Sunday, June 21, 2015

Understanding Obama Climate Policy

Holman W. Jenkins Jr. reports:
Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry has explained: “One argument that President Obama hasn’t tried to make explicitly is that the U.S. commitments to emissions reductions will actually slow down warming in a meaningful way. If you believe the climate models, the U.S. emissions reductions would reduce the warming by a fairly trivial amount, that would get lost among the natural variability of climate.”
That’s right, Mr. Obama, who has referred to the “urgent and growing threat of a changing climate,” has committed the U.S. to a program of costs without benefits.

3 comments:

  1. The cuts in CO2 Obama has set up for the USA are trivial fraction of the growth of CO2 output for China he agreed to.

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  2. From: http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/greenhouse_data.html
    "How much of the "Greenhouse Effect" is caused by human activity? It is about 0.28%, if water vapor is taken into account-- about 5.53%, if not."

    "Water vapor is 99.999% of natural origin. Other atmospheric greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), and miscellaneous other gases (CFC's, etc.), are also mostly of natural origin (except for the latter, which is mostly anthropogenic)."

    "Human activites contribute slightly to greenhouse gas concentrations through farming, manufacturing, power generation, and transportation. However, these emissions are so dwarfed in comparison to emissions from natural sources we can do nothing about, that even the most costly efforts to limit human emissions would have a very small-- perhaps undetectable-- effect on global climate."

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