One of the major issues I have had with “climate change” reporting is that articles portray carbon dioxide (CO2) as “toxic”. [emphasis, links added]
This assertion is a blatant lie, as I have often stated in discussing this issue at Legal Insurrection.
One of the biggest purveyors of this inanity was the Biden administration’s team at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Team Biden used a report to justify its update to Obama’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) policy, which was aimed at justifying stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.
Now a study recently published in Nature’s Scientific Reports challenges the Biden administration’s fivefold increase in its SCC estimate, which was partly based on projections of global crop yield declines.
The research, conducted by economist Ross McKitrick, re-examines and extends the dataset used in previous studies that influenced the SCC estimate.
The title pretty much sums up the key point: Extended crop yield meta-analysis data do not support upward SCC revision. It reviews the 2014 database set that was used to justify the hefty increase in regulations are carbon dioxide.
The paper makes many key points, including that the original dataset was less than complete.
The original dataset used for the SCC update contained 1,722 records, but only 862 were usable due to missing variables. McKitrick recovered 360 additional records, increasing the sample size to 1,222.
Interestingly, reanalysis of the larger dataset yielded significantly different results from previous studies.
While earlier analyses suggested yield declines for all crop types even at low levels of warming, the new and improved information suggests the potential positive global average crop yield changes, even with up to a 5°C temperature increase.
The study found that adaptation efforts and CO2 fertilization have beneficial effects on crop yields, which I have noted before.
It seems like a good time to share this video of Dr. William Happer, who offers a rational perspective on carbon dioxide.
In a nutshell, the research concludes that the climate change-related agricultural damage estimates used to justify the SCC increase are overly pessimistic, and the implied revisions to the SCC [lack support from] the extended data.
Because crop yields don’t crash as asserted in the report Biden’s EPA used, then the rationale for substantially increasing the “social cost of carbon” disappears.
Top photo by Luca J on Unsplash
Read rest at Legal Insurrection
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