I. Introduction

The 21st Conference of the Parties (COP-21), the latest installment of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, begins today in Paris amid a feverish effort to achieve “binding” commitments by no fewer than 142 nations to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases.  The attendees — the crème de la crème of the international climate industry — will tell themselves and the world that the anthropogenic (manmade) “climate change” crisis is the most important issue facing mankind today, even (or in particular) in the Middle East.  That they will find themselves forced to defend this preposterous argument in the very same city as the gruesome ISIS attacks barely two weeks earlier is no small measure of poetic justice given the wide gap between the rhetoric and the reality of climate phenomena, and the trivial effects of the policies that they will advocate, two topics discussed in detail below.

No less than President Obama will attend and tell the attendees that they are doing the work of the gods, because everyone understands clearly that following the negotiation debacle at the 15th COP in 2009 at Copenhagen, with its photo ops, high hopes, grand rhetoric, and claims of looming climate apocalypse, with COP-21 it is now or never.

But what’s the point of traveling to Paris if it’s all work and no play?  The attendees will party the nights away.  They will patronize the finest restaurants, hotels, night spots, and catering services that Paris has to offer.  Having consumed vast quantities of jet fuel merely to get there—often on private aircraft conspicuous for their luxury—and other forms of energy rather inconsistent with the environmentalist moral stance against “carbon,” they will rail loudly and without pause against fossil fuels.  They will engage in the exquisite moral preening so characteristic of the environmental left, an affectation that will elicit thunderous self-applause, even as they advocate with virtual unanimity policies that will exacerbate suffering among the world’s poorest.

And because “crisis” will be the single word uttered most often, the heat is on.  Nations are being pressured diplomatically for binding commitments to reduce GHG emissions.  This will prove futile, of course, as there will be no enforcement mechanism, even if GHG emissions from most nations could be measured accurately; and in any event, most such “commitments” are being defined against a future assumed “business as usual” emissions path.  This means that any promise by a given country can be fulfilled merely by overestimating future economic growth (and thus GHG emissions); when growth proves lower than assumed, so will GHG emissions.  Commitment fulfilled!  Moreover, the poorer nations are demanding compensation in the form of a “Green Climate Fund,” beginning at $100 billion and growing annually.  As the Chinese “contribution” document makes clear:

The 2015 agreement shall stipulate that developed countries shall, in accordance with the provisions of the Convention, provide new, additional, adequate, predictable and sustained financial support to developing countries for their enhanced actions. It shall provide for quantified financing targets and a roadmap to achieve them. The scale of financing should increase yearly starting from 100 billion U.S. dollars per year from 2020 which shall primarily come from public finance. The role of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) as an important operating entity of the financial mechanism of the Convention shall be strengthened. The GCF shall be under the authority of, guided by and accountable to the Conference of the Parties to the Convention.

Thus far, $10.2 billion has been “announced”— promised officially or unofficially — and $5.9 has been “signed,” that is, formally committed.  Will the wealthier nations pony up more and more even as climate policies make energy more expensive and their economies poorer?  Don’t bet on it.

And so the stage has been set.  Amid the ubiquitous claims of impending climate disaster, it is what will not be discussed at COP-21 that will be deeply revealing: the actual evidence on the relationship between increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas (GHG) concentrations and such climate phenomena as storms, polar ice, and droughts.  Nor will anyone refer to the discussion in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 5th Assessment Report (AR5) of the various horror stories supposedly looming large as a result of anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gas concentrations.  Sections II and III address those topics in turn.  Section IV presents estimates of the (trivial) temperature effects in 2100 of current proposals to limit GHG emissions, another topic that will go undiscussed at COP-21.  Section V offers concluding observations on political propaganda and on modern environmentalism as a religious movement.

II. The Evidence on the Climate Crisis

Let us begin with the actual evidence on climate effects commonly asserted to be catastrophic effects of rising GHG concentrations, which have increased from 337 parts per million in 1979 to 370 ppm in 2000 to 400 ppm now.  In brief, the evidence can be summarized as follows:

• The temperature record is ambiguous;
• The record on sea-level increases is ambiguous;
• The Arctic and Antarctic ice covers to not differ by statistically-significant amounts from their respective 1981-2010 averages;
• Tornado counts and intensities are falling;
• The frequency and accumulated energy of tropical cyclones are near their lowest levels since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s;
• U.S. wildfires are not correlated with the temperature record;
• The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895;
• U.S. flooding is not correlated with increased GHG concentrations over the last century; and
• Per-capita food production has increased and undernourishment has decreased, both more-or-less monotonically since 1993.

