Bloomberg urges world leaders to ignore Trump on climate
…Former Obama Energy official slams ‘consensus’ – Says ‘intense debates within climate science’ concealed
Mr. Koonin, a theoretical physicist, is director of the Center for Urban Science and Progress at New York University. He served as undersecretary of energy for science during President Obama’s first term.
The Wall Street Journal, 21 April 2017
Steven Koonin, The Wall Street Journal
Put the ‘consensus’ to a test, and improve public understanding, through an open, adversarial process.
Image result for red teaming
Tomorrow’s March for Science will draw many thousands in support of evidence-based policy making and against the politicization of science. A concrete step toward those worthy goals would be to convene a “Red Team/Blue Team” process for climate science, one of the most important and contentious issues of our age.
The national-security community pioneered the “Red Team” methodology to test assumptions and analyses, identify risks, and reduce—or at least understand—uncertainties. The process is now considered a best practice in high-consequence situations such as intelligence assessments, spacecraft design and major industrial operations. It is very different and more rigorous than traditional peer review, which is usually confidential and always adjudicated, rather than public and moderated.
The public is largely unaware of the intense debates within climate science. At a recent national laboratory meeting, I observed more than 100 active government and university researchers challenge one another as they strove to separate human impacts from the climate’s natural variability. At issue were not nuances but fundamental aspects of our understanding, such as the apparent—and unexpected—slowing of global sea-level rise over the past two decades.
Summaries of scientific assessments meant to inform decision makers, such as the United Nations’ Summary for Policymakers, largely fail to capture this vibrant and developing science. Consensus statements necessarily conceal judgment calls and debates and so feed the “settled,” “hoax” and “don’t know” memes that plague the political dialogue around climate change. We scientists must better portray not only our certainties but also our uncertainties, and even things we may never know. Not doing so is an advisory malpractice that usurps society’s right to make choices fully informed by risk, economics and values. Moving from oracular consensus statements to an open adversarial process would shine much-needed light on the scientific debates.
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Given the importance of climate projections to policy, it is remarkable that they have not been subject to a Red Team exercise. Here’s how it might work: The focus would be a published scientific report meant to inform policy such as …
13 reasons to CLEXIT (climate exit) from UN Paris Climate Treaty
- President Obama signed the UN “agreement” bypassing the constitutional requirement to seek the “advice and consent” of the Senate despite it possessing all the hallmarks of a “treaty”
- The climate models the UN relied on continually project a warmer world than observations record the scientific case for the agreement was never adequately made
- In the unlikely event the Paris agreement is fully complied with by all parties it will nonetheless have no meaningful impact on global temperature while imposing huge and wasteful costs and restrictions
- The agreement fails rational cost/benefit analysis
- The agreement weakens national sovereignty by giving foreign bureaucrats control over American energy use
- Climate activists will seek to compel American compliance with the agreement through the courts
- If the agreement remains in place climate activists will use it in the future as justification to reimpose burdensome regulations and create new ones
- If the U.S. remains within the agreement while failing to comply with its terms foreign governments will seek to apply penalties for noncompliance
- Financial transfers to the UN climate process and the Green Climate Fund represent a massive waste of taxpayer funds and an open door to corruption
- The agreement ensures unfair and disparate impacts by committing the U.S. to reduce its carbon emissions by nearly 30% below 2005 levels while emissions from major world economies such as China’s and India’s will continue to grow at a rate rendering any U.S. reductions inconsequential
- In effect the agreement would shift manufacturing from the U.S. and Europe to developing economies causing economic loss with no meaningful decrease in emissions
- Highly subsidized “renewable” energy is extremely expensive yet too inefficient to power the U.S. economy
Flashback: Candidate Trump: ‘We’re going to cancel the Paris climate agreement’
Trump Administration May Not Find Middle Ground on Paris Climate Deal
As the Trump administration debates whether to stay in the Paris climate agreement, observers are skeptical that opposing wings of the administration will reach a middle ground. President Donald Trump’s top advisers are expected to meet Tuesday to discuss whether the U.S. should remain in the agreement, Politico reported.
Source: Trump Administration May Not Find Middle Ground on Paris Climate Deal…
White House Postpones Meeting on Paris Climate Accord
President Donald Trump’s most senior advisers postponed a meeting Tuesday during which they had hoped to bridge the administration’s divide over whether the U.S. should leave or remain in the Paris climate change agreement. The fate of the agreement, backed by nearly 200 nations in 2015, has become a major symbolic policy question for a president who has dismissed human-caused climate change as a hoax and promised to revive the U.S. coal industry.
Source: White House Postpones Meeting on Paris Climate Accord…
Trump Meets With Italy’s Prime Minister After Refusing To Sign His Global Warming Pledge
‘The President should not listen to Washington’s Swamp’
Source: Trump Meets With Italy’s Prime Minister After Refusing To Sign His Global Warming Pledge…
President Trump Should Run, Not Walk, Away From The Paris Climate Treaty
The Paris Climate Treaty is a heat-seeking missile aimed solely at American jobs that will do nothing to reduce global warming. Why would we deploy it?
