"some mysterious mechanism." does not a serious hypothesis make.
Of course INCONVENIENT TRUTH is a con, as is so much of the CO2 global warming hype
The climate energy budget is not well understood; therefore, the GHG effect can not be well understood.
As to warming there are too many questionable observations ,let alone scare mongering models, to justify the taxes & expenses made in the name of CO2. (see Dr. Roy Spencer's latest blog post.)
Why do we hear so much of CABON EMISSION and so little of Dr. Joseph Fournier's "solar & cloud" theory of climate? Dr. Fournier's hypothesis seems to fit my humble climate observations better than the C02 models.
Dr. Fournier's formal graduate training was in solid state electrochemistry and fuel cell and battery technologies. He claims to be involved in unspecified development projects in excess of $100 M but currently runs a ranch and is a free-lance journalist who runs a Substack.
Unfortunately, a quick glance at his blog shows a poor understanding of climate basics. For example, his June 30, 2025 post treats changes in able as a forcing. However, the IPCC defines a forcing as something external to the climate system that changes the net radiative flux across the TOA such as changing GHGs, aerosols, solar output, changes in surface vegetation and albedo. Changes in the Earth's albedo are driven by clouds, ice and snow - parts of the climate system, not external to it. Anyone who is confused about what is causing changes rather than is part of changes probably doesn't have much to contribute IMO. Changes in albedo - part of the climate system - certainly can explain changes in the climate system but they can't explain the CAUSE of changes in the climate system. Perhaps my brief glance at his work hasn't done him justice.
Rising CO2 may be the biggest FORCING changing our climate today, so it gets all the attention.
I agree you haven't done him justice. You seem to be making a distinction without a difference. GHGs are part of the climate system and they are affected by, among other things, human activity . Changes in cloud, snow, radiant energy, etc. (also part of the climate system), are affected by the solar system. The CO2 argument: more CO2 more heat, doesn't stand the test of observation. Anthropogenic GHG has been increasing steadily, global warming hasn't. Closely examine the graph at the beginning of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, you will see that warming begins before the CO2 increase. There are many more inconsistencies between the CO2 hypothesis and observed or historically inferred climate.
Greg: I would encourage you to pay as little attention to An Inconvenient Truth as I recommend you pay to Dr. Fournier: None. Whether or not warming detected in the Antarctic ice cores predated rising CO2 or not*, there is a much bigger problem with Al Gore's presentation. Correlation between rising CO2 and rising temperature is not proof that rising CO2 causes warming. Rising temperature might instead cause rising CO2, and we do know warmer water holds less CO2. Alternatively, both CO2 and temperature could be responding to a third driving force, say the Sun. And weak correlations could be due to chance. Forget the ice core data.
*There is or was controversy about how long gases in the atmosphere diffuse into the snow with an isotopic signal for warming before the snow turns into ice; permanently trapping the gas the snow contained. Permanent trapping of gas could require millennia.
A good reason for believing CO2 and other GHGs cause warming is that they slow down the rate at which thermal infrared radiation (heat) escapes through the atmosphere to space. That slowdown depend on how temperature in the atmosphere decreases with altitude. If nothing else changes, conservation of energy requires the planet to respond by warming (somewhere) until a balance between incoming and outgoing heat is restored. (The climate establishment wants to oversimplify things for you: CO2 "traps" heat in the atmosphere by some mysterious mechanism.
With the DOE report, Energy Sec’y Chris Wright is telling the Catastrophist Climate Scientists (especially the most obnoxious ones like Michael Mann) to put up or shut up. Deadline for comments is Sept 2. Catastrophists will have to present, inter alia, real observational data to challenge the DOE report—not reams of computer output based on RCP 8.5! They don’t have that kind of data, so instead they’ll just resort to ad hominem attacks on Wright and the report’s authors plus sundry insults and invective. Then they’ll rely on good ol’ Seth Borenstein and other Mainstream journalists for cover and support. Let’s see what we get by Sept 2.
Roger, great responses, but you can be sure that NOTHING of what you said will be fairly presented by the AP. The best you can hope for is that you’ll be completely ignored. Seth Borenstein?!! For at least the last 2 decades, he’s been the most loyal journalist for what I’ll call the Michael Mann wing of the Catastrophist Climate Scientists. You can be sure that the AP report will say something like: “We checked w all the Scientists cited in the DOE report and they all basically said that they were grossly misrepresented and the DOE report is totally bogus.” Count on it.
