Top ten reasons why Washington should not inflict major new laws or regulations to combat global warming:

1. The world isn’t warming. Scientists measuring surface temperatures and atmospheric temperatures using satellites – including scientists who believe in the global warming theory — say the Earth hasn’t warmed since the Clinton Administration.

2. Anti-global warming laws hurt people. All the major legislative and regulatory proposals to combat global warming kill jobs and disproportionately hurt lower income people and minorities.

3. The U.S. already leads the world in CO2 reduction and is a great role model. U.S. energy-related CO2 emissions fell 12.6 percent between 2005 and 2012, thanks to technology and conservation.1 Worldwide, CO2 emissions increased by 17.7 percent during the same period.2 Those who want the U.S. to set a good example should wake up and realize: we already are!

4. Global warming climate models don’t work. Since 1979, over 96 percent of models predicted more future warming than took place.3 The models, run backward, also fail to predict past temperatures. Our climate system is extremely complex, and even the world’s most knowledgeable scientists don’t yet understand it.

5. Claims that 97 percent of scientists endorse the global warming theory are propaganda. To get to 97 percent, activists include every scientist who believes the Earth has warmed even a little, and that humans have paid even a small part, but activists use the 97 percent figure as if it represents only scientists who believe warming is catastrophically dangerous and overwhelmingly human-caused. Since even “skeptic” scientists believe the Earth has warmed somewhat since the 1800s, when the Little Ice Age ended, and almost everyone believes humans have played at least a small role in warming by building cities and using energy, that means skeptic scientists are included in the 97 percent figure, which then is used as “evidence” that skeptic scientists are wrong.

6. The IPCC is a political, not scientific, body. The IPCC is a United Nations agency that scientists have quit in protest after governments re-wrote their work to fit an agenda. One Harvard professor recently said the IPCC’s “summary for policymakers” should be called the “summary BY policymakers” because the policymakers actually write it for themselves. One IPCC meeting he attended had two scientists and 45-50 government officials at work on the summary document.4

7. Global warming believers change their predictions. As their temperature predictions have not come true, activists have desperately started blaming global warming for hurricanes, tornadoes and even cold weather. But climate has natural variations, hurricanes and tornadoes have not increased, and snow and colder winters don’t prove global warming. When Al Gore accepted the Nobel Peace Prize for his preaching and movie-making about global warming, he claimed in his acceptance speech that the Arctic would be ice-free by now. It isn’t even close.

8. Current sea ice levels prove nothing. While arctic sea ice levels are below average, Antarctic sea ice levels are above average, as are global sea ice levels.

9. Environmental groups give counterproductive advice. While claiming global warming is a crisis, major environmental groups paradoxically oppose the major energy sources that can reduce our CO2 emissions, such as nuclear power, hydropower and fracking, and seek laws to limit them.

10. Politicians are unreliable leaders. After the Clinton-Gore Administration signed the Kyoto global warming treaty, it never presented it to the Senate for ratification. After the Democrat-led House of Representatives passed a “cap-and-trade” bill to fight global warming in 2009, the Senate, led by global warming-believing Democrats, never even voted on it. These politicians claim global warming is a crisis, but they don’t act as if they believe it themselves.

Maybe they don’t.



Amy Ridenour is chairman of the National Center for Public Policy Research.

Footnotes:

1 http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/news_docs/pbl-2013-trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2013-report-1148.pdf page 17; see also http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/01/13/after-years-of-decline-u-s-carbon-emissions-rose-2-percent-in-2013/

2 http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/news_docs/pbl-2013-trends-in-global-co2-emissions-2013-report-1148.pdf page 17

3 droyspencer.com.

4 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2614097/Top-climate-experts-sensational-claim-government-meddling-crucial-UN-report.html.