• Tag Archives climate

  • 4 Questions You Probably Won’t Hear at CNN’s Climate Crisis Town Hall

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment


    Ten Democratic presidential candidates will square off in New York on Wednesday, fielding questions as part of a seven-hour telecast (yes, seven hours) that CNN is billing as an “unprecedented prime-time event focused on the climate crisis.”

    Though questions will come from members of the audience, CNN’s description of the event offers some indication of what questions viewers can expect.

    In his preview of the town hall-style event, CNN senior analyst Mark Preston writes that global warming “would cause coastal cities to disappear underwater, leaving hundreds of millions of people displaced and forced to migrate to dry areas.

    Because of this, Preston says, the UN warns that governments must take “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society.”

    Whether questions that do not accept these premises—that global warming is a crisis and only governments can fix it—will be entertained remains to be seen. But CNN’s description suggests the event may be closer to Greta Thunberg’s “I Want You to Panic” approach to climate change than level-headed analysis that explores the costs and benefits of inaction and action on climate change.

    Regardless of CNN’s approach to the issue, here are four climate change-related questions audience members should consider asking.

    Nuclear energy is safe, comparatively cheap, reliable, and generates zero greenhouse gasses. For this reason, the Union of Concerned Scientists has said nuclear energy is necessary to address climate change. It’s already a proven solution to CO2 emissions. France and Sweden, two nations that have far lower per capita carbon emission rates than the US, rely heavily on nuclear power, generating 72 percent and 42 percent of their energy from it, respectively. The US, on the other hand, generates just 20 percent of its power from nuclear energy.

    Despite its efficiency and low-cost, prominent Green New Deal plans from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Bernie Sanders either reject expanding US nuclear capacity or propose phasing it out entirely.

    A new study in Science magazine says one solution to the fears surrounding CO2 emissions is surprisingly simple: plant more trees. The study says that increasing the planet’s forests by an area the size of the United States “has the potential to cut the atmospheric carbon pool by about 25%.”

    That is no small order since we’re talking about an area more than five percent of the Earth’s land surface area. Yet it’s likely far more achievable than becoming a CO2-free economy by 2050.

    Assuming it could be achieved, would an international policy dedicated to increasing forestation not be preferable to taxing CO2?

    The environmentalist Dr. Bjorn Lomborg points out that since the 1920s, atmospheric CO2 concentrations increased by about 30 percent to more than 400 ppm, and global average temps increased by roughly 1°C. Yet during that same timeframe, climate-related deaths plummeted by 99 percent.

    The reason for this is that people in wealthier nations are more resistant to climate-related deaths than people in poorer nations, and the 20th century saw an unprecedented increase in economic growth (see below). This suggests the best way to protect people from climate change is with economic growth, not austerity. As it happens, the “socio-economic pathways” (SSPs) literature makes it clear that the most abundant future is one that relies on fossil fuels and free markets.

    About 65 percent of all electricity in the US is generated by fossil fuels, according to the Energy Information Administration. This actually increases during the coldest months of the year. During cold snaps, according to the Department of Energy, independent system operators (ISOs) can depend on coal, nuclear, and natural gas for more than 80 percent of the electricity they generate.

    Most parts of the country, however, aren’t heated with electric power. Natural gas—a fossil fuel—is the primary fuel for warming homes in most parts of the country by a wide margin. Kerosene and fuel oil also account for a sizable portion in some parts of the country. On a continent of about 3.8 million square miles that sees temps reach as low as 13 degrees Fahrenheit in Atlanta and -4 degrees in New York City, fossil fuels are what fight the freeze, keeping hundreds of millions of Americans warm during the coldest months. 


    Jon Miltimore

    Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has appeared in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Washington Times. 

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


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  • 5 Surprising Scientific Facts about Earth’s Climate

    Posted on by Azrael 1 Comment


    On the weekend of August 10–11, as if in chorus, major online news websites called on people to stop consuming meat. The calls echoed a recent United Nations report that recommended doing so to fight climate change.

    It surprised many, but there are other more surprising facts about climate change that are hardly published in our everyday news media.

    Below are some facts—scientifically recognized and published in peer-reviewed journals—that may raise your eyebrows.

