The Paris Climate Treaty Is Already Failing

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

No one outside of the environmental movement expected the Paris climate treaty to be a game changer, but already we’re seeing signs of an unwillingness to follow through on the deal—in “green” Europe of all places! Only three European countries—France, Germany, and Sweden—are following through on their commitments they made in Paris 15 months ago to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Guardian reports:

“EU politicians portraying themselves as climate leaders should put their money where their mouth is by closing loopholes in the EU’s key climate law and pushing for more ambition,” said Femke de Jong, the EU policy director for Carbon Market Watch, a campaign group that co-drafted the EU Climate Leadership Boardsurvey.

Loopholes abound for Europe, it seems. The Guardian continues:

Several countries have tried to gain wiggle room in the talks by pushing for measures such as a later (and higher) baseline for measuring their CO2 cuts, or greater use of forestry credits to meet the EU’s climate goal…Other “loopholes” identified in the paper include a handout of 100m surplus ETS allowances, worth an expected €2bn, to nine countries to help them meet their emissions obligations on paper. […]

Carlos Calvo Ambel, a spokesperson for Transport & Environment, the survey’s other co-sponsor, said: “The great majority of countries want to rig the law with loopholes so they can continue business as usual. Either Europe follows the lead of Sweden, Germany and France, which are going in the right direction, though not far enough, or we should forget about our climate leadership.”

Forget about your climate leadership, indeed. In fact, if we look at the numbers, Germany—one of the three European nations judged by this new survey to be following through on its commitments—is continuing to see its greenhouse gas emissions rise.

Full post

 

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 29, 2017 at 02:15AM

“Deadly heat stress could threaten hundreds of millions”

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
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By Paul Homewood

 

h/t Patsy Lacey

 

Deadly heat stress is projected to affect hundreds of millions more people each year under relatively little additional climate warming. The Paris Agreement commits the international community to limit global warming to no more than 2℃ above pre-industrial (late 19th century) air temperatures, with an aspirational target of 1.5℃. In our latest research, which looked at the impact of global temperature rises on megacities, we found that even if 1.5℃ is achieved, large increases in the frequency of deadly heat are expected.

By 2050 about 350m more people living in megacities could be exposed to deadly heat each year.

http://ift.tt/2nepkmg

 

 

Seeing as how we are told the world is already 1C warmer than those idyllic pre-industrial times, I might ask where all of the hundreds of millions are, who must already be dying.

In reality, of course, the UHI effect in big cities must totally dwarf the odd tenth of a degree resulting from any global warming, and it is that which needs attention.

 

But what Mr Matthews forgets to tell us is that cold weather kills many, many more times as many people as hot weather does, as this study in the Lancet proved in 2015:

 

Cold weather is 20 times as deadly as hot weather, and it’s not the extreme low or high temperatures that cause the most deaths, according to a study published Wednesday.

The study found the majority of deaths occurred on moderately hot and moderately cold days instead of during extreme temperatures.

"Although the risk of mortality due to extremely cold or hot days is actually higher, they are less frequent," said lead author Antonio Gasparrini of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The study — published in the British journal The Lancet — analyzed data on more than 74 million deaths in 13 countries between 1985 and 2012. Of those, 5.4 million deaths were related to cold, while 311,000 were related to heat.

Because the study included countries under different socio-economic backgrounds and with varying climates, it was representative of temperature-related deaths worldwide, the study said. The sharp distinction between heat- and cold-related deaths is because low temperatures cause more problems for the body’s cardiovascular and respiratory systems, it added.

"Public-health policies focus almost exclusively on minimizing the health consequences of heat waves," Gasparrini said. "Our findings suggest that these measures need to be refocused and extended to take account of a whole range of effects associated with temperature."

This report backs up a U.S. study last year from the National Center for Health Statistics, which found that cold kills more than twice as many Americans as heat

http://ift.tt/1K3123L

 

And this does not only apply to colder regions. As the analysis shows, countries like Spain and Thailand share the same phenomenon.

 

http://ift.tt/1Frx74j

 

Meanwhile, thanks to the advantages of our modern, fossil fuelled society, the death rate in countries such as India have plummeted since 1960:

 

http://ift.tt/2o75Dkf

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

March 29, 2017 at 02:00AM

House Science Committee Hearing

via Climate Etc.
https://judithcurry.com

by Judith Curry

My testimony at the House Science Committee Hearing on Climate Science: Assumptions, Policy Implications and the Scientific Method.

