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Sunday 18 December 2016

The Trump administration takes on the global warming establishment

There is reason to believe that the Trump administration will return to sanity with regard to global warming:

Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years.  Questions like:  Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted?  How do you explain an almost-20-year "pause" in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated?  What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of "warmest year ever" when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago?  Suddenly, the usual hand-waving ("the science is settled") is not going to be good enough any more.  What now?
And how will the United States fare on the international stage when it stops promising to cripple its economy with meaningless fossil fuel restrictions?  As noted above, people like Isabel Hilton predict a combination of ostracism and "loss of leadership" of the issue, most likely to China.  Here's my prediction:  As soon as the United States stops parroting the global warming line, the other countries will quickly start backing away from it as well.  This is "The Emperor's New Clothes," with the U.S. in the role of the little kid who is the only one willing to say the obvious truth in the face of mass hysteria.  Countries like Britain and Australia have already more or less quietly started the retreat from insanity.  In Germany the obsession with wind and solar (solar -- in the cloudiest country in the world!) has already gotten average consumer electric rates up to close to triple the cost in U.S. states that embrace fossil fuels.  How long will they be willing to continue that self-destruction after the U.S. says it is not going along?  And I love the business about ceding "leadership" to China.  China's so-called "commitment" in the recent Paris accord is not to reduce carbon emissions at all, but rather only to build as many coal plants as they want for the next fourteen years and then cease increasing emissions after 2030!  At which point, of course, they reserve their right to change their mind.  Who exactly is going to embrace that "leadership" and increase their consumers' cost of electricity by triple or so starting right now?  I mean, the Europeans are stupid, but are they that stupid?

Read the excellent article by Francis Menton here.

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