New Study Destroys Major Tenet of Climate Cultism by Confirming Carbon Dioxide is a Life-Essential Gas
One of the major issues I have had with “climate change” reporting is that articles portray carbon dioxide as “toxic”.
This assertion is a blatant lie, as I have often stated in discussing this issue at Legal Insurrection.
One of the biggest purveyors of this inanity was the Biden administration’s team at the Environmental Protection Agency. Team Biden used a report to justify its update to Obama’s Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) policy, which was aimed at justifying stricter regulations on greenhouse gas emissions.
Now a study recently published in Nature’s Scientific Reports challenges the Biden administration’s fivefold increase in its SCC estimate, which was partly based on projections of global crop yield declines. The research, conducted by economist Ross McKitrick, re-examines and extends the dataset used in previous studies that influenced the SCC estimate.
The title pretty much sums up the key point: Extended crop yield meta-analysis data do not support upward SCC revision. It reviews the 2014 database set that was used to justify the hefty increase in regulations are carbon dioxide.
The paper makes many key points, including that the original dataset was less than complete.
The original dataset used for the SCC update contained 1,722 records, but only 862 were usable due to missing variables. McKitrick recovered 360 additional records, increasing the sample size to 1,222.
Interestingly, reanalysis of the larger dataset yielded significantly different results from previous studies. While earlier analyses suggested yield declines for all crop types even at low levels of warming, the new and improved information suggests the potential positive global average crop yield changes, even with up to a 5°C temperature increase
The study found that adaptation efforts and CO2 fertilization have beneficial effects on crop yields, which I have noted before. It seems like a good time to share this video of Dr. William Happer, who offers a rational perspective on carbon dioxide.
In a nutshell, the research concludes that the climate change-related agricultural damage estimates used to justify the SCC increase are too pessimistic and that the large implied revisions to the SCC are unsupported by the extended data. Because crop yields don’t crash, as asserted in the report Biden’s EPA used, then the rationale for substantially increasing the “social cost of carbon” disappears.
Watts Up With That Contributor Vijay Jayaraj also reviews the paper’s findings and offers guidance on how the Trump administration should use this finding.
First, the social cost of carbon calculation needs a reset. A realistic assessment would show that carbon dioxide is a benefit, not a pollutant, and that increasing CO2 adds to global productivity rather than imposes costs on society.The EPA must revisit its numbers, stripping out inflated agricultural damages and grounding its estimates in all the data available. It is time to look at the facts, trust the real science, and end the irrational governmental messaging that feeds climate hysteria.
Now let’s review an issue, which I argue is related to this one. Scientific fraud in research papers has become an alarming trend in recent years, with significant implications for the integrity of academic publishing and public trust in science. The problem has grown substantially, with the proportion of retracted papers more than tripling in the past decade.
Scientific journals are usually a source of reputable research and information, but recently thousands of fraudulent papers have been published in those journals and have needed to be retracted. “The proportion of papers published in any given year that go on to be retracted — has more than tripled in the past decade,” said Nature.”In 2022, it exceeded 0.2%.” Wiley, a more than 200-year-old publishing company, has retracted more than 11,300 compromised papers and closed four journals in the past two years. The company also announced that it will be closing 19 others. Several other publishing companies have been required to take similar actions. “Although this large-scale fraud represents a small percentage of submissions to journals, it threatens the legitimacy of the nearly $30 billion academic publishing industry and the credibility of science as a whole,” said The Wall Street Journal.
If ‘science’ is based on only the data that support the conclusion policymakers want, then it is no longer science. And if Biden’s EPA policies for SCC were based on shoddy work, then I am delighted that Trump is axing the agency’s primary research body Office of Research and Development), potentially cutting more than 1,000 positions.
The Trump administration plans to eliminate a major research body of the Environmental Protection Agency, possibly cutting more than 1,000 employees, according to documents on the government’s reduction in force agenda.The EPA’s Office of Research and Development would be eliminated “as an EPA National Program Office,” documents reviewed by Democratic staffers on the House Science, Space and Technology Committee say. A portion of the documents was shared with CBS News.”Currently, the Office of Research and Development has 1,540 positions (excluding special government employees and public health officers), of which we anticipate a majority (50-75%) will not be retained,” the documents say.The documents also state that the EPA will request an exemption from the Office of Personnel Management to reduce the required 60-day notice of termination to a 30-day notice period for impacted employees.
The fact that carbon dioxide was ever painted as “toxic” argues that real science was jettisoned in favor of climate cultism…and Trump is in his constitutional rights to separate that faith from governmental policies based on real information.
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