The temperature record

The AR5 notes that the total surface temperature increase between the 1850-1990 average and the 2003-2012 average (thus, approximately a century) was 0.78°C.  For 1951-2012, the increase was 0.12°C per decade, or 1.2°C per century if we extrapolate linearly.  How should we interpret this?  Is it mainly anthropogenic, or is it the result of the earth’s emergence from the little ice age, which ended around 1800 or so?  Figure 1 presents a land-ocean surface temperature reconstruction for 1880-2014, published by the National Climatic Data Center.

Figure 1

After an increase in temperatures beginning around 1860, temperatures fell from 1880 through about 1910, perhaps in part due to the eruption of Mount Krakatoa in 1883.  Temperatures then increased through about 1940, fell until the late 1970s, increased through 1998 (a strong El Niño year), and then have been roughly flat until 2015, which is likely to set some sort of temperature record due to another strong El Niño.  Figure 2 illustrates the more recent satellite record for the lower atmosphere since 1979.

Figure 2

The AR5 Synthesis Report Summary for Policymakers argues that it is “extremely likely” that anthropogenic increases in greenhouse gas concentrations and “other anthropogenic drivers” “have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.”  (SPM Box 1.2, p. 4)  One central problem with that conclusion is that it is based upon the predictions of the climate models.  Professor Judith Curry of Georgia Institute of Technology notes that the models do a poor job of reconstructing the temperature record for 1910-1940, 1940-1970, and 2000-present.  Figure 3 presents the predicted temperature paths for 90 mainstream climate models (from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5, conducted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), against the recent surface and lower atmosphere temperature records from respectively, the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University and the University of Alabama at Huntsville.  The climate models, as a crude generalization, are not predicting what is actually happening.

Figure 3

The climate models predict some things correctly, foremost among them a slight cooling in the lower stratosphere.  But the models predict as well an enhanced heating effect in the tropical mid-troposphere, which the satellite data do not support.  In short, it appears to be the case that temperatures have been increasing in fits and starts since the end of the little ice age, and the central issue — whether the dominant cause is natural or anthropogenic — is unresolved.

Sea levels

The recent scientific literature reports that sea levels over the last two decades have been increasing about 3.3 mm per year, as illustrated in Figure 4.  If we make a simple extrapolation for the 21st century, that works out to about 12.6 inches for the 21st century.

Figure 4

Other data suggest a sea level increase during the 20th century of about 6.6 inches, although, interestingly, the rate of increase in that data set was higher during 1904-1953 than during 1954-2003.  In any event, if we take these data for the 20th and 21st centuries at face value, we might hypothesize that the rate of sea level increases itself is increasing.  That raises the same question inherent in the temperature data: Is the dominant cause natural or anthropogenic?  Figure 5 from the University of Colorado Sea Level Research Group suggests at a minimum that the former is important: The correlation between global mean sea levels and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation index is striking.  In short, the implications of the record on sea-level increases is ambiguous.

Figure 5

The Arctic and Antarctic Sea Ice

Figure 6 presents the recent data on the Arctic sea ice, compared with the average and the two-standard-deviation confidence interval for 1981-2010.  The recent record is at the bottom of the confidence interval, and so does not differ from the 1981-2010 average as a matter of statistical significance.

Figure 6

Figure 7 presents the analogous data for the Antarctic sea ice.  The recent data are close to the 1981-2010 average.  More such data for 1979-2015 for both the Arctic and Antarctic can be found here.  The recent data do not support the assertion that the polar ice is collapsing as a result of increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG.

Figure 7

Tornado counts and intensities

Figure 8 displays the data on U.S. tornadoes for 1954-2014.  No trend is apparent.

Figure 8

Figure 9 displays the data for strong to violent U.S. tornadoes for the same period.  The trend seems to be declining, a pattern not consistent with the common assertion that increasing GHG concentrations are exacerbating U.S. tornado activity.

Figure 9

Tropical cyclones and cyclone energy

Figure 10 displays the data on tropical storms and hurricanes since the early 1970s.  No long-term trend is apparent despite increasing GHG concentrations.  Figure 11 displays the data for hurricanes and major hurricanes.  Again, no long-term trend is apparent.

