Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Scientific American reports that the world economy is growing without increases in CO2 emissions, which the author attributes to the rise of green energy. However, there are several issues with this claim.
World Economy Grows without Growth in Global Warming Pollution
Energy-sector emissions of CO2 remains flat for second year in a row
Global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions held steady for the second year in a row while the economy grew, according to the International Energy Agency.
In a simple, two-column spreadsheet released yesterday, IEA showed that the world’s energy sector produced 32.14 metric gigatons of carbon dioxide in 2015, up slightly from 32.13 metric gigatons in 2014. Meanwhile, the global economy grew more than 3 percent.
Analysts credited the rise of renewables—clean energy made up more than 90 percent of new energy production in 2015—for keeping greenhouse gas emissions flat.
“The new figures confirm last year’s surprising but welcome news: we now have seen two straight years of greenhouse gas emissions decoupling from economic growth,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a press release. “Coming just a few months after the landmark COP21 agreement in Paris, this is yet another boost to the global fight against climate change.”
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But some were skeptical of the carbon numbers and questioned IEA’s conclusion that economic growth and energy emissions aren’t linked anymore.
CONSERVATIVES, OTHERS QUESTION IEA DATA
“I think that’s just silly,” said Benjamin Zycher, the John G. Searle chair and an energy scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “The estimates of global greenhouse gas emissions really vary depending on which data set you are looking at.”
Global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions are likely higher, Zycher said. Some nations have had flat emissions but for unique factors that are hard to replicate elsewhere, he said.
Frankly I’m a little skeptical of the model estimates of anthropogenic CO2 emissions. For example, we have seen recent enormous revisions to Chinese CO2 estimates, which begs the question of what other mistakes are waiting to be discovered. Whatever is happening to anthropogenic CO2, there doesn’t seem to be a noticeable change to the Mauna Loa CO2 trend, though who knows – perhaps it is too early to tell.
The slight global cooling, past 1998 and the oceans not changing in temp past 2003 is causing a standstill in global (human and natural) CO2. This is becoming a problem for the warmers, so they will have to pretend that cuts in human CO2 caused the global CO2 lag.
However, we still emit less than 5% of total CO2, so we still have very little effect on global CO2. There was a El Nino event recently, so there will still be a warming (this time, of cource, especially following the non increase in human CO2) there is no relation between theis warming and human CO2. (I say this fully knowing that El Ninos and La Ninas events have noting whatsoever to do with CO2, human or natural, but just to tell that the warmers now cannot even falsely claim that the warming was caused by CO2).
The lag and soon to come fall in global CO2 levels are caused by global cooling. The oceans are absorbing CO2, whereas they earlier emitted CO2. This will continue for 20-100 years.
But alas for the warmers, this lag and fall has nothing to do with so-called green energy efforts. Humans still do emit CO2, so if we had any effect earlier, we still have that same effect. And that is NONE.
No-one should believe the numbers presented above, because China and India are still firing up coal plants in record numbers with little or no cleaning of outgoing CO2 at all. So replacing 50 European or American coal plants (that were clean, and emitted very little CO2) with windmills (the erection of these let out as much CO2 or more than what the 50 coal plants emitted for 4-5 years) does not reduce CO2, and can not in any way way out the 100s of Chinese and Indian coal plants built and fired up in the same period.
The fall in global CO2 now shows us that human CO2 emissions are irrelevant, not only for global temperatures, but also for global CO2 levels.