0.02°C Temperature Rise Averted: The Vital Number Missing from the EPA’s “By the Numbers” Fact Sheet
By Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels
Last week, the Obama Administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a new set of proposed regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing U. S. power plants. The motivation for the EPA’s plan comes from the President’s desire to address and mitigate anthropogenic climate change.
We hate to be the party poopers, but the new regulations will do no such thing.
The EPA’s regulations seek to limit carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production in the year 2030 to a level 30 percent below what they were in 2005. It is worth noting that power plant CO2 emissions already dropped by about 15% from 2005 to2012, largely, because of market forces which favor less-CO2-emitting natural gas over coal as the fuel of choice for producing electricity. Apparently the President wants to lock in those gains and manipulate the market to see that the same decline takes place in twice the time. Nothing like government intervention to facilitate market inefficiency. But we digress.
The EPA highlighted what the plan would achieve in their “By the Numbers” Fact Sheet that accompanied their big announcement.
For some reason, they left off their Fact Sheet how much climate change would be averted by the plan. Seems like a strange omission since, after all, without the threat of climate change, there would be no one thinking about the forced abridgement of our primary source of power production in the first place, and the Administration’s new emissions restriction scheme wouldn’t even be a gleam in this or any other president’s eye.
But no worries. What the EPA left out, we’ll fill in.
Using a simple, publically-available, climate model emulator called MAGICC that was in part developed through support of the EPA, we ran the numbers as to how much future temperature rise would be averted by a complete adoption and adherence to the EPA’s new carbon dioxide restrictions*.
The answer? Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.
0.018°C to be exact.
We’re not even sure how to put such a small number into practical terms, because, basically, the number is so small as to be undetectable.
Which, no doubt, is why it’s not included in the EPA Fact Sheet.
It is not too small, however, that it shouldn’t play a huge role in every and all discussions of the new regulations.
*********
* Details and Additional Information about our Calculation
We have used the Model for the Assessment of Greenhouse-gas Induced Climate Change (MAGICC)—a simple climate model emulator that was, in part, developed through support of the EPA—to examine the climate impact of proposed regulations.
MAGICC version 6 is available as an on-line tool.
We analyzed the climate impact of the new EPA regulations by modifying future emissions scenarios that have been established by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to reflect the new EPA proposed emissions targets.
Specifically, the three IPCC scenarios we examined were the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) named RCP4.5, RCP 6.0 and RCP8.5. RCP4.5 is a low-end emissions pathway, RCP6.0 is more middle of the road, and RCP8.5 is a high-end pathway.
The emissions prescriptions in the RCPs are not broken down on a country by country basis, but rather are defined for country groupings. The U.S. is included in the OECD90 group.
To establish the U.S. emissions pathway within each RPC, we made the following assumptions:
1) U.S. carbon dioxide emissions make up 50 percent of the OECD90 carbon dioxide emissions.
2) Carbon dioxide emissions from electrical power production make up 40 percent of the total U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.
Figure 1 shows the carbon dioxide emissions pathways of the original RCPs along with our determination within each of the contribution from U.S. electricity production.
Figure 1. Carbon dioxide emissions pathways defined in, or derived from, the original set of Representative Concentration pathways (RCPs), for the global total carbon dioxide emissions as well as for the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to U.S. electricity production.
As you can pretty quickly tell, the projected contribution of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production to the total global carbon dioxide emissions is vanishingly small.
The new EPA regulations apply to the lower three lines in Figure 1.
To examine the impact of the EPA proposal, we replace the emissions attributable to U.S. power plants in the original RCPs with targets defined in the new EPA regulations. We determined those targets to be (according to the EPA’s Regulatory Impacts Analysis accompanying the regulation), 0.4864 GtC in 2020 and 0.4653 GtC in 2030. Thereafter, the U.S. power plant emissions were held constant at the 2030 levels until they fell below those levels in the original RCP prescriptions (specifically, that occurred in 2060 in RPC4.5, 2100 in RCP6.0, and sometime after 2150 in RCP8.5).
We then used MAGICC to calculate the rise in global temperature projected to occur between now and the year 2100 when with the original RCPs as well as with the RCPs modified to reflect the EPA proposed regulations (we used the MAGICC default value for the earth’s equilibrium climate sensitivity (3.0°C)).
The output from the six MAGICC runs is depicted as Figure 2.
Figure 2. Global average surface temperature anomalies, 2000-2100, as projected by MAGICC run with the original RCPs as well as with the set of RCPs modified to reflect the EPA 30% emissions reductions from U.S power plants.
