Climate Change Research Ignores Common Sense

Academics are still trying to point out the dangers of global warming, even while the rest of us are still wearing winter clothes well into the month of May.

“Although the world’s nations, including the United States, should intensify their efforts to reduce carbon emissions, we cannot wait patiently for action on carbon emissions while children’s health is in danger,” Ron Haskins, Janet Currie and Olivier Deschenes write in a policy brief published by Princeton and the Brookings Institution. “Considering the immense barriers, especially economic ones, that stand in the way of action to control emissions, even under the best-case scenario carbon emissions will continue to rise well into the middle of this century.”

“It follows that the effects on children won’t moderate soon and may well intensify. Our goal in this policy brief is to summarize the evidence that global temperatures are rising, review how rising temperatures affect children’s health, and highlight a modest set of policies that could minimize both the spread of diseases and the harm they cause to children’s health.” Haskins works at Brookings, Currie is a professor at Princeton and Deschenes is an economist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.  They go on to contradict themselves in the very next paragraph. (Italics and bold added by me for emphasis.)

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently published the results of an extensive study of changes in global temperatures since 1880,” they note. “One report details the annual departure from long-term average temperatures.  Between 1880 and approximately 1950, the global average temperature dropped slightly in most years. But beginning in 1950 or so, despite considerable year-to-year variation, the trend in global temperature has been distinctly upward. During this period, the global average temperature has risen by over 1° Fahrenheit, and some regional increases have been well above that figure.”

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