A review and commentary on topical matters concerning the science, economics, and governance associated with climate change developments.

By Alan Moran,

2  December, 2016

Trump, Paris and Marrakech

In September, President Obama ratified the Paris Agreement whereby affluent nations agreed to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 26 per cent. The Marrakech meeting last month was supposed to advance this further. The Paris Agreement came into force in October but presidential candidate Trump said he’d tear it up in line with Republican Party policy and there is no chance of Congress agreeing to the Paris Agreement’s $100 billion climate fund that has enticed mendicant countries’ support. 

Following the Trump victory, warmists have oscillated between being in denial about its ramifications, hoping that Trump would come round to their point of view, and depression at the reality that their world is to be turned upside down. Airhead French Minister Segoline Royal, President of the UN Conference of the Parties, wrongly reckons Trump could not take the US out of the agreement for 4 years.

I published "Trump the ghost stalking Marrakech" on Catallaxy Files and Rupert Darwell had this great account of the Climate crack-up in Marrakech. Trump’s choice of Administrator of the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) will be crucial in setting the pace of the Paris Agreement’s dismantling; some mooted choices might accommodate the warmistas, a matter I wrote about here.

Politico is hoping Trump’s daughter Ivanka is a warmista and will get the role. The Pope’s advice will not change Trump’s mind nor will Al Gore’s offer to work with him receive much consideration!

Among the agencies that have not recognised the changing tide is the IEA, whose excitable head, Fatih Birol, is calling for deeper emission cuts. IEA also announced 2013 to be the peak year for China's coal use, but it is now surging. Who’d-a-thunk that would happen?

Reaction to the change, in Australia and elsewhere

In The Australian and in the Herald Sun I wrote about the Trump victory giving Australia an exit ticket from its economy-paralysing anti-fossil fuel policies that, among other costs, has triggered the replacement of a coal generator that provides a fifth of Victoria’s power with unreliable wind at three times the cost.

Australian politicians, paralysed like kangaroos in the headlights, announced the ratification of the Paris Agreement the day after Trump’s victory had rendered it null and void. Prime Minister Turnbull called the ratification a “turning point in the global transition to a lower emission future” and sought to lock us into “our international commitments on emission reduction". Mr Turnbull also delivered a threnody reassuring his countrymen that they would survive the disaster of a Trump administration.

Sydney Mayor Clover Moore is here to help with advice to Mr Trump on how she reduced the city administration’s greenhouse gases by 27 per cent, while Californian moonbeam Governor Jerry Brown poses as a world saviour with a determination to export his state’s dairy industry by requiring farmers to control the methane emissions from their cows.

According to Prime Minister Trudeau, Canada remains determined to introduce a carbon tax but the interim Conservative leader Rona Ambrose more realistically said, “A carbon tax makes no sense anymore”. The Canadian government still plans to phase out coal by 2030 for which the Toronto Star says Trudeau deserves credit.

The EU Commission though shooting for 27 per cent renewables by 2030, up from the 20 per cent by 2020 target, has no procedures for promoting this and is supporting “capacity payments” for coal to compensate for the unreliability of renewables .

There are many stories of grief-handling following the Trump victory but, epitomising corporate idiocy, Australia’s head of PWC offered counselling to those of his workers who were distressed.

A Trump Presidency and the climate change bureaucracy

As part of the propaganda for Marrakech the White House issued a report claiming the cost of global warming to the US taxpayer will be $21 billion a year, about half a per cent of US federal spending. Almost all these alleged costs were due to hurricanes, which are currently at their lowest recorded levels!

No wonder Trump intends to reorientate NASA from its propaganda to inspire kids, help international relationships and help Muslim nations “feel good”, back into space exploration and science. And to stop its brand name being used by junk scientists like ABC pin-up boy Professor Brian Cox.

Salon helpfully identified $13 billion of direct savings on greenhouse spending that Trump could immediately make, most of which were from the Energy Department, but $1.9 billion were also from NASA’s climate misinformation budget. I identified $5 billion in spending for Australia, a far larger level relative to the economy’s size.

Climate trends

As Watts Up With That reported, global temperatures are dropping like a stone now that the el nino is subsiding.

The Arctic ice is also returning after the warm 2016.

Studies of Antarctic ice have been made based on the research of Scott and Shackleton at the turn of the 20th century. These show Antarctic ice was then 5.3 and 7.4 million square kilometres; it then grew rapidly during the 1950s but is now once again around 6 million square kilometres.

Chinese scientists examining China’s weather over a 2000 year period have identified four warm periods including the present, which they date from 1921, that they say, “may not in fact exceed natural climate variability seen over the last 2000 years”.

And it appears that the IPCC has miscalculated the effects of concrete, which comprises 5 per cent of emissions from fossil fuels, by failing to take into account its effect in absorbing carbon (which is about half of that emitted from concrete) according to a major study headed by Zhu Liu. An IPCC leading co-author, Professor Dabo Guan, (ex WWF) acknowledged the omission and that the models would therefore over-estimate the amount of warming.

Roy Spencer offers the sober assessment that public concern over global warming is at an all-time low, severe weather hasn’t increased, and warming has been occurring at only half the IPCC forecast rate. "The only part of climate theory that is relatively settled is that adding CO2 to the atmosphere has probably contributed to recent warming. That doesn’t necessarily mean it is dangerous. And it surely does not mean we can do anything about it… even if we wanted to."

But once again the Great Barrier Reef is deemed as being killed by global warming hype from scientists worried about Trump and their grants. Larry Pickering said each year there is “a fresh army of undergraduate marine biologists stream out of publicly funded universities intent on creating themselves jobs... No reef damage, no jobs!”

Added to government combustible funding, Wikileaks reveals that the evil Democrat financier, plutocrat Tom Steyer financed seven shills to write 160 articles against scientist Roger Pielke to discredit his genuine, path breaking research.

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