In case you can’t tell the impact by looking at Figure 2 (since the lines are basically on top of one another), we’ve summarized the numbers in Table 1.
In Table 2, we quantify the amount of projected temperature rise that is averted by the new EPA regulations.
The rise in projected future temperature rise that is averted by the proposed EPA restrictions of carbon dioxide emissions from existing power plants is less than 0.02°C between now and the end of the century assuming the IPCC’s middle-of-the-road future emissions scenario.
While the proposed EPA plan seeks only to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, in practice, the goal is to reduce the burning of coal. Reducing the burning of coal will have co-impacts such as reducing other climatically active trace gases and particulate matter (or its precursors). We did not model the effects of changes in these co-species as sensitivity tests using MAGICC indicate the collective changes in these co-emissions are quite small and largely cancel each other out.
Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”
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Great post.
People might relate to knowing how far north they would have to go to offset that tiny increase, or how much higher in elevation, or how long it takes in the morning for a similar amount of warming just from the sun coming up. I don’t know. (Anyone have a reference about that?) And, of course, as previously noted, even their tiny number is highly overstated.
I doubt the average person can reliably notice a temperature change of less than a degree or two without a thermometer.
I wonder what’s the estimated cost per taxpayer? (BTW, economies have positive feedback too. We could be near an economic tipping point.)
Willis Eschenbach says:
Geez, Willis. Get real. It is not without objection. MediaMatters is dedicated to finding lack of objectivity in the conservative direction in the news media and they are quoting the Detroit news as part of a story with the headline, “Editorial Boards Continue To Cite Debunked Study On Carbon Pollution Standards”. They first explain how the study has been debunked and then show examples of how editorial boards of some newspapers are citing it anyway. They didn’t specifically comment on the part about Europe because their article was not dedicated to debunking all aspects of these editorials, but just the use of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Study.
As I pointed out in another thread, the U.S. Supreme Court found that it was the Bush Administration that was trying to get around the law by not issuing an endangerment finding one way or the other in regards to CO2, as they were required to under the Clean Air Act. The EPA under Obama eventually issued such a finding and is then required to act on such a finding, especially if Congress refuses to act. That’s the authority that Congress gave to it under the Clean Air Act and that act has not been repealed.
Since we are only talking about a few degrees C total that we need to worry about, decreasing the temperature rise by 1deg C is much more than a first step. That estimate is probably still way high…and it might sound like a big number, but the fact is that it is a number that is equal to less than a third of the current world GDP in one year, which means that averaged over 85 years, it is equal to about 1/3 of a percent of current GDP…And, of course, you really want to use the fact that GDPs in the future will be even higher to realize that it is only going to be a tiny fraction of a percent of the world GDP dedicated to dealing with a very important problem over the next century.
It’s a false dichotomy based on false premises. We need to do both adaptation and mitigation. We need to adopt to the climate change that we can’t avoid and we need to get off a path of using all of the fossil fuels possibly available to us, which most scientists conclude would lead to changes in climate that would leave us a very different planet than the one that our civilization has evolved on. That’s true even if the climate sensitivity turns out to be on the low side of credible estimates; if it turns out to be in the middle or on the high side, then we will be challenged to get off the current path and on to a new path in time to avert serious consequences…and especially challenged the more we dilly-dally around, rather than starting to do what nearly all experts think we are going to have to do, with the only real debate being how much time we have to do it.
Willis says:
…why do you believe the administrations’ claims that the regulations will NOT increase electricity prices?
Obama explicitly stated that energy prices would “skyrocket” under his administration.
joelshore says:
…we need to get off a path of using all of the fossil fuels possibly available to us, which most scientists conclude would lead to changes in climate that would leave us a very different planet than the one that our civilization has evolved on.
Complete nonsense.
Most scientists agree with the OISM statement that CO2 is harmless, and beneficial to the biosphere. There is not a group of alarmists anuywhere that comes close to the OISM numbers. In reality, the alarmist crowd is a relatively small clique of misguided fanatics, led by self-serving riders on the climate grant gravy train.
willis- you really miss the boat when you try to justify Anything on the basis of ‘poor people’.
argumentum ad populum is especially dumb when you depend on a subset of losers.
can you say ‘Muh Rights!’? that’s a winner and always has been.
if you can’t defend your rights qua rights- well, you’ll surely be welcomed among the ranks of the losers in the poverty you revere as such a great virtue that it justifies the attempt to violate My Rights.
forget about ‘po ppl’ – cuz whether a person may have the strength of character to overcome his fnord training and PC affliction and admit it or not- he Does Not Really Care about po ppl and won’t do without the cream in his coffee for the sake of anonymous and even mythological po ppl. Nor should he. He should immediately react to the rude attempt to manipulate him with unearned guilt. And he does.
so forget about po ppl. reach in my pocket; pull back a stump- or respect my rights. that’s the bottom line.
