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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

Au Revoir, Paris Climate Accord A Michael Bloomberg–led group has announced that America will still adhere to the climate-change pact. By Julie Kelly

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.”

We’ll Never Have Paris The climate change agreement was designed as a feel-good, do-nothing program. Oren Cass

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?

Don’t Apologize for Being Honest about Climate Change A response to Ross Douthat’s lukewarm lukewarmism By Oren Cass —

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.

The Fanatical Prophet of Climate-Change Doom Michael Mann demands that skeptics submit to the ‘scientific consensus.’ By Ian Tuttle

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.

NOVEMBER 2, 1922 FROM THE WASHINGTON POST ON GLOBAL WARMING

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…

Art of the Climate Deal: How Trump Should Renegotiate Paris By Steve Milloy

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

Climate and the New York Times The newspaper is hoping to persuade readers to burn more carbon.By James Freeman

Much has been written lately about the intolerance of New York Times readers toward anyone who does not share their belief that emissions of carbon dioxide will destroy the planet. But this week the newspaper gave its readers cause to wonder whether even the Times shares this belief.

At least on the surface, the Manhattan-based news organization is keeping the faith. The various items in Friday’s editions amount to a collective primal scream against President Donald Trump’s decision to exit the Paris climate accord. As of this writing, the home page of the paper’s website features stories claiming that Mr. Trump’s decision was “stupid and reckless” as well as “disgraceful” and based on “dubious data” from “distorted reports.” A news report says that Mr. Trump made a political “calculation” to ignore the popular will and instead placate his base. Meanwhile a Times column carries the subtle headline, “Donald Trump Poisons the World.”

But the Times seems to have made its own calculation about the risks of environmental catastrophe. And the only reasonable conclusion is that folks at the Times don’t think burning carbon is quite as dangerous as you might think from reading their product.

Even as the newspaper warns about impending doom if Americans don’t limit their emissions, the Times has also been trying to persuade its readers to dramatically increase theirs. In print and online this week, the Times has proudly presented advertisements for an exciting product offering called, “Around the World by Private Jet: Cultures in Transformation.” It sounds delightful, assuming you like the company:

Fly around the world in a customized Boeing 757 jet for the ultimate in luxury travel. Spend 26 days visiting such places as Israel, Cuba, Colombia, Australia, Myanmar and Iceland. Four award-winning New York Times journalists will accompany you, each for several days as you visit areas where they have expertise.

The Times promises, “In the air, your private jet comes with lie-flat beds and a dedicated cabin crew and chef.” Most Americans, who are generally not as well-heeled as the Times’ target demographic, probably couldn’t leave carbon footprints this big if they tried. And it wouldn’t be easy for the Times to design a less efficient means of circling our beloved planet. This week the print version of the advertisement noted there would be just 50 travelers—on an aircraft that can carry more than 200.

The concept of this trip doesn’t seem to square with the message being conveyed in the newspaper’s news and opinion pages, to say the least. Could it be a rogue operation from some overly aggressive and less environmentally sensitive staff in the Times marketing department? That seems unlikely, because at least according to the online description of this fabulous adventure, one of the “experts” on this journey is none other than New York Times Company Chairman Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. CONTINUE AT SITE

Macron proposes Paris for a global junk science oasis By Monica Showalter

Perhaps because his capital’s name was on the global accord being scrapped by one country, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, 39, wheeled out le grand geste, or grand gesture, in offering “refuge” to America’s climate scientists. As if such a fraud-riddled cast of characters were somehow about to be arrested. Or lose tenure. Or not get a grant. Or something.

In fact, it was for nothing more than President Trump pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, a worthless global non-treaty premised on the fake claims of global warming and policed worldwide by an America-hating petty Eurocrat bureaucracy run out of Berlin. Because the U.S. simply does not want to be a part of the farce, Macron is going overwrought like so many of them and apparently offering asylum ahead of the knock on the door at midnight.

He’s gone off the deep end, just as most of them have.

The question remaining is whether he could actually be serious. Does he really mean to make Paris an oasis of global warming believers and then call it science?

Does he really think scientists in the States are going to give up their cushy tenured positions and hotfoot it to the charms of Paris, which has become considerably less charming, given the existing bureaucracy and existing refugee threat should one actually have to live there?

