Month: May 2017

Uncategorized 24 May 2017

Escaping the Paris climate agreement

by H. Sterling Burnett

As a candidate for president, Donald Trump said he would withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement and called it a bad deal for America. In an April speech in Harrisburg, Penn., Trump reiterated this claim, saying the Paris climate agreement in its current form hurts America. Despite his continued opposition, however, it remains unclear whether a withdrawal is in the nation’s future.

It’s time for this administration to keep its promise, by getting the U.S. out of this flawed, costly agreement.

Some in Trump’s team have reportedly said if the United States’ commitments are restructured there might be a path to stay in the Paris climate agreement. While there may be a better deal to be had — after all, the Obama administration could hardly have negotiated a worse deal for Americans — there is no deal that would be good for the country. Even Trump can’t put lipstick on this very ugly pig.

While our economic competitors, such as China and India, do not have to limit their fossil-fuel use under the agreement, the U.S. is required to make steep cuts, which are estimated to cost our economy trillions of dollars over the life of the agreement without providing any appreciable environmental benefits. Additionally, a deal isn’t possible without the U.S. paying into the political slush fund called the Green Climate Fund, which Trump promised to halt payments to. What is gained by staying in? Nothing.

The question is not whether Trump should keep his word and withdraw from the Paris agreement; it’s simply a matter of choosing the best way to do so. There are three options.

The first way to cancel America’s participation in the Paris climate agreement — and the one that most directly satisfies Trump’s campaign commitment — is simply to withdraw the United States’ signature entirely. Under the Paris agreement, any country can withdraw from the agreement by giving written notice of a decision to do so to the U.N. secretary general. Unfortunately, under the terms of the agreement, Trump can’t give such notice until the agreement has been in place for three years, which means the earliest withdrawal date is Oct. 5, 2019.

Making matters worse, the withdrawal does not become effective until one year after the written notice is delivered. This means even if Trump determines to withdraw from the Paris agreement today, the country will remain stuck with its terms for a minimum of almost four years, and while America remains a party to the agreement, it is obligated to keep its commitments. Because the four-year withdrawal period will not run out until after Trump’s first term is over, should he decide not to run for president again or should he run for re-election and lose, the next president could simply recommit the United States to the agreement with a simple signature.

The second way to scotch America’s commitments under the Paris climate agreement would be for Trump to submit it to the Senate for formal approval as a treaty. This is what Obama should have done in the first place. To become a binding treaty, the Senate would have to approve the Paris climate agreement by a two-thirds vote. If the agreement loses the treaty vote — and it likely would in a full vote of the Senate — the deal is canceled.

However, nothing requires the Senate to hold an up-or-down vote on the Paris climate agreement if Trump submits it to them. Using the Senate filibuster rules, Senate Democrats could block the treaty from ever coming up for a vote. Such a move is likely, since the vast majority of Democrats support the Paris agreement. Under this scenario, the treaty would remain pending, leaving a future Senate to decide its fate.

The easiest way for Trump to end U.S. participation in Paris and all international climate agreements would be for him to remove the country’s signature from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed by President George H.W. Bush in 1992. Article 25 of the UNFCCC allows any state party to the convention to withdraw, without further obligation, upon giving one year’s notice. Withdrawing from UNFCCC would cancel the United States’ obligations to all other United Nations-brokered climate agreements made subsequent to UNFCCC, because they are all built on it.

This would be the best and easiest way to get out of the Paris climate agreement, and it would help to prevent future burdensome climate agreements.

Mr. President, whichever path you choose, please keep your promise and withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement, placing it firmly in the dustbin of history — where it belongs.

H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is a research fellow on energy and the environment at the Heartland Institute.

via The SPPI Blog http://sppiblog.org

May 24, 2017 at 09:09AM

Uncategorized 24 May 2017

The case for nixing the Paris Agreement

via The SPPI Blog
http://sppiblog.org

Source: Washington Times

By Dr. Will Happer

The United States should withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. For too long, well-meaning policymakers have been misled by propaganda, masquerading as science, that more atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) will harm the planet. Paris represents the culmination of this campaign. The pact extends into perpetuity, its very terms dispensing with the value of the supposedly previous “seat at the table.” For this and many other reasons, the time to withdraw is now.

Real pollutants from fossil fuel combustion, such as oxides of sulfur, nitrogen and fly ash, are rightly controlled, and by cost-effective technology. But more CO2 is not a pollutant but is a benefit to humanity. The “social cost of carbon,” aka CO2, is negative. It is immoral to prevent developing countries from using reliable, inexpensive fossil fuels to escape centuries of poverty.

Most developing countries have offered no plans to limit CO2 emissions any time soon, rhetoric about Paris‘ universal inclusivity notwithstanding. Without their cooperation, stabilizing atmospheric levels of CO2 is not possible, nor would this stop climate change if it could be done. Climate has been changing since the Earth was formed — some 4.5 billion years ago — according to geological evidence. Climate changes on every time scale — decades, centuries, millennia and even longer periods.

The climate of Greenland really was warm enough for farming around the year 1100, and the Little Ice Age really did drive Norse settlers out of Greenland by the year 1500. Like these changes, the very minor warming we have had over the past few centuries is mostly from non-human causes.

Each human exhales about two pounds of CO2 a day from simply being alive. Living creatures, humans, animals and plants are largely made of carbon. Carbon dioxide is essential to the growth of plants. By the standards of geological history, plants have been coping with a CO2 famine for several tens of millions of years. Satellites already show dramatic greening of the Earth as CO2 levels begin recovery toward their historical norms. These were measured in thousands of parts per million (ppm), not today’s puny 400 ppm.