1. Seth Borenstien will twist your facts mercilessly to get the desired, alarmist viewpoint he desires. After reading him in the Daily Post and Courier, in Charleston, South Carolina for the past 23 years writing for the AP he is one of the master alarmists in an increasingly left wing paper.
2. I dispute your finding of MSL rise, the data is inconclusive with Roman ports far above sea level and photographic evidence from the 1890 showing no sea level rise. Subsidence causes sea level change.
3. Fires are far less frequent than in the 1900's and mainly controlled, or not controlled, by the actions (or non actions) of man.
4. Renewable energy is the scourge of of the late 20th and early 21st century. It destroys thousands of acres of irreplaceable farmlands, old growth forest, desert habitat, thousands of raptors, migratory and common bird species, bats and insects. Hundreds of whales, porpoises and deep sea creatures. And, worse (if possible), creates hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic waste, concrete footings, cables and millions of miles of copper wire and inverters. Exactly whose accountability is this? Tied up in courts for decades while rust never sleeps.
Get rid of the Endangerment finding as it will save our citizens billions, if not trillions a year.
Your ChatGTP summary table was hallucinating when it concluded that both the DOE Review and AR6 concluded model hindcasts "reproduce historical warming". Even the IPCC no longer makes this claim! In AR6 Section 7.5.6 Considerations on the ECS and TCR in Global Climate Models and Their Role in the Assessment, the IPCC QUIETLY STOPPED USING TRADITIONAL CLIMATE MODELS TO ASSESS CLIMATE SENSITIVITY (both ECS and TCR) because too many models show hindcast warming that was too great. See Figure 7.19, especially 7.19b (warming since 1975) when the forcing change from aerosols is better quantified than for the entire historical period. Since 1975, nearly half of CMIP6 models (including all six with ECS >5) hindcast too much warming. Presumably CMIP6 are doing a better job hindcasting the historical warming in Figure 7.19a by using more negative forcing from aerosols to compensate for additional warming from rising GHGs.
"However, AR6 differs from previous IPCC reports in excluding direct estimates of ECS and TCR from ESMs in the assessed ranges ... As a result of the above considerations, in this Report projections of global surface temperature are produced using climate model EMULATORS that are constrained by the assessments of ECS, TCR and ERF."
The NYT reports today, without evidence as they say....."Climate science. In the name of deregulation, the Trump administration rejected the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases threaten public health." Again, how can they actually think the science PROVES GHGs threaten public health????
Like you've said before, if you're the Climate Beat reporter, what's your incentive for the "crisis" to go away? What's your incentive to increase the hype?
As Munger said, Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes.
With respect to the DOE report, I reiterate that I was not asked by any reporter to respond on the reference to several of my research papers. However, I will be submitting a comment in the public input.
However, I want to provide here a set of issues with the most recent WG1 IPCC report. Richard Betts,
Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, United Kingdom asked me to write them up.
These involve issues in addition to what were discussed in the DOE report. These were written up in
Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2019: A Review of the AR6 First Draft of IPCC Working Group I (WG1) report, May 2019.
Like most commenters here I believe the endangerment finding should be rescinded. I find the legal definition argument that Roger poses to oppose rescinding technically correct but in using his important scientific voice to reject rescinding he's, I hope inadvertently, enabling the continuation of a regulatory regime that does enormous economic damage for negligible reward. I don’t know the precise language congress should use in altering the relevant legislation but “demonstrable harm” needs to replace “risk of harm” as a necessary basis for regulation. I’ve come to believe that unelected government departments will always have a bias towards enacting some sort of change simply to justify their existence, and in the case of the EPA that means drafting new regulations. The economic damage that results from those regulations is unfortunately outside the expertise of the EPA and permitting the exercise of regulatory authority based on risk that has no lower limit hasn’t worked and cannot work. I agree that Congress should alter the relevant legislation to prevent what Roger has described as climate policy ping-pong but in the meantime the executive branch is responsible for the judgement that the EPA uses when exercising it’s regulatory authority given the absence of a quantitative risk threshold in the relevant legislation. I strikes me as legitimate for the executive branch to demand the EPA begin using not only “demonstrable harm”as a hurdle in regulating but that those regulations meet a cost benefit threshold that can be rigorously defended.
