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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE

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Biden’s Climate Folly By Rich Lowry

By on April 24th, 2021

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/04/bidens-climate-folly/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_campaign=river&utm_content=featured-content-trending&utm_term=first

Making energy more costly, turning a blind eye to China’s brutality.

The White House, in effect, hosted the highest-powered Zoom call ever Thursday with a virtual summit on climate.

Everyone who is somebody participated, from Vladimir Putin (otherwise plotting a potential invasion of Ukraine) and Xi Jinping (taking time out from grinding Hong Kong to dust) to Pope Francis and Bill Gates.

The story line was big, ambitious goals for reduced emissions and a renewal of U.S. “credibility” after President Donald Trump supposedly trashed it by pulling out of the Paris climate accord.

Biden announced a commitment to cut U.S. emissions in half from 2005 levels by 2030. This was greeted by huzzahs from elite opinion-makers, but the commitment, and the entire effort, is misbegotten.

A key theory driving it is that if the U.S. cuts its emissions, everyone else around the world will as well, preserving Earth as we know it.

But even well-intentioned countries are liable to miss, or to manipulate, their climate targets, whatever they say. And not all countries are well-intentioned.

Consider China, which the Biden administration has been desperate to get on board. Amazingly enough, climate envoy John Kerry was the first Biden official to visit China, signaling that climate change is more important to the administration than China’s threatening behavior toward Taiwan, its aggression in the South China Sea, its suppression of the Uyghurs, its predatory trade practices or its theft of intellectual property.

Kerry got verbiage from the Chinese about tackling climate change “with the seriousness and urgency that it demands.”

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Biden And Kerry Get Humiliated On Earth Day, But Are Too Dumb To Realize It Francis Menton

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084

 Earth Day. The first such day was 51 years ago, April 22, 1970.

Since that first one, Earth Day has served as an annual opportunity for sanctimonious socialist-minded apocalypticists to issue prophesies of imminent environmental doom. Here from the Competitive Enterprise Institute is a great list of some 50 or so such predictions uttered since the late 1960s, all of which have since been proven wrong. Interestingly, the ones from the time of the first Earth Day mostly concerned overpopulation, famine, and global cooling. Today, those things seem ever so quaint.

Somewhere along the line, the prophesy of a coming ice age faded away, and global warming surged forth as the much more fashionable doomsday prediction. Today, fealty to the global warming apocalypse orthodoxy is a prerequisite for admission to polite society. Our President goes around repeating the mantra that climate change is an “existential threat,” even as he signs Executive Orders and re-directs half the energies of the vast federal government to fight it.

And what better opportunity than the annual return of Earth Day for our great leaders to demonstrate their deep climate change sincerity? Thus last week we had President Biden’s personal climate emissary to the world, John Kerry, traveling to Shanghai to triumphantly welcome China on board with the official plan to “save the planet” through ending the use of fossil fuels; and today, Biden himself has followed up with his Earth Day Climate Summit, a virtual event said to be attended by leaders of some 40 or so nations, including the likes of China, India and Russia. Surely, things have now completely changed course since the evil Trump has been banished, and the world will shortly be saved by the re-invigoration of the glorious Paris Climate Agreement.

The problem of course is that China, Russia, India, and for that matter all the rest of the developing countries, don’t care a whit about the whole climate change thing, and they also know that the Paris Agreement is a total scam. For a developing country, the basic strategy reflected in Paris is to hit up the U.S. and Europe for a lot of money, while simultaneously getting the more developed countries to cripple their own economies even as you yourself commit to absolutely nothing.