Charles Lyon says:
June 13, 2014 at 1:47 pm
Temperature gradient in the temperate zone is about half a degree of temperature per degree of latitude. So you’d have to move north about a kilometre (0.6 miles) to offset the warming.
Vertically, it’s about a degree per hundred metres. So you’d have to move vertically about two metres to offset the a warming of 0.02°C.
It also gives us a lovely measurement. We all know that air cools as you go up in elevation. The total amount of temperature change from the EPA regulations by 2100, therefore, is about the average difference between the temperature at head level versus the temperature at the level of your feet …
w.
joeldshore says:
June 13, 2014 at 7:39 pm
Thanks, Joel. That quote was about the estimated cost for the promised cooling. As I point out above, the total temperature difference which we’re supposed to get by 2100 is about the difference between the temperature at head level versus the temperature at floor level.
Me, I wouldn’t pay $50 to guarantee that the temperature would cool that much today. And I damn sure wouldn’t pay $50 for a weak possibility that the temperature would be 0.02°C cooler a century from now.
As a result, the Detroit News opinion about the cost is immaterial, and I’m sorry I mentioned it, since you are grasping at it to distract the unwary.
Let me invite you to focus on the real issue. I still haven’t seen you grasp the nettle of the tiny size of the proposed cooling. Seriously, Joel, how much is 0.02°C of cooling today worth? If I wanted to sell you an air conditioner and I told you it would cool your house by 0.02°C, how much would you pay for it?
Real question, my friend …
w.
gnomish says:
June 13, 2014 at 9:11 pm
Thanks, gnomish, but you seem to misunderstand what I’m saying.
I’m saying that the actions of the climate alarmists drive electricity prices up, and this harms everyone. It harms poor people the worst, but I assure you, gnomish, it harms you and I as well.
I can say “Muh Rights”, but since I sound like an ignorant hick when I do so, I try to avoid it.
Next, I totally fail to see how my compassion regarding the poor is some kind of “attempt to violate Yer Rights™”. Which ones of Yer Rights™ does my compassion violate? All I’m trying to do is keep the damn electricity prices down, for the poor as well as the rich, and suddenly I’m trompling on Yer Rights™? How does that work.
Finally, I am a member of the global 1%, what I call the Lucky Sperm Club, as are you. Even the poorest among us are immensely more wealthy than the Unlucky Sperm Club, those born into a world where you live on $1 a day.
And if you truly think that you being born into the lucky sperm club is a result of you being a “winner”, and that those born into a world of living on $1 per day are “losers” … well, I can only say, it must not be much fun being you.
I find that analysis likely valid in your case as a self-description. Your idea that it applies to all others, however, is deeply in error.
Do you realize how dull, angry, and ignorant you sound? I doubt that you are those things, but dang, you’re giving a good imitation. I’m sure you have a point, and that some of the things that you value I value as well. I’m a proud man, and protective of my honor and my rights.
But when you come on all raging like that, I just want to get as far from you as I can. I don’t want to listen to your ideas, even though I might agree with some of them, because they are so harshly and angrily posed.
Finally, your claim that a six-year-old third-world kid dying of malaria on some dirt-poor remote Pacific island is a result of her or her parents not having enough “strength of character” is … well … deeply disturbing. I wouldn’t wave that flag too hard, it doesn’t redound to your credit.
w.
aw, willis. you show me i failed to be unambiguous enough.
appeals to ‘da poor’ is a rhetorical device of use to a demagogue influencing the soi disant ‘thinking’ of an ignorant mob.
it is distinct from ratiocination for which you have something of a claim to fame – it makes me cringe. why?
i call it ‘the mascara moustache effect’.
that’s a performance or behavior that doesn’t achieve your aspirations but merely betrays them.
thinker or guru? one seeks truth; one is simply vain.
finally, please name the six year old third world dying of malaria on some dirt poor remote pacific island (gawd, but that’s atrociously melodramatic crap)- or name all of them.
and if you can’t, then admit it’s still a somewhat nebulous vision to you- a bit of a myth – something to conjure with.
nothing to build a logical argument with, tho.
