RUTHFULLY YOURS

A few days after President Trump said the U.S. would pull out of the Paris Climate Accord, a group of political and corporate heavy-hitters announced that they are still in.

The climate flank of the Trump resistance is being led by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. On June 5, Bloomberg — the United Nations secretary general’s special envoy on cities and climate change — published a letter to the U.N. signed by more than 1,200 “mayors, governors, college and university leaders, businesses, and investors” who are “joining forces for the first time to declare that we will continue to support climate action to meet the Paris Agreement.” The group’s new website is called WeAreStillIn.com and immodestly claims to represent the collective interest of 120 million Americans and one-third of the nearly $18 trillion U.S. economy.

Bloomberg says the group will

formally quantify these sectors’ aggregate climate actions and submit a report to the UN as “America’s Pledge” to the world under the Paris Agreement. America’s Pledge intends to eventually submit a “Societal Nationally Determined Contribution” to the United Nations, accounting for the efforts of U.S. cities, states, businesses and other subnational actors.

Among the signatories signaling their fealty to a poorly run international organization hostile to American interests are nine states (all of which voted for Hillary Clinton except for North Carolina), 19 state attorneys general, a few hundred university presidents, and a roster of American businesses including Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Tesla. In a bit of shade-throwing, the mayor of Pittsburgh also signed the letter. (Trump said during his Rose Garden announcement last week that he was elected to represent the “citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”)

This should be an interesting exercise not just in political posturing and global boot-licking, but also to see how this group will appease its many members opposed to two technologies — nuclear energy and agricultural biotechnology (or GMOs) — that are proven to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

One of the key organizers is the Sierra Club, which called Trump’s move a “historic mistake which our grandchildren will look back on with stunned dismay at how a world leader could be so divorced from reality and morality.” But while the Sierra Club pushes for clean energy options to end fossil-fuel use, it remains “unequivocally opposed” to nuclear energy: “Nuclear is no solution to Climate Change and every dollar spent on nuclear is one less dollar spent on truly safe, affordable and renewable energy sources.” The Sierra Club even wants your help to “phase out nuclear as quickly as possible.”

Even before President Trump had completed his announcement that the United States would withdraw from the Paris Accord on climate change, howls of disbelief and outrage went up from proponents of the agreement. But the critical dynamic underlying the 2015 Accord, willfully ignored by its advocates, is that major developing countries offered “commitments” for emissions reduction that only mirrored their economies’ existing trajectories. Thus, for instance, China committed to reaching peak emissions by 2030 — in line with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s prior analysis. India committed to improving its emissions per unit of GDP — at a rate slower than that metric was already improving. President Obama, meanwhile, pledged America to concrete and aggressive emissions cuts that would require genuine and costly change.

As I wrote in NATIONAL REVIEW at the conclusion of the Paris conference in December 2015:

The full scope of the catastrophe will emerge only in the years to come. One of the agreement’s few binding provisions is a requirement for countries to gather and review their commitments and their adherence to them every five years. Given the caliber of the pledges, that promise of review has little value; countries that promised to proceed on their existing trajectories will pass with flying colors. But the United States, whose commitments far exceed what even the aggressive Obama agenda is expected to produce, will be the nation off track.

Sure enough, a recent headline from Inside Climate News blares, “China, India to Reach Climate Goals Years Early, as U.S. Likely to Fall Far Short.” That is, China and India are reaching the “goal” of proceeding along their unaltered course, while the U.S. is “falling short” of a very high bar.

One might think this prima facie evidence of the agreement’s folly, but Jonathan Chait of New York magazine instead links to it as proof that the Right’s criticism of Paris “has proven incontrovertibly false.” Citing data from Climate Action Tracker, he avers that “India, which had promised to reduce the emissions intensity of its economy by 33–35 percent by 2030, is now on track to reduce it by 42–45 percent by that date. China promised its total emissions would peak by 2030 — an ambitious goal for a rapidly industrializing economy. It is running at least a decade ahead of that goal.” Chait concludes, “The factual predicate upon which the American right based its opposition to Paris has melted away beneath its feet.”

However, Climate Action Tracker’s own analysis of India’s Paris commitment in December 2015 determined, “According to our analysis, with the policies it already has in place, India will achieve an emissions intensity reduction of around 41.5% below 2005 levels by 2030.” India committed to less than business-as-usual, has proceeded with business-as-usual, and now wins applause from Chait for beating its worthless commitment. It’s easy to slim down to 180 pounds, if you weigh 175 to begin with.