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President Biden’s 50% Emissions Reduction Target Is Political Theater, Not Serious Policy Wayne Winegarden

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://www.forbes.com/sites/waynewinegarden/2021/04/22/president-bidens-50-emissions-reduction-target-is-political-theater-not-serious-policy/?sh=74d3939c5351

At the 2021 global climate summit, President Biden committed the U.S. to cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030. Cutting emissions in half is a great talking point and a satisfying sounding goal. Unfortunately, the 50% – 52% reduction goal is more of a political statement than an achievable policy. Even a cursory look at the data raises serious questions regarding the goal’s achievability.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in 2019 were around 6.6 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent emissions (see the black line in the Figure). Relative to the benchmark year of 2005, this means total GHG emissions in the U.S. are down 11.6% (compared to the U.S. emissions peak in 2007, emissions are down 12.0%). On an annual basis, GHG emissions declined approximately 0.9% each and every year between 2005 and 2019.

Under the assumption that the current trends will continue, emissions will decline to a bit under 6.0 billion metric tons by 2030, or a total decline of 19.8 percent compared to 2005 (see the black dotted line in the Figure). Clearly, this progress is important from a global climate change perspective, but insufficient for the Biden Administration. Their goal is for a decline that is more than 2.5 times as large as our current declines (see the red dotted line in the Figure).

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We’ve Lost Count Of How Many ‘Last Chances’ We’ve Had To Save The Planet

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/04/23/weve-lost-count-of-how-many-last-chances-weve-had-to-save-the-planet/

John Kerry said earlier this month that we’ve reached “the last best opportunity we have to get real and serious” about global warming. What’s the difference between him and a loon walking down Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue wearing one of those sandwich boards proclaiming the end of the world is nigh? We’re struggling to see any.

Kerry, the Biden administration’s special presidential envoy for climate – an office that amounts to much less than a bucket of warm spit – is part of a chorus of fearmongering that goes back more than three decades. 

“In 1989 the United Nations gave us 10 years to save the world,” science site Watts Up With That posted last year. 

Guess blogger Eric Worrall then went on to list more than a dozen “last chances” to stop global warming.

“If we do not heed this last chance, I’m sure there will be another last chance in the near future, just like all the previous last chances,” he said.

Dire, way-off-base predictions have been the hallmark of radical environmentalism for at least a half century. Reason’s Ronald Bailey took “a look back” in 2020 at the first Earth Day and the forecasters “who got the future wrong.” He notes that the world did not have to halve the planet’s population or stop economic growth completely “to prevent the imminent ecological cataclysm.”

Nor have we run out of natural resources, been forced to shut down automobile travel, ban luxury items, and wear gas masks in urban areas due to air pollution (though the doomsters among us are happy that we’ve been forced to mask up for a least a year for another reason).

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Biden’s 10-Year Climate Plan He’s committing the U.S. to a far-fetched CO2 emissions goal without a vote of Congress.

By on April 23rd, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-10-year-climate-plan-11619132440?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Was President Biden trying to impress China’s Xi Jinping at Thursday’s climate pep rally by committing to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by half below 2005 levels by 2030? His pledge tees up sweeping new government controls over the economy of the kind you might see in one of Mr. Xi’s five-year plans. Mr. Biden now has a 10-year version of central economic planning.

Mr. Biden’s virtual world summit was intended to coax China and other emerging countries to make more aggressive emissions reductions. The U.S. accounts for less than 15% of global CO2 emissions, Mr. Biden told world leaders. Emissions in the U.S. and Europe have been falling since 2005 as natural gas and renewables have replaced coal power.

But rising emissions from China have swamped these declines. At the Paris climate summit in 2015, China committed only to begin reducing emissions in 2030, and it has continued to build coal plants and expand industrial production. China’s CO2 emissions increased by more between 2015 and 2018 than the U.K.’s total emissions in 2018 (see nearby chart).

All of the CO2 commitments made in Paris, including Barack Obama’s to reduce U.S. emissions by 26% to 28%, would reduce the Earth’s temperature increase by a mere 0.17 degree Celsius by 2100—not even close to the 1.5 degrees that is supposedly needed to head off doomsday. Yet Mr. Biden now wants to double down on Mr. Obama’s futile climate gesture.

