Should the U.S. continue to pursue the goals of the Paris climate accord?

Yes: World needs America’s climate leadership

The Paris agreement on climate change, signed by 194 nations in December 2015, reflects nearly universal support for ambitious actions to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the impacts of climate change in the coming decades.

U.S. leadership was integral to securing this historic agreement. America is the largest per capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the world and is second only to China in total emissions. The Paris agreement, which took effect in November, would be seriously weakened without continued U.S. backing.

Under the accord, all nations are to develop plans to reduce emissions and to regularly report on their achievements. They also are committed to revisiting and strengthening those plans over time because the currently pledged actions will only get us halfway to what are viewed as the truly necessary emissions-reduction targets.

The goal is to limit average temperature increases to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels. To do this, most climate scientists think it imperative that global emissions peak as soon as possible and that we then move rapidly to non-carbon sources of energy such as wind, solar and nuclear power.

While national efforts remain voluntary, the progress made under this agreement should be much greater than what’s happened under previous accords. To ensure such progress, the United States and other leading emitters need to follow through on their commitments while assisting other nations in achieving their goals.

Under terms of the agreement, the U.S. is to reduce its carbon pollution by 26-28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025.

Today, the administration of President Donald Trump and many Republicans say the U.S. should pull back from these commitments because they doubt the validity of climate science and think the nation is ill-served by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Indeed, the president wants to end the Clean Power Plan, which is directed at reducing coal-fired power plant emissions, and retreat from vehicle fuel economy standards.

These actions are ill-advised and, with the prices of sustainable energy sources falling, would likely to hurt the U.S. economy, not help it.

The Paris agreement is a modest plan to begin with. The U.S. backtracking from its commitments would weaken the accord and discourage other nations from holding up their ends of the bargain. That, in turn, would expose both the U.S. and the world to unacceptable risks of climate change, including severe warming, rising sea levels, increases in extreme flooding and droughts, and food and water scarcity.

Members of Congress would be wise to review polls conducted after the election by George Mason and Yale universities. They show a public increasingly alarmed by climate change and highly supportive of action.

Some 69 percent of the poll-takers said the nation should participate in the Paris agreement, compared to only 13 percent who said we should not. Even Trump voters favored the agreement by 47 percent to 28 percent. Moreover, nearly 80 percent of the public favor taxing or regulating carbon pollution.

News reports suggest that the Trump administration is divided on the agreement and on climate change itself, with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and some foreign policy advisers and career diplomats in favor of sticking with it. They recognize that the fallout from walking away from the agreement could be massive, inflicting damage on U.S. credibility on other foreign policy goals and harming relations with allies.

The best course is to create a path forward toward broadly acceptable energy goals. These include keeping existing nuclear plants operating, continuing incentives for wind and solar power, advancing energy conservation and efficiency, and funding research on carbon capture and storage.

We also should build on the many promising clean energy initiatives at state and local levels and in the business community. And we should think seriously about a revenue-neutral carbon tax that can replace regulatory actions, a step endorsed by prominent Republicans such as James Baker.

No: Junk science-based treaty should be junked

By H. Sterling Burnett

Tribune News Service

Shortly before the Paris climate conference of December 2015, a leading U.S. government scientist published a paper purporting to show that the Earth had not experienced an 18-year pause in rising temperatures.

The claim was contrary to every temperature dataset in existence at the time, but Tom Karl, then director of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Information, argued that previous findings were wrong and temperatures actually were rising at an alarming rate.

Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary proof. But world leaders, including President Obama, chose to immediately get behind Karl’s startling “discovery,” seeing it as the iron-clad evidence they needed to produce a strong climate agreement requiring sharp reductions in carbon-dioxide emissions.

Last month, however, in a much-discussed article on a prominent climate change blog, John Bates, an award-winning scientist responsible for establishing and maintaining the NOAA’s data-testing and archiving process, disclosed Karl and his team violated the agency’s rules for ensuring the quality of their research.

Prior to the publication of Karl’s paper, the NOAA had adopted a process for reviewing climate datasets to ensure they would be archived for sharing, replication and testing — key components of the scientific process.

Defying agency rules, Karl did not run his team’s dataset through the agency’s software and did not archive key datasets, Bates wrote. Because Karl failed to archive and store his datasets properly, some of the original datasets were lost when the computer used to process the data failed.

How convenient for climate alarmists.

The data purportedly showing an alarming and continuous global temperature rise gets lost, but Karl and his team say, in effect, “The computer ate our homework, but trust us anyway. We’re right and everyone else is wrong.”

Bates, in his article, castigated Karl’s research for consistently exaggerating measured warming in an effort to produce the results his team wanted.

“So, in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets leading into (Karl’s paper), we find Tom Karl … pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming and minimize documentation,” Bates wrote.

“Gradually, in the months after (Karl’s paper) came out, the evidence kept mounting that Tom Karl constantly had his ‘thumb on the scale' – in the documentation, scientific choices, and release of datasets – in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.”

Prior to the publication of Bates’ article, much of the climate-science community had already become suspicious of Karl’s claims when it was discovered, as David Rose wrote in a report for the Daily Mail, Karl took seawater-level readings from buoys but then adjusted them upwards. Karl used readings from seawater intakes on ships that act as weather stations even though readings from the ships have long been known to be too hot, Rose explained.

As a result, the ocean temperature dataset used by Karl exaggerated the warming.

Even if the science motivating the Paris climate agreement weren’t suspicious, the treaty itself is a costly farce.

While the United States is expected to restrict its people’s fossil-fuel use, China, India and other major carbon-dioxide emitters get to keep growing their coal, natural gas and oil use.

Their economies get to thrive while ours is expected to stagnate — all without any hope of a real climate benefit.

United Nations officials have admitted that even if all the parties to the agreement were to cut emissions as promised, temperature rise would still exceed the upper limit – by a substantial margin — in 2100.

If disaster is in the offing, the Paris climate agreement won’t stop it. The U.S. should withdraw.

This story was originally published March 10, 2017 at 4:35 AM with the headline "Should the U.S. continue to pursue the goals of the Paris climate accord?."