Likewise, in December 2015, it was Climate Action Tracker’s view that “under a scenario with currently implemented policies, Chinese CO2 emissions are likely to peak around 2025.” The New York Times reports that Chinese emissions may have peaked in 2014, just as the nation’s leaders were formulating their international pledge. Is it more likely that the Chinese inadvertently made a pledge they could meet without trying, or that Chait has fallen for a pledge that was formulated such that it would have to be met?

Writing about climate change in the New York Times, Ross Douthat describes “lukewarmers” as those who:

accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO2 emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.

Douthat placed himself among the lukewarmers and very graciously referred his readers to some of my recent work for a longer discussion of those themes. But his column was also quite gracious in conceding two problems with lukewarmism, which instead deserve rebuttal.

Douthat’s Problem #1: “No less than alarmism, lukewarmism can be vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias, reaching for any piece of evidence — and when you’re dealing with long-term trends, there’s a lot of evidence to choose from — that supports its non-catastrophic assumptions, even if the bulk of the data starts to point the other way.”

This is a generic critique that might apply to any position on any issue. School-choice advocacy is vulnerable to cherry-picking and selection bias, as is support for universal pre-K. So are the claims that Scandinavian-style welfare states are good or bad for innovation and economic growth. And the claims that an interventionist U.S. foreign policy promotes or harms our national interest. Highlighting such a complaint about lukewarmism would make sense only if the position were uniquely reliant on such bad behavior.

To the contrary, the key hypothesis (of my work, anyway) is that even working from the mainstream scientific and economic studies advanced by alarmists, the data do not support a conclusion of catastrophe. That is, the effects identified by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are serious but manageable. The economic costs identified by the Obama administration’s Social Cost of Carbon analysis are no larger than those associated with a variety of other policy issues.

Of course, plenty of people cherry-pick this or that study in an effort to undermine the mainstream conclusions of climate science. But such analysis is unnecessary to a moderate view of climate change and, I would argue, often counterproductive. Lukewarmism is, or should be, about describing accurately the mainstream of climate research and then assessing how well human society’s resilience and capacity for adaptation will allow it to cope with the challenges we might face.

Editor’s Note: This piece originally appeared in the February 20, 2017 issue of National Review.

In early January, Slate columnist Eric Holthaus tweeted: “I’m starting my 11th year working on climate change, including the last 4 in daily journalism. Today I went to see a counselor about it.” Holthaus announced that he was in “despair” over climate-change inaction: “There are days where I literally can’t work. I’ll read a story & shut down for rest of the day. Not much helps besides exercise & time.” His job, he says, is “chronicling planetary suicide.”

Holthaus’s tweets, and the massive online group-therapy session that followed, would be amusing were they not so pitiful. Here is the emotional toll of buying into one of our most saleable beliefs at present: that the planet faces imminent destruction as a result of anthropogenic climate change, rescue from which is being held up by greedy midwestern oilmen, the political operatives in their pocket, and obnoxious Republican uncles swallowed up in ignorance.

There is an extensive literature in this new millenarianism, the latest contribution to which is Michael E. Mann and Tom Toles’s The Madhouse Effect: How Climate Change Denial Is Threatening Our Planet, Destroying Our Politics, and Driving Us Crazy. Mann, as National Review readers may know, is the creator of the much-ballyhooed “hockey stick” climate graph, which purports to show an unprecedented, precipitous warming of the climate beginning in 1920; he is also currently suing National Review for having the audacity to question his findings. Tom Toles is a cartoonist for the Washington Post, whose contribution to the book is several dozen smug, self-congratulatory drawings mocking Republicans as avaricious, oblivious, and/or simply stupid.

Readers familiar with climate-change zealotry will find recognizable sound bites here: “The warming of the planet caused by our profligate burning of fossil fuels poses perhaps the greatest challenge that human civilization has yet faced. . . . If we continue with the course we are on, our destiny may indeed be to leave behind an unlivable planet of destroyed ecosystems and continuous, unpredictable chaos.” One short chapter gives an overview of the “overwhelming” scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change, another chapter elaborates the threat — “Be it national security, food, water, land, the economy, or health . . . the specter of climate change is upon us” — and then Mann gets to his real purpose: scolding anyone who thinks differently from Michael Mann.

