Some Problems With That New Climate Change Report

Last Friday, as in Black Friday, the Fed.gov released the latest version - 1700 pages - of the National Climate Assessment (NCA). Typical of media reaction is The Atlantic, wondering "why would they release this on Black Friday?  To keep people from reading it?" and then going on to highlight that the report "contradicts nearly every position taken on the issue by President Donald Trump."  Funny how they never criticized Obama for all his Friday and holiday weekend document dumps. 

The fact of the matter is that the report is required by law, was scheduled for "late in the year" all along, and is a product of government agencies and employees that have nothing to do with President Trump.  It's not like the report was put together by a team President Trump picked by hand.  If anything it's the opposite: it's a report put together by a team Barack Obama picked.

Which means it's based on all the bad data we see all the time: temperature series that have been adjusted to make the past look colder and the present hotter (long term temperature records from around the world always disagree with the adjusted version the Feds use); wild exaggerations about the effects on hurricanes, fires and every aspect of our lives.  

Nicolas Loras at the Daily Signal reports on four points you might find useful should you need to point out the errors of the "the world is going to end before I grow up" crowd at a holiday get together.

1. It wildly exaggerates economic costs.
   One statistic that media outlets have seized upon is that the worst climate scenario could cost the U.S. 10 percent of its gross domestic product by 2100.  The 10 percent loss projection is more than twice the percentage that was lost during the Great Recession.
   
   The study, funded in part by climate warrior Tom Steyer’s organization, calculates these costs on the assumption that the world will be 15 degrees Fahrenheit warmer. That temperature projection is even higher than the worst-case scenario predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In other words, it is completely unrealistic. 


2. It assumes the most extreme (and least likely)climate scenario.
   Here we have to go down a rabbit hole. The NCA is based on a model called Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5. In estimating impacts on climate change, climatologists use four representative trajectories to project different greenhouse gas concentrations.  The NCA chose the most severe and least likely of the four different trajectories.
   
   It assumes “the fastest population growth (a doubling of Earth’s population to 12 billion), the lowest rate of technology development, slow GDP growth, a massive increase in world poverty, plus high energy use and emissions.”... It estimates nearly impossible levels of coal consumption, fails to take into account the massive increase in natural gas production from the shale revolution, and ignores technological innovations that continue to occur in nuclear and renewable technologies.
   
   When taking a more realistic view of the future of conventional fuel use and increased greenhouse gas emissions, the doomsday scenarios vanish. Climatologist Judith Curry recently wrote, “Many ‘catastrophic’ impacts of climate change don’t really kick at the lower CO2 concentrations, and [Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5] then becomes useful as a ‘scare’ tactic.”


3. It cherry-picks science on extreme weather and misrepresents timelines and causality.  
   This seems to happen all the time.
   
   A central feature of the National Climate Assessment is that the costs of climate are here now, and they are only going to get worse. We’re going to see more hurricanes and floods. Global warming has worsened heat waves and wildfires.
   
   But last year’s National Climate Assessment on extreme weather tells a different story. As University of Colorado Boulder professor Roger Pielke Jr. pointed out in a Twitter thread in August 2017, there were no increases in drought, no increases in frequency or magnitude of floods, no trends in frequency or intensity of hurricanes, and “low confidence for a detectable human climate change contribution in the Western United States based on existing studies.”


4. It relies on energy taxes which are a costly non-solution.  
   
   Through the use of the wildly pessimistic "Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5" and the wildly exaggerated costs, the authors of the report are clearly trying to drive readers to the conclusion that the costs of inaction (10 percent of America’s GDP) dwarf the costs of any climate policy.
   
   The reality, however, is that policies endorsed to combat climate change would carry significant costs and would do nothing to mitigate warming, even if there were a looming catastrophe like the National Climate Association says. Which there is precious little evidence to support. 

Two articles in the New York Mullet Wrapper Times: Last January, it was OK to say the forest management practices that left 100 million dead trees on the ground could cause a horrifying wildfire season.  In November, after the worst of those wildfires it suddenly was no longer acceptable to say forest management might be a problem, but it was thought critically important to quibble over the wording of the president's tweets.

In the land of uncomfortable truths is this fact: virtually no country on Earth is meeting its Paris Accord obligations.  Here's another one:  the US is now the global leader at reducing its emissions even though we didn't sign the accords.   Possibly the most uncomfortable truth of all:  if all of the dire assumptions and models in the Climate Change camp are applied, the Paris accords result in a net temperature change of 0.05C by 2100.  The current NOAA procedure rounds the high and low temperature to the nearest whole degree Fahrenheit (0.55°C, a value eleven times greater than the .05°C savings Paris offers).  That means the effect of Paris would be undetectable.  There are no words for how preposterous I find this. 

From The One Graph Every Discussion About the Paris Climate Treaty Needs to Include: here.