President Donald Trump on June 1, 2017, announced that the US would exit from the international agreement on the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reached at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), held in Paris in December 2015. A final exit cannot take place until November of 2020. While that decision represented a major step forward in terms of bringing reality to bear on climate policy, it still was a serious mistake procedurally: Mr. Trump should have submitted the Paris agreement to the Senate for ratification, where it would have met an ignominious end.

Doing so would have ended the fiction that the agreement is a mere administrative measure rather than a treaty. Doing so would have forced all the senators—in particular those who have argued for years that increasing atmospheric concentrations of GHG have created a crisis—to vote, on the record, on an agreement that is all cost and no benefit, about which more below. And doing so would have exposed the utter shallowness of the Paris agreement in terms of the claims that it would (1) actually reduce emissions and (2) even if taken at face value yield a nontrivial reduction in global temperatures.

Isn’t this old news? Well, no: A sizable contingent of congressmen now have introduced H.R. 9 “to direct the President to develop a plan for the United States to meet its nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement, and for other purposes.”

For reasons that perhaps are obvious, the many sponsors of this bill have not bothered to ask, or to inform the rest of us, what a US readoption of its Paris promises—a reduction in US GHG emissions of 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020—would yield in terms of a global temperature reduction in the year 2100. The answer is straightforward, as an application of the EPA climate model makes clear: 0.015°C, under a set of assumptions that exaggerate the effects of reduced emissions well above those supported in the modern peer–reviewed literature. Add another 0.01°C if you believe that the Obama administration pseudo-agreement with China (for the US, another 10 percent reduction by 2025) is meaningful. (It is not.) The Chinese “commitment” is particularly amusing. They promise that their GHG emissions will peak “around 2030.” How high will that peak be? No one knows. What will their emissions be after the peak? No one knows.

Because the standard deviation of the surface (land/ocean) temperature record is about 0.11°C—an order of magnitude greater than the temperature effect—the latter would not be measurable. The same would be true for any ancillary impacts in terms of sea level rise and the like, effects in all climate models correlated closely with temperature changes. As day follows night, the proponents of international climate policies will argue that the near-zero impact of US policies is irrelevant because the US adoption of such policies would represent US “leadership” of a global effort, one that would be meaningful.

So what would the effect of the entire Paris agreement be under the assumption that the promised reductions in GHG emissions (Nationally Determined Contributions or NDCs) were honored? Again using the EPA climate model: 0.17°C. As for the NDCs, few supporters of the Paris agreement seem actually to have examined them. If, again, the goal is some reduction in global GHG emissions intended to moderate future temperature increases, then the Paris “strategy” is preposterous because (1) rather than flowing from some sort of scientific assessment, it simply lumps together the notional NDC promises made by the signatories, and (2) the agreement does not and even in principle could not contain a mechanism to enforce the emission promises.

More important: Most of the promised GHG emissions cuts are defined relative to a “business as usual” baseline, that is, relative to a future emissions path unconstrained by any policies at all. Put aside the fact that natural gas consumption is replacing coal use globally, however slowly and unevenly. Since emissions are closely correlated with economic growth, a nation can “achieve” its promise by overestimating future economic growth slightly; when future growth proves lower than projected, the same will be true for GHG emissions. Accordingly, the “commitments” can be met without any actual change in underlying emissions behavior at all. Promise fulfilled!

Note that the Paris agreement “requires” (again, there is no enforcement mechanism) each signatory to “update” its NDC every five years. This is an obvious acknowledgment that any given NDC might not be met; accordingly, the reasons to believe the updated promises, and the ones five years later, ad infinitum, are far from clear. What is clear is that this international UNFCCC/NDC game has little to do with GHG emissions or climate phenomena or environmental quality at all. It is instead a long-term full-employment program for the international climate bureaucracy, with endless COPs, meetings, financial support from governments and foundations, and conferences in upscale resorts and banquets at pricey restaurants. A solution to the purported problem of anthropogenic climate change is the last outcome actually preferred by this industry; only a permanent crisis can justify its existence.

This global effort to reduce GHG emissions would impose costs of at least 1 percent of global GDP, or roughly $800 billion or more per year, inflicted disproportionately on the world’s poor. Would those arguing that the US should adhere to the Paris agreement please explain how it can be justified simply as a straightforward exercise in benefit/cost analysis?

Those massive costs explain why the proponents of the Paris agreement claim that there is a crisis upon us, an assertion for which there is little evidence. Temperatures are rising; but as the Little Ice Age ended around 1850, it is not easy to separate natural from anthropogenic effects on temperatures. The latest research in the peer–reviewed literature suggests that since 1850 mankind is responsible for about half a degree of the global temperature increase of about 1.5 degrees.

There is little trend in the number of “hot” days for the period 1895–2017; 11 of the 12 hottest years occurred before 1960. Global mean sea level has been increasing for thousands of years; it may or may not be accelerating. The Northern and Southern Hemisphere sea ice changes tell very different stories. US tornado activity shows either no trend or a downward trend since 1954. Tropical storms, hurricanes, and accumulated cyclone energy show little trend since satellite measurements began in the early 1970s. The number of US wildfires shows no trend since 1985. The Palmer Drought Severity Index shows no trend since 1895. US flooding over the past century is uncorrelated with increasing GHG concentrations. The available data do not support the ubiquitous assertions about the dire impacts of declining pH levels in the oceans.

Back to H.R. 9: As environmental policy the Paris agreement is silly, and H.R. 9 should be defeated; but all supporters of realism with respect to climate phenomena and climate policy should hope that H.R. 9 is brought to the House floor for a vote. Should it pass, we should hope that the Senate will vote on it as well. Only by forcing our elected representatives and senators to make their rhetoric consistent with their votes can we hope to make actual progress beyond empty assertions and meaningless gestures.