***
Willis Eschenbach says:
June 14, 2014 at 12:06 am
joeldshore says:
June 13, 2014 at 7:39 pm
Let me invite you to focus on the real issue. I still haven’t seen you grasp the nettle of the tiny size of the proposed cooling. Seriously, Joel, how much is 0.02°C of cooling today worth? If I wanted to sell you an air conditioner and I told you it would cool your house by 0.02°C, how much would you pay for it?
***
I’ve questioned joelshore on this issue of unmeasurable/unfalsifiable “benefits” (how is cooling a benefit anyway — couldn’t warming be a benefit?) & haven’t gotten a response. Don’t hold yer breath — the only real benefit might simply be job security….
joelshore has wisely skedaddled. He couldn’t win an argument with me, much less with Willis.
gnomish says:
June 14, 2014 at 3:37 am
gnomish, you’ve clearly proven that don’t give a flying fark about most folks on this planet except your precious self. In particular, you truly don’t care in the slightest about those born into the Unlucky Sperm Club in places where people live and die on a dollar a day.
Now, that’s not a huge surprise. You’re not the first developed-world egocentric jerkwagon I’ve run across in my life. However, most of them are sly enough not to advertise the fact that they don’t care about anyone but themselves. You don’t appear to possess even that level of primitive cunning.
OK, gnomish, we got it. On your planet, the poor are poor because they don’t have, what was it you called it? Hang on … oh, yeah, they are lacking in “strength of character”. Wonderful. Can we move on to the real world now, where some of us do care about the other folks around us?
For you, “the poor” seem to be some kind of abstraction. For me, having lived in the poorer parts of the third world for a good chunk of my life, they are my one-time neighbors and still my friends.
As to the names of the kids that died of malaria in the third-world villages around where my gorgeous ex-fiancee and I lived, the ones I know the names of were the children of my friends. I will not disturb their memories, or bring up the heartbreak of my friends at their loss, by naming them for a sleazeball like you to jeer at.
My wife ran the local health clinic on the outer Pacific island where we lived. During the three years that she ran it, I saw medical cases come in both to her clinic and to the local hospital on another island that would make you weep … well, maybe not you, but anyone with a heart would weep.
For you, poor children dying of disease in the third world are just theoretical pawns in your rhetorical argument. You don’t even seem to believe that kids in the Pacific islands die of malaria. And you seem to think that you bear no responsibility if your energy-related actions further impoverish them.
For me, having been to some of their funerals, with their tiny, sad, hand-made caskets, it’s a whole lot more real …
w.
willis, i don’t think i’ve proven anything- but you have certainly lost your critical faculties in your rapid descent to ad hominem attack.
your attempt to turn a thread into a quagmire of nonsensical fits and blurts is straight out of the Rulez for Trollz:
GO META!
question or attribute motive for the statement rather than addressing the content of it.
optionally, imply insult without actually getting pinned down by slow witted targets who are inexperienced.
this opens up the entire universe and destroys focus on the actual topic
RAMIFY!
simply assert that the statement is proof of malformed and malicious metaphysics- unless you hate children as much as the guy who said that.
BE STUPID!
one surefire way to stymie an intelligent discussion is to play stupid- reason has absolutely no way of dealing with stupid.
on this basis, then – with these tactics which are NOT logical argumentation- what did willis win?
why, he’s successfully become the center of attention, not by brilliant reasoning, but by petulance and obstreperousness.
it doesn’t get any cheesier than flinging dead babies . they are not pawns in my rhetorical argument. i’m not using the tools of the guru. they are rhetorical devices of your poor attempt at demagoguery. even as you pretend such great respect for the memories.
now you say it’s my energy policies that impoverish these anonymous dead babies? cheesy tactic listed above. but to be perfectly clear: no, i bear no responsibility for anybody other than myself, duh. don’t even try to stick me with responsibility for anybody else. i am not my brother’s keeper, you cryptosocialist, you.
and why do you bring your wife into this?
and wherefore springs the phrase ‘strength of character’ from your pursed and pouties?
i don’t know where you heard it, but you could do with a little understanding of what it means.
one of the things it might imply is that a person chooses reason over insult; logic over drama.
no, willis, you don’t have any slam dunk insults that can signify anything other than your wish for them. and that, willis, is your problem- meaning it’s not mine. i’m not on your guilt trip; your insults don’t touch me and you are not winning anything, much less some argument.
that’s enough for free. that means you’ll have to find some way to reward me if you want additional attention. you’ll have to earn it. i’m not in the market for dead babies. try reason.
i’m pleased to be able to name a new logical fallacy in your honor, willis.
let it be known as Argumentum ad Infantes Mortuos, the dead.babbies fallacy.
now you are immortal. 🙂
Ce n’est pas un bébé mort. Funny, eh?