CO2 is indeed a greenhouse gas, but much less important than the major greenhouse gas, water vapor (H2O) and clouds. Observations show that doubling CO2 will warm the Earth’s surface by around 1 degree Celsius. At the current rate of increase of CO2, it will take more than a century to double. Twice as much CO2 and a modest 1 degree Celsius warming would benefit the world in many ways, extending growing seasons for agriculture, increasing crop yields, and lessening human mortality, which increases in cold weather. And modest warming means that there will also be no dangerous increase in sea levels.

via The SPPI Blog http://sppiblog.org

May 24, 2017 at 09:02AM

Uncategorized 24 May 2017

Not Worried About CO2

via Science Matters
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We should all know what Alfred E. Neuman knows, namely: Where does all that CO2 come from? Here is the answer from engineer Ronald Voisin.

Excerpts below are from An Engineer’s Take On Major Climate Change

Figure 3 outlines the primary sources of natural CO2 release in decreasing order of quantity of carbon emitted: oceanic release, microbial decay, insect activity, frozen terrestrial release; volcanic release; forest fire and then mammalia exhalations and emissions – summing to a total of ~325-485 petagrams (PgC). Then there is our ~2.0% anthropogenic release at ~8-9 petagrams. (Based on terrestrial sources alone, without oceans, anthropogenic release is ~3-4% of the natural flux. Some argue that the oceans are net absorbers and ignore the oceanic release estimate below. However, according to the hypothesis presented herein the oceans are net emitters as indicated below when warmed by ~0.5C per century).

These natural sources all correlate to global temperature (including, at the least, terrestrial volcanism, as recently verified). When the Earth gets warm, for whatever reason, these natural sources all kick-in together to contribute vast quantities of CO2; and to produce the observed habitual atmospheric CO2 spikes upward. Conversely, when the Earth gets cold, for whatever reason, they all go into remission together; naturally and (generally) coherently to produce a consequential reduction in atmospheric CO2. Each spike or dip in CO2 follows temperature with a lag time averaging 800 years, but proportional to the level and magnitude at which the temperature swings take place.

It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine that these natural sources are not at play during this current period of warming. They most likely are the primary cause of the currently observed CO2 spike. And yes, we humans, as co-inhabitants of this Earth, are emitting CO2. But so are microbes and insects emitting. And each of them is emitting with ~10 times our current anthropogenic emission. In both cases (microbes and insects) there is every reason to believe that their populations are geometrically exploding in this current highly favorable environment to their existence. The recently warming oceans are most likely the largest emitter of all.

Atmospheric CO2 is spiking just now. And we have good reason to believe that it is largely, essentially entirely doing so for all the same reasons it has done so within each and every prior warming period of the past. All natural sources of CO2 emission are currently revved-up and in high gear during this extended interglacial. Approximately 98% of the current spike is natural while we add our anthropogenic 2%.

We also have reason to believe that the current spike would be as large, or larger, than now observed, if we humans were never here at all. Why? Because those organisms that would otherwise be here in our stead would most likely emit much more CO2 than we are. i.e. We humans have chosen to systematically limit the proliferation of micro-organisms and insects in the land we use for cultivation and occupation – which represents about 1/3rd of all land. And in the other 2/3rds of all land, microbes and insects are each estimated to emit ~10 times our anthropogenic emission (insects alone outnumber humans >>10,000,000,000:1 – enough to fill several large dumpsters per person).

The relative contribution from microbe and insect emissions would have gone up significantly if we were never here (by a very rough factor of up to 1.5*). They would have filled our void geometrically; unlike our anthropogenic contribution. When we humans get rich, we uniquely self-limit our proliferation, by deciding to have fewer children. And our human emission pales in comparison to the emission from these astronomically vast numbers of other organisms. So if we were never here, greatly enhanced populations of microbes and insects would be emitting many times our anthropogenic emission from the very land that we systematically exclude them from. This situation most likely characterizes the events within prior interglacials.

Summary

1. Climate science is very complicated and very far from being settled.

2. Earth’s climate is overwhelmingly dominated by negative-feedbacks that are currently poorly represented in our Modeling efforts and not sufficiently part of ongoing investigations.

3. Climate warming drives atmospheric CO2 upward as it stimulates all natural sources of CO2 emission. Climate cooling drives atmospheric CO2 downward.

4. Massive yet delayed thermal modulations to the dissolved CO2 content of the oceans is what ultimately drives and dominates the modulations to atmospheric CO2.

5. The current spike in atmospheric CO2 is largely natural (~98%). i.e. Of the 100ppm increase we have seen recently (going from 280 to 380ppm), the move from 280 to 378ppm is natural while the last bit from 378 to 380ppm is rightfully anthropogenic.

6. The current spike in atmospheric CO2 would most likely be larger than now observed if human beings had never evolved. The additional CO2 contribution from insects and microbes (and mammalia for that matter) would most likely have produced a greater current spike in atmospheric CO2.

7. Atmospheric CO2 has a tertiary to non-existent impact on the instigation and amplification of climate change. CO2 is not pivotal. Modulations to atmospheric CO2 are the effect of climate change and not the cause.

Ronald D Voisin is a retired engineer. He spent 27 years in the Semiconductor Lithography Equipment industry mostly in California’s Silicon Valley. Since retiring, he has made a hobby of studying climate change for the last 7 years. Ron received a BSEE degree from the Univ. of Michigan – Ann Arbor in 1978 and has held various management positions at both established equipment companies and start-ups he helped initiate. Ron has authored/co-authored 55 patent applications, 24 of which have issued.

Footnote: Voisin’s article was published in 2013, the facts still overlooked and ignored.

via Science Matters http://ift.tt/2oqIky9

May 24, 2017 at 07:55AM