Environment

Claims that the earth is rapidly heating up because of man-made CO2 and thus heading for a “climate catastrophe” have taken a serious body blow over the past three years as a huge and fresh body of science emerges.

For example, under the agreement, China will be able to increase these emissions by a staggering number of years -- 13. They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us.

Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount. In fact, 14 days of carbon emissions from China alone would wipe out the gains from America -- and this is an incredible statistic -- would totally wipe out the gains from America's expected reductions in the year 2030, after we have had to spend billions and billions of dollars, lost jobs, closed factories, and suffered much higher energy costs for our businesses and for our homes.

The debate is settled,” asserted propagandist in chief Barack Obama in his latest State of the Union address. “Climate change is a fact.” Really? There is nothing more anti-scientific than the very idea that science is settled, static, impervious to challenge.

Syukuro Manabe, right here in Princeton, was the first person who did climate models with enhanced carbon dioxide and they were excellent models. And he used to say very firmly that these models are very good tools for understanding climate, but they are not good tools for predicting climate. I think that’s absolutely right. They are models, but they don’t pretend to be the real world. They are purely fluid dynamics. You can learn a lot from them, but you cannot learn what’s going to happen 10 years from now. What’s wrong with the models. I mean, I haven’t examined them in detail, (but) I know roughly what’s in them. And the basic problem is that in the case of climate, very small structures, like clouds, dominate. And you cannot model them in any realistic way. They are far too small and too diverse.

I used to think there was a consensus among government-funded certified climate scientists, but a better study by Strengers, Verheegen, and Vringer shows even that is not true. The “97% consensus” is now 43%.

...the increase in tropical storms in the Atlantic since the late-19th Century is not distinguishable from no change.

The evidence for an upward trend is even weaker if we look at U.S. landfalling hurricanes, which even show a slight negative trend beginning from 1900 or from the late 1800s

It is a proven fact that plants, including trees and all our food crops, are capable of growing much faster at higher levels of CO2 than present in the atmosphere today. Even at today’s concentration of 400 ppm plants are relatively starved for nutrition. The optimum level of CO2 for plant growth is about 5 times higher, 2000 ppm, yet the alarmists warn it is already too high. They must be challenged every day by every person who knows the truth in this matter. CO2 is the giver of life and we should celebrate CO2 rather than denigrate it as is the fashion today [Moore 2015].

(It is worth emphasizing that Moore is someone who has been at the forefront of the environmental movement. Whether he is correct or not, his views should at least be evaluated rather than automatically dismissed.)

Antarctic ice cores reveal a clear relationship between temperature and CO2 as the earth goes into and out of ice ages that is the reverse of that predicted by the theory: CO2 levels follow temperature up and down, rather than precede them.

Natural CO2 sources account for the majority of CO2 released into the atmosphere. Oceans provide the greatest annual amount of CO2 of any natural or anthropogenic source.

The US, Denmark, China, and Singapore all have low fertility rates: 1.87, 1.73, 1.6, and 0.81, respectively. Japan, one of the most extreme cases of population implosion, has a fertility rate of 1.41. Its population has been declining for the past few years.

Moreover, consistent with the concept of path dependency (Greif and Laitin 2004, Arthur 1989), once a scientific paradigm becomes locked in, it becomes increasingly difficult to challenge the status quo in the accepted scientific outlets, at least until challenges to the orthodoxy of the day become so compelling they cannot be ignored.

Climate Change Business Journal estimates the Climate Change Industry is a $1.5 Trillion dollar escapade, which means four billion dollars a day is spent on our quest to change the climate. That includes everything from carbon markets to carbon consulting, carbon sequestration, renewables, biofuels, green buildings and insipid cars. For comparison global retail sales online are worth around $1.5 trillion.

Confirmation bias is our tendency to cherry pick information which confirms pre-existing beliefs or ideas. This is also known as myside bias or confirmatory bias. Two people with opposing views on a topic can see the same evidence, and still come away both validated by it. Confirmation bias is pronounced in the case of ingrained, ideological, or emotionally charged views.

Though he professes great concern about climate change, the Gates Foundation had at least $1.2bn invested in oil giants BP and ExxonMobil as of December 2013, and those are only the start of his fossil fuel holdings.

By [energy] miracles, he means nuclear reactors that have yet to be invented (he is a major investor and chairman of nuclear startup TerraPower), machines to suck carbon out of the atmosphere (he is a primary investor in at least one such prototype) and direct climate manipulation (Gates has spent millions funding research into schemes to block the sun, and his name is on several hurricane-suppression patents).

This tsunami of government money distorts science in hidden ways that even the scientists who are corrupted often don’t appreciate.

Apparently, if you take money from the private sector to fund research, your work is inherently biased, but if you get multimillion-dollar grants from Uncle Sam, you are as pure as the freshly fallen snow.