13th International Conference on Climate Conference Floods Washington, D.C. with Facts

Published August 5, 2019

An international lineup of 24 speakers at The Heartland Institute’s 13th International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC 13) in Washington, D.C. presented the scientific evidence indicating a climate crisis is not occurring and explained why policies like the Green New Deal and carbon taxes would do more harm than good for people and the environment.

More than 300 attendees and 8,000 online viewers watched the July 25 event as experts from the federal and state governments and representatives of academia, industry, and think tanks discussed climate science, energy and climate economics, and whether various policy options were likely to harm or promote economic prosperity while maintaining a healthy environment.

The July 25 event had five panels of speakers, two panels on the state of climate science, one panel on energy and climate economics, and two panels discussing policy options most likely to continue economic prosperity while maintaining a healthy environment. In addition, ICCC 13 had breakfast, lunch, and dinner keynote speakers, including four award ceremonies.

The first science panel featured presentations by David Legates, Ph.D., a professor of climatology at the University of Delaware; Nir Shaviv, Ph.D., an astrophysicist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Roy Spencer, Ph.D., principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

Spencer showed climate modelers build incorrect assumptions into their models, which then produce false results suggesting humans will cause dangerous climate change.

“Climate models’ global average temperature projections are what proposed energy policy changes are based upon, but they produce twice as much warming as is actually measured by global satellites and the average of four reanalyses,” Spencer said. “Reanalyses are global data sets [which include] all the observations they [scientists] can find—surface temperatures, weather balloons, commercial aircraft, ship [measurements], buoys, a variety of satellites. …

“The reanalysis data sets agree with the satellites that the climate models are producing too much warming,” said Spencer.

On a second science panel, Craig Idso, Ph.D., founder and chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change cited data showing people in countries using fossil fuels at higher rates experience less hunger and malnutrition, achieve greater food production, and have longer lifespans, lower infant mortality rates, and significantly higher per capita GDP than those in countries with less access to fossil fuels.

“Countries with lower per capita CO2 emissions have lower per capita GDP, whereas countries with higher per capita CO2 emissions have higher per capita GDP,” said Idso. “Fossil energy use is fundamentally linked to economic growth.

“As countries have embraced and increased their production and use of fossil energy, their citizens have been amply rewarded with increased economic development and growth,” Idso said.

Kevin Dayaratna, Ph.D., senior statistician and research programmer in The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis; and Benjamin Zycher, Ph.D., a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute spoke on the Energy and Climate Economics panel with both concluding the Green New Deal (GND) proposed by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and sponsored and endorsed by more than 100 Democrat or Independent members of the U.S. House and Senate, including every senator currently vying for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, would cost trillions of dollars and provide little to no benefits.

Dayaratna’s research indicates the trillions of dollars and millions of jobs would be lost under GND for a negligible impact on the climate.

“[GND] would result in a peak employment shortfall of over 5.3 million jobs, … [and] a typical family of four would experience $8,000 in lost income per year, amounting to a total loss of $165,000 [per household] through 2040,” Dayaratna said. “Yet, even eliminating carbon dioxide emissions from the economy completely … would produce less than 0.2 degrees Celsius temperature mitigation by the end of the century [and] less than 2 centimeters of sea level rise reduction.”

Speaking on the panel on Winning Public Policy Options, James Taylor, director of The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, said Republicans who embrace carbon taxes and increasing subsidies for renewable energy production are committing political suicide.

“A watered-down Green New Deal is a losing policy for Republicans,” said Taylor.

Polls show the public does not rank climate change high among its list of concerns and people are unwilling to pay much to combat it, said Taylor.

“Republicans who have said we need to take action on climate change and the way to win votes of voters in the future is to show that concern,” have consistently lost elections, Taylor said. “They were unable to win over the far Left … but what they are doing is [losing] me and people like me who say there is no way I’m going to cast a ballot for somebody who is going to [restrict fossil fuel use].

“Going to the left on climate change is not a winning political issue,” said Taylor.

Among ICCC 13’s prominent international speakers was Dominik Kolorz, chairman of the board of the Śląsko-Dąbrowski Region of Polish Solidarity, the labor union which famously led a civil resistance movement against the Soviet Union and its Polish puppet government in the 1980s, who delivered the breakfast keynote address via video.

Kolorz said the climate policies of the European Union are dangerous to Europe generally and Poland specifically.

“Since 2005, [Solidarity] has been actively involved in the process of assessing climate policy,” said Kolorz. “We are the first institution in Poland which began to pay attention to the fact that the climate policy which suggests that carbon dioxide emissions, that man [is] responsible for global warming, will have huge social and economic consequences. … The climate goals of the European Union, associated with the [United Nations’] climate goals, make us increasingly likely to be in a social and economic crisis.