    All proxy temperature data sets reveal that there have been cyclical changes in climate in the past 10,000 years. There is not a single climate scientist who denies this well-established fact. It doesn’t matter what your position on the causes and magnitude and danger (or not) of current climate change is—you have to be on board on this one. Climate has always changed. And it has changed in both directions, hot and cold. Until at least the 17th century, all these changes occurred when almost all humans were hunters, gatherers, and farmers.

    Industrialization did not happen until the 17th century. Therefore, no prior changes in climate were driven by human emissions of carbon dioxide. In the last 2,000 years alone, global temperatures rose at least twice (around the 1st and 10th centuries) to levels very similar to today’s, and neither of those warm periods were caused by humans.

    Yes, you read that right. The 10,000-year Holocene paleoclimatology records reveal that both the Arctic and Antarctic are in some of their healthiest states. The only better period for the poles was the 17th century, during the Little Ice Age, when the ice mass levels were higher than today’s. For the larger part of the past 10,000 years, the ice mass levels were lower than today’s. Despite huge losses in recent decades, ice mass levels are at or near their historic highs.

    If you paid attention to the previous fact, then the following one is not hard to understand. Polar bears—often used as a symbol of climate doomsday—are one of the key species in the Arctic. Contrary to the hype surrounding their extinction fear, the population numbers have actually increased in the past two decades.

    Last year, the Canadian government considered increasing polar bear killing quotas as their increasing numbers posed a threat to the Inuit communities living in the Nunavut area.

    The increase in population size flies in the face of those who continue to claim otherwise in the popular news media. And it is not just the polar bears in the Arctic. Other critical species elsewhere, like tigers, are also making a comeback.

    While most of the current climatologists who collaborate with the United Nations believe anthropogenic CO2 emissions have exacerbated natural warming in recent decades, there is no empirical proof to support their claim. The only way to test it would be to wait and see if their assumptions come true.

    The entire climate fraternity was in for a surprise when global temperature between 2000 and 2016 failed to rise as anticipated by the climate alarmists. The scientists assumed that rising CO2 emissions from human activity would result in a rapid rise in temperature, but they didn’t.

    This proved that atmospheric CO2 concentrations are not the primary factor controlling global temperature. Consideration of a much longer period (10,000 or more years) suggests that CO2 had no significant role to play in temperature increases. CO2 never was the temperature control knob.

    These are some of the many climate facts that the media refuses to acknowledge, like the impending solar minimum that NASA has predicted for the next two solar cycles between 2021 and 2041, ushering in a period of global cooling like it did during the solar minimum of 17th century.

    There are other facts that run contrary to popular belief, such that there has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, wildfires, droughts, or other extreme weather events. Even the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported low confidence that global warming—manmade or not—was driving increases in extreme weather events.

    The list is endless. It would be naïve not to acknowledge this blatant and lopsided reporting in our news media.


    Vijay Jayaraj

    Vijay Jayaraj (M.S., Environmental Science) is the Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He currently lives in Udumalpet, India.

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


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  • The Economics of Climate Change: What Universities Won’t Teach College Students

    Posted on by Azrael Comment


    climate-change

    I recently gave a talk to a student group at Connecticut College on the economics of climate change. (The video is broken up into three parts on my YouTube channel: one, two, and three.) In this post I’ll summarize three of my main points:

    (1) There is a huge disconnect between what the published economics research actually says about government policies to limit global warming, and how the media is reporting it.

    (2) President Trump taking the U.S. out of the Paris Agreement doesn’t really affect anything on the margin, even if we stipulate the alarmist position on climate change.

    (3) If I’m wrong, and human-caused climate change really does pose a dire threat to humanity in the next few decades, then scientists are currently working on several lines of research of practical ways to actually deal with the problem.

    I first clarified to the students that throughout my talk, I wasn’t going to grab results from right-wing think tanks, or from “fringe” scientists who were considered cranks by their peers. On the contrary, I would be relaying results from sources such as the work of a Nobel laureate William Nordhaus (whose model on climate change policy had been one of three used by the Obama Administration) and from the UN’s own periodic report summarizing the latest research on climate change science and policy.

