Alarmist Gary Hohe Twists Data To Save Paris Agreement

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

By Paul Homewood

Senator Rand Paul has backed up Trump’s decision to exit Paris by reiterating that the Paris Agreement would do little to reduce global temperatures. His interview however has attracted the expected kickbacks from the alarmist fraternity.

Gary Yohe, Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, has written this piece for Climate Feedback blog, (which no doubt is highly reliable in these matters!):

Senator Paul’s opinion piece includes several sentences to which I take strong exception. The first four appear together in his third paragraph:

“So what did Obama sign us up for in exchange for maybe reducing global temperature by 0.2°C by 2100? Experts predict that by 2040, the agreement could cost us 6.5 million lost jobs—a number significantly larger than the entire population of Kentucky. It will cost us $3 trillion in lost GDP. For each household, the average annual lost income could be as high as $4,900.“

Let us take the first sentence by itself; it reads:

“So what did Obama sign us up for in exchange for maybe reducing global temperature by 0.2°C by 2100?”

This statement is incorrect. Figure 1 appropriated from Fawcett, et al (2015)* displays the nuances of correctly projecting the impact of the Paris Accord through 2100. Business as usual creates an emission trajectory that rapidly passes by 80 gigatons of CO₂ per year by 2070; the likelihood of seeing warming less than 3 °C through 2100 along this path is 10% with a median of more than 4 °C. Abiding by the Paris Accord through 2030 and continuing its momentum through 2100 would increase that likelihood to nearly 60% with a median somewhere around 2.5 °C – a reduction of approximately 1.5 °C and not 0.2 °C.

Figure 1 — Ranges of emissions scenarios with and without the Paris Accord through 2030 and beyond. The bars on the right indicate distributions of warming through 2100, and the trajectories show a no policy case as well as a modest policy, the Paris Accord extended, and an accelerated policy case. Source: Fawcett (2015)

Fawcett et al (2015) Can Paris pledges avert severe climate change? Science

http://ift.tt/2qQEt38

Unfortunately the Yohe is himself wrong in his interpretation.

This is what the Fawcett paper actually says:

In other words, the INDC line on the graph (also labelled Paris-Continued Ambition) relies upon every country continuing to decarbonise their economies beyond 2030, and presumably all the way till 2100. Although this may be the outcome, in no way can this claimed as the result of Paris, as Yohe dishonestly claims.

In any event, the baseline scenarios are themselves extremely contentious and unrealistic.

Climate Interactive, for instance, have produced this graph, which seems to have been widely circulated.

http://ift.tt/1NF1Hto

You will note that the Reference Scenario essentially just assumes that emissions carry on rising at the rate since 2000.

But the actual figures show that, following a sharp rise up to around 2011, the rate of growth has subsided, and there has barely been any increase at all since 2013.

http://ift.tt/1RSrHnr

There are many reasons for this slowdown, but little of it has anything to do with climate policies or Paris in particular. The biggest factor is likely to be the dropoff in Chinese economic growth, which up to 2011 was regularly well over 10% pa. This has since dropped back to 7%.

As with all maturing economies, energy intensity has also fallen away, as the economy transitions away from heavy industry, and towards low energy intensive sectors.

There is no way of knowing whether emissions and economic growth will pick up again to previous levels. But IMF projections strongly suggest not.

I am certainly not an economic guru, and neither, I suspect, is our friend Gary Yohe. But I suspect that the assumption that, without Paris, annual emissions would more double by 2100 is deliberately meant to deceive.

Even James Hansen admitted that the Paris Agreement was a fraud, because it achieved so little.

I know all of this, and I am a simple retired accountant. Why is it that “Professors of Economics and Environmental Studies” either don’t know this, or aren’t prepared to admit it?