Willis,
I agree, of course, with your argument with gnomish. But, in regards to what we were talking about, we seem to have come full circle where you are back focused on the first step by a single country in a long, collective process. In the end, what it really comes down to is this: Eventually, we will have to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels if for no other reason than they are a finite natural resource. However, there are enough of them to raise CO2 levels in the atmosphere to several multiples of pre-industrial values (the numbers seem to be roughly on the order of 5 to 10 times pre-industrial values) if we burn them all. The question thus becomes whether we wean ourselves off of them sooner (and avoid the consequences of raising CO2 levels that dramatically) or later (and don’t avoid those consequences).
Or, in economic terms, the question becomes one of whether we continue to pretend there is no cost to using our atmosphere as a gigantic sewer for CO2 or whether we recognize there is a cost and at least roughly try to internalize this cost into our market economies so that the market does all of the cool and groovy stuff that markets do so well when there are not problems like externalities that screw them up.
As for the poor, I agree with you that this is something that merits care in what we do…and a good argument for why a wealthy country like the U.S. should be doing more than its share (which is already substantial given our CO2 emissions) to solve the problem. But, the poor tend to lose out in any scenario: Yes, the poor can be hurt by energy becoming more expensive, but the poor are also more vulnerable to the consequences of climate change.
Also, while I think your concern for the poor is genuine, there are other people who seem to only discover the concerns of poverty and the huge inequities in wealth in the world when it comes to environmental regulation. I think we can do more to help the poor of the world without causing great destruction to our environment. [It is also interesting to note that, while some who oppose action on climate change talk about how the poor will be hurt by such action, others complain that the action is a huge redistribution scheme.]
joeldshore says:
June 16, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Ah, I see you don’t understand how the redistribution system works.
It moves money from the poor people in the rich countries … to the rich people in the poor countries.
So indeed, both of them are true. It does hurt the poor, and it is a wealth redistribution scheme.
w.
joeldshore says:
June 16, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Thanks, Joel, as I mentioned before, it’s always good to hear from you.
First, I must object to the use of “sewer”. That’s a blatant appeal to the emotions that has no place in this discussion.
Second, as your use of “sewer” shows, you seem to be under the impression that CO2 is a pollutant. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Finally, a man who talks about external costs and doesn’t once mention external benefits is a man with an agenda.
In general I strongly oppose the attempts to include such “externalities” because there is no agreement on what to include or exclude.
BUT, if you want to play that game, I calculated that the net increase in crops and vegetables due to the increase in CO2 is currently providing us with about $300 billion per year in increased food and forage production …
…
… your move. Bear in mind that you need to show actual harm or benefit, not imagined future calamities.
w.
joelshore says:
… the question becomes one of whether we continue to pretend there is no cost to using our atmosphere as a gigantic sewer for CO2.
Amazing. He still believes that carbon dioxide is pollution!
CO2 is every bit as essential for life on Earth as H2O. Only in the deranged minds of climate crackpots is CO2 ‘pollution’. So now I suppose it’s time to trot out the usual inane arguments like, “Venus!” or, “Would you sit in a room with 100% CO2?”
Hypothesis: CO2 is harmless at current and projected concentrations. That can be falsified by demonstrating global harm due to the rise in anthropogenic CO2.
Theory: CO2 is a net benefit to the biosphere; it has caused a measurable greening of the planet.
Both are testable, and both are falsifiable. But neither has been falsified, therefore the hypothesis and the theory remain standing…
…and the ‘CO2 is pollution’ nonsense goes down in flames.
I see that Willis beat me to the draw on all the same points…
joeldshore says:
June 13, 2014 at 7:39 pm
We don’t need to do either adaptation or mitigation, since so far there is no valid scientific basis for alarm of any kind over CO2 levels, the increase in which to date over 19th century levels has been a huge boon to mankind & the planet.
But should adaptation be called for between now & 2100 (highly unlikely), that would be far cheaper & preferable to shutting down industrial civilization with attendant deaths of billions of people, as you advocate.
