alarmist theory of peak oil—the idea that at some point we’ll run out of petroleum to extract—fell out of favor long ago, due in large part to the predictions stubbornly refusing to come true. Forbes has a good timeline of the junk science behind the theory here, saying, “the research was not scientific at all but statistical analysis so badly done that it wouldn’t pass a first-year college course.”

Junk science never deterred our radical friends pushing bad theories, though. And now they’re back. Over at Daily Caller,  energy expert David Blackmon writes:

One could almost hear the howls of laughter emanating from the hallways of major oil companies and analyst firms in August when the increasingly politicized International Energy Agency published a report projecting that global demand for crude oil would peak by 2030. Last week, the agency doubled down on that prediction, going further to add similar predictions about natural gas and coal demand in its Global Energy Outlook for 2023.

‘A legacy of the global energy crisis may be to usher in the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era: the momentum behind clean energy transitions is now sufficient for global demand for coal, oil and natural gas to all reach a high point before 2030 in the STEPS,’ the report’s executive summary says, referring to its Stated Policies Scenario (STEPS). That scenario, one of several the agency ran through its statistical model, is supposedly based on energy, climate, and industrial policies already in place in countries around the world.

To be fair, they’re not exactly trotting out peak oil 2.0. Rather, like their transition from man-made global warming to climate change to climate boiling, environmentalists are transitioning to “Peak Oil Demand.” Electric vehicles will take over the world! This despite the stubborn lack of enthusiasm among consumers to buy EVs, at least in part owing to their massive costs and billions in federal subsidies just to make them appear viable in the market.

One Item Of Good Climate News This Week:

Norway Puts a Pin in the Global Boiling Balloon

Statistics Norway, the Norwegian office for official government statistics, released a much-needed dose of reality not too long ago. Established in 1867, the office provides the government with research and analysis on about 1,000 topics annually. The office conducts direct research on population and public economics, environmental, resource and innovation economics, macroeconomics, labor market and taxation, and other topics of interest to the people of Norway. A 123-page report it recently published came to the following conclusion, as stated in the report’s abstract:

Weather and temperatures vary in ways that are difficult to explain and predict precisely. In this article we review data on temperature variations in the past as well possible reasons for these variations. Subsequently, we review key properties of global climate models and statistical analyses conducted by others on the ability of the global climate models to track historical temperatures. These tests show that standard climate models are rejected by time series data on global temperatures. Finally, we update and extend previous statistical analysis of temperature data (Dagsvik et al., 2020). Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find, as in Dagsvik et al. (2020), that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.

The study authors note, “it is still a difficult challenge to establish how much of this change is due to increasing man-made emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases,” the mass media has conveyed a “high degree of consensus” among climate science that the warming is man-made, and it is impossible “to obtain an overview and understanding of the scientific basis for such a consensus.”  They conclude, through statistical analysis, that it is impossible to distinguish between human-caused effects and natural historical temperature variations.

Somehow, this seems unlikely to break the climate cultists out of their adherence to Scientism, but we can always dream.