In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Bjorn Lomborg expands on his findings on the environmental implications of the Inflation Reduction Act:
Unlike most other nations on the planet, the U.S. has substantially reduced its carbon emissions over the past 15 years. This is largely owing to the fracking revolution that replaced a lot of America’s coal with natural gas, which is cheaper and cleaner. Even without the new law, the U.S. was on track to cut emissions substantially by 2030, according to research by the Rhodium Group. Averaging their high and low emission predictions, the U.S. would drop emissions by almost 30% absent the new law. With the new law, emissions will decline instead by a little over 37%. The “most significant legislation in history†will actually cut emissions by less than eight percentage points.
While the administration talks up its emission reductions, it never seems to tout the law’s impact on temperature and sea level—for good reason. If you plug the predicted emissions decline into the climate model used for all major United Nations climate reports, it turns out the global temperature will be cut by only 0.0009 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century. This is assuming the law’s emission reductions end when its funding does after 2030. But even if you charitably assume they’ll somehow be sustained through 2100 without any interruption, the impact on global temperature will still be almost unnoticeable, at 0.028 degree Fahrenheit.
The law will similarly have little effect on the sea level. A model that calculates changes in ocean levels predicts waters will be somewhere between 0.006 and 0.08 inch lower in 2100 than they would have been without the Inflation Reduction Act.
To reach even this minuscule climate impact, the law would have to be kept intact over the rest of the decade, across four more Congresses and two presidential terms. Given the $369 billion price tag on the act’s climate policies, it’s hard to imagine the Inflation Reduction Act surviving a Republican majority. It might not even survive sustained Democratic rule.
Based on that it seems reasonable to conclude that the IRA isn’t about climate change. And in fairness the U. S. had a lot more to do in reducing its carbon emissions than France, Germany, or the UK so comparing our results over the last 15 years with theirs is a bit misleading.
And it clearly isn’t about reducing inflation, either? What is it about?
Locally, it seems to be about government purchasing electric irrigation motors for farmers who always have political clout far beyond their numbers as a voting bloc.
https://www.kfornow.com/usda-rural-development-invests-121-million-in-critical-infrastructure-to-combat-climate-change-across-rural-america-56k-in-nebraska/
I’d kind of like to know who benefits here, GE?
A. Payoffs for favored groups, especially doners.
B. Goosing an economy slipping into recession.
A trip down memory lane……..
Climate Change Forecasts
“No real action has been taken to save the environment, [Ehrlich] maintains. And it does need saving. Ehrlich predicts that the oceans will be as dead as Lake Erie in less than a decade.” –Redlands Daily Facts, 1970.
“Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century: Air pollution may obliterate the sun and cause a new ice age in the first third of the next century. … If the current rate of increase in electric power generation continues, the demands for cooling water will boil dry the entire flow of the rivers and streams of continental United States. … By the next century ‘the consumption of oxygen in combustion processes, world-wide, will surpass all of the processes which return oxygen to the atmosphere.'” –The Boston Globe, 1970
“The world could be as little as 50 or 60 years away from a disastrous new ice age, a leading atmospheric scientist predicts. … ‘In the next 50 years,’ the fine dust man constantly puts into the atmosphere by fossil fuel-burning could screen out so much sunlight that the average temperature could drop by six degrees. If sustained ‘over several years’ –‘five to 10,’ he estimated — ‘such a temperature decrease could be sufficient to trigger an ice age!’ –Washington Post, Times Herald, 1971.
“Dear Mr. President: …We feel obliged to inform you on the results of the scientific conference held here recently. … The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon. The cooling has natural cause and falls within the rank of processes which produced the last ice age. … The present rate of the cooling seems fast enough to bring glacial temperatures in about a century.” –Brown University, Department of Geological Sciences, 1972.
“However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing.
“Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age. Telltale signs are everywhere — from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7 (degrees) F. Although that figure is at best an estimate, it is supported by other convincing data. When Climatologist George J. Kukla of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory and his wife Helena analyzed satellite weather data for the Northern Hemisphere, they found that the area of the ice and snow cover had suddenly increased by 12% in 1971 and the increase has persisted ever since. Areas of Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic, for example, were once totally free of any snow in summer; now they are covered year round.” -Time Magazine, 1974.
“A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.” –Associated Press, 1989.
“Unless drastic measures to reduce greenhouse gases are taken within the next 10 years, the world will reach a point of no return.” –former Vice President Al Gore, 2006.
