THIS WEEK: By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) Paris Agreement – Treaty or Not? The December 26 TWTW emphasized that from a scientific and practical viewpoint the Agreement in Paris reached at the conclusion of the Conference of Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), “Paris Agreement” is largely smoke and mirrors. It does not obligate countries to reduce Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions or countries to contribute to the “Green Climate Fund. Further, the climate science on which the fear of global warming/climate change is based is not robust and far from complete. The models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fail to properly account for natural climate change and past warming periods including the one from about 1910 to 1940. These models consistently overestimate the warming of the lower atmosphere. It is here where greenhouse gas warming, chiefly from human emissions of CO2, should occur. Yet, since 1979 satellites have provided the most comprehensive data of global warming and cooling in existence. For the lower atmosphere the data show no significant warming for over a decade. As John Christy has demonstrated, lower atmospheric temperatures are calculated by three independent groups and are confirmed by independent measurements of temperatures by four sets of weather balloon data. The recent effort by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to alter the historic surface temperature record to show recent warming has been severely criticized and has little merit. It can be considered to be a desperate act to continue fear of global warming. However, political analyst Marlo Lewis of the Competitive Enterprise Institute warns that the Paris Agreement may turn into a tiger to the detriment of the US public and the US economy. Lewis lists eight points that the State Department and the Administration may use to argue that the Paris Agreement is an enforceable treaty, with the force of law and all its obligations onto the US government and the American public, even though Congress was not consulted in its formation or its execution. If the Administration, and State Department, tries this tactic, then protracted litigation is a likely result. At what point does the US government have a moral obligation to meet an agreement agreed to by the executive branch, without the advice and consent of the legislative branch? Lewis suggests that Congress pass a resolution similar to the Byrd-Hagel resolution passed by Congress during the Kyoto process to avert such an effort to avoid Congressional oversight by the Administration. See links under Analyzing Paris! USGCRP – IPCC: The IPCC has no mandate to consider the natural influences on climate change and it largely ignores them. This leads to a significant gap in its science, which chiefly asserts human cause and ignores natural cause. This effort leads to unsubstantiated claims that most of recent global warming/climate change is human caused. Unlike the IPCC, which it largely follows, the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has a legal mandate to understand the natural processes of climate change. “The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) was established by Presidential Initiative in 1989 and mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act (GCRA) of 1990 to develop and coordinate “a comprehensive and integrated United States research program which will assist the Nation and the world to understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.“ [Boldface added] The USGCRP, with a FY 2014 enacted budget of $2,489,000,000 (not including State and USAID), has systematically ignored a critical component of its legal mandate to understand natural processes of global change. The entity is acting outside of its legal powers. Reducing or eliminating its budget is not an attack on “science” but a necessary reduction of a government entity that has gone beyond its legal powers. By ignoring half its legal mandate, the USGCRP is presenting a false view of climate change. “USGCRP is steered by the Subcommittee on Global Change Research (SGCR) of the National Science and Technology Council’s Committee on Environment, Natural Resources, and Sustainability (CENRS), and overseen by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).” The Chair of the critical Subcommittee on Global Change Research (SGCR) is Thomas Karl, who led the recent manipulation of historic sea surface temperatures to create an impression of a warming where there was none. See links: http://www.globalchange.gov/about/l… and http://www.globalchange.gov/about/o… State Department – UNFCCC. In discussing the role of the Department of State, the USGCRP states: “Through the Department of State (DOS) annual funding, the U.S. is the world’s leading financial contributor to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and to the IPCCthe principal international organization for the assessment of scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information relevant to the understanding of climate change, its potential impacts, and options for adaptation and mitigation” Thus, the State Department deliberately funds an entity that largely ignores the natural causes of climate change, in spite of the legal mandate creating the USGCRP and the role of the State Department to “understand, assess, predict, and respond to human-induced and natural processes of global change.” See link http://www.globalchange.gov/agency/… USGCRP Conclusion: Given the actions of the USGCRP, and its 13 entities, in ignoring its legal mandate to understand natural processes of climate change and focusing virtually solely on human cause, we can expect the USGCPR to continue to do so, even at the expense of climate science. Marlo Lewis may be correct in that it may take an act of Congress to stop the emotional mania reached in Paris. Sadly, what passes for climate science under the USGCRP is more social science than natural science. See links given above and under Challenging the Orthodoxy, Defending the Orthodoxy, Questioning the Orthodoxy, Seeking a Common Ground, and Measurement Issues Forecasting Extreme Weather and Results: Unlike the IPCC and the USGCRP, the business of reinsurance companies depends on recognizing expected catastrophic events, including extreme weather events, and adjusting premiums accordingly. Failure to do so can result in bankruptcy. Munich RE, the world’s largest reinsurance company, released its annual summary of losses from natural disasters, both total and insured losses, for 2015. Once again, this questionably claimed “hottest year ever” turned out to be quite benign. The biggest insured losses came from the extreme cold, with deep, light snow, that gripped the northern part of eastern and central US last winter. These losses directly contradict forecasts by the IPCC and the USGCRP. One year does not make a trend, but 2015 is a continuation of a trend of lower losses from heat, floods, hurricanes, etc., that are repeatedly predicted by the Administration and other climate alarmists. See links under Changing Weather.
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