Spin vs. Reality

The Washington Examiner posted an article today about the latest events in the climate change debate.

The article reports:

Speaking at the United Nations in December, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drew cheers by saying the United States was “still in” the Paris Climate Agreement. Green activists applauded Pelosi’s defense of the international climate accord, which President Trump had vowed to exit. These activists claim that remaining in the Paris Agreement will help reduce global emissions.

They are wrong.

European leaders have spent years trying and pointedly failing to solve the climate crisis with regulation. Whether intentionally or not, U.S. policymakers have mostly avoided top-down solutions. And counterintuitively, or perhaps it should have been intuitive, the U.S. now leads the developed world in reducing carbon emissions.

America didn’t need a treaty–we just needed a President who understood how to balance environmental policy and the freedom and interests of the American people.

The article explains why the American approach has worked:

…instead of banning fossil fuels outright, the U.S. embraced natural gas amid a boom in its production. Thanks to a process called hydraulic fracturing or “fracking,” we’ve managed to tap new reserves of natural gas. In 2015, the U.S. surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world’s top producer of natural gas. By 2018, energy companies produced over 60% more natural gas than they had two decades earlier. This newfound abundance of natural gas has helped our nation transition away from coal, which emits twice as much carbon dioxide.

Thanks to this shift, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have hit 30-year lows, even as global emissions have increased by 50% during the same period. And since 2005, natural gas has done more to reduce power sector dioxide emissions than all renewable energy sources combined, according to the Energy Information Administration.

By eschewing regulation, America has also spurred additional emissions-reducing innovations in the private sector. Freed from red tape, U.S. energy firms have been able to devise and implement a host of groundbreaking green technologies. For example, a new technology called CleanWave strips chemicals from fracking wastewater using positively charged ions and bubbles. The Texas-based energy firm Apache reduces greenhouse gas emissions by powering fracking engines with natural gas instead of diesel.

The article concludes:

While the rest of the world fumbles with green energy policies, the U.S. continues to reduce emissions. We don’t need regulation to guarantee future success. American firms will continue to combat climate change, as long as we let them.

The free market works any time you let it.

Things That Just Make You Wonder

Investor’s Business Daily posted an article yesterday about the Paris Climate Accord. It seems as if President Trump did the right thing by pulling America out of the agreement.

There is still no agreement among scientists as to the role that man and his civilization play in climate change. Obviously the climate has been changing continually since man has inhabited the earth. There is a documented period of global warming during the Middle Ages, and there is no way that carbon emissions could be responsible for that. There are also plant fossils found beneath the ice in Greenland, another indication that the climate has changed over time. We all remember the TIME Magazine cover during the 1970’s warning of the coming ice age. We also know that our local weatherman is not accurate 100 percent of the time.

The article at Investor’s Business Daily reports:

According to the latest annual UN report on the “emissions gap,” the Paris agreement will provide only a third of the cuts in greenhouse gas that environmentalists claim is needed to prevent catastrophic warming. If every country involved in those accords abides by their pledges between now and 2030 — which is a dubious proposition — temperatures will still rise by 3 degrees C by 2100. The goal of the Paris agreement was to keep the global temperature increase to under 2 degrees.

Eric Solheim, head of the U.N. Environment Program, which produces the annual report, said this week that “One year after the Paris Agreement entered into force, we still find ourselves in a situation where we are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of millions of people from a miserable future. Governments, the private sector and civil society must bridge this catastrophic climate gap.”

The report says unless global greenhouse gas emissions peak before 2020, the CO2 levels will be way above the goal set for 2030, which, it goes on, will make it “extremely unlikely that the goal of holding global warming to well below 2 degrees C can still be reached.”

The article concludes:

What the report does make clear, however, is that all the posturing by government leaders in Paris was just that. Posturing. None of these countries intended to take the drastic and economically catastrophic steps environmentalist claim are needed to prevent a climate change doomsday. As such, Trump was right to stop pretending.

Whether you believe in climate change or not, the Paris climate accord amounted to nothing, or pretty close to it. Even the UN admits that now.

We need to look at the balance between civilization of the environment. America is one of the economic leaders in the world and yet one of the least polluting. Look at the progress we have made in recent years–many of our formerly polluted rivers are being cleaned up, the industries that created the ‘super fund sites’ are now controlled to the degree that they can no longer ruin the environment, waste disposal has improved, and carbon emissions for cars and factories have decreased.

The following chart is from the Energy Information website:

We are making progress. The Paris Agreement would not have positively impacted that progress–it would only have crippled the American economy.

When Your Predictions Are Wrong, Just Change The Time Frame

Yesterday The Independent Journal Review posted an article about the global warming predictions that were supposed to be happening about now that are nowhere in sight.

The article reports:

The cult’s leader — Al Gore — said in 2009 that there was a 75 percent chance that the entire arctic polar ice cap would melt by 2014.

It’s still there.

The year before the North Pole was supposed to be gone, noted climate scientist Hans von Storch went against cult orthodoxy in an interview with Spiegel Online in 2013 and had some interesting things to say about the climate prediction models so revered by the alarmists.

After noting that “climate change seems to be taking a break,” von Storch had this to say about the models:

“If things continue as they have been, in five years, at the latest, we will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models. A 20-year pause in global warming does not occur in a single modeled scenario. But even today, we are finding it very difficult to reconcile actual temperature trends with our expectations.”

I’m not a scientist, but it seems to me that if your predictions supposedly using the scientific method continually do not happen, there might be something wrong with your models or your calculations.

The article reports what the scientists are doing to modify their failed predictions:

Climate alarmist James Hansen’s prediction of Manhattan being underwater by 2018 seems to not be happening, so he’s moving his own goal posts and saying “50 to 150 years” now.

That’s the beauty of being one of the “we believe in science” people: there’s never any penalty for being wrong. Every prediction that doesn’t come true isn’t a cause for reflection about perhaps adjusting the conclusion; it’s merely an opportunity to pull a new prediction out of thin air.

Perhaps they are finally getting embarrassed, though. Tossing all of the predictions a century down the road at least saves them from having to be around when those are proved wrong.

The global warming movement has never been about science or the environment.

The following is from an article I posted in March 2016:

Then listen to the words of former United Nations climate official Ottmar Edenhofer:

“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015.

So what is the goal of environmental policy?

“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.

For those who want to believe that maybe Edenhofer just misspoke and doesn’t really mean that, consider that a little more than five years ago he also said that “the next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”

The earth’s climate is cyclical.  Scientists have found fossils in Greenland of animals from much more temperate climates. The Middle Ages experienced a period of global warming that had nothing to do with SUV’s.  The bottom line is that man is rather insignificant in the grand scheme of the earth’s climate. I believe that we have a responsibility to keep the earth as clean as possible, but we also have a responsibility to develop the earth’s resources to allow all people on the planet to experience freedom and the ability to earn enough to have food and shelter. Redistribution of wealth is not the solution to poverty–freedom is–and that is exactly what the global warming crowd is trying to limit.

I would like to note at this point that at least one generation of school children has been raised on this fake science as if it were fact. Combined with the fact that our children are no longer being taught critical thinking skills, this may be a major problem for the future of our country.