The text of my written testimony is here [Curry house science testimony mar 17].   I really enjoyed preparing this testimony, it provided me an opportunity to reflect on my writings over the past 7 years and synthesize them into an essay on the philosophy of climate science, including what went wrong and why, and some suggestions for fixing these problems.

I realize that this essay is a bit esoteric, but in my opinion these are the kinds of issues that need to be understood and confronted.

My verbal testimony attempted a simplified synthesis.  The text of my verbal remarks:

I thank the Chairman and the Committee for the opportunity to offer testimony today.

Prior to 2010, I felt that supporting the IPCC consensus on human-caused climate change was the responsible thing to do. That all changed for me in November 2009, following the leaked Climategate emails, that illustrated the sausage making and even bullying that went into building the consensus.

I came to the growing realization that I had fallen into the trap of groupthink in supporting the IPCC consensus. I began making an independent assessment of topics in climate science that had the most relevance to policy. I concluded that the high confidence of the IPCC’s conclusions was not justified, and that there were substantial uncertainties in our understanding of how the climate system works. I realized that the premature consensus on human-caused climate change was harming scientific progress because of the questions that don’t get asked and the investigations that aren’t made. We therefore lack the kinds of information to more broadly understand climate variability and societal vulnerabilities.

As a result of my analyses that challenge the IPCC consensus, I have been publicly called a serial climate disinformer, anti-science, and a denier by a prominent climate scientist. I’ve been publicly called a denier by a U.S. Senator. My motives have been questioned by a U.S. Congressman in a letter sent to the President of Georgia Tech.

While there is much noise in the media and blogosphere and professional advocacy groups, I am mostly concerned about the behavior of other scientists. A scientist’s job is to continually challenge their own biases and ask “How could I be wrong?” Scientists who demonize their opponents are behaving in a way that is antithetical to the scientific process. These are the tactics of enforcing a premature theory for political purposes.

There is enormous pressure for climate scientists to conform to the so-called consensus. This pressure comes from federal funding agencies, universities and professional societies, and scientists themselves. Reinforcing this consensus are strong monetary, reputational, and authority interests. Owing to these pressures and the gutter tactics of the academic debate on climate change, I recently resigned my tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech.

The pathology of both the public and scientific debates on climate change motivated me to research writings on the philosophy and sociology of science, argumentation from the legal perspective, the policy process and decision making under deep uncertainty. My analysis of the problems in climate science from these broader perspectives have been written in a series of posts at my blog Climate Etc. and also in 4 published journal articles. My reflections on these issues are summarized in my written testimony.

The complexity of the climate change problem provides much scope for disagreement among reasonable and intelligent people. Why do scientists disagree about the causes of climate change? The historical data is sparse and inadequate. There’s disagreement about the value of different classes of evidence, notably the value of global climate models and paleoclimate reconstructions. There’s disagreement about the appropriate logical framework for linking and assessing the evidence. And scientists disagree over assessments of areas of ambiguity and ignorance.

Policymakers bear the responsibility of the mandate that they give to panels of scientific experts. In the case of climate change, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change framed the problem too narrowly. This narrow framing of the climate change problem essentially pre-ordained the conclusions from the IPCC assessment process.

There are much better ways to assess science for policy makers than a consensus-seeking process that serves to stifle disagreement and debate. Expert panels with diverse perspectives should handle controversies and uncertainties by assessing what we know, what we don’t know, and where the major areas of disagreement and uncertainties lie.

Let’s make scientific debate about climate change great again.

This concludes my testimony.

JC note:  I will write another blog post tonite about the hearing, including the testimony of other witnesses, the questioning and discussion, and the media coverage.

 

 

via Climate Etc. https://judithcurry.com

March 29, 2017 at 02:00AM

Trump’s Rollback of EPA Overreach: What No One is Talking About

via Roy Spencer, PhD.
http://ift.tt/1o1jAbd

President Trump’s actions yesterday to rein in the EPA on a number of fronts involves the usual tension between environment and prosperity. Trump has rightly asserted that we can have both a relatively clean environment and prosperity, but this falls on deaf ears in the environmental community. His actions are painted as Republican’s desire to harm your children, because a more polluted environment is claimed to be worse for human health and welfare than achieving a cleaner environment.

