Guest essay by Marlo Lewis Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute

They’re back! The same GOP elders who have been pushing what American Enterprise Institute economist Ben Zycher charitably calls “The Deeply Flawed Case for a Carbon Tax” are now urging President Trump to stay in the Paris Agreement.

Yesterday in the New York Times, former Reagan Secretary of State George P. Shultz and his Climate Leadership Council colleague Ted Halstead, who heads the organization, argue that staying in the pact will “spur new investment, strengthen American competitiveness, create jobs, ensure American access to global markets and help reduce future business risks associated with the changing climate” whereas exiting will “yield the opposite.”

Shultz and Halstead ignore the chief perils of remaining in the Paris Agreement:

1. The Agreement is the legal framework for a permanent global campaign of political pressure and diplomatic blowback to “name and shame” leaders, like Trump, who dare to champion the American people’s freedom to develop the country’s vast energy resources.
2. Remaining in the Agreement ensures that U.S. leaders will continually have to negotiate domestic energy policy with foreign governments, multilateral bureaucrats, and anti-growth advocacy groups—elites who do not put America’s interests first.
3. If Trump is free to treat President Obama’s emission-reduction pledge—the U.S. “nationally determined contribution” (NDC)—as a retractable wish list rather than the official commitment it plainly is, the next progressive president will similarly be free to rescind Trump’s NDC and pick up where Obama left off. No revision of the U.S. NDC can secure the future of U.S. energy producers as well as exiting a pact designed to bankrupt them.
4. Failing to repudiate a treaty adopted unilaterally, with the stroke of a presidential pen, without benefit of the Senate’s advice and consent, will set a dangerous precedent undermining one of the Constitution’s important checks and balances.

Shultz and Halstead write that, “Our companies are best served by a stable and predictable international framework that commits all nations to climate-change mitigation.” No so. Our companies are best served by an international framework that allows them to capitalize on comparative advantages. One of U.S. industry’s key advantages, so vital to the manufacturing renaissance on which Trump campaigned, is an abundance of affordable energy.

As Stephen Eule of the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21^st Century Energy explains:

It is well understood that America’s abundance of affordable, reliable energy provides businesses a critical operating advantage in today’s intensely competitive global economy. IEA [International Energy Agency] data show a huge comparative energy advantage in natural gas, electricity, and coal prices for U.S. industry compared to its OECD competitors, with prices for these energy sources in the United States often two to four times less.

European Union environment minister Margot Wallström once said that the “Kyoto [Protocol] is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big business around the world.” That goes in spades for the Paris Agreement. The only way to impose  high European energy prices on U.S. firms is to pressure U.S. leaders to adopt European energy policies.

Humorless scolds never consider that candidate Trump might have been twisting their tails when he tweeted that “The concept of global warming was invented by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Eule notes that the marginal cost of carbon dioxide emission reductions under China’s mostly business-as-usual NDC is $0 per ton whereas the marginal cost under the U.S. NDC is $85 per ton. What I find in Trump’s funny tweet is a serious point: Global warming is the rationale for the Paris Agreement, which would handicap U.S. manufacturers much more than it would China’s.

Shultz and Halsteed warn there will be “repercussions” and damage to America’s “reputation and credibility” if “America fails to honor a global agreement that it helped forge.” However, the exact same can be said if America fails to implement the NDC on the basis of which the Obama administration negotiated the Agreement, and which he subsequently submitted as the official U.S. commitment. The Paris Agreement expressly provides two options for withdrawing, but provides no option to “adjust” an NDC to make it less stringent. By what logic is the former less kosher than the latter?

Shultz and Hallstead would have us believe that Article 4.11, which states that a party “may” adjust its NDC “with a view to enhancing the level of ambition” also implies the party may adjust the NDC to do just the reverse. Huh?

