Yesterday President Trump announced the US withdrawal from
the Paris Climate Accord, and the world is in turbulence today.
Panic, generally, does not lead to good results. So I
thought I’d comment today in an effort to encourage calm.
Because the Spherical Model is about the interrelationships
of the political, economic, and social spheres, I’ll try to cover all three
aspects (which are somewhat mixed, because of their interrelationships).
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| Our beautiful world includes climates that change. This was a normal Utah winter, 2013. |
First, the political perspective—the freedom-related issues.
The agreement was not your typical international treaty. In December 2015, when
then-president Obama signed on, he did something that we Americans don’t give our
presidents power to do: he signed onto an international treaty without passing
it along to the legislative branch for agreement. It’s not that he signed a
treaty, sent it to Congress, and they disagreed with him, so they voted it
down. He never sent it—never intended to send it.
Another oddity of the agreement was that it was set up with
a 4-year back-out period. Like a major purchase in which you have three days to
cancel the contract. He did this a year and a month before a new president
would be sworn in. In other words, the whole thing was a PR stunt, not law. He
knew it would not stand. He was just posturing before the elites of the world
that he wanted to impress.
If he had truly believed that we are in dire straits, and this
accord would be the only way to save the world, wouldn’t he have simply made
the case? Instead, he, along with other elites, tried to shut down the
conversation. Anyone who questions the line we’re being given, or asks for data
and evidence and convincing, has been labeled a “climate denier.”
Jeffrey A. Tucker, of the Foundation for Economic Education, offered this explanation:
Let me pause to protest this “denial” language. It attempts
to appropriate the widely shared disgust toward “Holocaust denial,” a bizarre
and bedraggled movement that belittles or even dismisses the actual history of
one of the 20th century’s most egregious mass crimes against human rights and
dignity. Using that language to silence questions about an attempt to centrally
plan the energy sector is a moral low that debases the language of denial.
This rhetorical trick reveals all you need to know about the
desperate manipulation the climate planners are willing to engage in to realize
their plot regardless of popular and justified skepticism concerning their
regulatory and redistributionist policies.
I’m not an expert, or a scientist. But I have a good enough
mind that, if things are explained to me, I can understand them. Here’s what I
think I know. Climate changes. All the time. The earth has not always been the
way it is now. We’re in a warming cycle—that we’ve been in since the Little Ice
Age, which we are still coming out of (it was from 1300-1850, following a warm
period from 900-1300). In this rising trend, there are shorter warming and
cooling periods, roughly 30 years each. We were in a cooling segment from about
1942 to 1977, and then temperatures rose from about 1977 to 2005. Overall, since
then temperatures have been flat or slightly cooling.
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| Chart citation[i] |
This trend has been happening since before the Industrial
Revolution. And far before the predominance of gas-powered vehicles and
fossil-fuel powered electricity and heating.
I remember being a young woman and hearing scientists
convince us we were in a global cooling period—because of pollutants like
carbon monoxide in the atmosphere. They were trying to get funding to put
particulates into the atmosphere, to create a beneficial greenhouse effect. This
was, I believe, before the end of the warming segment.
And then, almost as suddenly as it had started, that talk
ended (coinciding, ironically, with the period of stasis or slight cooling that
we’re still in); we were in a deadly warming period, because of greenhouse
gases—mainly carbon dioxide. I did a double take the first time I heard that. “You
mean carbon monoxide, don’t you? Because that’s a poison. But carbon dioxide is
just what we breathe out and plants breathe in.” No, we need to disregard the
science we thought we knew for this sudden new science.
So, when I ask for data and convincing, there’s good reason.
How much of the atmosphere is greenhouse gases? 1-2%. Mostly
it’s nitrogen and oxygen.
How much of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is CO2?
19%. Greenhouse gases are 75% water vapor and clouds. In the atmosphere as a
whole, C02 is a trace gas, only 4/10,000 molecules.
And the next question is, how much does the trace gas carbon
dioxide affect the climate—and is that bad or good? In general, we’re in a lot
more danger as humans from cold than we are from warm. A degree or two might
mean greater land mass available for growing food, and better plant growth. (I
was recently told cannabis growers know this, so they pump in C02 to
improve crop yields.) So it’s not necessarily catastrophic, even if true.
