State AGs to Waste Tax Dollars on ‘Climate Fraud’ Investigations

Thirteen noted climate researchers have filed a friend of the court brief supporting the 27 states challenging the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. The scientists note the Clean Power Plan is premised on fundamentally flawed lines of evidence for manmade global warming to justify the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) endangerment finding. They note each line of evidence “ha[s] been shown to be invalidated by highly credible empirical data.”

For instance, while EPA claims there has been an unusual amount of warming on a global scale in recent decades, temperatures recorded by satellites and weather balloons show limited or no warming. Ground-based measurements have undergone continual manipulation, making them unreliable. In addition, the global climate models EPA has relied on assuming a cause/effect relationship of increased carbon dioxide leading to rising temperatures do “not comport with the real world.”

The scientists conclude EPA’s endangerment finding violates “the single most fundamental principle of the scientific method, known to every high school student, namely that any hypothesis that is inconsistent with the empirical evidence of the real world must be rejected.” Since the endangerment finding is mistaken, the underlying motivation and justification for the Clean Power Plan is fatally flawed.

In a recent paper, Tim Ball, Ph.D., states “every single forecast the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] ever made was wrong.” Why? Because the data used to build and feed into the climate models are incomplete, and fundamental climate processes are poorly understood.

IPCC acknowledged the models’ limitations in its Third Assessment Report, writing, “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

Climate models mathematically divide the world into a series of cubes based on the grid system. IPCC claims the smaller the grid system, the more accurate the model. But Ball notes it doesn’t matter how small the grid is: If data are not available for a grid data point, the data aren’t available. We have essentially no weather data for approximately 85 percent of the globe: Virtually no weather data are available for the oceans, and there are relatively few weather stations located on the parts of Earth that are 19 percent mountains, 20 percent deserts, 20 percent boreal forest, 20 percent grasslands, and 6 percent tropical rainforest. As Ball notes, “There is so little data that for many parts of the world they use a single station as representative of a 1200 km radius, [and] even the smallest grid size is so large that major weather systems such as thunderstorms and tornadoes cannot be included.”

In addition, climate models can’t accurately account for major components of the atmosphere, including dust particles and water vapor. Nor can the models accurately depict large-scale shifts in ocean currents.

A new study conducted by researchers at Texas A&M University at Galveston and published in the academic journal Energy Policy concludes the temperature goal established at the Paris climate conference – limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius above temperatures seen at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution – will be almost impossible to achieve.

Assuming increased greenhouse gas emissions drive temperature increases, based on the best projections of global population growth and per-capita energy use, marine sciences professor Glenn Jones, one of the study’s authors, says meeting the Paris temperature goal

would require rates of change in our energy infrastructure and energy mix that have never happened in world history and that are extremely unlikely to be achieved. Just considering wind power, we found that it would take an annual installation of 485,000 5-megawatt wind turbines by 2028. The equivalent of about 13,000 were installed in 2015. That’s a 37-fold increase in the annual installation rate in only 13 years to achieve just the wind power goal. For a world that wants to fight climate change, the numbers just don’t add up to do it.

Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide during photosynthesis, but they also emit some carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere during respiration. A new study in Nature shows the amount of carbon dioxide trees would emit into the atmosphere under warmer conditions would be five times less than the amount previously projected.

The study shows plants were able to adapt their respiration to increases in temperature, releasing only 5 percent more carbon dioxide than they did under normal conditions. As a post at The American Interest notes, the big downward revision of expected carbon dioxide releases from plants provides further evidence “our understanding of our planet’s climate, and of the countless systems that contribute to and are affected by changes in that climate, is far from complete. … [C]limate science is riddled with mysteries. The system researchers are studying is bafflingly complex, replete with variables known and unknown that interact with one another in ways we don’t fully comprehend.”

The American Interest article also points out environmentalists themselves have become the leading source of climate denial: “Greens would have you believe we’ve fully diagnosed the problem and can see what’s coming next, but time and again climate models have gotten their predictions wrong. By exaggerating how settled the science is, environmentalists are setting themselves up to look foolish when we find our best understanding wasn’t good enough.”