Climate Change Fanaticism

You remember the Paris Climate Treaty—I mean, Deal—the one that President Barack Obama signed but did not submit to the United States Senate for ratification. When President Trump pulled out of the deal, the hue and cry was immediate. The world was going to end. Nature was going to wither up and die. Humanity was doomed. No one would ever take America at its word.... so much for the Constitution.

Since this is largely in the realm of prophecy we do not know to a certainty what is going to happen. Nevertheless the United Nations has published a new report suggesting that the Climate Deal that was going to save the planet will not really do what it said it would do. It was just a down payment on the eventual repeal of the Industrial Revolution.

Anyway, Investor’s Business Daily (via Maggie’s Farm) editorializes about the latest UN report:

Global Hot Air: Here's a United Nations climate report that environmentalists probably don't want anybody to read. It says that even if every country abides by the grand promises they made last year in Paris to reduce greenhouse gases, the planet would still be "doomed."

When President Obama hitched America to the Paris accords in 2016, he declared that it was "the moment that we finally decided to save our planet." And when Trump pulled out of the deal this year, he was berated by legions of environmentalists for killing it.

But it turns out that the Paris accord was little more than a sham that will do nothing to "save the planet."

According to the latest annual U.N. report on the "emissions gap," the Paris Agreement will provide only a third of the cuts in greenhouse gas that environmentalists claim is needed to prevent catastrophic warming. If every country involved in those accords abides by their pledges between now and 2030 — which is a dubious proposition — temperatures will still rise by 3 degrees celcius by 2100. The goal of the Paris Agreement was to keep the global temperature increase to under 2 degrees.

Of course, we all look forward to knowing what the climate will be like in the year 2100. But that assumes that we can control for all the other factors that can influence it. Lately, serious scientists, the ones who predicted that the earth is going to become a hothouse are warning us against global cooling. It would be nice if they could make up their minds.

The climate change crew is using the UN report as a reason to introduce ever more Draconian measures to control industry. Among them, ending the consumption of coal. It’s like saying that we need to confiscate all 300 million guns now owned by American citizens.

Investor’s Business Daily:

According to the report, "phasing out coal consumption … is an indispensable condition for achieving international climate change targets." That means putting a halt to any new coal plants while starting to phase out the ones currently in use.

Good luck with that. There are currently 273 gigawatts of coal capacity under construction around the world, and another 570 gigawatts in the pipeline, the U.N. says. That would represent a 42% increase in global energy production from coal. Does anyone really think developing countries who need coal as a cheap source of fuel to grow their economies will suddenly call it quits?

Are we all doomed? Must we allow industrial production to be controlled by bureaucrats who believe in the dogma about climate change:

So, does this mean the planet is doomed? Hardly. As we have noted in this space many times, all those forecasts of global catastrophe are based on computer models that have been unreliable predictors of warming. And all of the horror stories assume the worst.

What the report does make clear, however, is that all the posturing by government leaders in Paris was just that. Posturing. None of these countries intended to take the drastic and economically catastrophic steps that environmentalists claim are needed to prevent a climate change doomsday.  As such, Trump was right to stop pretending.