Category Archives: climate

A Brazilian Extortion Move

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The headline of a Wall Street Journal piece regarding the Amazon forest, its putative role in Earth’s climate, and Brazil says it all: Brazil’s Climate Overture to Biden: Pay Us Not to Raze Amazon. The article’s lede lays it out in crystalline terms.

Brazil’s government, widely criticized by environmental groups as a negligent steward of the Amazon rainforest, has made an audacious offer to the Biden administration: provide $1 billion and President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration will reduce deforestation by 40%.

The article closed with a question for readers:

Should the US give the Bolsonaro government in Brazil $1 billion to slow deforestation in the Amazon?

No, I say. No, in spades.

Here’s my counteroffer to Bolsonaro: slow deforestation of the Amazon by 50%, and we won’t cut our imports of Brazilian goods and services by $1 billion. End your deforestation by 2030—your proposed goal—and we’ll continue, after that date, to import Brazilian goods and services at rates consistent with market demand.

Here are the Brazilian terms starkly articulated by Bolsonaro’s Minister of the Environment, Ricardo Salles:

If we don’t give these people this economic support, they will continue to be co-opted or incentivized by illegal activities.

Cute. Those are “activities” the Brazilian government condones with its own passivity. Hence the Bolsonaro/Salles threat: “Nice forest you guys got here. Be too bad if something was to happen to it. Be better if you was to pay up.”

People Like Me

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President Joe Biden’s Climate MFWIC, John Kerry, traveled to Iceland to accept an Arctic Circle award for his climate “leadership.” Of course, Kerry traveled by flying in his private jet (which has a much larger per-passenger carbon footprint than a commercial jet, but we won’t mention that).

An Icelandic journalist, Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson, asked him how that works. Kerry said,

If you offset your carbon—it’s the only choice for somebody like me who is traveling the world to win this battle.
I negotiated the Paris Accords for the United States.
I’ve been involved with this fight for years. I negotiated with President Xi to bring President Xi to the table so we could get Paris.

Of course. “I’m so special. I negotiated all this cool, yet vapid, stuff. I even got Xi to think about doing something decades into the future so we could get to the emptiness of Paris.

“Did I mention that I’m also rich enough to afford the carbon indulgences, unlike the little people—don’t they look like ants from my jet’s altitude?”

He’s so self-importantly oblivious, too, that he can’t conceive of spending his precious time in a commercial passenger jet. ‘Course, he’d be cooped up with so many of those ants.

I wonder if he invited James Taylor along on any of his private jet travels.

Global Warming

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From Watts Up With That, some data for the continental United States over the last 100 years, in graph form.  Here’s the lead graph.

Cooling? Say, what? Notice the year-on-year variability, too. Sort of puts the “warming” since the mid- to late-80s in perspective.

Other data are similar in vein: precipitation data—flat; drought severity, when we have one—slightly rising.

RTWT

Climate Modeling

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Readers here have known of my long-standing disdain for climatistas’ climate modeling skills: their models cannot simultaneously predict our past and our present, and their predictions of our future have wildly exaggerated for the last 20 years, and counting.  NASA (yes, an agency that has been caught altering past temperature data to “true up” current temperature change) also has commented on the matter.

Working from cloud modeling and clouds’ effect on climate change, NASA noted that [emphasis in the article]

In some models “clouds decrease the net greenhouse effect, whereas in others they intensify it.”
Because the uncertainties are so pervasive, NASA concludes that “today’s models must be improved by about a hundredfold in accuracy” if we wish to make climate projections.

And

When both the cloud and the forcing uncertainties are allowed to accumulate together, after 5 years the A2 [greenhouse gas-induced] scenario includes a 0.34°C warmer Earth but a ±8.8°C uncertainty. At 10 years this becomes 0.44±15° C and 0.6±27.7°C in 20 years. By 2100, the projection is 3.7±130°C.

So far, climate models are useless.

The Climate Emergency

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There is no climate emergency.

That’s the opening sentence of a letter from Professor Guus Berkhout of The Hague and 500 other scientists and climate science professionals to António Guterres, UN Secretary-General, and Patricia Espinosa Cantellano, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Berkhout, et al., did expand on that.

The general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is at present founded are unfit for their purpose. Therefore, it is cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions on the basis of results from such immature models.

These immature models have, in fact, consistently failed to predict the past and the present simultaneously, and they’ve badly overstated, to the point of exaggeration, the predicted future amount of global warming over each of the last 20 years.

Those models also ignore all the natural causes of what is, in fact, planetary warming: the sun has been warming for some 4.5 billion years, so of course the earth has been, also.  Orbital mechanics play a significant role, too, not only our trip around the sun, but the precession of our rotational axis.  We (in the northern hemisphere, where most of the land surface turns out to be—a tectonic plate motion that also plays a role in our climate evolution) currently tilt toward the sun when we’re farthest away, and tilt away from it when we’re closest. That’s why our summers and winters are so relatively temperate and close to each other in average temperatures.

Our axis precesses, though, at a rate that completes a cycle in 26,000 years.  Thus, in a few thousand years (think of the time since the last Ice Age for an idea of how quick that is, geologically.  It’s well inside, for instance, the rate at which our tectonic plates mosey around), we’ll tilt toward the sun at our closest approach to the sun and away from it at our farthest.  Those will be some hot summers and cold winters in the northern hemisphere.  Climate control that.

For all of this, though, at present we are, and for the foreseeable future (in human lifetime terms), will be some degrees cooler than the geologic warming trend line, and it’ll be a significant while before we even warm up to the level of the Medieval Warm Period or the climate extant during the height of the Roman empire.