That theory can’t be right, because it conflicts with the plain meaning of words like promise, pledge, and commitment. Try applying it to more mundane circumstances. Dad promises to pick up the kids after school. He fails to do so and they wait for hours in the freezing rain. Mom demands to know why he broke his promise. Dad retorts: “I did not break my promise, because I am now retracting it!”

Shultz and Halstead note that “Global statecraft relies on trust, reputation and credibility, which can be all too easily squandered.” No quarrel there. But that’s actually a reason to withdraw. President Obama had no business putting the trust, reputation, and credibility of the United States on the line without first vetting the Paris Agreement with the U.S. Senate. Submitting the Agreement to the Senate for its review would have spared everyone the present controversy, because the pact had no chance of being approved.

Article II, Section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution states:

He [the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur. . . .

The advice and consent process is a quality control filter. Especially as combined with the supermajority ratification requirement, Senate review ensures that no treaty will be adopted without broad-based political support. That discourages the executive from promising others more than the political composition of the country and statutory authorities actually allow him, or his successors, to deliver. The treaty process minimizes the risk that national interest concerns will impel one executive to upend international commitments made by his predecessor.

Shultz and Hallstead should be encouraging Trump to repudiate the dangerous precedent Obama set, not validate it. After all, how much confidence can other countries put in U.S. leaders if the latter cannot be trusted to follow their own Constitution’s rules of international engagement?

Shultz and Hallstead claim “the only risk Mr. Trump faces from altering or weakening domestic climate policy under Paris is in the court of public opinion, not in federal courts.” The court of public opinion, however, is what ultimately determines the direction of public policy. As long as we stay in, the Agreement will give “progressives” at home and abroad a high-profile global platform for lobbying U.S. policymakers and influencing public opinion.

It is naïve to suppose that legitimizing such an arrangement could not severely narrow the energy policy choices available to future administrations, Congresses, and voters. It is also naïve to assume the U.S. government can remain in a pact built on the narrative that governments must take urgent action to avert planetary disaster without inviting courts to step in when policymakers fail to deliver.

Shultz and Hallstead warn that “pulling out of the agreement could subject the United States to retaliatory trade measures, enabling other countries to leapfrog American industry.” But they just told us the only penalty for tearing up Obama’s NDC is bad PR. If pulling out exposes us to retaliatory carbon tariffs, why wouldn’t replacing Obama’s emission reduction pledge with a drill-baby-drill-style enthusiasm for new oil and gas exploration?

None of Shultz and Hallstead’s arguments for staying in make much sense. Until we get to the penultimate paragraph. Then we learn what they’re really after—a carbon tax:

If the president wants to strengthen America’s competitive position, he should combine a price on carbon with border tariffs or rebates based on carbon content. United States exports to countries without comparable carbon pricing systems would receive rebates, while imports from such countries would face tariffs on the carbon content of their products.

Far from viewing the Paris Agreement as a voluntary pact with no penalties for non-compliance, Shultz and Hallstead actually expect the Agreement to be enforced through a global regime of “border tariffs or rebates based on carbon content.” They want the United States to lead the world into a new era of retaliatory trade measures. History, however, suggests protectionism is harmful to world peace and prosperity. Also, how do they know U.S. firms would always or usually prevail in trade disputes, rewarded with rebates rather than penalized with tariffs?

Zycher points out how difficult it would be for the border tariff/rebate assessors to equilibrate carbon taxes with “regulations, or subsidies for such alternative energy sources as wind and solar power, or other policies that are purported to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions.” Even more difficult is factoring in “the international supply chain phenomenon: Goods imported from a given nation are likely to embody components and other inputs from other nations—perhaps many other nations—in vastly differing proportions, and those nations’ policies on GHG emissions almost certainly will vary considerably.”

Sorting it all out—especially in anything approaching real time—would likely require “a new bureaucracy, or perhaps an expanded one at the Internal Revenue Service,” making highly technical decisions with “important implications” for  profits, shareholder value, and market share. Hardly a plan to make America great again.