At least the science is settled……………..
Drew: Scientist Predicts a New Ice Age by 21st Century
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus
Between 1965-1979 62% of papers predicted warming, 28% took no stance and 10% predicted cooling. (Not that surprising as back then we didnt know how to reliably measure temps at very high altitudes.
https://skepticalscience.com/ice-age-predictions-in-1970s.htm
The comments are kind of funny. The deniers keep citing papers, but they didnt actually read them, as is so often the case. The actual scientists on the site who have read the papers quote for the the relevant findings.
Steve
My own view is that climate change is a risk not an issue (an issue is a risk that has already happened). A serious policy would be an “all of the above” energy policy that emphasized nuclear power and CCUS. Don’t subsidize long haul trucking or commuting, have a lot less cement, and a lot less transpacific shipping.
I dont assume that just because I dont get 100% of my wishes that something is not an issue.
Steve
https://clintel.org/world-climate-declaration/
“There is no climate emergencyâ€
A global network of over 1100 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.
Science has been corrupted by politics. This is true dealing with the COVID pandemic, and the ensuing money-making synthetic remedies put out by big pharmaceuticals. It’s also true dealing with the hysterics of climate change promoted by big government. Thankfully there are those. in both fields of medicine/epidemiology and climate, who are coalescing around apolitically-reached analysis, creating coalitions of rational, less damaging approaches to what is constantly promoted as a crisis. Much like the Great Barrington Declaration, supported by thousands over their concerns about the distortion of science over COVID, there is now another Declaration emerging, putting real science and common sense ahead of the illogical emotional predictions dominating the news and creating destructive, inane policies like Biden’s recent inflation Reduction Act!
What will those crazy climate scientists come up with next?! However, natural causes would result in a climate that is slightly cooling, rather than the warming trend that is observed.
https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-07/models-observed-human-natural.png
Atmospheric CO2 has risen slower than the “business as usual” scenario.
Models and observations are in agreement.
https://climate.nasa.gov/system/internal_resources/details/original/1984_for_alan.jpg
That’s right! However, the greening effect is not sufficient to keep atmospheric CO2 in check.
Evidence is accumulating that global warming will lead to stronger storms, as well as increased chance of flooding and drought. However, this is not yet known with certainty, and it is certainly not true that the evidence says global warming has not led to increased natural disasters.
Indeed. Any reasonable climate policy must allow for continued economic development. People have the right the benefits of modernity, and economic growth is essential for fueling the innovation required to make the transition to a greener future. However, no reasonable policy can be had by ignoring the problem.
You may want to avert your eyes jan since I am going to use numbers again. The declaration you cite has relatively few climate scientists. The lead signature, the Nobel Laureate, won his prize in something not related in 1973 and is now 93 years old. Most of the people signing this are people in other professions like engineering, medical doctors, etc. Of note, at least 8 were former oil company employees.
The numbers part. According the report at the link below the US has about 6.9 million scientists and engineers. Lets say roughly 1 million doctors. We need to include the retired ones up to at least the age of 93 for equivalency. Lets round to 8 million. So how many scientists, engineers and MDs in the whole world? This is a world declaration. Lets be conservative and just double that, 16 million. 1100/16,000,000= 0.00006875. That equals 0.006875%. So when I hear that a tiny, tiny fraction of a very broad based group of people without specific expertise, knowledge or maybe even interest in climate I am just not that impressed. Especially when their arguments are wrong.
https://sgp.fas.org/crs/misc/R43061.pdf
Having been in the predicting-the-future business, I understand how difficult and humbling it is. So I tend to treat all long-term forecasts with a lot of skepticism, particularly those that seek to claim a high degree of certainty. That goes for skeptics too, who typically are very self-assured in their predictions that it’s all no big deal.
Andy: So I tend to treat all long-term forecasts with a lot of skepticism, particularly those that seek to claim a high degree of certainty.
Skepticism is good, but some phenomenon are more predictable than others. For instance, there will be a solar eclipse viewable in North America in 2099. Sure, an interstellar body could enter the solar system and disrupt orbits, but it’s still a reasonable prediction.
Global warming is hardly as predictable as solar eclipses, but is more predictable than the rain forecast for Paris twenty days out. There are a few basic physical principles involved that mean the Earth’s surface will tend to warm as long as, and for some time after, the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases. Sure, a sustained series of supervolcanoes could plunge the Earth into an ice age, but the warming effect is real and greater than effects such as Milankovitch cycles.