"Whatever happened to polar bears? They used to be all climate campaigners could talk about, but now they’re essentially absent from headlines. Over the past 20 years, climate activists have elevated various stories of climate catastrophe, then quietly dropped them without apology when the opposing evidence becomes overwhelming. The only constant is the scare tactics.
Protesters used to dress up as polar bears. Al Gore’s 2006 film, “An Inconvenient Truth,” depicted a sad cartoon polar bear floating away to its death.
...
Then in the 2010s, campaigners stopped talking about them. After years of misrepresentation, it finally became impossible to ignore the mountain of evidence showing that the global polar-bear population has increased substantially. Whatever negative effect climate change had was swamped by the reduction in hunting of polar bears. The population has risen from around 12,000 in the 1960s to about 26,000.
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The same thing has happened with activists’ outcry about Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. For years, they shouted that the reef was being killed off by rising sea temperatures.
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The latest official statistics show a completely different picture. For the past three years the Great Barrier Reef has had more coral cover than at any point since records began in 1986, with 2024 setting a new record. This good news gets a fraction of the coverage that the panicked predictions did.
More recently, green campaigners were warning that small Pacific islands would drown as sea levels rose. In 2019 United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres flew all the way to Tuvalu, in the South Pacific, for a Time magazine cover shot. Wearing a suit, he stood up to his thighs in the water behind the headline “Our Sinking Planet.” The accompanying article warned the island—and others like it—would be struck “off the map entirely” by rising sea levels.
About a month ago, the New York Times finally shared what it called “surprising” climate news: Almost all atoll islands are stable or increasing in size. [Moi ici: BTW, vi isto hoje no Twitter]
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Today, killer heat waves are the new climate horror story. [Moi ici: Esta esteve há dias na moda em Portugal] In July President Biden claimed “extreme heat is the No. 1 weather-related killer in the United States.”
He is wrong by a factor of 25. While extreme heat kills nearly 6,000 Americans each year, cold kills 152,000, of which 12,000 die from extreme cold. Even including deaths from moderate heat, the toll comes to less than 10,000. Despite rising temperatures, age-standardized extreme-heat deaths have actually declined in the U.S. by almost 10% a decade and globally by even more, largely because the world is growing more prosperous."
Entretanto, hoje no Twitter apanhei um artigo do Observador, "Encontros entre ursos polares e humanos são cada vez mais frequentes". O artigo começa com uma certeza:
"As alterações climáticas estão a levar a encontros mais frequentes entre ursos polares e humanos."
Se a população triplica tem de aumentar os seus territórios de caça, com ou sem alterações climáticas.
Recordar Políticos e o ambiente.
Trechos retirados do artigo de Bjorn Lomborg, "Polar Bears, Dead Coral and Other Climate Fictions" publicado no WSJ no dia 31.07.
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