The current global warming hysteria has being driven largely by the combination of successive IPCC Summary Reports for Policy Makers, which are political statements, not scientific ones, the inflammatory commentary by successive Secretary Generals of the UN, the COP conferences, the development of the Paris Accords leading to the net zero 2050 goal, and by the 2009 Endangerment Finding which supported the idea that life on the Planet might be at risk due to rising CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
The relatively moderate statements that you have cited by Working Group 1 on the severity of the potential climate threat have had little effect on dampening down the growing climate hysteria, or countering the increasing resort to lawsuits by parties seeking compensation for perceived manmade global warming damages, or preventing the mandated replacement of ICE vehicles with EV’s, or the creation of the IRA legislation and subsidy regime to force adoption of the net zero 2050 goal.
Many steps will have to be taken to permanently reverse the current direction of US energy policy. I agree with the other writers who have said that one of the first major steps that must be taken is the cancelation of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding.
The real danger of just calling for an “update” of the Endangerment Finding (EF) is that it could introduce a delay in realizing the real goal of reversing the disastrous EPA rulemaking now on the table. I can hear the climate lobby response – “Oh, so we need to update the EF. Fine. We must wait and see how that comes out before doing anything”. How long will that take – probably years. Let’s hope that the fine thread of ambiguous legalese – “the risk exceeds an exceedingly low bar” – will break.
The EPA recission document is pretty dense to comprehend, but it seems that the EPA is claiming it lacks the statutory authority to regulate GHGs.
I would have said that Congress lacks the authority. I would have noted that GHGs are emitted by all of humanity in all types of energy-consuming and agricultural activities. Whatever danger might arise from GHG emissions, the danger could not be prevented without regulating emissions from such activities of all humanity. Moreover, whatever Congress's intent, Congress lacks the jurisdiction to regulate all of humanity -- or to require the EPA to do so. By most estimates, US emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels are less than 10% of global emissions from all causes.
There also exists a number of calculations that demonstrate that regulating US tailpipe or stack emissions are inconsequential in affecting global temperature, much less in any secondary effects of warming. As I recall, EPA even published a document that showed that the warming effect of its tailpipe regulations is insignificant.
I would also note that there is NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF that global warming (by any cause) is a danger to human beings. There are certainly many learned scientific papers, theories, and climate models that claim or postulate global warming causes harm, such as enhancing the frequency and intensity of extreme (dangerous) weather.
But such claims are not proof unless they have been validated by the scientific method. For example, if a model claims that global warming makes hurricane activity more frequent or intense, then the model needs to make specific predictions that are subsequently confirmed to be reasonably accurate by scientific observations. That can only be done by backtesting -- comparing the predictions to reliable records of historical weather events -- during a period of known global warming.
Chapter 6 of the DOE document is devoted to such comparisons for dangerous weather events archived by NOAA, like tropical cyclones, and finds no statistical correlation during the past warming (since 1890). Not only is there no proof of danger, but the evidentiary record shreds the credibility of such claims and theories of secondary danger of warming. And, as THB notes, the IPCC mostly concurs.
There is also very strong evidence published in JAMA that extreme cold is roughly ten times more dangerous to humans than extreme heat.
Chapter 7 of the DOE documents questions predictions of rising sea levels. However, the models that make predictions of future sea levels have not been validated as being accurate. That means that the predictions amount to claims or allegations, not proven science. Moreover, none of the predictions is evidence of danger to human life. People don't die from gradually rising tide levels, not even if the rate of rise is accelerating. People move to higher ground because they have plenty of time to do so.
Rising tide levels are a threat to the value of coastal structures and coastal land. But the fact that the rate of rise may be accelerating does not negate the fact that the land will eventually be engulfed by the sea, regardless of the cause. As for structures, coastal property owners have plenty of warning to replace their aging structures on higher ground as they approach the end of their useful life. Regulating all energy activity in the US to avoid this inconvenience is bonkers.
I contend that the lack of scientific proof of danger is reason enough to make related regulation unlawful. If regulators are allowed to regulate solely based on unproven claims, then almost any human activity is subject to regulation. That is the height of irrationality, if not illegality.