But such assertions must be rejected, and forcefully. Because exactly the opposite is true.

Let me give you a simple example. Let’s say you pay to have your house cleaned once a week, and for a reasonable price the house is 90% cleaner each time.

Now let’s say you decide you want your house 99% cleaner on a continuous basis. Cleaner is better, right?

You have crews come in and work for hours every day, cleaning every surface with disinfectant. You buy the best air and water filtration systems. The cost goes up dramatically, and as a result you can no longer afford, say, the health care you once could afford before.

Then your young child falls ill from something she picked up at daycare. You figure she will probably be OK, kids get sick all the time, and you don’t take her to the doctor.

But this time it’s something more insidious. A rare disease left untreated leads to the rapid formation of an aneurysm in her coronary artery. Several years later she dies at a young age.

All because you wanted your house cleaner.

You might think this example is outlandish. Well, in the past week one of my grandsons was diagnosed with this disease. But since his parents have health insurance, it was caught in time.

In a theoretical sense, we can always work to make the environment “cleaner”, that is, reduce human pollution. So, any attempts to reduce the EPA’s efforts will be viewed by some as just cozying up to big, polluting corporate interests. As I heard one EPA official state at a conference years ago, “We can’t stop making the environment ever cleaner”.

The question no one is asking, though, is “But at what cost?”

It was relatively inexpensive to design and install scrubbers on smokestacks at coal-fired power plants to greatly reduce sulfur emissions. The cost was easily absorbed, and electricty rates were not increased that much.

The same is not true of carbon dioxide emissions. Efforts to remove CO2 from combustion byproducts have been extremely difficult, expensive, and with little hope of large-scale success.

There is a saying: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.

In the case of reducing CO2 emissions to fight global warming, I could discuss the science — how warming is only progressing at half the rate forecast by those computerized climate models which are guiding our energy policy; how there have been no obvious long-term changes in severe weather; and how nature actually enjoys the extra CO2, with satellites now showing a “global greening” phenomenon with its contribution to increases in agricultural yields.

But it’s the economics which should kill the Clean Power Plan and the alleged Social “Cost” of Carbon. Not the science.

There is no reasonable pathway by which we can meet more than about 20% of global energy demand with renewable energy…the rest must come from fossil fuels. Yes, renewable energy sources are increasing each year, usually because rate payers or taxpayers are forced to subsidize them by the government or by public service commissions. But global energy demand is rising much faster than renewable energy sources can supply. So, for decades to come, we are stuck with fossil fuels as our main energy source.

The fact is, the more we impose high-priced energy on the masses, the more it will hurt the poor. And poverty is arguably the biggest threat to human health and welfare on the planet.

But isn’t it true that renewable energy such as solar and wind actually employ more people than the fossil fuel business? Yes, but once again there is a basic economic concept people need to keep in mind. We could put all of our unemployed people to work tomorrow by having them dig holes in the ground and filling them up again.

Yet, what would that do to increase prosperity? In order to build wealth, jobs needs to be efficiently producing goods and services that people want… not just moving dirt around. So, just because it takes more people to provide more expensive renewable energy that can’t meet our needs anyway… that’s not a good thing.

People want — and need — inexpensive energy to prosper. Energy is required for everything humans do. Everything. The more it costs, the less money we have available for other more pressing problems.

So, the elephant in the room no one is talking about is that fact that the Clean Power Plan (which Trump is trying to dismantle) will make poverty worse, and as a result more people will die. Expensive attempts to make things too clean will be worse for human health and welfare — not better.

And what would have been gained for all that extra expense? Even the EPA has admitted that President Obama’s plans for reducing CO2 emissions will have no measurable effect on global temperatures in this century… only hundredths of a degree reductions in global warming, even if the “consensus of scientists” theory is correct.

This is why Obama’s coal-killing efforts have been legitimately characterized as all pain for no gain.

So, this is an issue where we global warming “skeptics” have the moral high ground. Let’s take it and own it.

Do not accept the premise that everything the EPA wants to do is good for America. The EPA provided a useful service years ago when it required us to clean up our air and waterways. Now it is a bloated bureaucracy in a continuing search for relevancy. It wants to force use to make everything not just 90% cleaner, but 99% cleaner.

And THAT is bad for human health and welfare.

via Roy Spencer, PhD. http://ift.tt/1o1jAbd

March 29, 2017 at 01:51AM