Trump should be wary of taking advice about the Paris Agreement from carbon tax advocates, because their political judgment is terrible. The battle for hearts and minds in American politics is to no small extent a contest between a party that is pro-tax and anti-energy and a party that is anti-tax and pro-energy. That clear product differentiation is a political asset of enormous value to the GOP. Indeed, that sharp contrast was an important factor enabling Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections and the GOP to retain majorities in the House and Senate.

So now a group of GOP elders argues that Trump, despite promising to cut taxes and remove political impediments to domestic energy production, should impose a new tax on energy. Similarly, they argue that Trump, despite promising to “cancel” America’s participation in the Paris Agreement, should stay in. And all so that America can finally get the carbon tax the elders think is a brilliant idea.

Had Trump campaigned for the Paris Agreement and a carbon tax in 2016, would he still have defeated Hillary Clinton? Indeed, had he campaigned as Shultz and Hallstead now urge him to govern, would he even have won the GOP nomination?

Those are questions Trump and his advisors should consider carefully if he does not want to become a mere blip on the road to a carbon-constrained future rather the president who changed the direction of U.S. energy policy and made America great again.

Temp data in dispute can reverse conclusions about human influence on climate.

Guest essay by Dr. Fred Singer

Exploring some of the intricacies of GW [Global Warming] science can lead to surprising results that have major consequences. In a recent invited talk at the Heartland Institute’s ICCC-12 [Twelfth International Conference on Climate Change], I investigated three important topics:

1. Inconsistencies in the surface temperature record.

2. Their explanation as artifacts arising from the misuse of data.

3. Thereby explaining the failure of IPCC to find credible evidence for anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

A misleading graph

In the iconic picture of the global surface temperature of the 20th century [fig 1, top] one can discern two warming intervals — in the initial decades (1910-42) and in the final decades, 1977 to 2000.

Fig 1 20^th century temps; top—global; bottom– US

Although these two trends look similar, they are really  quite different:  the initial warming is genuine, but the later warming is not. What a surprise!  I wouldn’t exactly call it ‘fake,’ but it just does not exist; I try to demonstrate this difference as an artifact of the data-gathering process, by comparing with several independent data sets covering similar time intervals.

The later warming is contradicted by every available dataset, as follows:

**the surface record for the ‘lower 48’ [US] shows a much lower trend; [see fig 1, bottom]; presumably there is better control over the placement of weather-stations and their thermometers;

**the trend of global sea surface temp [SST] is much less; with 1995 temp values nearly equal to those of 1942 [acc to Gouretski and Kennedy, as published in Geophysical Research Letters in 2012];

** likewise, the trend of night-time marine air-temperatures [NMAT], measured with thermometers on ship decks, according to data from J Kennedy, Hadley Centre, UK

** atmospheric temperature trends are uniformly much lower and close to zero (during 1979-1997), whether measured with balloon-borne radiosondes or with microwave sounding units [MSU] aboard weather satellites [see fig 8 in ref 2].

**compatible data on solar activity that show nothing unusual happening. [Interestingly, the solar data had been assembled for a quite different purpose – namely, to disprove the connection between cosmic rays and climate change [see here fig 14 of ref 2], assuming that the late-century warming was real. In the absence of such warming, as I argue here, this attempted critique of the cosmic-ray –climate connection collapses.]

**proxy data also show near-zero trends, whether from tree rings or ice cores, as noted about 20 years ago [see fig 16 in ref 1 and figs 2 and 3 of ref 2; plus those that may have been withheld by Michael Mann]. [If you look carefully at Mann’s original 1998 paper in Nature or subsequent copies, you will note that his proxy temps cease suddenly in 1979 and are replaced by temps from thermometers from CRU-EAU, the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University. This substitution not only supplies the ‘blade’ of Mann’s ‘hockey-stick’ but enables the claim of IPCC-AR3 [2001] that the 20^th century was the warmest in the past 1000 years, surpassing even the high temps of the Medieval Warm Period. In Climategate e-mails this substitution was referred to as “Mike’s Nature trick. I can’t help wondering if Mann’ s original post-1979 proxy data showed warming at all; perhaps that has some bearing on why Mann has withheld these data; it could have killed the blade and spoiled the IPCC claim.]