Great stuff, as usual Roger. Although the reporters may well be fishing for reasons to trash the DOE report, it still pays to treat them with respect. Because then there is some chance they might start to reconsider their views.
I am curious about the IPCC findings re climate change and wildfire. Have you ever done a deep dive on that one (from your comments it seems that you may have)?
thank you Roger! such a great source of information!
I wonder how the IPCC evaluated those factors - temperature, drought etc in coming up with their findings. In some systems you need moisture to grow the fuel, and then drought to make it flammable. Temp (heat) is only a player to the extent that it increases drying. Wind is so important, and overall (globally) depends on the latitudinal temperature gradient which decreases with increasing CO2. (Also the primary reason tropical cyclones haven't been increasing in frequency or severity, as I'm sure you know). CO2 counteracts drought, since plants don't need to keep their stomata open as long to get it. Appears the IPCC didn't consider that...
I gather you agree with the thrust of the DOE Report that climate change is not a crisis. As I read it, the thrust of the Report is that climate change is a real concern but not a crisis, and that therefore the EPA endangerment should be rescinded. The Report cites economic studies showing that GDP will be harmed at most by only a few percent by 2100. But I gather your opinion is that climate change is enough more than a concern so that the endangerment finding should be kept. Why do you think that the threat is high enough as to warrant the retention of the endangerment finding?
The legal bar for endangerment is set forth in the US Clean Air Act. It is a very low bar. So a high threat is not necessary. This is a legal question, not a science question.
Unfortunately the CAA is silent on these questions, meaning that the text stands as written. This is one example why Congress needs to revisit the language.
"some mysterious mechanism." does not a serious hypothesis make.
Of course INCONVENIENT TRUTH is a con, as is so much of the CO2 global warming hype
The climate energy budget is not well understood; therefore, the GHG effect can not be well understood.
As to warming there are too many questionable observations ,let alone scare mongering models, to justify the taxes & expenses made in the name of CO2. (see Dr. Roy Spencer's latest blog post.)
Why do we hear so much of CABON EMISSION and so little of Dr. Joseph Fournier's "solar & cloud" theory of climate? Dr. Fournier's hypothesis seems to fit my humble climate observations better than the C02 models.
Dr. Fournier's formal graduate training was in solid state electrochemistry and fuel cell and battery technologies. He claims to be involved in unspecified development projects in excess of $100 M but currently runs a ranch and is a free-lance journalist who runs a Substack.
Unfortunately, a quick glance at his blog shows a poor understanding of climate basics. For example, his June 30, 2025 post treats changes in able as a forcing. However, the IPCC defines a forcing as something external to the climate system that changes the net radiative flux across the TOA such as changing GHGs, aerosols, solar output, changes in surface vegetation and albedo. Changes in the Earth's albedo are driven by clouds, ice and snow - parts of the climate system, not external to it. Anyone who is confused about what is causing changes rather than is part of changes probably doesn't have much to contribute IMO. Changes in albedo - part of the climate system - certainly can explain changes in the climate system but they can't explain the CAUSE of changes in the climate system. Perhaps my brief glance at his work hasn't done him justice.
Rising CO2 may be the biggest FORCING changing our climate today, so it gets all the attention.
I agree you haven't done him justice. You seem to be making a distinction without a difference. GHGs are part of the climate system and they are affected by, among other things, human activity . Changes in cloud, snow, radiant energy, etc. (also part of the climate system), are affected by the solar system. The CO2 argument: more CO2 more heat, doesn't stand the test of observation. Anthropogenic GHG has been increasing steadily, global warming hasn't. Closely examine the graph at the beginning of AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, you will see that warming begins before the CO2 increase. There are many more inconsistencies between the CO2 hypothesis and observed or historically inferred climate.
Greg: I would encourage you to pay as little attention to An Inconvenient Truth as I recommend you pay to Dr. Fournier: None. Whether or not warming detected in the Antarctic ice cores predated rising CO2 or not*, there is a much bigger problem with Al Gore's presentation. Correlation between rising CO2 and rising temperature is not proof that rising CO2 causes warming. Rising temperature might instead cause rising CO2, and we do know warmer water holds less CO2. Alternatively, both CO2 and temperature could be responding to a third driving force, say the Sun. And weak correlations could be due to chance. Forget the ice core data.
