0.02°C Temperature Rise Averted: The Vital Number Missing from the EPA's "By the Numbers" Fact Sheet

Global Science Report is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly "Current Wisdom."

Last week, the Obama Administration's U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled a new set of proposed regulations aimed at reducing carbon dioxide emissions from existing U. S. power plants. The motivation for the EPA's plan comes from the President's desire to address and mitigate anthropogenic climate change.

We hate to be the party poopers, but the new regulations will do no such thing.

The EPA's regulations seek to limit carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production in the year 2030 to a level 30 percent below what they were in 2005. It is worth noting that power plant CO2 emissions already dropped by about 15% from 2005 to2012, largely, because of market forces which favor less-CO2-emitting natural gas over coal as the fuel of choice for producing electricity. Apparently the President wants to lock in those gains and manipulate the market to see that the same decline takes place in twice the time.  Nothing like government intervention to facilitate market inefficiency. But we digress.

The EPA highlighted what the plan would achieve in their "By the Numbers" Fact Sheet that accompanied their big announcement.

For some reason, they left off their Fact Sheet how much climate change would be averted by the plan. Seems like a strange omission since, after all, without the threat of climate change, there would be no one thinking about the forced abridgement of our primary source of power production in the first place, and the Administration's new emissions restriction scheme wouldn't even be a gleam in this or any other president's eye.

But no worries.  What the EPA left out, we'll fill in.

Using a simple, publically-available, climate model emulator called MAGICC that was in part developed through support of the EPA, we ran the numbers as to how much future temperature rise would be averted by a complete adoption and adherence to the EPA's new carbon dioxide restrictions*.

The answer? Less than two one-hundredths of a degree Celsius by the year 2100.

0.018°C to be exact.

We're not even sure how to put such a small number into practical terms, because, basically, the number is so small as to be undetectable.

Which, no doubt, is why it's not included in the EPA Fact Sheet.

It is not too small, however, that it shouldn't play a huge role in every and all discussions of the new regulations.

http://www.cato.org/blog/002degc-temperature-rise-averted-vital-number-missing-epas-numbers-fact-sheet

Slowly -- ever so slowly -- this carnival  barker's sideshow is being exposed for the unmitigated, utter, felonious fraud it is. No matter where you look on the AGW side of the debate, you will find rent-seekers, political con artists, and power brokers.

I think we'd have to go back to the flat earth theory to find a more egregious, dishonest, and uninformed slander of the word "science." Well, actually, the current AGW scam is far worse. The flat-earthers at least had the excuse of ignorance. They didn't falsify evidence; they just didn't have any. The AGW crowd, on the contrary, has lots of evidence, and they're happy to falsify it because it doesn't support their position. There's a big difference between simple ignorance in one instance and malice aforethought in the other.

As it seems is so often the case, we have to venture outside the US to obtain anything close to honest reporting on this subject. The UK's Telegraph has an excellent write-up today, specifically highlighting the falsification of date I mentioned above. Here's a snip:

QuoteWhen future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years, nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically "adjusted" to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data justified.
Two weeks ago, under the headline "How we are being tricked by flawed data on global warming", I wrote about Paul Homewood, who, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, had checked the published temperature graphs for three weather stations in Paraguay against the temperatures that had originally been recorded. In each instance, the actual trend of 60 years of data had been dramatically reversed, so that a cooling trend was changed to one that showed a marked warming.
This was only the latest of many examples of a practice long recognised by expert observers around the world – one that raises an ever larger question mark over the entire official surface-temperature record.