PRESS RELEASE: Heartland Institute Reacts to ‘Alarmist’ UN IPCC Climate Report

Published August 9, 2021

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (August 9, 2021) – The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report today, stating that it is now ‘code red for humanity,’ with temperatures expected to increase by 1.5C over the next 20 years regardless of what humans do to try to stop it.

The Heartland Institute is the leading global think tank promoting the work of scientists who say the data do not show human activity is causing a climate crisis. Heartland will be hosting many of those scientists and policy experts at the 14th International Conference on Climate Change Oct. 15-17 at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. The public and media are welcome to attend.

The following statements from environment policy experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/377-4000 or (cell) 312/731-9364.

“The new IPCC report, in which the IPCC bureaucracy must strike an alarmist tone in order to justify and perpetuate the bureaucracy’s existence, adds virtually no substantive scientific evidence to the global warming debate. The objective data still show that global temperatures are rising much more slowly than the IPCC previously predicted, and that most extreme weather events and climatological factors are either not being impacted by modest warming or are becoming more benign rather than harmful.

“IPCC may be ramping up its rhetoric and fear-mongering, but this merely highlights the lack of any new scientific evidence to resuscitate the climate alarmism narrative.”

James Taylor
President
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]


“Last week, the IPCC admitted the newest climate models they used in their report are flawed, running unrealistically hot. Yet, rather than delaying their report, they released it based on unbelievable inputs. How can the IPCC claim to have ‘high confidence’ that the warming of the past 50, 100, or 150 years is unusual, much less unequivocally caused by humans, when the models used to source the claim don’t track observed temperature data sets from weather balloons or satellites? The answer is, they can’t. This a political, not a scientific document.

“It’s like a doctor notifying a patient that his or her X-rays and lab tests were flawed and need to be done again with better equipment, which doesn’t exist. But in the meantime, we can say with ‘high confidence’ you are getting sicker, and are going to die, unless we do major surgery to remove a key organ vital to continued survival, which is what fossil fuels are.”

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D.
Senior Fellow, Environment & Energy Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
[email protected]


“The new IPCC report is nothing new. If you track the history of UN climate statements all the way back to 1972, Maurice Strong, first UN Environment Program director warned that “the world had just 10 years to avoid catastrophe” and he was speaking of global cooling then. When the alarm switched to global warming, similar gloomy statements were made by the UN in 1982, 1989, 1990, 2007, 2015, and in 2018. An example: “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” said former IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri in 2007.

It seems that climate disaster is always just five to 10 years away, but none of the predictions of climate doom have yet to come true. The “before it is too late” claim has come and gone, many times.
 
And just last week, climate scientists admitted that their new AR6 generation of global climate models such as RCP8.5 are ‘implausibly hot’ and therefore incorrectly predicting a hellishly hot future. Their admission raises questions on the reliability of IPCC temperature forecasts often touted in the media and used to promote extreme climate action.”

Anthony Watts
Senior Fellow
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]