Paris Accord an empty gesture

Vincent J. Curtis

23 Oct 22

There are plenty of alleged climate experts out there who claim the Paris Climate Accord is essential to saving the world from disaster in the year 2100.  The problem is that the Paris Accord is built on sand.

One of the claims is that the global average temperature has to be kept from rising by 1.5℃, or 2℃, and that disaster looms if temperatures rise by 3℃ or more.  What is never stated in the Accord, in various IPCC Reports, and other highly official documents is rising above what?  Nowhere is the base temperature actually stated.  Nowhere in the official literature is the global average temperature given, be it 16℃, or 15℃, or whatever.  It simply isn’t stated.  Part of the reason is that “Global Average Temperature” is not defined in the Paris Accord, or in the official literature!

Another fallacy on which the Paris Accord is based is the expression “pre-industrial levels.”  When is the “pre-industrial” period, exactly?  Well, that’s another thing left to be resolved at some future date.  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) takes the period 1880 to 1937 as the baseline for the “pre-industrial” period, but the literature on the subject says that 1720 to 1800 is the most suitable choice.  The Paris Accord leaves pre-industrial period undefined.

Then, there’s CO2.  There’s plenty of forecasts of emission quantities going out to 2100, but no one has a firm range of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere in 2100.  The only thing firm about CO2 is that the pre-industrial level is 280 ppm, which corresponds to the 1720 to 1800 period.

Hence the Paris Accord asks the world to keep temperature rise 1.5℃ below we know not what.  It also offers no firm numbers on atmospheric CO2 level we need to keep below to keep temperatures from rising above some critical level.  It simply maintains that more is bad.

When the climate crazies say they “follow the science” they don’t know what they’re talking about because there is no science in this.  Nothing that can be checked empirically, that is.

The problem with all of these is lack of firm data that would lift these claims above the purely arbitrary.  There is no global temperature measurements in 1720, and the business didn’t get started until 1860.  The US is the only place with good temperature data over a large area before 1920.  There were no weather stations in South America, Africa, most of Asia, the Arctic, Antarctic, the oceans, and most of Australia before 1920, so some average is impossible based on measurements.

In addition, there is an arbitrariness to assigned some period as the baseline.  Temperatures in the U.S. rose from 1880 to 1939, fell from 1940 to 1979, and then started rising again from 1980 to 1998.  There was the pause in global warming from 1998 to 2015, and we could be in another pause period.  To say 1.5℃ above something means you have to say what that something is first, and then explain why 1.5℃ is a critical thing.  Any pre-industrial period is going to have the same ups and downs as the 20^th century experience if it’s big enough.

The science behind global warming falls apart as soon as you ask questions that would enable empirical checking.

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With at tip of the hat to Howard Hayden, Ph.D. whose presentation at the ICCC conference on 28 Oct 21 brought to my attention the lack of definiteness in the global warming argument.  It took me three runs of the video to grasp what he was saying, but once I understood where his computations were coming from, it hit me the lack of accountability on the global warming side.

Another point Dr. Hayden made was the embarrassing claims made in peer reviewed literature by alleged scientists.  One I ran across, in preparation for this, was the claim that CO2, followed by CH4 and N2O were the most important greenhouse gases.  In fact, water vapour, H2O, is by far the most important GHG, first because it is present in vast quantities as compared to CO2, and because it absorbs all over the IR spectrum, not just in a few discrete areas like CO2, CH4, and N2O.  That a climate "scientist" could make such an egregious error I find strangely unsurprising.