When it comes to addressing the crisis of our rapidly warming planet, the February 28th, 2022 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forcefully concluded that time is running out: “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action on adaptation and mitigation,” the world’s scientists wrote, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” Leading the world in limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius will require a monumental effort, and the climate components of Build Back Better are an indispensable foundation.

Throughout 2021, we bore witness to the devastating impacts of the climate crisis, further illustrating why transformational action cannot wait. Inaction now will mean irreversible consequences for our future generations. Given the widespread agreement in the U.S. Senate for House passed climate provisions, we have an opportunity to recommence negotiations with climate serving as a key starting point.

So wrote 80 members of Congress—all Democrats—to President Biden a few days ago. And they’re wrong.

The planet is not “rapidly warming.” As Cornwall Alliance board member and Senior Fellow Dr. Roy W. Spencer, a climate scientist and Principal Research Scientist in the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, records, global average temperature has been rising just about 0.13 degree C per decade—or 1.3 degrees per century—since our most credible means of monitoring it, satellites, went into service 43 years ago, as shown in this graph.

That’s no more rapid than the pace from about 1910 to 1940 and to similar periods over the last 2,500 years or so that led into the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period.

Nothing in the IPCC’s AR6 Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis substantiates the notion of a “rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future.” Even the IPCC’s own scenarios for the future—which are hopelessly pessimistic and based on a CO2 emission scenario so unrealistic it couldn’t transpire even if we burned all the world’s fossil fuels in this century, which won’t happen—only call for a reduction in gross global product of perhaps a percent or two at the end of this century. And that’s a percent or two of a gross global product that is multiple times greater than today’s and in a world in which today’s poorest countries have per capita incomes similar to that of the United States today. Quite simply, climate change, even by the IPCC’s standards, is not a threat to “a livable and sustainable future.”

Neither are “the climate components of Build Back Better … an indispensable foundation” for limiting global warming. We could eliminate all US emissions, and the effect would be a tiny fraction of a degree less warming by the end of this century—a fraction erased multiple times by growing emissions from China, India, and other growing economies that have no intention of reducing their emissions.

Finally, 2021 did not bear “witness to the devastating impacts of the climate crisis.” Neither 2021 nor the whole period from 1960 to the present has shown any upward trend in the frequency or intensity of severe weather events, and throughout that period the numbers of deaths attributable to them, and the percentage of annual wealth produced that they’ve destroyed, have dropped precipitously.

Add these factual errors to the obvious mistake of prioritizing climate change over the threats of a hot war that could easily escalate beyond Ukraine into much of Europe and possibly envelope the United States, and the harms to the global economy not only from that war but also from the misguided “war on the coronavirus,” and it’s clear these Congressmen are simply wrong.