I have not commented on
the recent US
'Climate Change
Assessment'
written by
leftist bureaucrats
appointed by Obama,
now living
in "the swamp".
The reason is
I am not interested
in reading science fiction --
wild guess predictions
that are going to be wrong !
In my 21 years of reading
about climate science,
the most important
fact I have learned
is that predictions
of the future climate
will be wrong.
In the past 30 years,
the demonization of CO2
has been accompanied by
warming predictions
that were triple
of the actual
global warming.
And the actual warming
has not been steady since 1940,
and mainly near the poles,
as the greenhouse theory
predicts:
-- We had global cooling
from 1940 to 1975,
as CO2 levels rose rapidly,
not global warming,
-- We had a flat trend of the
average temperature from
2003 through 2018, in spite of
rapidly rising CO2,
not global warming, and
-- The Arctic had
a lot of warming,
which was expected,
but Antarctica did not,
except for small areas
of local warming,
located near
underwater volcanoes.
Also, in the past 800,000 years,
ice core studies show that
temperature peaks happened
BEFORE CO2 peaks,
not after.
This adds up to
strong evidence
that CO2 levels
do NOT control
the average temperature
of our planet ...
which was certainly true
during the 4.5 billion years
of natural climate change,
before the ramp up
of burning fossil fuels,
and adding man made CO2
to the air, after 1940 !
Climate Change Assessments
deliberately ignore the benefits
of adding CO2 to the air
( see my next article too ),
which I believe far outweigh
the costs of adding CO2
( the only cost I can identify
is air pollution from burning
fossil fuels without modern
pollution controls, which is
too common in China and India )
A good summary
of the benefits of CO2:
"Carbon Dioxide - The Good News"
by Indur M. Goklany
The foreword, by Freeman Dyson,
which I have extensively quoted
on this blog, is excellent too.
https://elonionbloggle.blogspot.com/2018/11/freeman-dyson-on-benefits-of-adding-co2.html
Here is the conclusion,
from pages 32 and 33,
of this excellent 2015 paper:
"The approach used in
impacts assessments
therefore suffers from
three fundamental flaws.
Firstly, they rely on climate models
that have failed the reality test.
Secondly, they do not fully account
for the benefits of carbon dioxide.
Thirdly, they implicitly assume
that the world of 2100
will not be much different
from that of the present
– except that we will be
emitting more
greenhouse gases
and the climate will be
much warmer.
In effect, they assume
that for the most part
our adaptive capacity
will not be any greater
than today.
But the world of 2015
is already quite different
from that of 1990,
and the notion that
the world of 2100
will be like that
of the baseline year
verges on the ludicrous.
Moreover, this assumption
directly contradicts:
(a)
the basic assumption
of positive economic growth
built into each of the
underlying IPCC scenarios
(b)
the experience over
the past quarter millennium,
of relatively rapid
technological change
and increasing
adaptive capacity.
It is also refuted
by any review
of the changes
that have taken place
in the human condition
and the ordinary person’s life
from generation to generation,
at least as far back
as the start of the
Industrial Revolution."
"Carbon dioxide levels
have risen inexorably
since the 1700s.
Yet despite this,
climate-sensitive indicators
of human and environmental
wellbeing that carbon dioxide
affects directly,
such as crop yields,
food production,
prevalence of hunger,
access to cleaner water
and biological productivity,
and those that
it affects indirectly,
such as living standards
and life expectancies,
have improved
virtually everywhere.
In most areas they have
never been higher,
nor do they show
any sustained signs
of reversing."
Full paper here:
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2015/10/benefits1.pdf
Indur Goklany
is an independent
scholar and author.
He was a member
of the US delegation
that established the IPCC
and helped develop
its First Assessment Report.
He subsequently served
as a US delegate to the IPCC,
and an IPCC reviewer.
He is a member of the
GWPF’s Academic
Advisory Council.