Back on January 3rd, Boise State Public Radio published a short piece on some reports from a local university about what climate change might mean for Idaho. It links to a 2-page “Snapshot” of the full report’s climate section, and a “Key Findings” summary of the larger report, both of which give the usual sort of overview of how climate change will be bad for the state.
For some reason though, this 74-second story caught the attention of Heartland Institute President James Taylor, who took to their Climate Realism page to complain about the “misinformation on Idaho climate” coming from “U. of Idaho and Boise State.”
Taylor tries to make three main points to justify saying misinformation is coming from journalism done by a National Public Radio affiliate about a University of Idaho report. Per Taylor, “the two universities teamed up to paint a dark picture of climate change in the Idaho,” [sic] but “objective data destroys the universities’ climate myths.” Which is, as Taylor might say, the wrong. Boise State Radio is just a professionally-run NPR affiliate housed at Boise State University, and of course, “objective data” is what the University of Idaho report is based on, not Taylor’s climate myths.
He makes three feeble attempts to prove he knows better than real scientists. The first is a claim that Idaho’s not warming much so far, so their claims that it will warm a lot by 2100 “are simply absurd.” Which only makes sense if you don’t think accumulating carbon dioxide concentrations would increase the temperature, which would make you a climate denier. Which would be absurd, which Taylor, obviously, is.
His second point is that “the flyer presents no good reason” why precipitation in Idaho would decrease as the planet warms, instead of the increase we’ve seen to date. Apparently Taylor didn’t realize the pamphlet he was looking at, clearly labeled “Snapshot” at the top and with a link for more information at the bottom, was not the whole report. Had he navigated his way one (1) whole click from the “Key findings” page to the full Idaho Climate-Economy Impacts Assessment page, he could have found links to all the full report chapters, and then the Climate Technical Report, a 24 page document that lays out the details Taylor apparently couldn’t find.
Taylor’s final point is that (a cherry picked selection of) (the) Idaho’s crops are doing fine and the academic quoted “gives no reason why the beneficial impacts” of carbon pollution like “longer growing seasons will suddenly start harming rather than assisting crop production.”
Again, had Taylor bothered to actually look for, or been capable of finding, the easily located Agriculture technical report, he could have seen the multitude of reasons: drought, storms, heat waves, and of course groundwater availability issues, all of which are thoroughly detailed and documented in the 46 page document.
To summarize, then, Taylor’s first point is that it’s not warming much so far, so we don’t need to plan for warming in the future; his second that warming is already causing an increase, not decrease in precipitation (contradicting the first point, but whatever); and his third that actually, there is warming, but it’s good and crops like it.
So climate change is not happening but is also changing rainfall and is actually "assisting rather than harming Idaho’s economy,” Taylor concludes. And everyone knows it, “except agenda-driven climate alarmists.”
Fun fact: the University of Idaho school that produced the supposedly agenda-driven alarmist reports is the James A and Louise McClure Center for Public Policy Research, named for Idaho’s 3-term Republican Senator James McClure.
Clearly Taylor doesn’t know Idaho. In fact, this whole post is likely little more than an excuse to kick the dust off of some old state-level work he did in 2020, when he apparently got confused as to where he was, and multiple media sources mocked his presentation for repeatedly referring to (the) Idaho as Iowa.
These days Taylor’s climate claims still aren’t even in the ballpark of being right, but hey, at least he got the state right this time!
