Senator Kennedy sends unhinged climate cultists into utter state of SHOCK, short circuit after GRILLING them on radical climate agenda🔥 pic.twitter.com/74TF9OPINK
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 20, 2023
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I can’t tell if the expert witnesses are supreme con men or psychopaths. Or both..
Useful idiots.
Litterman is making money, Period; He is also trying to enhance his appearance as whatever he is.
Not a useful idiot.
It would be reasonable (and moral) to punch him in the nose.
These two knuckleheads need to be held personally responsible for scaring the bejesus out of folks for no good reason. The fact that they are well educated makes their crime even worse.
One more thing, it is so refreshing to finally have a Kennedy we can look up to.
To put that supposed $50 trillion price tag (to be spent over 28 years) into perspective, the U.S. government’s total revenue from all sources for 2023 is projected to be $4.71 trillion.
So let’s figure out what Drs. Litterman and Holtz-Eakin apparently could not: just what that USD $50 trillion is supposed to buy.
Total U.S. carbon emissions in 2022 are projected to be about 5.6 Gt CO2 = 1.53 PgC.
Consider two scenarios:
A. 1.53 PgC / year for 28 years. (Continuation of current emissions with no reductions, to 2050.)
B. 1.53 PgC / year phased down linearly to zero in 2050 (i.e., in 28 years), at a cost of $50,000,000,000,000 (fifty trillion USD).
The effective residence time (“adjustment time”) of CO2 is only about fifty years, because CO2 is removed from the atmosphere into the terrestrial biosphere (“greening“), and into the oceans, at rates which accelerate as CO2 levels rise. So quite a bit of the emissions would be gone by 2050 (in both scenarios). But for simplicity let’s ignore that.
(Of course that means these estimates are too high, but we’re just calculating a back-of-the-napkin rough estimate, so please forgive me.)
Scenario A total emissions would be 1.53 PgC / year × 28 years = 42.84 PgC.
Scenario B total emissions would be half that, or 21.42 PgC.
The difference is 21.42 PgC.
Let’s conservatively estimate that projected atmospheric CO2 level might be 470 ppmv in 2050 with scenario B. That’s 1001 PgC.
Scenario A would increase that to 1022.42, which is 2% higher, which results in a radiative forcing increase equivalent to 3% of a full doubling of CO2.
Effective climate sensitivity (between TCR and ECS) is certainly no higher than about 1.5°C per doubling of CO2, so 3% of that would be 0.045°C.
That’s about the temperature change you’d get from an elevation change of 22 feet.
That’s about the temperature change you’d get from a latitude change of 3 miles.
Midwestern farmers could compensate for that much warming by planting about 6 hours earlier.
Does that sound like a catastrophe worth spending USD $50 trillion to avoid?
I don’t see anyone showing the slightest signs of being in “shock” here. Littermann in particular was pretty cocky.
Kudos to Senator Kennedy for his stance but he really missed the opportunity to point out that the temperature change caused by US going “carbon neutral” is independent of what other countries do and is infinitesimal.
Skimmed and flushed due to overpowering language
“unhinged”
“climate cultists”
“utter state of SHOCK”
“”radical climate agenda”
I wish one of them would ask these “DOCTORS” (doctors of WHAT) if they have considered how much of the rise in temps (BS entirely) has resulted from moving manufacturing from EFFICIENT, REGULATED US Industries to China and India!! Ask them how much is added by China/India burning “nasty old coal” vs OUR CLEAN COAL and NATURAL GAS!! Ask if it would be more beneficial to the “world” if all that manufacturing came back to the US!! I bet they could show on their graphs how much change occurred after OUR industries were exported!!