• Tag Archives climate change

  • Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Climate Hysteria Is Dangerous (But Typical)

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

     

    In a MLK-day interview with Ta-Nehsisi Coates, congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (“AOC”) opined that “We’re like, the world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”

    On its face, this seems silly. She’s misreading an October report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel called “Global Warming of 1.5°C.” But is it surprising that a radical politician would exaggerate something? That’s what politicians often do. And so do many media outlets—see this story in The Guardian that AOC used to justify her statement on Twitter, which opens with the following dire paragraph:

    The world’s leading climate scientists have warned there is only a dozen years for global warming to be kept to a maximum of 1.5C, beyond which even half a degree will significantly worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of millions of people.

    The recent report does not say the “world will end” unless we “address climate change” within 12 years. Instead, it says that in order to keep warming below 1.5°C, we should reduce emissions nearly 50 percent below 2010 levels by 2030, and then quickly reduce them to zero, perhaps by 2050.

    The UN report, unfortunately, is as misguided as AOC and The Guardian. It assumes that all the warming since the mid-19th century is caused by human emissions of dreaded carbon dioxide. It’s not.

    There are two major periods of warming since then. The first, from 1910-45, can have little, if any, human component. When it started, the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over the preindustrial background was far too small to have caused the 0.45°C warming that subsequently ensued (a calculation showing this is in here). If such slight changes caused that much warming, surface temperatures would be so sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide, and it would be so hot by now, that climate change actually would be dire.

    That’s about half of the total warming that has been observed. So we really have about another degree to get to the 1.5°C human-caused warming.

    AOC and The Guardian are referencing the 2030 benchmark used in multiple projections throughout the report. It is similarly used in the UN’s 2015 Agenda for Sustainable Development, also referenced in the report. This benchmark year is used alongside other benchmark years (e.g. 2050) to indicate projected emissions and temperature trajectories under different abatement assumptions.

    Nowhere in the lengthy report does it claim that 2030 is an immutable deadline of any sort, after which all abatement efforts will be futile. Moreover, the report itself acknowledges that the current, nonforcible commitments of the Paris Climate Accord, if met by all signatories, would still fall dramatically short of achieving the dodgy 1.5°C target.

    End of the world? No. Exaggeration for political effect? Yes. AOC’s really doing nothing more than politics-as-usual.

    This article was reprinted from the Cato Institute.

    Derek Bonett


    Derek Bonett

    Derek Bonett is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, where he writes on a range of regulatory issues, with a particular emphasis on financial markets and commercial banking.

    This article was originally published on FEE.org. Read the original article.


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  • 4 Big Problems With the Government’s New Climate Change Report

    Posted on by Azrael Comment

    If you’re like me, you’re happy the White House released the latest version of the National Climate Assessment on Black Friday. Publishing the 1,700-page report the day after Thanksgiving saved me from unwanted dinner conversations about our planet’s impending climate doom.

    But if your aunt calls you up this week spouting claims of mass deaths, global food shortages, economic destruction, and national security risks resulting from climate change, here’s what you need to know about this report.

    One statistic that media outlets have seized upon is that the worst climate scenario could cost the US 10 percent of its gross domestic product by 2100.  The 10 percent loss projection is more than twice the percentage that was lost during the Great Recession.

    The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer’s organization, calculates these costs on the assumption that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That temperature projection is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic.

    The scary projections in the National Climate Assessment rely on a theoretical climate trajectory that is known as Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5. In estimating impacts on climate change, climatologists use four representative such trajectories to project different greenhouse gas concentrations.

    To put it plainly, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 assumes a combination of bad factors that are not likely to all coincide. It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”

    Despite what the National Climate Assessment says, Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 is not a likely scenario. It estimates nearly impossible levels of coal consumption, fails to take into account the massive increase in natural gas production from the shale revolution, and ignores technological innovations that continue to occur in nuclear and renewable technologies.

    When taking a more realistic view of the future of conventional fuel use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the doomsday scenarios vanish. Climatologist Judith Curry recently wrote, “Many ‘catastrophic’ impacts of climate change don’t really kick at the lower CO2 concentrations, and [Representative Concentration Pathway] then becomes useful as a ‘scare’ tactic.”

    A central feature of the National Climate Assessment is that the costs of climate are here now, and they are only going to get worse. We’re going to see more hurricanes and floods. Global warming has worsened heat waves and wildfires.

    But last year’s National Climate Assessment on extreme weather tells a different story. As University of Colorado Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr. pointed out in a Twitter thread in August 2017, there were no increases in drought, no increases in frequency or magnitude of floods, no trends in frequency or intensity of hurricanes, and “low confidence for a detectable human climate change contribution in the Western United States based on existing studies.”

    It’s hard to imagine all of that could be flipped on its head in a matter of a year.

    Another sleight of hand in the National Climate Assessment is where certain graph timelines begin and end. For example, the framing of heat wave data from the 1960s to today makes it appear that there have been more heat waves in recent years. Framing wildfire data from 1985 until today makes it appear as though wildfires have been increasing in number.

    But going back further tells a different story on both counts, as Pielke Jr. has explained in testimony.

