Cruz Climate Hearing Puts Data over Dogma

The first day of the United Nations’ COP-21 climate conference in Paris was set aside for world leaders to make opening statements. Marita Noon details the distortions and misstatements President Barack Obama made in his speech including, “…the sea is already swallowing villages…” As Noon explains, the barrier islands Obama was describing are constantly changing due to a variety of natural factors. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s tide gauge station closest to the islands Obama flew over show no sea level rise in that region of Alaska. In addition, Obama’s claim “… glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times” is not true for the glaciers he visited on his trip to Alaska in August. The Exit Glacier’s retreat has slowed from more than 300 feet per year in 1918, long before human carbon dioxide emissions started to rapidly rise, to approximately 187 feet annually today, and the melting of Glacier Bay’s glaciers has slowed substantially from their peak retreat in the 1860s. While Obama obfuscated in his presentation, Christina Figueres, the UN’s top climate change official, got to the truth of what the climate conference was really about: “The meeting isn’t ‘about the temperature’ — which she said ‘is just a proxy.’ Instead, she revealed: it ‘is about the decarbonization of the economy’ — which means ending the use of fossil fuels, such as natural gas, oil, and coal.”

Patricia Adams, an economist and executive director of Probe International, a Toronto-based non-governmental organization that has tracked and publicized the environmental movement in China since its beginnings, has written a report examining the chances China will submit to meaningful restrictions on its carbon dioxide emissions at the Paris climate talks. China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, relies heavily on imported fossil fuels for energy. It is aiming to reduce fossil-fuel consumption to 80 percent of its energy mix by 2030, but officials there say they will not forsake national economic growth to satisfy Western climate fears. Adams says the highest priority of China’s Communist Party is to maintain high economic growth rates to continue bringing the country’s people out of poverty – and this economic growth depends upon the use of fossil fuels for energy. While China’s government is under intense domestic pressure to clean up its air pollution, which by some estimates kills as many as half a million people each year, cutting carbon dioxide emissions won’t solve China’s air pollution problems. Abating air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide using proven, relatively inexpensive, technologies will allow China’s continued use of fossil fuels.

The UK’s majority Tory government is planning £37 billion in spending cuts over the next five years in order to wipe out the country’s deficit by 2020. To meet this goal, many of the UK’s climate diplomats currently in Paris could be greeted with pink slips when they get back home. The UK’s climate diplomats were told to plan for cuts as they were leaving for negotiations in Paris. About 200 Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) staff, 79 full-time, work on climate-related initiatives, including climate attachés and senior officials at British embassies in Brazil, China, India, and Nigeria. More than 100 climate-related diplomatic posts are threatened by recently announced budget cuts of 25 to 40 percent between 2019 and 2020. Those cuts are in addition to 39 percent reductions to the diplomacy budget in 2011–2013, representing cuts of £7.5 million to £4.5 million, and a 10 percent reduction made in the office of chief climate diplomat Sir David King in 2015.

“The rumors – so we have been told – are they are going to axe the climate posts once the COP [Paris climate summit] is over,” said Barry Gardiner, the Labour party’s shadow climate minister. In addition to the cuts in the foreign office, the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has been told to expect a 22 percent cut in its daily operations budget.

A comprehensive new study in the Journal of Hydrology finds the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is likely wrong by a factor of 10 or more in its claim precipitation increased in some regions by as much as 1 percent in each decade of the twentieth century. Using more than 1.5 million monthly precipitation totals from 1,000 measuring stations in 114 countries, the researchers determined there has been “No significant global precipitation change from 1850 to present.” While data for some stations extend back to the 1700s, most of the data come from stations that have existed since 1850, with all stations providing data for more than 100 years.

The researchers plotted the percentage of annual precipitation change relative to the years 1961 to 1990 for six continents, as well as for stations at different latitudes and those experiencing low, moderate, and high annual precipitation totals. They found no substantial differences for stations located in northern, tropical, or southern latitudes. From 1850 to 2000 the percentage rate of precipitation change was –1.2 ± 1.7 per century, or less than 0.09 mm per decade – far less than the 1 percent per decade change claimed by IPCC.

Energy and environmental policy analysts Roger Bezdek and Paul Driessen say the proposed carbon restrictions believed necessary to keep future global temperature increases to 2º Celsius (3.5º F) would be immoral, indefensible, and inhumane. Bezdek and Driessen note there is a strong causal relationship between gross domestic product (GDP) and fossil energy consumption, with the use of fossil fuels facilitating successive industrial revolutions and enabling billions to live better than royalty did a century ago – allowing average incomes to increase elevenfold and average global life expectancy to climb from less than 30 years of age in 1870 to 71 years today. Attempting to limit the use of fossil fuels ignores the benefits they have provided and whitewashes the harm such cuts would cause. Bezdek and Driessen say the proposed climate treaty under development, which seeks a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 to 80 percent below actual 1990 levels, would require fossil fuel energy reductions of 96 percent below currently forecasted 2050 levels. Eliminating this amount of energy would reduce 2050 world per-capita GDP to less than what Americans “enjoyed” in 1830, resulting in a catastrophic shrinking of developed economies and stunting economic progress in the developing world with lethal results for millions of people in poor nations who would be denied the blessings of electricity and fossil fuels for decades to come.