What the USSC may or may not have found could not be less relevant. The fact is that Obama’s EPA is a rogue agency intentionally thwarting the will of Congress, ie the People, by spewing anti-scientific garbage.
dbstealey says:
June 16, 2014 at 7:03 pm
Re sewer, true.
Our atmosphere is being used as a gigantic plant fertilizer, not sewer conducting dangerous waste away, but a delivery system for life-giving, vital nutrients to enrich the planet.
Appalling that our tax dollars support drains on society like Joel.
joeldshore says:
June 16, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Look out the window, my friend … do you see the rats jumping into the sea? Germany is going back to lignite. Spain has dumped its green subsidies. Australia has thrown out the carbon tax. Canada says it’s done with the game. Russia has walked out from Kyoto, and Japan has declared themselves out of the game.
You started this by saying it would encourage people to sign on. I asked for evidence. Instead, you’ve just restated your fantasy, that other countries will join in our pointless self-flagellation.
Which other countries? Russia? Canada? Australia? Japan? I can guarantee that China is laughing all the way to the bank as they watch the cowboy nation shoot itself in the foot. Your claim that this is “the first step by a single country in a long, collective process” is a stillborn joke.
“Wean ourselves off of fossil fuels”? Again with the emotion-laden terms, but in this case the terms aren’t even accurate. Did we “wean ourselves” off of wood when we switched to coal? Did we “wean ourselves” off of coal when we switched to diesel? Did we “wean ourselves” off of whale oil lights when we switched to kerosene? That’s just a patriarchal fantasy, that we are babies who need to be “weaned” off of something for our own good …
We will transition to the next energy source when it is market-ready, without any need for either scientists or bureaucrats or politicians to do it. I’m tired of people like you assuming that we have to somehow orchestrate the next shift in energy. And do you know why I’m tired?
Other than the unpleasantness of the “daddy knows best attitude”, it’s because every time scientists and bureaucrats and politicians get involved, we get another billion-dollar boondoggle like Solyndra or ethanol or the bottomless pit of solar subsidies. I’m tired of my money being wasted.
Mmmm … as near as I can see, we probably will transition, without benefit of clergy, to some new energy source at some point during this century. However, given the coal reserves, tight oil, shale gas, and methane clathrates, I doubt greatly that we’ll be out of fossil fuel by then.
And by that point, unless something very radical changes, it is unlikely that we will be at twice the current CO2 levels (which would be 0.8%, in place of the current 0.4%). I’ve run the various scenarios, it just doesn’t go up that fast.
Finally, where is the evidence, Joel? You are a scientist. Where is the evidence that increasing CO2 will perforce increase the temperature? I am aware that it works like that in the lab, but the climate has a host of compensating mechanisms. So where is the real-world evidence that rising CO2 will perforce increase the temperature?
w.
joeldshore says:
June 16, 2014 at 1:20 pm
You seem to be having a problem with the tenses of your verbs. Here is a corrected statement
Now me, I’m not willing to trade a current, guaranteed increase in poverty, want, and death for a possibility that cutting CO2 will someday do … well, something unspecified but good.
The 80/20 rule applies just about everywhere, there are plenty of what we used to call “Easter Christians” in every religion and walk of life … and?
Do NOT try to play the environment card with me, I won’t wear it. The idea that CO2 is a danger to the environment is a canard, and you as a scientist know it. The real danger to the environment is poor people, which is in part a function of the unavailability of cheap electricity. It is your actions in jacking electrical prices that are harming the environment, not CO2, and I will not allow you to pretend otherwise.
w.
David Ball says:
June 12, 2014 at 7:43 am
TedEZello says:
June 12, 2014 at 6:53 am
“Right, dbstealey. CO2 in the atmosphere is good for us. That’s why Venus is such a paradise.”
You see what happens when people learn their science from television.
—————————————————————————————————————————
Personally I blame Hollywood …
joel- while you blithely propose to expropriate (steal) or redistribute (steal) from ‘a wealthy country’ and mendaciously characterize the plunder as ‘a proper share’- and while simpletons may fall for ‘self sacrifice is a virtue’ despite the obvious self contradiction- do not try to steal from me. you have NO right to MY stuff. reach in and you will pull back a stump. where my rights begin, yours end. End of story.
let’s see a weaner make a quagmire of that.
Odd, since you seemed to condone stealing (software piracy) some time ago on Chiefio’s blog. I guess your rights are more important that other people’s.