*There is or was controversy about how long gases in the atmosphere diffuse into the snow with an isotopic signal for warming before the snow turns into ice; permanently trapping the gas the snow contained. Permanent trapping of gas could require millennia.
A good reason for believing CO2 and other GHGs cause warming is that they slow down the rate at which thermal infrared radiation (heat) escapes through the atmosphere to space. That slowdown depend on how temperature in the atmosphere decreases with altitude. If nothing else changes, conservation of energy requires the planet to respond by warming (somewhere) until a balance between incoming and outgoing heat is restored. (The climate establishment wants to oversimplify things for you: CO2 "traps" heat in the atmosphere by some mysterious mechanism.
With the DOE report, Energy Sec’y Chris Wright is telling the Catastrophist Climate Scientists (especially the most obnoxious ones like Michael Mann) to put up or shut up. Deadline for comments is Sept 2. Catastrophists will have to present, inter alia, real observational data to challenge the DOE report—not reams of computer output based on RCP 8.5! They don’t have that kind of data, so instead they’ll just resort to ad hominem attacks on Wright and the report’s authors plus sundry insults and invective. Then they’ll rely on good ol’ Seth Borenstein and other Mainstream journalists for cover and support. Let’s see what we get by Sept 2.
Roger, great responses, but you can be sure that NOTHING of what you said will be fairly presented by the AP. The best you can hope for is that you’ll be completely ignored. Seth Borenstein?!! For at least the last 2 decades, he’s been the most loyal journalist for what I’ll call the Michael Mann wing of the Catastrophist Climate Scientists. You can be sure that the AP report will say something like: “We checked w all the Scientists cited in the DOE report and they all basically said that they were grossly misrepresented and the DOE report is totally bogus.” Count on it.
1. Seth Borenstien will twist your facts mercilessly to get the desired, alarmist viewpoint he desires. After reading him in the Daily Post and Courier, in Charleston, South Carolina for the past 23 years writing for the AP he is one of the master alarmists in an increasingly left wing paper.
2. I dispute your finding of MSL rise, the data is inconclusive with Roman ports far above sea level and photographic evidence from the 1890 showing no sea level rise. Subsidence causes sea level change.
3. Fires are far less frequent than in the 1900's and mainly controlled, or not controlled, by the actions (or non actions) of man.
4. Renewable energy is the scourge of of the late 20th and early 21st century. It destroys thousands of acres of irreplaceable farmlands, old growth forest, desert habitat, thousands of raptors, migratory and common bird species, bats and insects. Hundreds of whales, porpoises and deep sea creatures. And, worse (if possible), creates hundreds of thousands of tons of toxic waste, concrete footings, cables and millions of miles of copper wire and inverters. Exactly whose accountability is this? Tied up in courts for decades while rust never sleeps.
Get rid of the Endangerment finding as it will save our citizens billions, if not trillions a year.
https://energysecurityfreedom.substack.com/p/how-much-warming-would-result-from?utm_medium=email&r=1onuea
Your ChatGTP summary table was hallucinating when it concluded that both the DOE Review and AR6 concluded model hindcasts "reproduce historical warming". Even the IPCC no longer makes this claim! In AR6 Section 7.5.6 Considerations on the ECS and TCR in Global Climate Models and Their Role in the Assessment, the IPCC QUIETLY STOPPED USING TRADITIONAL CLIMATE MODELS TO ASSESS CLIMATE SENSITIVITY (both ECS and TCR) because too many models show hindcast warming that was too great. See Figure 7.19, especially 7.19b (warming since 1975) when the forcing change from aerosols is better quantified than for the entire historical period. Since 1975, nearly half of CMIP6 models (including all six with ECS >5) hindcast too much warming. Presumably CMIP6 are doing a better job hindcasting the historical warming in Figure 7.19a by using more negative forcing from aerosols to compensate for additional warming from rising GHGs.
"However, AR6 differs from previous IPCC reports in excluding direct estimates of ECS and TCR from ESMs in the assessed ranges ... As a result of the above considerations, in this Report projections of global surface temperature are produced using climate model EMULATORS that are constrained by the assessments of ECS, TCR and ERF."
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-7/#7.5
Other sections of the IPCCs reports continue to use CMIP6 models as if they don't have any serious drawbacks.