    Moreover, correlation is not causality. Western wildfires have been particularly bad over the past decade, but it’s hard to say to what extent these are directly owing to hotter and drier temperatures. It’s even more difficult to pin down how much man-made warming is to blame.

    Yet the narrative of the National Climate Assessment is that climate change is directly responsible for the increase in economic and environmental destruction of western wildfires. Dismissing the complexity of factors that contribute to a changing climate and how they affect certain areas of the country is irresponsible.

    The National Climate Assessment stresses that this report “was created to inform policy-makers and makes no specific recommendations on how to remedy the problem.” Yet the takeaway was clear: The costs of action (10 percent of America’s GDP) dwarf the costs of any climate policy.

    The reality, however, is that policies endorsed to combat climate change would carry significant costs and would do nothing to mitigate warming, even if there were a looming catastrophe like the National Climate Association says.

    Just last month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change proposed a carbon tax of between $135 and $5,500 by the year 2030. An energy tax of that magnitude would bankrupt families and businesses and undoubtedly catapult the world into economic despair.

    These policies would simply divert resources away from more valuable use, such as investing in more robust infrastructure to protect against natural disasters or investing in new technologies that make Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 even more of an afterthought than it already should be.

    The Trump administration is coming under criticism for publishing the report on Black Friday. To the extent that was a conscious strategy, it certainly isn’t a new tactic. The Obama administration had frequent Friday night document dumps in responding to congressional inquiries about Solyndra and the Department of Energy’s taxpayer-funded failures in the loan portfolio. The Environmental Protection Agency even released its Tier 3 gas regulations, which increased the price at the pump, on Good Friday.

    No matter what party is in charge, the opposite party will complain about their burying the story. Regardless, the American public would be better served by enjoying the holiday season and shopping rather than worrying about an alarmist report.

    This article was reprinted from The Daily Signal.

    Source: 4 Big Problems With the Government’s New Climate Change Report – Foundation for Economic Education


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  • NYT: Biofuel Mandates Have Been an Environmental Disaster

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment

    Gridlock that stops any legislation from being passed is usually better than “bipartisanship.” To get bipartisan support, legislation has to buy off power brokers and special interest groups in both political parties. A classic example is America’s harmful legislation requiring the use of biofuels. It has resulted in the destruction of vast areas of tropical rainforest, massively increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

    The New York Times describes this in a story called “Palm Oil Was Supposed to Help Save the Planet. Instead It Unleashed a Catastrophe.” The story explains that “A decade ago, the U.S. mandated the use of vegetable oil in biofuels, leading to industrial-scale deforestation—and a huge spike in carbon emissions.” In some areas once covered by rainforest, there are now “only charred stumps poking up from murky, dark pools of water.” As the Times explains:

    Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe.

    Despite this massive destruction of forests, Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the Speaker of the House at the time, continues to defend the “biofuels mandate she shepherded into law.” She claims it is “reducing emissions” when it obviously isn’t. Her fellow Democrat and political ally, former Congressman Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), admits as much. He helped enact the mandate as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. But he now recognizes the obvious reality that the mandate is “doing more harm to the environment” than any fossil fuels it has replaced.

    Former President George W. Bush enabled this destruction by supporting the mandate and signing it into law. This bipartisan support for the mandate didn’t make it better because bipartisanship is usually a toxic blend of evil and stupidity. “In America, we have a two-party system,” a Republican congressional staffer told a visiting group of Russian legislators in the 1990s. “There is the stupid party. And there is the evil party. … Periodically, the two parties get together and do something that is both stupid and evil. This is called—‘bipartisanship.’”

    This harm to the environment was also facilitated by the Obama-era Environmental Protection Agency. It massively underestimated the destruction of forest that the mandate would cause. Dire losses of forests were projected in its initial, honest estimate of what would happen from the mandate going into effect. But in response to lobbying from special interests, it replaced that estimate with a rosier one that dismissed forest losses as negligible.

    As The New York Times notes, initially, the Obama EPA recognized that the negative effect on the environment “of land-use changes overshadowed any other consideration, and not by a small margin,” resulting in negative effects on the climate annually for at least 32 years and taking “a century” before the resulting replacement of fossil fuels would “reach the level of benefit required under the law.” But in response to lobbying, the EPA’s stance changed:

    By the time the E.P.A. released its final rule in early 2010, it had made a complete about-face. Its models now found that the impact from land-use changes were almost negligible. For Indonesia, the E.P.A. estimated that just 110,000 acres of forest would be converted to cropland as a result of the American biofuels law, and almost none of it on sensitive peatland.

    Across the world, the land substitution effects of biofuels mandates have been profoundly negative.

    Biofuel mandates drove up wheat prices in Egypt, triggering riots and contributing to the ouster of pro-American ruler Hosni Mubarak. Egypt is now under a veiled military dictatorship that is far more oppressive and wasteful than Mubarak’s rule, and there is far more terrorism and much less tourism and growth in small businesses than under Mubarak. Related food price increases fueled terrorism and violence in places like Yemen and Afghanistan. They also contributed to hunger and child malnutrition in Guatemala.

    This article was reprinted from Liberty Unyielding.

    Source: NYT: Biofuel Mandates Have Been an Environmental Disaster – Foundation for Economic Education


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