The Paris Climate Treaty is a heat-seeking missile aimed solely at American jobs that will do nothing to reduce global warming. Why would we deploy it?
By Joseph Bast
APRIL 18, 2017
Top officials in the Trump administration apparently are debating whether to withdraw from the Paris Climate Treaty, an agreement negotiated in the waning years of the Obama administration that would commit the United States to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 percent relative to 2005 levels by the year 2025.
The Heartland Institute has been studying climate change for nearly two decades. Our advice to the Trump administration is simple: Run, don’t walk, away from the Paris Climate Treaty! Here are our reasons for this recommendation. Sources for our statements are readily found here and here.
There Is No Scientific Basis for the Paris Climate Treaty
The Paris Climate Treaty is supposedly an attempt to keep global temperatures from increasing 2 degrees C, but this objective is based on political science, not climate science.
The goal is an arbitrary political target based on climate activists’ demands for a number, no matter how dubious or fake, to use in their fundraising letters and to appear on their signs at protests. There is no scientific evidence suggesting a warming of 1.9 degrees C is safe while 2.1 degrees C is not safe.
Climate models that forecast temperature increases of more than 1 or 2 degrees during the next century are not scientific. They flunk the objective requirements of scientific forecasting. They are educated guesses by activists whose credibility and livelihood depend on showing ever-increasing certainty of impending doom, even as their data point in the opposite direction.
Climate models have greatly overestimated warming over the past two decades. The models have not matched observed temperatures from satellites, the only truly global and accurate way we have of measuring Earth’s temperature. Why should we imagine their forecasts of climate conditions 100 years from now and beyond are accurate?