The NYT reports today, without evidence as they say....."Climate science. In the name of deregulation, the Trump administration rejected the scientific consensus that greenhouse gases threaten public health." Again, how can they actually think the science PROVES GHGs threaten public health????
Like you've said before, if you're the Climate Beat reporter, what's your incentive for the "crisis" to go away? What's your incentive to increase the hype?
As Munger said, Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcomes.
With respect to the DOE report, I reiterate that I was not asked by any reporter to respond on the reference to several of my research papers. However, I will be submitting a comment in the public input.
However, I want to provide here a set of issues with the most recent WG1 IPCC report. Richard Betts,
Head of the Climate Impacts strategic area at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, United Kingdom asked me to write them up.
These involve issues in addition to what were discussed in the DOE report. These were written up in
Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2019: A Review of the AR6 First Draft of IPCC Working Group I (WG1) report, May 2019.
https://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/ipcc-wg-final-3.pdf
Pielke, R.A. Sr., 2020: Comment on the AR6 Second Draft of IPCC Working Group 1 (WG1) report. February 2020.
https://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/ipcc-letter-1.pdf
As I noted in my 2020 Comment, I was ignored
Like most commenters here I believe the endangerment finding should be rescinded. I find the legal definition argument that Roger poses to oppose rescinding technically correct but in using his important scientific voice to reject rescinding he's, I hope inadvertently, enabling the continuation of a regulatory regime that does enormous economic damage for negligible reward. I don’t know the precise language congress should use in altering the relevant legislation but “demonstrable harm” needs to replace “risk of harm” as a necessary basis for regulation. I’ve come to believe that unelected government departments will always have a bias towards enacting some sort of change simply to justify their existence, and in the case of the EPA that means drafting new regulations. The economic damage that results from those regulations is unfortunately outside the expertise of the EPA and permitting the exercise of regulatory authority based on risk that has no lower limit hasn’t worked and cannot work. I agree that Congress should alter the relevant legislation to prevent what Roger has described as climate policy ping-pong but in the meantime the executive branch is responsible for the judgement that the EPA uses when exercising it’s regulatory authority given the absence of a quantitative risk threshold in the relevant legislation. I strikes me as legitimate for the executive branch to demand the EPA begin using not only “demonstrable harm”as a hurdle in regulating but that those regulations meet a cost benefit threshold that can be rigorously defended.
Hi Roger
The current global warming hysteria has being driven largely by the combination of successive IPCC Summary Reports for Policy Makers, which are political statements, not scientific ones, the inflammatory commentary by successive Secretary Generals of the UN, the COP conferences, the development of the Paris Accords leading to the net zero 2050 goal, and by the 2009 Endangerment Finding which supported the idea that life on the Planet might be at risk due to rising CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
The relatively moderate statements that you have cited by Working Group 1 on the severity of the potential climate threat have had little effect on dampening down the growing climate hysteria, or countering the increasing resort to lawsuits by parties seeking compensation for perceived manmade global warming damages, or preventing the mandated replacement of ICE vehicles with EV’s, or the creation of the IRA legislation and subsidy regime to force adoption of the net zero 2050 goal.
Many steps will have to be taken to permanently reverse the current direction of US energy policy. I agree with the other writers who have said that one of the first major steps that must be taken is the cancelation of the EPA’s Endangerment Finding.
The real danger of just calling for an “update” of the Endangerment Finding (EF) is that it could introduce a delay in realizing the real goal of reversing the disastrous EPA rulemaking now on the table. I can hear the climate lobby response – “Oh, so we need to update the EF. Fine. We must wait and see how that comes out before doing anything”. How long will that take – probably years. Let’s hope that the fine thread of ambiguous legalese – “the risk exceeds an exceedingly low bar” – will break.
The EPA recission document is pretty dense to comprehend, but it seems that the EPA is claiming it lacks the statutory authority to regulate GHGs.
I would have said that Congress lacks the authority. I would have noted that GHGs are emitted by all of humanity in all types of energy-consuming and agricultural activities. Whatever danger might arise from GHG emissions, the danger could not be prevented without regulating emissions from such activities of all humanity. Moreover, whatever Congress's intent, Congress lacks the jurisdiction to regulate all of humanity -- or to require the EPA to do so. By most estimates, US emissions of CO2 from burning fossil fuels are less than 10% of global emissions from all causes.
