Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
When President Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, he also pulled us out of paying any additional money to the so-called “Green Climate Fund” (GCF). Sorry, no more green for the greenies’ fund. This is the fund which has been given $7.2 billion dollars of taxpayer money from a variety of countries. It is the fund that countries around the world have been pushing hard to get their hands on. It is also the fund that was supposed to be given $100 billion, so they could parcel it out for corrupt third world politicians and greedy UN rent-seekers to swim around in for decades … dream on.
So let me start with the basics of the GCF. In 2017, all of the countries around the globe emitted a total of about 33 gigatonnes (“Gt”, 10^9 tonnes) of CO2. However, those countries that emitted just under two-thirds of the total CO2 contributed a total of zero dollars to the GCF. Not one penny.
Yep, that’s right. The countries currently emitting almost two-thirds of the total CO2 aren’t putting up a penny for the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Not China. Not India. Not Brazil. Not Russia. Not a host of countries. Only the lucky few have to pay, because … well, “because history” seems to be the favored explanation …
Next, as has often been the case until recently, the US was among the biggest suckers on the planet. Three countries, the US, Germany, and Japan, have put up nearly half of the $7.2 billion dollars that the GCF is currently wasting … but no more. We’re out of that money-losing game.
To see just how bad the GCF waste is, I took a look at the Green Climate Fund “mitigation” projects. These are the projects that are supposed to reduce the amount of CO2 emitted. To date, there have been 22 of them, with a total funding (GCF + other public and private) of $6.9 billion dollars.
And according to their undoubtedly rosy predictions of CO2 saved by windmills, solar panels, building insulation, and the like, all of the projects together will save just under two gigatonnes (Gt) of CO2. Two billion tonnes! That’s a huge weight of CO2 … but what does that all mean?
To understand it, let’s convert that to parts per million by volume (ppmv) of CO2. At present, we’re at 410 ppmv. Back in 1750, we were at about 278 ppmv of CO2.
And according to the UN IPCC, that increase in CO2 is claimed to have caused a temperature increase of 2.0787°C. The reason for the number of decimals will become apparent in a moment.
Now, to increase the atmospheric CO2 concentration by 1 ppmv, you need to emit about 16.8 Gt of CO2. The Green Climate Fund has avoided the emission of 2 Gt of CO2 … so IF their estimates are correct, and IF we got all of the savings today, instead of 410 ppmv it would make the CO2 concentration 409.88 ppmv.
And in turn, this would make the claimed temperature increase caused by CO2 to be smaller … at 2.0771°C.
So IF their estimates are correct, and IF we got all the savings today, and IF CO2 actually were the secret temperature control knob for the planet … if all that were true, the total of all the projects funded by the GCF would cause a temperature reduction of … wait for it … 0.0015°C.
How small a temperature change is this? Well, if you walk up a flight of stairs, which is about ten feet (three metres) vertically, there is a temperature difference due to the change in altitude. How big a difference? Well, temperatures drop about one degree C for every hundred metres you go up in altitude. So in climbing a flight of stairs, you’d experience a temperature drop of about 0.03°C. Three-hundredths of one degree. Far too small to detect without special instruments.
But that’s still twenty times the possible temperature reduction from the $6.9 billion dollars wasted on these GCF mitigation projects, a reduction which was only 0.0015°C. So we’ve spent $6.9 billion dollars for a POSSIBLE decrease of about the temperature difference from the floor to half-way up to your knee … be still, my beating heart …
Or we could look at it another way … how much would we have to spend to drop possible temperatures by one measly degree? Since we are spending $6.9 billion for a possible theoretical drop of 0.0015°C, that would mean that a drop of 1°C would cost us a mere $4.6 TRILLION DOLLARS … with absolutely no guarantee of success.
And people are still whining about the US pulling out of this cockamamie Green Climate Fund??? Does the phrase “Don’t throw good money after bad!” still mean anything these days?
w.
PS—QUOTE THE EXACT WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING. I get grumpy if you don’t, but that’s not the point. The point is, without an exact quote, nobody (possibly including you) is clear just what you are referring to.
“However, those countries that emitted just under two-thirds of the total CO2 contributed a total of zero dollars to the GCF.” They instead contribute to the GCF projects in their home countries.
“Three countries, the US, Germany, and Japan, have put up nearly half of the $7.2 billion dollars that the GCF is currently wasting.” Wasting by giving people access to electricity, increasing crop resilience and access to markets, facilitating investment, providing clean water… Why didn’t you talk about the “adaptation” projects? You did not even mention them, and they are a big part of the picture. There are 76 projects total, some that are both adaptation and mitigation. Adaptation is often about agricultural resilience when storms, flood, drought, etc. destroy crops, and water management. In other words, food security. That seems like a pretty good thing.
How about on a per capita basis? Swedes are contributing over $60/pp. The U.S. would have contributed less than $10 per person, had we fulfilled our pledge. For the price of a cup of coffee (well, an iced latte, maybe) we could still be in the Paris Agreement. I would gladly give that just to take our place as world leader, but we evidently don’t want that anymore.
“The Green Climate Fund has avoided the emission of 2 Gt of CO2 … so IF their estimates are correct, and IF we got all of the savings today, instead of 410 ppmv it would make the CO2 concentration 409.88 ppmv.”
If your math is right and it takes $7 billion, a cost shared by governments, investors, individuals and NGOs (not just by tax payers!) to halt the rise of CO2 in the atmosphere, that would be a heck of a bargain.
But I don’t understand your math. The GCF is potentially avoiding the emission of only a portion of that which causes an increase in ppm, so wouldn’t temperature still rise? According to the site as of now, the avoided emissions are only 1.3 B tonnes, anyway. https://www.greenclimate.fund/what-we-do/portfolio-dashboard I don’t think that’s the whole point of the mitigation projects, though. They provide electricity to communities that need it. They help increase energy use efficiency. They trigger investment.
9 Trillion . That’s 9 000 billionaires or 9 million millionaires.
I’m just wondering..if you really want to curb emissions .. and environmental damage by human activity .. and acid rain .. and .. ocean acidification … and cars .. and …overfishing of the oceans … and .. so on.
If you REALLY WANT to do any of these things… how effective would 9 Trillion worth of contraception be?
If you look thru his list, you see that most of the projects are basically renewable power sources. So, first, he should be comparing to the cost of power sources replaced, not $/ton of CO2 saved. Second, because it is a small amount saved compared to the whole, that is irrelevant, like saying I don’t haf to pay my taxes because no one would miss my little pittance.
I love seeing actual math instead of propaganda! Well done!
LOve this matter od act approach to the realities i of the big green climate disaster mitigation snake oil scam. “Do the arithmetic” David MacKay. NOthing in the climate change science and certainly not in the phoney CO2 reduction measures makes snese if you simply follow y the facts, or enumerate the hypotheses. Because pseudo science can never be proven right by independnent validation.
Willis, you state that, “according to the UN IPCC, that increase in CO2 is claimed to have caused a temperature increase of 2.0787°C”. I have not seen this elsewhere. Would you give a source, please? It puzzles me because I thought that the great UN/IPCC objective was to avoid an increase in average global temperature of 2.0 degrees C. from pre-industrial times before 2100. If we have already surpassed the 2.0 degree C. barrier that supposedly will produce catastrophe, I wonder where is the catastrophe. Has someone misplaced it?
$6.9 billion to reduce two billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions? If true, that would be an incredible bargain (by comparison with other projects to date), but of course the question is how this was measured. It would seem that the Green Climate Fund’s methodology for measuring the emissions reductions from projects, or for assessing the credibility of the project sponsors’ methodologies, needs a bit of work.