The Coal Truth Part 3: Climate
November 12, 2018 - You’ve heard the myths...now hear The Coal Truth.
Coal Myth 3: Coal power is causing so much dangerous global warming that it needs to be stopped.
The Coal Truth: Coal power is contributing to at most mild global warming but major global greening--while giving us reliable, affordable energy to make all climates livable.
- To understand coal power's impact on climate we need to look at the whole truth--both its climate benefits and climate costs.
- Benefits: Coal power is contributing reliable, affordable energy to make the earth's naturally dangerous climate more livable--and its contribution to higher CO2 levels causes global greening.
- Costs: Coal power's CO2 emissions are contributing to mild, not major, global warming--which is very manageable as long as we have affordable energy.
- The best policy: The government should not try to stop global greening and global warming by restricting CO2 levels; it should leave us free to choose the best sources of energy for prosperous lives and ample climate protection.
Coal Myth: Coal power is causing so much dangerous global warming that it needs to be stopped.
Myth Part 1: CO2 emissions are causing rapid global warming and climate change.
The Coal Truth: The evidence supports the conclusions we’re at perfectly healthy levels of CO2 where we’ll experience, not unprecedented and catastrophic warming in the coming decades, but slightly warmer average temperatures along with increased plant growth.
Myth Part 2: Climate models prove that global warming and climate change will only get worse.
The Coal Truth: Predictions of dramatic warming are based on false, failed models of how the climate works. [1]
Myth Part 3: Government restrictions on coal power will help solve the problem.
The Coal Truth: If CO2 emissions were a problem, the only way to solve it would be to make non-carbon energy cheap--not to make carbon energy expensive.
The Coal Truth: Coal power is contributing to at most mild global warming but major global greening--while giving us reliable, affordable energy to make all climates livable.
To understand coal power's impact on climate we need to look at the whole truth--both its climate benefits and climate costs.
Assessing the benefits: Coal power is contributing reliable, affordable energy to make the earth's naturally dangerous climate more livable--and its contribution to higher CO2 levels causes global greening.
- The world has become visibly greener since the 1980s. NASA images showed that between 25-50% of the global vegetation area is literally already greener since 1982, while <4% has become ‘browner’. We have already made our world greener. [2]
.jpg)
- Thanks to technology powered by abundant and affordable energy, we enjoy the safest climate in history of humanity. Climate-related deaths have decreased by 98 percent over the last century. [3]
(4).png)
Assessing the costs: Coal power's CO2 emissions are contributing to mild, not major, global warming--which is very manageable as long as we have affordable energy.
- While some warming impact of CO2 is established science, the magnitude of the impact in the real world is unknown and subject to speculation, and the consequences for human well-being are highly speculative. The models used to project future warming of the planet have a poor track record and contradict each other in their speculative assumptions and resulting projections. [4]
- Mild warming as we have experienced since before major human CO2 emissions will prove highly advantageous if we leverage technology to improve our climate livability, as cold kills more humans than warmth in our current climate state. [5]
- Current global average sea level change as measured by satellite instruments is calculated to be slightly over 3 mm/year, which would translate to about one foot per century. [6] This is not a particularly high rate of change. Theories about future accelerations of sea level changes are speculative and depend on the behavior of large ice masses in places like Antarctica and Greenland, which we may or may not be able to influence. Some of the longest tide gauge data, such as in New York or Wismar, Germany, show a very linear trend of local sea level at the coastlines since the 19th century, when human emission were too small to have much influence. [7]
(5).png)
(5).png)
- Projections of sea-level rise by the IPCC, even in the most extreme emission scenarios, only get to 1 meter (3 feet) or less of sea level rise by 2100. [8] Since the last ice age with the warming period starting about 20,000 years ago, sea level has risen about 120 meters with periods of sharp rises that far exceeded what is projected for the coming century. [9]
- The oceans are not acidifying because of the CO2 emissions from humans. They might decrease in pH level on average over this century but this is unlikely to be a problem for marine life and the additional CO2 in the ocean water might even benefit many species. Laboratory experiments that tried to show negative impact of lower ocean pH levels did not accurately simulate the conditions of a slow-pace change in average ocean alkalinity over long periods of time and ignored the resilience marine life shows in an environment that shows far larger changes in shorter periods of time on the local level. [10]
The best policy: The government should not try to stop global greening and global warming by restricting CO2 levels; it should leave us free to choose the best sources of energy, which will contribute to prosperous lives and ample climate protection.
[1] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/27/are-climate-models-overstating-warming/; http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL074016/full
[2] Nature; NASA
[3] http://emdat.be/
[4] https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/27/are-climate-models-overstating-warming/
[5] Gasparrini et al. (2015)
[6] University of Colorado Sea Level Research Group
[7] NOAA Tides & Currents Sea Level Trends
[8] Judith Curry - Sea level rise acceleration (or not)
[9] Judith Curry - Sea level rise acceleration (or not): Part II – The geological record
[10] Patrick Moore - Ocean “Acidification” Alarmism in Perspective
.gif)
