The cost of climate change alarmism – by Terence Corcoran (National Post – June 25, 2014)

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Exactly how much climate alarmism and economic scaremongering will people endure before they turn off and decide to drive to the beach and otherwise have a good time, global warming or no global warming? Nobody knows, but a group of U.K. scientists said Tuesday that the tipping point may have already passed.

In a report titled Time for Change? Climate Science Reconsidered group of eminent British academics from various disciplines and associated with University College London (UCL) warns that “fear appeals” may be turning the public against the climate issue as “too scary to think about.”

If that’s true, U.S. President Barack Obama and his billionaire activists buddies — Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg and others — are on track to destroy their own campaigns.

A whole chapter of the U.K. report — chaired by UCL Professor Chris Rapley — is dedicated to “The Consequences of Fear Appeals” on public opinion. “Alarmist messages have also played a direct role in the loss of trust in the science community,” it says. “The failure of specific predictions of climate change to materialize creates the impression that the climate science community as a whole resorts to raising false alarms. When apparent failures are not adequately explained, future threats become less believable.”

All of which is apparently news to U.S. billionaire activists Bloomberg and Steyer. On Tuesday they released their own report, Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change in the United States, a national fear-induction document that — if the British scientists are right — could promote indifference to climate change issues across the United States and might even sink the issue long term.

Henry Paulson, who also co-chaired the Risky Business report with the two billionaires, wrote a related commentary in The New York Times headlined “The Coming Climate Crash.” He called it a “crisis” and warned “we fly on a collision course toward a giant mountain. We can see the crash coming…”

So far, few Americans are fastening their seatbelts. Risky Business is a catalogue of a looming economic hell in which heat, humidity, floods, fires and hurricanes will inundate the United States, preventing people from working as conditions become “literally unbearable to humans, who must maintain a skin temperature below 95 degrees F … to avoid fatal heat stroke.” No such conditions have ever existed in the States, but the report warns that such days could become routine by the end of the century and beyond.

Page after page warns of economic calamity due to the lost ability to work, sea-level rise, property loss, increased mortality, heat stroke, declining crop yields, storm surges and energy disruptions. Dollar-loss numbers run to the trillions. Example: By 2100, up to $700-billion worth of property will be below sea levels.

For the rest of this column, click here: http://business.financialpost.com/2014/06/24/terence-corcoran-the-cost-of-climate-change-alarmism/