But if, for the sake of questioning, we say that C02
has an effect, how much? Haven’t there been fluctuations that appear
independent from C02 levels? So we’re not even sure of that
cause-effect assumption.
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| The CO2 line is too thin to show up on the chart. I developed the chart from information in a book.[ii] |
Then, how much of the C02 is manmade? 3%. Nature
put more C02 into the atmosphere every day than all of us.
Do humans play a role, then, in climate change? Yes, but
only negligibly. Like how, when you jump up, not only are you exerting a force
that moves you away from the earth, but you are exerting a force that moves the
earth away from you. True. I learned it in a science class. When two bodies
have nearly equal mass, you can see the effect better, but when they are very
disparate, as between the mass of earth and you, your effect on the earth is so
small as to be hard to measure.
There are other parts of the climate change crisis that I
question.
Ice has been melting in the Arctic; it’s at a 30-year low. (Polar
bear populations, incidentally, have grown from 22,000 in 1960 to 31,000 today,
doing better with less ice.) Greenland is losing ice around the edges, but it’s
getting thicker in the center, so it’s stable. Ice in Antarctica, which
contains 90% of the earth’s ice, is at a 30-year high.
Every computer model has been wrong. Instead of assuming “but
now they’re right,” maybe we should go back to find out why they deviated from
reality and fix that before we trust them.
The Paris Climate Accord would require that US emissions be limited
by 83%[iii].
That would be lowering emissions by 1.5 tons per person—a sacrifice that is
countered by nature twenty-fold every day.
If we could return to pre-1870 technology levels, then, by
the end of the century, using the most generous of computer models (which include
much more severe cutbacks in emissions following 2030 than have yet been agreed
to), then we might have a slight effect on only 1% of the assumed greenhouse
effect. A century’s worth of worldwide technology dieting could be wiped out by
a single major volcanic eruption. In dieting terms, that’s enough to send you
to the freezer to drown your frustrations with your own personal gallon of ice
cream.
The cutbacks required of the US are much greater than for
other nations. Our economy would be drastically affected. Our energy sector
would be emasculated. Anyone who thinks we could simply shift to other energy
sources, like wind and solar, are mistaken. While I’m in favor of innovation, the
cost to the environment for these alternatives is currently greater than that
of fossil fuels.
Climatism (not climate-related science, but the thing you’re
not allowed to question) looks to me like a pagan religion. The sacrifices
being required of us in the essentially vain hope that such sacrifices will
appease the climate gods look eerily similar to throwing people into the
volcano. It might make people feel like they have some control over something
out of their power, but it doesn’t actually affect an eruption—and it’s really
bad for the ones who get thrown into the volcano.
So, if you were in favor of the Paris Climate Accord, you
were in favor of ceding American sovereignty to foreign sources, allowing them
to impose limitations on us that would in the short-term require us to limit
ourselves to second-world status, and eventually to third-world conditions, and
we would get out of in only the satisfaction that we had appeased the climate
panickers.
Our president thought that was a bad deal.
As Tucker sums up:
A global agreement that somehow binds entire countries to
centrally plan and regulate the whole of a crucial sector of economic life that
supports all economic advances of our time—at the very time when the energy
sector is innovating its own solutions to carbon emissions in the cheapest
possible way—is certainly going to breed resentment, and for good reason. It is
a bad and unworkable idea.
The Paris Climate Accord was bad for freedom, bad for the
economy, and bad religion. So, let’s not panic. Let’s breathe—even though you’re
going to exhale C02. And maybe do a better job of scientific
conversation going forward.
[i]
This chart was adapted from Climate4You,
www.climate4you.com/ . I found it in The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism, by
Steve Goreham, © 2012, p. 67.
[ii]
Gorham, pp. 83-83.
[iii]
Gorham, p. 18, which takes population data from N. C. Aizenman, “U.S. to Grow
Grayer, More Diverse,” Washington Post,
Aug. 14, 2008, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/13/AR2008081303524.html
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