During President Obama’s final State of the Union (SOTU) address last night, he brought up a few key elements that have been part of his building a lasting climate legacy. One hot-button issue that is dear to Obama is global warming. He said to “feel free to question the science behind climate change,” but doing so will leave you “pretty lonely” because “you’ll be debating our military, most of America’s business leaders, the majority of the American people, almost the entire scientific community, and 200 nations around the world who agree it’s a problem and intend to solve it.”
Not so, writes the Daily Signal today, because the issue of climate change is not as black and white as the president would like the masses to believe. In fact, “natural variations have altered the climate much more than man has.” Those that believe immediate action must be taken to stop global warming use the thoroughly debunked canard that “97 percent of the climatologists agree on climate change.”
Even skeptical climate scientists agree that the Earth has “warmed moderately over the past 60 years” and that “some portion of that warming may be attributed to man-made carbon dioxide emissions.” However, there is no consensus that temperatures are increasing at an accelerating rate and even the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has admitted there has been a global pause in rising temperatures for the past twenty years.
There have been nearly 70 excuses trying to explain away the global warming pause, from volcanic eruptions to solar variances to Deep Ocean absorption. Climate scientist Dr. Judith Curry even notes that the “climate models making dire predictions of warming in the 21st century are the same models that predicted too much warming in the early 21st century, and can’t explain the warming from 1910-1945 or the mid-century grand hiatus.”
It should be noted that Ms. Curry has been called “anti-science” by climate scientists because she believes natural variability has a much stronger impact on temperatures and it is underrepresented by reports disseminated by the IPCC. She also writes that the IPCC made a dire prediction that temperatures would increase four degrees Celsius at this century’s end, even though “global climate models cannot predict future major volcanic eruptions or solar cycles, and do not adequately predict the long-term oscillations in the ocean.”
As for the much-hyped increase in extreme weather? Again, the data shows that the world has not shown an upward trend in the “frequency or magnitude of extreme weather events.” Much of the data the Obama administration relies on to justify its 7-year rein of new regs and rules are “heavily dependent upon certain assumptions and extremely sensitive to very reasonable tweaks to these assumptions.”
So while the president touts that nearly 200 nations have signed onto the Paris Climate Talks agreement, it is not legally binding and non-enforceable. They also don’t take into account that two of the largest CO2 emitters, India and China, do not plan on decreasing their carbon footprint any time soon. India and China have both stated publicly that they plan to build more coal-fired plants, much to the chagrin of this administration, who have all but decimated the coal industry.
And the statistical models the administration relies on do not take into account natural variability, and some models even suggest there might be “net benefits to global warming.” All of the regulations implemented by this administration do have one thing in common: increased costs for affordable energy. Solar and wind is so unreliable and expensive to build and maintain it can’t compete with nuclear, natural gas, or coal on a level playing field. That’s why the wind and solar tax credit is so important to Obama’s far-reaching agenda of eliminating all fossil fuels.
And if the world somehow transitioned to zero carbon emissions, it would only lower the average temperatures “no more than 0.2 degrees Celsius” by 2100. Obama believes that through sheer force of will he can make the world transition to a none-of-the-above energy policy. During his SOTU address, Obama asks, “Why would we want to pass up the chance for American businesses to produce and sell the energy of the future?” Reality once again trumps rhetoric: only five percent of our energy comes from renewable sources like wind and solar. The rest of our power comes from natural gas, nuclear energy, coal, and oil.
Obama even hinted at a carbon tax during his address, saying he was “going to push to change the way we manage our oil and coal resources, so that they better reflect the costs they impose on taxpayers and our planet. That way,” he continued, “we put money back into those communities and put tens of thousands of Americans to work building a 21st century transportation system.”
