The Week That Was: December 19, 2015 – Brought to You by www.SEPP.org
By Ken Haapala, President, Science and Environmental Policy Project
COP-21: The Conference of Parties (COP-21) of the United Nations’ Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is over. With great fanfare, an agreement was signed. The parties agreed to agree to try to limit carbon dioxide emissions. The agreement will have no identifiable effect on global climate change, because the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has failed to establish the influence that human carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) have on climate. This “scientific body” has failed to distinguish between natural variation of climate, which has been ongoing for hundreds of millions of years, and the human influence, if any, of CO2 on this natural variation. Multiple studies that have the same flaw are just more of the same.
Further, no global climate model has been validated and there has been no effort, announced to the public, to validate one, in spite of billions of dollars spent by governments. This failure indicates there is a major problem in the publicly announced IPCC science, most likely because the influence of CO2 on climate is small, rendering these costly efforts to regulate CO2 insignificant. As Richard Lindzen said of the effect of CO2 on climate: “[It is] trivially true and numerically insignificant.”
A diverse array of views on the agreement is found below. In the major additions, it is an agreement, not a treaty, in the sense that it has no binding effect on the United States. A treaty would require approval of two-thirds of the Senate present. One purpose of this requirement in the US Constitution is to provide a check on presidential powers. Unlike in many other countries, a treaty in the US has the force of law. The Obama Administration realized it would not obtain approval of two-thirds of the Senate, thus delegates representing the Administration made last minute changes to the Agreement making it nonbinding and thereby avoiding Constitutionally required approval.
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