There also exists a number of calculations that demonstrate that regulating US tailpipe or stack emissions are inconsequential in affecting global temperature, much less in any secondary effects of warming. As I recall, EPA even published a document that showed that the warming effect of its tailpipe regulations is insignificant.
I would also note that there is NO SCIENTIFIC PROOF that global warming (by any cause) is a danger to human beings. There are certainly many learned scientific papers, theories, and climate models that claim or postulate global warming causes harm, such as enhancing the frequency and intensity of extreme (dangerous) weather.
But such claims are not proof unless they have been validated by the scientific method. For example, if a model claims that global warming makes hurricane activity more frequent or intense, then the model needs to make specific predictions that are subsequently confirmed to be reasonably accurate by scientific observations. That can only be done by backtesting -- comparing the predictions to reliable records of historical weather events -- during a period of known global warming.
Chapter 6 of the DOE document is devoted to such comparisons for dangerous weather events archived by NOAA, like tropical cyclones, and finds no statistical correlation during the past warming (since 1890). Not only is there no proof of danger, but the evidentiary record shreds the credibility of such claims and theories of secondary danger of warming. And, as THB notes, the IPCC mostly concurs.
There is also very strong evidence published in JAMA that extreme cold is roughly ten times more dangerous to humans than extreme heat.
Chapter 7 of the DOE documents questions predictions of rising sea levels. However, the models that make predictions of future sea levels have not been validated as being accurate. That means that the predictions amount to claims or allegations, not proven science. Moreover, none of the predictions is evidence of danger to human life. People don't die from gradually rising tide levels, not even if the rate of rise is accelerating. People move to higher ground because they have plenty of time to do so.
Rising tide levels are a threat to the value of coastal structures and coastal land. But the fact that the rate of rise may be accelerating does not negate the fact that the land will eventually be engulfed by the sea, regardless of the cause. As for structures, coastal property owners have plenty of warning to replace their aging structures on higher ground as they approach the end of their useful life. Regulating all energy activity in the US to avoid this inconvenience is bonkers.
I contend that the lack of scientific proof of danger is reason enough to make related regulation unlawful. If regulators are allowed to regulate solely based on unproven claims, then almost any human activity is subject to regulation. That is the height of irrationality, if not illegality.
Great stuff, as usual Roger. Although the reporters may well be fishing for reasons to trash the DOE report, it still pays to treat them with respect. Because then there is some chance they might start to reconsider their views.
I am curious about the IPCC findings re climate change and wildfire. Have you ever done a deep dive on that one (from your comments it seems that you may have)?
Yes, have a look at these posts
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/what-the-media-wont-tell-you-about-783
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-north-american-fire-deficit
thank you Roger! such a great source of information!
I wonder how the IPCC evaluated those factors - temperature, drought etc in coming up with their findings. In some systems you need moisture to grow the fuel, and then drought to make it flammable. Temp (heat) is only a player to the extent that it increases drying. Wind is so important, and overall (globally) depends on the latitudinal temperature gradient which decreases with increasing CO2. (Also the primary reason tropical cyclones haven't been increasing in frequency or severity, as I'm sure you know). CO2 counteracts drought, since plants don't need to keep their stomata open as long to get it. Appears the IPCC didn't consider that...
Roger,
I gather you agree with the thrust of the DOE Report that climate change is not a crisis. As I read it, the thrust of the Report is that climate change is a real concern but not a crisis, and that therefore the EPA endangerment should be rescinded. The Report cites economic studies showing that GDP will be harmed at most by only a few percent by 2100. But I gather your opinion is that climate change is enough more than a concern so that the endangerment finding should be kept. Why do you think that the threat is high enough as to warrant the retention of the endangerment finding?
The legal bar for endangerment is set forth in the US Clean Air Act. It is a very low bar. So a high threat is not necessary. This is a legal question, not a science question.
So where is the bar and how do you measure it? Presumably it is above zero. 1%, 10%, 25%? And X% of what - GDP growth or something else?
Unfortunately the CAA is silent on these questions, meaning that the text stands as written. This is one example why Congress needs to revisit the language.
Superb, Roger.
Yeah, questions 8 and 9 are bush league team sport. But given the sources, we are not surprised.