To the Editor:
Support for the Paris Agreement on climate change signed in December 2015 (“Paris Accord”) was a recurring theme in recent local climate marches. However, if noted climate activist James Hansen (the “father” of climate change awareness) is to be believed, these protesters should be demanding that the U.S. leave the Paris Accord, which he has labeled a “fraud.”
Dr. Hansen is no poser. He was the first to testify before Congress about the greenhouse effect in 1988, and has been arrested several times in climate protests.
To understand why Dr. Hansen is right about the Paris Accord, you first need to understand the “problem” it was attempting to address, namely that the climate model known as MAGICC had predicted that the Earth’s temperature would rise by 4° centigrade by the year 2100 if steps were not taken to mitigate carbon emissions. The goal of the convention was to reduce this temperature increase to 2° by having each party announce voluntary, nonbinding, intended, nationally- (i.e., self-) determined contributions, or “INDCs,” which are only effective until 2030. You don’t have to be a lawyer to understand why Dr. Hansen calls this system of unenforceable, “intended” commitments “worthless … bulls___.” And he was right!
After the world leaders took their victory laps, the ugly truth began to emerge. It is far easier to “announce” than to meet commitments — especially when they are only “intended” commitments. For example, New Zealand will rely on “carbon credits” purchased from Russia to meet its INDC, despite the fact that (surprise) all of these credits proved to be fraudulent. Moreover, Climate Action Tracker finds New Zealand’s policies will cause its emissions to rise by 2030, not decrease by 30 percent, as “intended.” A Dec. 12, 2015, article in the Toronto Sun titled “Paris Deal a Fraud” notes that Canada would fall 23 million tons short of its INDC, even under the impossible scenario that it banned all use of oil and gas in the near future. Moreover, the government’s futile plans to meet this “commitment” would cost its citizens billions of dollars for programs proven so ineffective they earned two “Fossil of the Day” awards from environmental groups during the Paris Convention. The list of unrealistic commitments and phony “solutions” to meet INDCs goes on, but I cannot, in this limited space.
Yet this system of meaningless “announcements” is not even the most important reason why the Paris Accord threatens — not helps — the environment. On Nov. 3, 2015, just before the Paris Convention, the New York Times published an article titled “China Burns Much More Coal Than Reported, Complicating Climate Talks.” Anyone who still supports the Paris Accord must read this article. It reports that China admits that for the past 13 years, it has been burning 17 percent more coal per year than it had been reporting. That is equal to 70 percent of all the coal burned in the U.S. per year, and translates to an underreporting of almost one billion (with a “b”) metric tons of CO2 each year since at least 2011, and hundreds of millions more tons of CO2 in each of the years before 2011.
This confession invalidates the MAGICC model used by the Paris Accord both to allegedly project the planetary temperature increase and the draconian level of cutbacks necessary to lower it! Why? Well, as the Times points out, the revised Chinese numbers do not alter scientists’ estimates of the total amount of CO2 in the air, because that is measured directly. Yet the MAGICC model was developed and calculated using the grossly underreported Chinese emission numbers to arrive at this same measured amount of CO2 in the air. As a result, the MAGICC model substantially underestimates how much CO2 is being absorbed by the planet’s ecosystems or “natural sinks,” and therefore greatly overestimates the percentage of CO2 emissions that will remain in the air to supposedly cause “global warming.” As Josep Canadell, director of the Global Carbon Project, put it: “If the emissions are partially wrong, we’ll be wrong in attributing carbon sources and sinks.” Sure, but when “partially wrong” involves several billion tons, the model’s attribution of carbon absorption to natural sinks is going to be understated by billions of tons, resulting in the unrealistically dire temperature scenarios relied upon by the Paris Convention!
The article goes on to conclude that “researchers will want to understand where the extra [Chinese] output ended up.” Maybe, but sadly world leaders, including our president, did not “want to understand” any of this. They would not have science delaying their political grandstanding, so they chose to ignore science and the unnecessary costs they were imposing on their people, and rushed ahead using a model they knew substantially overstated the problem and the extent of the required solution.
Worse yet, by ignoring the defects in the MAGICC model, the Paris Accord gives continuing cover to dictators in countries like China and Russia (home of the phony “carbon credit”) to pollute more and report less by effectively giving them credit for CO2 being absorbed by the planet’s natural sinks! Moreover, by accepting emission reports from these dictators as gospel, the more they underreport, the less credit the climate models attribute to the planet’s natural CO2 sinks, the more urgent the warnings the models will issue, and the more costly the remedial action the models will say is necessary.
In other words, the Paris Accord ensures that everyone pays, including the planet, to subsidize lying dictators like Vladimir Putin. And that cost is not cheap. Based on the 2015 U.S. Energy Information Administration’s 2015 National Energy Modeling System, the total income loss for a family of four caused by compliance is $20,000 per year. That is why we should all want to scrap the Paris Accord, require independently verified emissions data, use that real data to fix the climate models, and only then determine the real nature of the problem and the solution.
Ronald Monterosso
Edgartown