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John Kerry’s Climate Kowtow How much will Biden trade away in exchange for empty promises?

By on April 20th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerrys-climate-kowtow-11618873552?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

These columns noted last year that putting John Kerry in charge of climate negotiations with China was a recipe for coming home “dressed in a barrel.” After Mr. Kerry’s sojourn to Shanghai last week, the question is: What happened to the barrel?

President Biden’s climate envoy emerged from two days of meetings with counterpart Xie Zhenhua with a joint statement that says little new. The two sides say they “are committed to cooperating with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis.” Both countries will work “to strengthen implementation of the Paris Agreement” limiting carbon emissions. Mr. Kerry didn’t make any big concessions to Beijing, and Beijing didn’t make any new promises about emissions limits it would break anyway.

In one sense that’s a relief. But all this empty hot air isn’t cost free in U.S. prestige and the missed opportunity to engage in more important talks. Making climate the sole focus of an early visit tells the Chinese that the U.S. puts that single issue above everything else in the bilateral relationship. China is happy to jibber-jabber about climate with the Americans if it means not having to engage on Taiwan, Hong Kong, Beijing’s repression of Uighurs in Xinjiang, the South China Sea, North Korea, or intellectual property theft.

But Beijing is clear that it will ignore any carbon-emissions commitments that might impinge on China’s economic growth. “Some countries are asking China to do more on climate change,” deputy foreign minister Le Yucheng said last week. “I am afraid this is not very realistic.”

Instead of triggering a rethink in Beijing, Mr. Kerry’s Shanghai jaunt gave China’s leaders a new opportunity to go on the public-relations offensive. “China welcomes the U.S. return to the Paris agreement and expects the U.S. side to uphold the agreement,” vice-premier Han Zheng told Mr. Kerry in a jab at Washington’s withdrawal from the pact under President Trump. Mr. Kerry also flattered Beijing by all but begging President Xi Jinping to join another global climate confab later this week.

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U.S. and China agree to cooperate to “tackle the climate crisis”

By on April 19th, 2021

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-china-climate-change-joe-biden-john-kerry-agreement/

Seoul, South Korea — The United States and China, the world’s two biggest carbon polluters, agreed to cooperate to curb climate change with urgency, just days before President Joe Biden hosts a virtual summit of world leaders to discuss the issue.
 
The agreement was reached by U.S. special envoy for climate John Kerry and his Chinese counterpart Xie Zhenhua during two days of talks in Shanghai last week, according to a joint statement.
 
The two countries “are committed to cooperating with each other and with other countries to tackle the climate crisis, which must be addressed with the seriousness and urgency that it demands,” said the statement, issued Saturday evening U.S. time.

Meeting with reporters in Seoul on Sunday, Kerry said the language in the statement is “strong” and that the two countries agreed on “critical elements on where we have to go.” But the former secretary of state said, “I learned in diplomacy that you don’t put your back on the words, you put on actions. We all need to see what happens.”
 
China is the world’s biggest carbon emitter, followed by the United States. The two countries pump out nearly half of the fossil fuel fumes that are warming the planet’s atmosphere. Their cooperation is key to the success of global efforts to curb climate change, but frayed ties over human rights, trade and China’s territorial claims to Taiwan and the South China Sea have been threatening to undermine such efforts.

Noting that China is the world’s biggest coal user, Kerry said he and Chinese officials had a lot of discussions on how to accelerate a global energy transition. “I have never shied away from expressing our views shared by many, many people that it is imperative to reduce coal, everywhere,” he said. 

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How a Physicist Became a Climate Truth Teller After a stint at the Obama Energy Department, Steven Koonin reclaims the science of a warming planet from the propaganda peddlers. By Holman Jenkins

By on April 17th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-a-physicist-became-a-climate-truth-teller-11618597216?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

Barack Obama is one of many who have declared an “epistemological crisis,” in which our society is losing its handle on something called truth.