Figure 10

Figure 11

Figure 12 displays the data for accumulated cyclone energy, a measure of the combined intensity and duration (or “destructiveness”) of a given cyclone season.  It is not far from the lowest level in the satellite record since the early 1970s.  The cyclone data do not support the argument that tropical storms are worsening because of increasing GHG concentrations.

Figure 12

U.S. wildfires

Figure 13 displays the data on U.S. wildfires for 1960-2014.  (The sharp drop after 1982 is due to a change in the law: States no longer were required to report fires on state lands.)  The data show an upward trend during 1960-1982 — during which temperatures either were constant or declining — and no trend after 1982.

Figure 13

Droughts

The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895, as shown in Figure 14.

Figure 14

U.S. flooding

The peer-reviewed literature does not support the assertion that U.S. flooding is correlated with increasing GHG concentrations.  Figure 15 shows the analytic findings, in which the rectangles are the 95-percent confidence intervals for the effect of GHG concentrations on U.S. flooding.  Only for the southwest region does the effect differ from zero as a matter of statistical significance, and that effect is negative.

Figure 15

Food production and undernourishment

The United Nations reports that global food production has increased more-or-less monotonically over the last two decades, as illustrated in Figure 16.  Figure 17 displays the recent downward trend for world undernourishment.

Figure 16

Figure 17

III. AR5 on the Horror Stories

The AR5 discusses (Table 12.4 and attendant analysis) various adverse scenarios—horror stories—that have been suggested as longer-term effects of increasing GHG concentrations.  A summary of the scenarios and the AR5 view of them is presented in Table 1.

Table 1

Accordingly, the only such scenario that the AR5 considers important with at least medium confidence is the disappearance of the summer arctic sea ice, under a “high forcing scenario” such as RCP8.5.  RCP8.5 is an extreme emissions scenario in which the average annual increase in GHG concentrations through 2100 would be about 11.4 ppm.  The average increase since 1979 has been about 1.75 ppm.  The single largest increase since 1954 was about 2.9 ppm, in 1998.  RCP8.5 may be useful as an assumption used for sensitivity analysis, but it is not credible as a projection for purposes of policy formulation.

IV. The Temperature Effects of Policy Interventions

Amid the sound and fury of COP-21, one searches in vain for systematic estimates of the future temperature effects of efforts to reduce GHG emissions.  Whatever the costs of such policies—the demands for the $100 billion+ Green Climate Fund indicate that they will not be cheap—it is important to examine what “benefits” they would yield.  Table 2 provides those numbers, generated with the same climate model used by the Environmental Protection Agency.  (Table 2 assumes the IPCC AR4 midrange emissions path and a climate sensitivity of 4.5° C for a doubling of GHG concentrations.)

Table 2

Whatever one believes about the underlying climate science: Are effects this small worth costs approximating one percent of global GDP, or roughly $600 billion to $750 billion per year, inflicted disproportionately upon the world’s poor?

V. Concluding Observations

The phrase “carbon pollution” will be ubiquitous at the Paris gathering.  It is, unsurprisingly, political propaganda.  Carbon dioxide is a colorless, odorless gas, a certain minimum concentration of which is necessary for life itself.  It is not “carbon,” which in the context of environmental policy is soot, or particulates.  Water vapor and clouds are responsible for approximately 65-85 percent of the radiative (warming) properties of the troposphere; does anyone view them as “pollutants”?  It is no answer to say that water vapor occurs naturally while GHG emissions do not; after all, volcanoes are natural phenomena, and the massive amounts of particulates and toxins that they emit clearly are pollutants.  Clearer thinking would result were “carbon pollution” to be replaced with “greenhouse gases,” a term that has the virtue of scientific accuracy without assuming the answer to the underlying policy question.

It is no exaggeration to observe that modern environmentalism is essentially a religious movement, as noted by the late Michael Crichton.  The interpretation of the destruction wrought by weather as the gods’ punishment of men for the sins of Man is ancient, and just as pagans for millennia attempted to forestall destructive weather by worshipping golden idols, so do modern environmentalists pursue the same end by bowing down before recycling bins.  At a more general level, a simplistic but accurate summary of the underlying tenets of modern environmentalism can be stated as follows: Once upon a time, Earth was the Garden of Eden. But mankind, having consumed the forbidden fruit of the tree of technological knowledge, has despoiled it. And only through repentance and economic suffering can we return to the loving embrace of Mother Gaia.  As we observe COP-21 unfold in Paris, it is useful to bear this reality in mind.