Environmental activists and their supporters in mainstream media are appalled that not a single question in the presidential debates focused on climate change.
Writing for The New York Times, David Leonhardt called it “a failure of journalism … the lack of a single question on the world’s biggest problem was a grievous error.”
May Boeve, executive director of climate group 350 Action, complained in The Guardian (U.K.), “This crisis threatens our communities, our economy, and the future for our children … yet climate change doesn’t get a single direct question in the debate.”
Baltimore Sun editorial staff identified those they consider responsible: “Shame on the various moderators for not insisting that Mr. Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speak directly on such a critically important topic.”
Penn State climate scientist Michael Mann even speculated in The Guardian, “One has to wonder if television networks are compromised by the millions of advertising dollars they take from fossil fuel interests.”
According to Michael D. McCurry, a chairman of the Commission on Presidential Debates, the moderator and the candidates set the content. Regardless, Clinton or Trump could have easily bridged the questions posed to address climate change if they had wanted to. So clearly, neither of them placed a high priority on the issue.
And that is exactly how it should have been.
Contrast climate change with many of the topics asked about in the debates: the Syrian civil war (asked about six times), terrorism (four times), Russia (three times), immigration (three), job creation (three), and the national debt (twice). These are real issues that demand our attention.
But man-made climate change is a hypothetical future problem based on controversial computer model forecasts. There is little happening now that warrants our concern.
In his 2014 book “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science”, Dr. Tim Ball, former University of Winnipeg climatology professor and now chief science adviser of the International Climate Science Coalition, wrote, “Contrary to the message of the last thirty years, the current rate of climate change is well within the bounds of natural variability.”
The observational data validates Ball’s position.
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that the statistical average of surface temperatures increased 1.53 degrees between 1880 to 2012. Such modest warming is not surprising given that the Earth has been recovering from the Little Ice Age since the late 19th century. Humanity’s contribution to this relatively small temperature rise is obviously not a problem of the same importance as terrorism or the Syrian civil war.