On the other hand, the early warming [1910-40] is supported by many proxy data – including temps derived from tree rings, ice cores, etc; unfortunately, we could not find any temperature data of the upper troposphere. However, I bet they would have shown an amplified warming trend – a hot spot.

A Digression on Hotspot [HSp] and Hockeystick [HSt]

[Sorry about using these two technical terms.]

‘Hotspot’ refers to an enhanced temp trend in the tropical upper troposphere [UT]; it is produced by convection of latent energy through water vapor [WV] and is the dominant agent for heating the UT. In IPCC-AR2 [1996], BD Santer mistakenly identified the HSp as the fingerprint for GH [greenhouse] warming, which has led to much confusion in the technical literature, fostering the mistaken claim that the HSp owes its existence to tropospheric CO2. But according to textbooks, it is merely an amplification of any temp trend at the surface through the ‘moist’ atmospheric lapse rate. It surely existed during 1910-42 but we lack data to prove it. Virtual absence of the HSp during 1979-97 [see fig 8 of ref 2 ] implies a near-zero surface trend in that interval. This observation also disproves the AGW hypothesis of IPCC-AR2 [1996] that led to the Kyoto Protocol.

Mann’s construction of his hockeystick graph [often referred to as ‘Mike’s Nature trick’] was explained earlier [see above].

This recital of data should suffice to convince alarmists and climate skeptics alike that the late 20^th-century global warming does not exist.  We should note, however, that both IPCC-AR4 [2007] and AR5 [2013] rely on such (non-existing) warming in trying to prove that its cause is anthropogenic.
Explaining the climate-trend artifact

Now we tackle, using newly available data, what may have caused the fictitious temperature trend in the latter decades of the 20^th century:
We first look at Ocean data: as seen from fig 2, there was a great shift in the way Sea Surface Temperatures [SSTs] were measured

Fig 2 Sources of SST data: Note the drastic changes between 1980 and 2000 as global buoys increasingly replaced bucket sampling of SST – with also important geographic changes.

Data from floating buoys increased from zero to 60% between 1980 and 2000.  But such buoys are heated directly by the sun, as indicated in the cartoon of fig 3, showing a floating buoy in the solar-heated top layer and unheated engine inlet water in lower ocean layers; this combination leads to a spurious rise in SST when the data are mixed together.

Fig 3 Cartoon showing floating buoy in solar-heated layer and inlet for engine cooling water

In merging them, we must note that buoy data are global, while bucket and inlet temps are perforce confined to [mostly commercial] shipping routes. Nor do we know the ocean depths that buckets sample; inlet depths depend on ship type and degree of loading. Disentangling this mess requires data details that are not available. About all we can demonstrate is a distinct diurnal variation in the buoy temps.

The land data have problems of their own. During the same decades, quite independently, there was a severe reduction in ‘superfluous’ (mostly) rural stations [fig 12 in ref 2] — unless they were located at airports. As seen from fig 4, the number of stations decreased drastically in the 1990’s

Fig 4 Weather stations at airports [Source: NOAA data]

[fig12 of ref 2], but the number at airports declined less sharply, leading to a major rise in the fraction of reporting stations at airports [according to basic NOAA data]

This led to a huge increase, from 35% to 80%, in the fraction of airport weather stations — producing a spurious temperature increase from all the construction of runways and buildings — hard to calculate in detail.  About all we can claim is a general increase in air traffic, about 5% per year worldwide [see fig 19 in ref 1].

We have however MSU data for the lower atmosphere over both ocean and land; they show little difference; so we can assume that both land data and ocean data contribute about equally to the fictitious surface trend reported for 1977 to 1997.