“Just like The Heartland Institute, we do not deny that we live in a time where the temperature on Earth is different, higher … than what has occurred over the recent periods,” Kolorz said. “We do not deny that we are in a period of global warming, but since there is no real scientific consensus, in our opinion, about human responsibility for climate change, we cannot allow that in the disguise of climate change that poorer societies only bear the results of climate policies.”

  • H. Sterling Burnett (Tim Benson, a policy analyst at The Heartland Institute contributed to this story)

SOURCES: The Heartland Institute


IN THIS ISSUE …

Climate change unlikely to swamp island nations Study finds no experimental evidence of AGW


CLIMATE CHANGE UNLIKELY TO SWAMP ISLAND NATIONS

A new study published in Geology, the journal of the Geological Society of America, indicates even if seas continue to rise, low-lying islands and atolls, such as Kiribati, Tokelau, and Tuvalu and are likely to adapt to the rising seas rather than sink beneath them, contrary to climate model projections.

Lead author Megan Tuck, of the University of Auckland, teamed with Dr. Murray Ford, also from the University of Auckland, Professor Paul Kench, at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and Professor Gerd Masselink from the University of Plymouth in the UK to recreate the effect of rising seas using a scale model of tiny Fatato Island on the southeast rim of Funafuti Atoll in Tuvalu to test the ability of the real island to withstand predicted climate affects.

The researchers simulated higher sea levels and storm-generated waves up to 4m in a 20 meter (m)-long water chute to replicate real-world sea levels of 0.5 m and 1 m. During the experiment, Tuck, et al., used lasers to track changes in the model as simulated sea levels rose, finding the crest of the island—its highest ground—actually increased 1.13m height as higher sea levels and strong wave action washed sand and gravel inland. The experiment found lower lying areas could decline as the height of the crest increased, though that might not occur because lower lying ground on such atolls and islands are “are continually replenished by sediment from the surrounding reef.”

This paper confirms earlier research by the same scientists in which, using aerial photos beginning in 1943 to track changes to the 101 islands that make up the Tuvalu archipelago, they found the islands’ land area grew by 2.9 percent or approximately 73.5 hectares over the past 40 years, even as sea levels rose.

Tuck, the lead author, says these two sets of findings show low-lying islands are more dynamic and resilient than is commonly assumed.

“Atoll islands do not sit inert on the reef, instead the gravel and sand they are made up of shifts on the reef itself so that the land changes in response to environmental conditions,” Tuck said in a news release discussing the Geology paper.

SOURCE: SciMex; Geology (behind paywall)


STUDY FINDS NO EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE OF AGW

A new paper by Jyrki Kauppinen and Pekka Malmi, at Finland’s University of Turku argues no experimental evidence confirms anthropogenic climate change.

The authors do not count projections made by climate models as evidence of climate change because, they note, climate models often disagree with each other and have a range of sensitivity estimates of a doubling of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere from “very close to zero while the highest ones are even 9 degrees Celsius for a doubling of [carbon dioxide]. The majority of the papers are using theoretical general circulation models (GCM) for the estimation. These models give very big sensitivities with a very large uncertainty range. Typically sensitivity values are between 2–5 degrees.”

According to Kauppinen’s and Malmi’s research, changes in cloud cover, a factor climate modelers are unable to replicate, account for most of the warming experienced since 1983, just before fearmongering about human caused global warming began.

“Experimental observations indicate that [a] 1 percent increase of the low cloud cover fraction decreases the temperature by 0.11 degrees Celsius,” says the paper. “This number is in very good agreement with the theory given in the papers. Using this result we are able to present the natural temperature anomaly by multiplying the changes of the low cloud cover by −0.11 degrees Celsius.”

Kauppinnen and Malmi show changes in low cloud cover, and other natural factors like shifts and ocean currents and volcanic eruptions, account for or track the changes—increases, declines, and periods of relative stasis—in global average temperatures since 1983, leaving no room for greenhouse gases to be a contributing factor. In short, holding other factors equal, when low cloud cover declines recorded temperatures have risen, though less than climate models assuming carbon dioxide as a driver of temperatures have predicted. And when low cloud cover has increased on average globally, temperatures have declined or stabilized, despite an ongoing increase in carbon dioxide.

The researchers conclude, “[d]uring the last hundred years the temperature is increased about 0.1 degrees Celsius because of carbon dioxide. The human contribution was about 0.01 degree Celsius,” which is hardly the majority of the temperature increase the earth has experienced over that time period.

If this research is correct, it puts the lie to the supposed 97 percent consensus claim that human greenhouse gas emissions have accounted for the majority of the increase in temperatures over the past century.

SOURCES: Cornell University arXiv

The Climate Change Weekly Newsletter has been moved to HeartlandDailyNews.com. Please check there for future updates!