By Joseph Bast
APRIL 18, 2017
Top officials in the Trump administration apparently are debating whether to withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty, an agreement negotiated in the waning years of the Obama administration that would commit the United States to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent relative to 2005 levels by the year 2025.
The Heartland Institute has been studying climate change for nearly two decades. Our advice to the Trump administration is simple: Run, don’t walk, away from the Paris Climate Treaty! Here are our reasons for this recommendation. Sources for our statements are readily found here and here.
There Is No Scientific Basis for the Paris Climate Treaty
The Paris Climate Treaty is supposedly an attempt to keep global temperatures from increasing 2 degrees C, but this objective is based on political science, not climate science.
The goal is an arbitrary political target based on climate activists’ demands for a number, no matter how dubious or fake, to use in their fundraising letters and to appear on their signs at protests. There is no scientific evidence suggesting a warming of 1.9 degrees C is safe while 2.1 degrees C is not safe.
Climate models that forecast temperature increases of more than 1 or 2 degrees during the next century are not scientific. They flunk the objective requirements of scientific forecasting. They are educated guesses by activists whose credibility and livelihood depend on showing ever-increasing certainty of impending doom, even as their data point in the opposite direction.
Climate models have greatly overestimated warming over the past two decades. The models have not matched observed temperatures from satellites, the only truly global and accurate way we have of measuring Earth’s temperature. Why should we imagine their forecasts of climate conditions 100 years from now and beyond are accurate?…
Memo To Trump: Run, Don’t Walk, From The Destructive UN Paris Climate Treaty
IBD COMMENTARY
Memo To Trump: Run, Don’t Walk, From The Destructive Paris Climate Treaty
Donald Trump met with advisors and Cabinet members Tuesday to decide whether to take the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Treaty — a deal that was sold to the public based on the idea it would lessen the threat of global warming. In fact, it’s really nothing more than an attempt by other, less-well-to-do nations to shame the U.S. into dismantling its economy and its standard of living.
Walking away from the sham treaty shouldn’t be a hard decision.
Trump promised several times to exit the Paris treaty during his presidential campaign. He should keep his promise.
It was a bad idea from the beginning, a bogus climate deal intended to take billions of dollars from wealthy nations and give them to developing nations, many of which lack even basic political or human rights.
President Obama agreed to the deal, but never presented it as a treaty to the Senate for ratification, as the law requires. Instead, in 2016 he pretended it wasn’t a treaty and started using executive orders to put the agreement into effect unilaterally.
This wasn’t just some political maneuver. It was a brazen attempt by Obama to put the U.S. economy under the control of other nations without the input of U.S. citizens and their representatives in Congress — a clear violation of our Constitution.
The U.S. should walk away — quickly, and without hesitation — from this awful climate deal, which would sock Americans with hundreds of billions of dollars in lost output and millions of lost jobs in exchange for minuscule, impossible-to-measure cuts in carbon-dioxide output.
No doubt, Trump will get an earful from climate-change zealots about being a science “denier.” But those who say such foolish things are not speaking in the interest of science; they’re mainly media types and hyper-politicized scientists who are hooked on government funding for their global warming crusade.
The 184-nation Paris deal was ridiculous from the very beginning.
Instead of CO2 cuts that would lead to a 2-degree-centigrade rise in expected temperatures from preindustrial levels during this century, radical environmental groups pushed the assembled
Why Big Oil wants Trump to stay in UN climate deal – Restrictions on emissions favor natural gas
by Matt Egan
Excerpt:
A BP (BP) spokesman told CNNMoney that it “welcomed the Paris agreement when it was signed, and we continue to support it…
“We believe it’s possible to provide the energy the world needs while also addressing the climate challenge,” BP said.
Chevron (CVX) told CNNMoney it “supports continuing with” the Paris deal because it “offers a first step towards a global framework.”
Exxon (XOM), the biggest US oil company that Tillerson used to lead, sent a letter to the White House last month hailing the Paris agreement as an “effective framework for addressing the risks of climate change.”
A Shell (RDSA) spokesman confirmed that the energy giant remains “strongly in favor” of the Paris deal.
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At first glance, it might seem surprising to hear that Big Oil isn’t seizing on the shifting political environment to poke holes in a deal that undermines fossil fuels like crude oil.
After all, Trump himself has called climate change a “hoax” and blasted COP21 as a “bad deal” for the U.S. (Trump later told The New York Times he has an “open mind” about the agreement).
But these traditional energy companies have a vested financial interest in the Paris deal. That’s because COP21’s crack down on carbon emissions favors natural gas, which emits much less pollution than coal.
While Exxon, BP and Shell are primarily identified as oil companies, they are actually diversified energy firms that rely heavily on natural gas to make money.
For instance, 42% of Exxon’s total daily production last quarter was actually in natural gas, according to FactSet. BP and Shell also lean on natural gas for a large chunk of their output.
“These companies view natural gas as a key growth area going forward for them. It just makes sense for them to be at the table,” said Brian Youngberg, senior energy analyst at Edward Jones.
Natural gas production has soared over the past decade, thanks to the abundance of shale gas in North America.
And now there’s the added benefit that governments are cracking down on carbon emissions.
BP’s statement mentioned its commitment to “reducing emissions in the power sector by producing and marketing natural gas.”…