    To demonstrate just how wide the chasm is between the actual economics research and the media treatment of these issues, I described to the students the spectacle I observed back in the fall of 2018, when on the same weekend news came out that William Nordhaus had won the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on the economics of climate change and that the UN released a “Special Report” advising governments to try to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

    The media treatment (sometimes in the same story) presented these events with no sense of conflict or irony, leading regular citizens to assume that Nordhaus’ Nobel-winning work supported the UN’s goals for policymakers.

    But that is not true at all. Here’s a graph from a 2017 Nordhaus publication that I included in my presentation:

    slide-2.png

    As the figure shows, Nordhaus’ model—and again, this isn’t cooked up by the Heritage Foundation, but instead was one selected by the Obama Administration’s EPA and was the reason he won the Nobel Prize—projects that if governments “did nothing,” total global warming would reach about 4.1 degrees Celsius. In contrast, if governments implemented the “optimal carbon tax,” as Nordhaus would recommend in a perfect world, then total warming would be about 3.5 degrees Celsius.

    Anyone remotely familiar with the climate change policy debate knows that such an amount of warming would terrify the prominent activists and groups advocating for a political solution. They would quite confidently tell the public that warming of this amount would spell absolute catastrophe for future generations.

    My point here isn’t to endorse Nordhaus’ model. My point is simply that Americans never heard anything about this when the media simultaneously covered Nordhaus’ award and the UN’s document calling for a 1.5°C limit. And yet, Nordhaus’ own work—not shown in the figure above, but I spell it out here—clearly concludes that such an aggressive target would cause far more damage to humans in the form of reduced economic output, that it would be better for governments to “do nothing” about climate change at all.

    To continue with the theme of how they’ve been misinformed, I reminded the students of the media’s apoplexy when Trump announced his intention to remove the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement (or treaty, in lay terms). I showed them a headline in which famed physicist Stephen Hawking said Trump was pushing the planet “over the brink.”

    I then asked the students rhetorically, “You would think that the Paris Agreement was going to ‘work’ to contain the threat of climate change, except for Trump pulling out and wrecking it, right?”

    And yet, the pro-intervention group ClimateActionTracker.org nicely illustrates that even if all countries met their pledges (including the U.S.), it wouldn’t come close to limiting warming to the weaker benchmark of 2°C, let alone the newer, more chic target of 1.5°C. Things were even worse if we evaluated the actual policies of governments (as opposed to what they stated they intended to do about limiting their emissions).

    slide-2.png

    slide-1_0.png

    Further, I included a screenshot (in the top left of the slide) from a Vox article published before Trump’s Paris announcement, which said not a single country on Earth was taking the 2°C target seriously.

    After spending so much time showing that the political “solutions” were failing even on their own terms, I summarized a few avenues of research (see this article for details) where scientists are exploring techniques to either remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or reflect some incoming sunlight.

    Although I personally do not think human-caused climate change is a crisis, and do think that adaptation coming from normal economic growth will be more than sufficient to deal with any problems along the way, nonetheless scientists do have these other techniques in their back pocket should they become necessary to “buy humanity a few decades of breathing room” while technology advances in the transportation and energy sectors.

    Americans, especially students, are being whipped into a panic over the allegedly existential threat of climate change. Yet the actual research, summarized in the UN’s own periodic reports and in the research of a Nobel laureate in the field, shows that at best only a modest “leaning against the wind” could be justified according to standard economic science.

    By their own criteria, the alarmist activists are admitting that political measures are nowhere near achieving their goals. Their own rhetoric says that these activists are wasting everyone’s time pushing solutions that will end in catastrophe. Occasionally they slip up, as for example when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admits that her “we have 12 years left” was not to be taken literally.

    In order to bring light to the climate change debate, at this point one just needs to actually screenshot and explain the evidence from the establishment sources. The rhetorical framing of the issue is so far removed from the underlying research that this alone is heretical.

    This article is republished with permission from the Mises Institute. 

    Robert P. Murphy

    Robert P. Murphy is senior economist at the Independent Energy Institute, a research assistant professor with the Free Market Institute at Texas Tech University, and a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute.

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


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