And more to the point, does he really think climate science, which has been shown time and time again to be a fraud-riddled, data-faked, hide-the-decline, messed up hockey stick, is actually going to buckle down and start producing some hard science, which so far it has failed to do?

Why not call in all the astrologers, quack-medicine practitioners, and soothsayers as well, and make Paris the world’s junk science empire? You know their public will be happy to pay for it, given all the virtue-signaling potential.

Trump Skips Climate Church Paris exists to provide an imprimatur to what politicians would do anyway. By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

The business case for the Paris agreement has nothing to do with climate change. It goes like this: It is better to be part of any confab than outside of it. Like saluting the flag or bowing your head in church, there is no cost to being insincere, but there is a cost to not going along.

Let us understand something: 195 countries will not be dragged kicking and screaming to sign any agreement that imposes a cost on them. Such deals exist only because they provide an international imprimatur to what politicians were going to do anyway.

The oil countries like Saudi Arabia and Norway signed. They plan to keep producing oil. India and China plan to grow energy consumption until it is similar to the per capita consumption of the developed countries, at which point it will level off.

The U.S. and Europe intend to keep subsidizing green energy as long as domestic voters give them permission to do so, because the whole point of being in office is to redirect resources to interest groups best able to reward politicians for doling out the goodies.

The Paris countries agreed to meet certain emissions targets, and claimed an intent to hold a planetary temperature increase to less than 2 degrees Celsius.

Not only are the emission targets unenforceable, they have no intelligible relation to the temperature goal according to the very iffy science. By the shot-in-the-dark estimates of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, it’s even possible the rest of the century will bring little warming anyway.

And that’s good. Because the unenforceable cuts agreed to in Paris would be a rounding error even if carried out.

In the 30 years since global warming became a daily concern of the newspapers, one lesson has been reliably demonstrated for policy participants: There is no appetite in the body politic for the kinds of energy taxes and prohibitions needed to make a meaningful change in atmospheric CO 2 . CONTINUE AT SITE

The Non-Existent Case for the Paris Accord Getting out of Paris shouldn’t be a close call. By Rich Lowry *****

For a bull in the china shop, President Donald Trump has so far gingerly stepped around the Paris climate accord. That dance could end as soon as this week, with Trump deciding whether to stay in or opt out.

“Out” should be the obvious answer. No U.S. interest is served by remaining part of the accord, which even its supporters say is mostly an exercise in window dressing — that is, when they aren’t insisting that the fate of the planet depends on it.

The treaty’s advocates, hoping to forestall a Trump exit, are trying to save the accord by arguing that it is largely meaningless. In this spirit, a piece in the liberal website Vox explained, the Paris accord “asks participants only to state what they are willing to do and to account for what they’ve done. It is, in a word, voluntary.” In other words, “Nothing to see here, just us climate-change alarmists playing pretend.”

And there is indeed much to be said for the worthlessness of Paris. Beijing pledges that China’s emissions will “peak around 2030.” By one estimate, this is when its emissions would peak regardless. So the world’s largest emitter is using the accord as a platform for climate virtue-signaling.

According to Benjamin Zycher of the American Enterprise Institute, even if Paris is fully implemented and you accept the Environmental Protection Agency’s model for how emissions affect warming, it will produce a rounding error’s worth of decline in the global temperature by 2100 — .17 of a degree Celsius.

If Paris is such a nullity, why shouldn’t we simply pull out? This is where its supporters reverse field and contend that it will be a global disaster if the U.S. leaves. Supposedly the moral suasion involved in countries coming up with voluntary targets and having to defend their performance meeting them will drive an ever-escalating commitment to fight global warming.

Once upon a time, Paris was portrayed as a tool for steadily tightening restrictions on fossil fuels. The Obama team referred to one provision in the accord as “ratcheting up ambition over time.”

Whatever their opportunistic salesmanship at the moment, this clearly is still the goal of the treaty’s supporters and a reason why Trump should get out while the getting is good. International agreements acquire a dead-weight momentum of their own. Witness how hard it is to pull out of the Paris accord now, when it went into effect only last November. In another couple of years, it will acquire the sanctity of the Peace of Westphalia.

The treaty may be notionally voluntary, but climate-change activists will surely hunt for a judge willing to find a reason that the U.S. emission target in the accord is binding. Trump’s unhappy experience in the courts with his travel ban should make him highly sensitive to this judicial threat.