One of the main lines of evidence used by the Obama administration to justify its global warming regulations doesn’t exist in the real world, according to a new report by climate researchers.
Researchers analyzed temperature observations from satellites, weather balloons, weather stations and buoys and found the so-called “tropical hotspot” relied upon by the EPA to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant “simply does not exist in the real world.”
They found that once El Ninos are taken into account, “there is no ‘record setting’ warming to be concerned about.”
“These analysis results would appear to leave very, very little doubt but that EPA’s claim of a Tropical Hot Spot (THS), caused by rising atmospheric CO2 levels, simply does not exist in the real world,” reads the report by economist James Wallace, climatologist John Christy and meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo.
“Also critically important, even on an all-other-things-equal basis, this analysis failed to find that the steadily rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations have had a statistically significant impact on any of the 13 critically important temperature time series analyzed,” they wrote.
When EPA released its CO2 endangerment finding in 2009, it used three lines of evidence to bolster its argument that greenhouse gases threatened human health through global warming.
The crux of EPA’s argument rested on the existence of a “tropical hotspot” where global warming would be most apparent. That is, there should be enhanced warming in the tropical troposphere — the “fingerprint” of global warming.
EPA’s endangerment finding is the legal basis for agency global warming regulations, including the Clean Power Plan (CPP) now being fought over in federal court. CPP aims to cut power plant carbon dioxide emissions 32 percent by 2030 and could cost $41 billion a year, according to independent estimates.
D’Aleo and his colleagues looked at the data and controlled for El Ninos and La Ninas. What they found was that once natural oceanic warming and cooling events are accounted for, there’s no warming trend.
“El Nino is not by any means new,” D’Aleo told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “The El Ninos and La Ninas do not occur at a regular frequency but tend to cluster as we showed in our paper.”
