OpEd submission from Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris: “Time to publicly debunk science underlying UN climate plans”
By Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris
On June 1, President Donald Trump announced that the United States would withdraw from the United Nations Paris Agreement on climate change. He correctly identified it as a bad deal for America.
In July 1997, the U.S. Senate reached a similar conclusion about the U.N. climate change policy-making process in general. Senators from across the aisle unanimously endorsed the Byrd/Hagel resolution, which stated that America shouldn’t be a signatory to any agreement based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC] that would seriously damage the U.S. economy and didn’t include emission reductions for developing countries that were similar to those imposed on the U.S.
Both the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2015 Paris Agreement are based on the UNFCCC and both had the potential to seriously damage the U.S. economy, while not holding developing countries to emission reductions similar to those imposed on America.
That’s why former President Bill Clinton never submitted the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification. It is also why former President Barack Obama approved the Paris Agreement as an ‘executive agreement’ instead of submitting it for Senate approval as required by the Constitution for international treaties. Both Clinton and Obama knew that the Senate would reject these agreements as not in America’s best interests.
According to Australian author and climate analyst Iain Aitken, “To achieve the goal agreed in Paris of a maximum 2 degrees C increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels has been estimated to have a global cost of $17 trillion by 2040 (about 800 times more than was spent on all the Apollo missions to the moon) – and it would require carbon dioxide reductions about 100 times greater than those pledged in Paris.”
So, even if the man-made climate change problem were real, the actions specified by the Paris Agreement would solve nothing. And since the climate scare isn’t based on sound science, no treaty based on the UNFCCC, which assumes the science is settled in favor of alarmism, makes any sense.
Yet the Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted last month showed that a majority of Americans opposed the President’s decision to pull out of Paris. This is largely because most people are unable to differentiate between global warming propaganda, as promoted by activists, and climate change science conducted by independent researchers.
The focus therefore must be on educating the public about the realities of climate science. This is especially important since Trump is talking about the possibility of the U.S. agreeing to a Paris Agreement with “fairer terms.” There is no need for a deal at all since there is no man-made climate problem.
Fortunately, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt is launching a program to critique climate change science. He wants to bring in experts from both sides of the debate in order to determine the actual state of the field. In his July 10 interview with the Reuters news agency, Pruitt explained that such an evaluation “advances science. It advances discussion. It advances transparency… There is a host of questions that will be asked and answered during the process.”
Global warming campaigners will not welcome such a review. That’s because it will show that, rather than being settled in favor of the position activists hold dear, the science is all over the map with experts even arguing about whether warming or cooling lies ahead.
Handled effectively, the EPA climate science evaluation should lead many in the public to ask their representatives, “Why are you supporting the expenditure of billions of tax dollars on such an uncertain cause when funds are desperately needed to address society’s real, well understood issues?”
Aside from ignorance, or cowardice in the face of political correctness, politicians will have no answer. The climate scare, the biggest deception in history, will then be over.
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Dr. Tim Ball is an environmental consultant and former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba. Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.