The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference kicks off next month, and the European Union and the Obama administration are both pushing for a binding global treaty.
In fact, the UN itself wants to establish a new bureaucracy with the power to spend $100 billion worth of taxpayers’ money interfering in the energy market.
Yet the science behind climate change is now fairly clear, and only a much more modest approach can be justified.
Indeed, whenever you hear that “97% of scientists” agree about climate change or anything else, you should be deeply skeptical of the speaker’s agenda.
That statistic is spurious; you could barely get that percentage of scientists to agree about the law of gravity.
In reality, there are huge differences among scientists when it comes to climate change – some of which have to do with their sources of funding.
For instance, governments have devoted huge sums of money to climate change research over the last three decades, and this has ultimately compromised researchers’ skepticism.
The oil company funding in the opposite direction is a mere flea bite by comparison.
Misguided Regulations
On climate change, I’m a skeptic but not a “denier.”
The reality is that we’ve seen a global warming of about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the last century, which accelerated in the 1980s and 1990s, thus producing the first global warming hysteria.
This gentle warming has been paused since 1998 and may remain so until 2030. By 2100, the most likely climate scenario is for a warming of 0.7 to 1.0 degrees Celsius, with a two degree warming being at the very top end of potential outcomes over that period.
Now, two degrees Celsius by 2100 would raise global sea levels by no more than 70 centimeters or so, an amount that could be mitigated with sandbags in most cases.
On the other hand, the world won’t end in 2100 (we hope), and global warming will presumably continue thereafter if not properly addressed.
