(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) Australian journalists at Sky News reported on a climate change study in which Italian researchers debunked the “climate emergency” ideology and advised that environmentalists focus on reducing air and water pollution.
Sky News host Chris Smith said that climate ideologues link all natural disasters, including “drought, bush fires, heavy rain, flooding or cyclones,” to existential climate change while claiming that humans have never before experienced such “unprecedented” events.
“As a trained skeptic, I always wonder whether they say that from proper research—history into the areas where the bush fires or floods have occurred—or just from gut feel,” he said.
Four Italian researchers helped answer that question in an article titled, “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming,” which the European Physical Journal Plus published in January 2022.
The study analyzed historical weather trends and failed to establish “a clear positive trend of extreme events,” leading the researchers to conclude that “the climate crisis … is not evident yet.”
The team accepted the notion that the Earth is currently in a “warm phase,” about “one degree centigrade” warmer that the “pre-industrial era.”
But the study does not attribute the planet’s increasing temperatures to carbon-dioxide emissions alone, nor does it consider this trend to be wholly destructive.
Instead, greater carbon-dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere cause a “global greening” that leads to a “significant increase in productivity of ecosystems,” without which humans could face a “decrease in agricultural production with significant negative impacts on global food security.”
These considerations led the researchers to much more modest proposals for future environmental policy than the current goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
“We should work to minimize our impact on the planet and to minimize air and water pollution,” the researchers wrote. “Whether or not we manage to drastically curtail our carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades, we need to reduce our vulnerability to extreme weather and climate events.”