Thus an interesting experiment will be his and other Democrats’ response to a book by Steven Koonin, who was chief scientist of the Obama Energy Department. Mr. Koonin argues not against current climate science but that what the media and politicians and activists say about climate science has drifted so far out of touch with the actual science as to be absurdly, demonstrably false.

This is not an altogether innocent drifting, he points out in a videoconference interview from his home in Cold Spring, N.Y. In 2019 a report by the presidents of the National Academies of Sciences claimed the “magnitude and frequency of certain extreme events are increasing.” The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is deemed to compile the best science, says all such claims should be treated with “low confidence.”

In 2017 the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report claimed that, in the lower 48 states, the “number of high temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low temperature records.” On closer inspection, that’s because there’s been no increase in the rate of new record highs since 1900, only a decline in the number of new lows.

Mr. Koonin, 69, and I are of one mind on 2018’s U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment, issued in Donald Trump’s second year, which relied on such overegged worst-case emissions and temperature projections that even climate activists were abashed (a revoltcontinues to this day). “The report was written more to persuade than to inform,” he says. “It masquerades as objective science but was written as—all right, I’ll use the word—propaganda.”

Mr. Koonin is a Brooklyn-born math whiz and theoretical physicist, a product of New York’s selective Stuyvesant High School. His parents, with less than a year of college between them, nevertheless intuited in 1968 exactly how to handle an unusually talented and motivated youngster: You want to go cross the country to Caltech at age 16? “Whatever you think is right, go ahead,” they told him. “I wanted to know how the world works,” Mr. Koonin says now. “I wanted to do physics since I was 6 years old, when I didn’t know it was called physics.”

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Climate Media vs. Climate Science The good news is that scientists themselves have started to correct the record. by Holman Jenkins Jr.

By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climate-media-vs-climate-science-11618355224?mod=opinion_featst_pos3

Joe Biden has put a presidential imprimatur on climate change being an existential threat, and he doesn’t mean in the Jean-Paul Sartre sense of man’s search for meaning in an uncomforting universe.

He means the end of humanity, a claim nowhere found in climate science.

This is odd because the real news today is elsewhere. Its movement may be ocean-liner-like, the news may be five years old before the New York Times notices it, but the climate community has been backing away from a worst-case scenario peddled to the public for years as “business as usual.”

A drumroll moment was Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peter’s 2020 article in the journal Nature partly headlined: “Stop using the worst-case scenario for climate warming as the most likely outcome.”

This followed the 2017 paper by Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi asking why climate scenarios posit implausible increases in coal burning a century from now. And I could go on. Roger Pielke Jr. and colleagues show how the RCP 8.5 scenario was born to give modelers a high-emissions scenario to play with, and how it came to be embraced despite being at odds with every real-world indicator concerning the expected course of future emissions.

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Kamala’s Theory of Everything The VP identifies Central America’s big problem: climate.

By on April 15th, 2021

https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamalas-theory-of-everything-11618440600?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Biden has handed Vice President Kamala Harris the job of fixing the mess at the U.S.-Mexico border, and she’s no fool. Rather than taking charge of the actual border, she is at pains to say she has been tapped for something far more grand (and vague): to be the Administration’s point person for addressing the “root causes” of emigration from these countries and providing “hope” for the region.

And so on Wednesday she brought together experts on the Northern Triangle nations of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, the home countries of so many migrants. Here’s how the Vice President summed up the issue before her discussion:

“We are looking at issues that have been a long time in the making.  We are looking at issues that relate to the need for economic development, a need for resilience around extreme climate; looking at the fact that this is, in large part—these Northern Triangle countries—a large part of their economic base was agriculture, and then what the severe climate experiences have done in dampening and really harming their ability to have that economic driver in their countries.”

If we understand this word salad, Ms. Harris seems to be saying that the development problem in these countries is that climate change is making agriculture impossible. This in turn is one of the root causes sending people to our Southern border.

Climate has become this Administration’s theory of everything.

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