That there are varying degrees of skepticism toward the large set of questions that constitute the climate-change debate, or that different people partake of different motives, seems not to have occurred to Mann. Skeptics are “deniers,” and “deniers” are obviously on the payroll of fossil-fuel companies or their shadowy network of supporters. (The Koch brothers, who are apparently funding the entire Republican party, should be paying Mann as well, given the space they’re occupying in his head.) Scientists, by contrast, are just humble servants of the truth, and anyone who suggests that there might be perverse incentives operating in the scientific community simply does not know how scientific scholarship works. There is “a roughly 97 to 99 percent agreement among scientists that climate change is real and caused by humans.”

That familiar statistic, trotted out regularly by the Obama White House to bolster its climate agenda, is based on a convenient sampling of the relevant literature. In fact, there is a vigorous, vocal minority of dissenters from the climate-change consensus within the scientific community, the vast majority of whom have nothing to do with ExxonMobil. And it’s not as if there are no reasons to exercise caution. Environmental forecasts have been wildly wrong going back half a century. In 1970, Life magazine reported growing evidence that “by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching Earth by one half.” That same year, ecologist Kenneth Watt told an audience at Swarthmore College that, “if present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.” NASA scientist James Hansen, an early advocate for climate-change action whom Mann cites approvingly, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 1986 that, “in 20 years, the global warming should reach about 1 degree Celsius, which would be the warmest the Earth has been in the last 100,000 years.” (It increased by about 0.38 degrees Celsius.)

Seeing oneself as a visionary repelling a global threat does not lead to politics as much as to fanaticism.

https://news.grabien.com/story-10-dumbest-reactions-trump-quitting-paris-climate-accord

https://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/mwr/050/mwr-050-11-0589a.pdf

The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consulate at Bergen Norway
Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes.
Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the Gulf Stream still very warm.
Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared.
Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelt which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds.

I must apologize.
I neglected to mention that this report was from November 2, 1922, as reported by the AP and published in The Washington Post – 94 years ago.
This must have been caused by the Model T Ford’s emissions or possibly from horse and cattle flatulence?
Here is the report from 1922
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/re…

While a coalition of leftists, globalists, and rent-seekers rage about President Trump’s awesome decision to withdraw America from the Paris climate hoax, a key aspect of the president’s announcement is being overlooked — his offer to renegotiate.

In his Rose Garden speech, Trump stated:

So we are getting out. But we will start to negotiate and we will see if we can make a deal that’s fair. And if we can, that’s great. And if we can’t, that’s fine.

As a leader in the climate skeptic movement, I was at first disappointed to hear about the possibility of renegotiation. But upon further reflection, I considered that Trump had simply included it as one might use “sure, I’ll call you” following a bad date.

Yet now, I’ve concluded that his renegotiation offer may actually be brilliant, and could possibly be utilized to help American businesses, to solve real environmental problems, and even to assuage climate alarmists.

Thanks to fracking, America has a surfeit of natural oil and gas. So much so that our glut has depressed global oil prices.

Although Obama’s war on coal was wrong, it was made possible by the gas glut. There would have been no way for utilities to switch from coal to gas without the surfeit provided by fracking. But as a result, America’s carbon dioxide emissions are back down to 1990s levels. So fracking is a tried-and-true way to reduce emissions while keeping electricity prices low.

Our problem, though, is that the gas glut is not only hurting the coal industry, but it’s also hurting the oil and gas industry by keeping prices so low. If prices are too low, incentives for greater production are limited. Prices are hurting ExxonMobil so much, for example, the oil giant actually supports a carbon tax as a means of raising prices.

That’s bad business, bad policy, and bad politics.

A much better policy: Look to Europe and China, two large economies that have major problems which American natural gas can solve.

Europe is dependent on Russia for a large part of its gas supply, and is therefore vulnerable to the whims of Vladimir Putin on energy — and just about everything else. In China, the dirty way it burns coal for residential heating and cooking befouls its air, especially during the winter, to the point where deadly accidents occur because of visibility problems.

President Trump should sit down with the Europeans and the Chinese and offer them America’s natural gas.

Natural gas would wean Europe off of Russia. CONTINUE AT SITE