Reasons Why Regulating CO2 Emissions Needs to be Reconsidered « Roy Spencer, PhD

Today, the Washington Post is reporting the EPA Administrator is considering recommending to the White House that the EPA’s 2009 CO2 Endangerment Finding be rescinded. Let’s look at a few of the reasons why this might be a good thing to consider.

The Science

The science of human-caused climate change is much more uncertain that you have been led to believe. The globally-averaged surface temperature of Earth seems to have warmed by 1 deg. C or so in the last century. The magnitude of the warming remains uncertain with a 30% range in different thermometer-based datasets, and considerably weaker warming in global “reanalysis” datasets using all available data types. But whatever the level of warming, it might well be mostly human-caused.

But we don’t really know.

As I keep pointing out, the global energy imbalance caused by increasing human-caused CO2 emissions (yes, I believe we are the cause) is smaller than the accuracy with which we know natural energy flows in the climate system. This means recent warming could be mostly natural and we would never know it.

I’m not claiming that is the case, only that there are uncertainties in climate science that are seldom if ever discussed. The climate models that are the basis for future projections of climate change are adjusted (fudged?) so that increasing CO2 is the only cause of warming. The models themselves do not have all of the necessary physics (mostly due to cloud process uncertainties) to determine whether our climate system was in a state of equilibrium before CO2 was increasing. (And, no, I don’t believe the warming caused the oceans to outgas more CO2 — that effect is very small compared to the size of the human source).

As most readers here are aware, for many years I’ve been saying the science of “climate change” has been corrupted by big government science budgets, ideological worldview biases, and group-think. Even my career has depended upon Congress being convinced the issue is worthy of big budgets.

It is almost impossible for new science to be published in the peer-reviewed literature that in any way runs counter to the current narrative which states that humans are causing a “climate crisis” from our CO2 emissions, a natural consequence of fossil fuel burning. That “peer review” is now at the hands of climate scientists whose research careers depend upon continuing government funding. If the “problem” of global warming were to be much less than previously believed, funding for that research could dry up.

The most alarmist science papers are the ones that get all of the press, which then get exaggerated and misrepresented by the news media. As a result, the public has a very skewed perception of what scientists really know.

As Roger Pielke, Jr. has been pointing out for many years, even the IPCC’s official reports do not claim that our greenhouse gas emissions have caused changes in severe weather. Every severe weather event in the news is now dutifully tied in some inferential way to human causation, but with public opinion of mainstream news outlets at an all-time low, fewer and fewer people take those news reports seriously. Severe weather has always existed, and always will. Storm damages have increased only because of increasing infrastructure and everyone wanting to live on the coast.

And about the only clear long-term change I’m aware of is a 50% decline in strong to violent tornadoes since the 1950s.

But you would never know of any good climate news if your main source of information is Al Gore’s books, your favorite environmental think tank (that you contribute to so you can get their yearly calendar), or the mainstream media.

Costs vs. Benefits

If there was no cost to replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources of energy, I might be a little more supportive of regulations which choose winner and losers, rather than letting the marketplace decide. But everything humans do requires energy, and so human flourishing depends upon abundant and affordable energy. We in the developed world might have excess wealth to spend on pricey new forms of energy (although our rapidly increasing national debt argues we don’t have excess wealth to squander), but most of the world’s poor continue to struggle to pay for energy we have in relative abundance… if they even have access to it.

The 2009 Endangerment Finding

The Supreme Court has ruled that CO2 falls under the EPA’s Clean Air Act, and so EPA would need to regulate it if it was considered a threat to human health and welfare.

But this “threat to human health and welfare” business cuts both ways.

For example, I could argue that most human deaths are premature, and those premature deaths are dominated by what we eat (or don’t eat). The incidence of obesity and related illnesses continues to rise. So, given the threat of food to human and welfare, why not just outlaw food? Food is a threat to human health and welfare, too.

Clearly we don’t do that because food is necessary for life. But so is CO2. CO2 is required for photosynthesis, which in turn is required for food chain on land and in the oceans. NASA-based satellite measurements since the 1980s have documented global greening from increasing CO2. It has been estimated global agricultural productivity has increased by trillions of dollars from crops growing better (with more drought resistance) in a CO2-enriched atmosphere.

I’ve read the technical support document for the 2009 EF. It is full of gloom and doom. Any benefits to more CO2 are downplayed while costs are trumpeted. Its authorship appears to have been heavily influenced by environmental activists, most of whom have their own agendas. Much of the science in it now sounds more like Al Gore’s original alarmist book Earth In The Balance (which referenced me, but couldn’t get my science contributions right) than a balanced assessment of the science of climate change.

Fifteen years hence, we now know much more. None of the scary scenarios originally predicted have actually come to pass, or at a minimum they were greatly exaggerated. Ten-year deadlines to “do something” about the “climate crisis” have come and gone… a few times. Even the IPCC (which only allows alarmist-leaning scientists to participate) has admitted it is unlikely we will experience significant changes in severe weather by the year 2100 that can be tied to increasing CO2.

It makes sense to now reconsider the Endangerment Finding.