A Guide to the Climate Apocalypse Our Journey from the Age of Prosperity to the Era of Environmental Grief

:	Vítězslav Kremlík
:	A Guide to the Climate Apocalypse Our Journey from the Age of Prosperity to the Era of Environmental Grief
:	Identity Publications
:	9781945884542
:	1
:	CHF 8.40
:

:	Sonstiges
:	English

:	360
:	DRM
:	PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
:	ePUB

Public media is awash with the deteriorating state of our planet. Every new climate report shows a worse scenario than the one before, and the prophesized outcome is always the same-worldwide disaster.

In A Guide to the Climate Apocalypse, Vítězslav Kremlík delivers a refreshing and objective analysis of the history and science behind climate change. Books about climate change frequently endorse a narrow, often malicious angle of total indoctrination or abject denial of the official story. Kremlík employs a direct and detailed critique of not only the studies that have led to our current understanding of large-scale changes in the weather but also the political biases and motives behind global action taken in response to it.

Proceed step-by-step through the history of how we came to understand everything we currently do about climate change, including natural climate cycles, modern carbon footprints and pollution, periods of extreme weather, ocean acidification, biofuels, climate doomsayers, hockey stick graphs, and our dear old friend Al Gore.

Kremlík's informative guide offers an expert-backed new perspective on the history and politics of our understanding of climate change and the agendas behind those who speak most vocally on it or enforce policies that affect us all. With well-researched and cited real-world findings and examples, it calls all of us to wake up to an accurate and educated view of what is and has been happening to our planet-and what we ought or ought not to do about it.

DON'T PANIC!

"During the course of the 20thcentury, mankind's relationship with nature underwent a revolution. At the beginning of the last century, human intervention in nature was regarded as beneficent and a sign of progress of civilization. By its end, such interventions were presumed harmful unless it could be demonstrated they were not."

Rupert Darwall,The Age of Global Warming1

In 2019, a 16-year-old Swedish activist, Greta Thunberg, was invited to give a speech at a UN climate change conference."People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!"2The audience seemed to enjoy being criticized by a little girl and rewarded her with applause. But did she really do her homework to get her facts straight?

The average world GDP per capita increased ten times between 1820 and 2010.3This economic growth is the reason why poverty has mostly been eradicated, not only in Europe. World poverty rates (including the developing countries) fell from about 85% to about 25% between 1820 and 1990.4This is no fairy tale. And all of that was happening in a period of global warming and rising sea level.

Global warming has been occurring, with some interruptions, since the Thirty Years' War. In the 20thcentury, the planet warmed by about 0.8°C, and the same warming can be expected in the 21stcentury. Is this increase in temperature really the reason for disruption, hunger, misery, and devastation, as we hear daily in the media?

Between 1975 and 2005, there was a rise in average temperatures with food prices falling by 75% over this period.5While 991 million people suffered from malnutrition in developing countries in 1991, it was only 780 million in 2015, despite world population growth over the same period of time. Thus, global warming had no net negative impact on food production. Temporary deterioration occurred only in the era of biofuel boom, when the number of starving people rose y-o-y for several years (from 908 million in 2001 to 927 million in 2006).6However, this trend was not caused by climate change; in fact, it was caused by the misguided efforts to fight climate.

So why does the UN depict the world in such bleak colors?"The gap between the poorest and the wealthiest around the world is wide and is growing," UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon lamented on the growth of inequality.7However, this gap is not growing because some people are doing worse and worse. The opposite is true. This is happening because some have already been liberated from poverty, whereas others have not. Two hundred years ago, the richest states' average incomes were only four times higher than in the poorest states. But by the end of the 20thcentury, it was 30-fold higher.8This inequality is the difference between a grass hut somewhere in Africa and a skyscraper in New York.

Moreover, the term poverty today means something else than envisaged centuries ago. In the Czech Republic, people are considered"poor" if they have les