Posted: December 28, 2016 | Author: Jamie Spry | Filed under: Carbon Dioxide, Empirical Evidence, Fact Check, Fossil Fuels | Tags: Alex Epstein, Carbon Dioxide, CARBON DIOXIDE, Energy, Fossil Fuels |
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse?
Isn’t it our responsiblity to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong,
founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue.
Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,
we will be doing the right thing in terms of
economic and environmental policy.“
– Timothy Wirth,
President of the UN Foundation
“The only way to get our society to truly change is to
frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
– emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
Bookmark this brilliant explanation of life-giving fossil fuels, ergo CO2, by Climate and Energy reasonalist Alex ALEX EPSTEIN …
Via The Daily Caller :
9 Graphs That Prove Using Fossil Fuels Hasn’t Harmed The Planet
ALEX EPSTEIN
President, Center for Industrial Progress
1:17 PM 11/13/2014
.
Conventional wisdom is that the more
fossil fuels we use, the less livable we make our planet.
And we have been using a lot more fossil fuels over the last 30 years — an 80 percent increase since 1980. Fossil fuel use has increased so dramatically that our environment “should be” much worse.
But is it?
1. Air quality has improved in the countries that use the most fossil fuels.
Take the United States. Since 1970 our fossil fuel use has increased 40 percent, and yet according to President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, here is what has happened to 6 top air pollutants.
Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data
The main cause here is anti-pollution technology that can generate energy from coal, oil, and natural gas evermore cleanly. As this technology is used more and more in China and India, their pollution problems will decrease, not increase.
2. Water quality has improved around the world
One of the most important environmental indicators is access to improved water sources, which measures access to clean water. Although we’re taught to think of fossil fuel use as fouling up our water, access to clean drinking water has gone up dramatically in the last 25 years as countries have used more fossil fuels.
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Nature doesn’t give us the ample clean water we need. We need a lot of cheap, reliable energy to power machines that clean up nature’s health hazards, such as water purification plants. Using fossil fuels supplied it.
3. Sanitation has also benefited from more fossil fuel energy
Here’s the big picture of sanitation — the percent of our world population with access to improved sanitation facilities, according to the World Bank.
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Note that as recently as 1990, under half the world had “improved sanitation facilities.” The increase to two thirds in only a few decades is a wonderful accomplishment, but a lot more development is necessary to make sure everyone has a decent, sanitary environment. And development requires energy.
Want a more sanitary environment for people around the globe? We need more cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels.
4. More fossil fuels, mild global warming
For decades we have heard predictions of runaway global warming that is making our climate progressively unlivable. In 1986 climate scientist James Hansen predicted that “if current trends are unchanged,” temperatures would rise .5 to 1.0 degree Fahrenheit in the 1990s and 2 to 4 degrees in the first decade of the 2000s. According to Hansen’s own department at NASA, from the beginning to the end of the 1990s, temperatures were .018 degrees Fahrenheit (.01 degrees Celsius) higher, and from 2000 to 2010, temperatures were .27 degrees Fahrenheit (.15 degrees Celsius) higher—meaning he was wrong many times over.
In 1989 journalist Bill McKibben, summarizing the claims of Hansen and others, confidently predicted that by now we would “burn up, to put it bluntly.” Looking at the actual data on a graph, it becomes clear that he was completely wrong.
Here’s a graph of the last hundred-plus years of temperature compared to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We can see that CO2 emissions rose rapidly, most rapidly in the last fifteen years.
Global warming since 1850 — the full story
Sources: Met Office Hadley Centre HadCRUT4 dataset; Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged Ice Core Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
But there is not nearly the warming or the pattern of warming that we have been led to expect. We can see a very mild warming trend overall — less than 1 degree Celsius (less than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over a century — which in itself is unremarkable, given that there is always a trend one way or the other, depending on the time scale you select. But notice that there are smaller trends of warming and cooling, signifying that CO2 is not a particularly powerful driver, and especially notice that the current trend is flat when it “should be” skyrocketing.
Given how much our culture is focused on the issue of CO2-induced global warming, it is striking how little warming there has been. We’re talking tenths of a degree. Without instruments, we couldn’t perceive it. Maybe that’s why the doomsayers stopped talking about “global warming” and started using “climate change.”
5. More fossil fuels, less climate danger
Is our climate becoming more dangerous?
The key statistic here, one that is unfortunately almost never mentioned, is “climate-related deaths,” which tracks changes over time in how many people die from a climate-related cause, including droughts, floods, storms, and extreme temperatures.
The trends are shocking.
Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2013); Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged Ice Core Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; EM-DAT International Disaster Database
In the last eighty years, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide fell by an incredible rate of 98 percent. That means the incidence of death from climate is fifty times lower than it was eighty years ago.
Clearly, as the climate-related death data shows, there are some major climate-related benefits — namely, the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization that is highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on.
Some might say the planet will soon be unlivable (though environmentalists have been saying that for 40 years) because of mounting dangers like rising sea levels. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth terrified many with claims of likely twenty-foot rises in sea levels. Given the temperature trends, however, we wouldn’t expect warming to have a dramatic effect on sea levels. And, in fact, it hasn’t.
Read all nine here: http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/13/9-graphs-that-prove-using-fossil-fuels-hasnt-harmed-the-planet/#ixzz4U8uL5Fkr
•••
CO2 (Fossil Fuel) Related :
CO2 = Extreme Weather Related :
CO2 = Sea Level Rise Related :
9 Graphs That Prove Using Fossil Fuels Hasn’t Harmed The Planet
ALEX EPSTEIN
President, Center for Industrial Progress
1:17 PM 11/13/2014
Drilling wells are pictured in Los Angeles, California December 11, 2013. The United States has a long history of keeping industrial activity out of middle and upper-middle-class residential neighborhoods. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni
Conventional wisdom is that the more fossil fuels we use, the less livable we make our planet.
And we have been using a lot more fossil fuels over the last 30 years — an 80 percent increase since 1980. Fossil fuel use has increased so dramatically that our environment “should be” much worse.
But is it?
Source: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook
Let’s look at the hard data for key environmental indicators like air quality, water quality, sanitation, disease, climate danger, and resource availability. They show that using fossil fuels hasn’t harmed the planet — it’s actually made the planet a far more livable place.
1. Air quality has improved in the countries that use the most fossil fuels.
Take the United States. Since 1970 our fossil fuel use has increased 40 percent, and yet according to President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency, here is what has happened to 6 top air pollutants.
Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data
The main cause here is anti-pollution technology that can generate energy from coal, oil, and natural gas evermore cleanly. As this technology is used more and more in China and India, their pollution problems will decrease, not increase.
2. Water quality has improved around the world
One of the most important environmental indicators is access to improved water sources, which measures access to clean water. Although we’re taught to think of fossil fuel use as fouling up our water, access to clean drinking water has gone up dramatically in the last 25 years as countries have used more fossil fuels.
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Nature doesn’t give us the ample clean water we need. We need a lot of cheap, reliable energy to power machines that clean up nature’s health hazards, such as water purification plants. Using fossil fuels supplied it.
3. Sanitation has also benefited from more fossil fuel energy
Here’s the big picture of sanitation — the percent of our world population with access to improved sanitation facilities, according to the World Bank.
Sources: BP, Statistical Review of World Energy 2013, Historical data workbook; World Bank, World Development Indicators (WDI) Online Data, April 2014
Note that as recently as 1990, under half the world had “improved sanitation facilities.” The increase to two thirds in only a few decades is a wonderful accomplishment, but a lot more development is necessary to make sure everyone has a decent, sanitary environment. And development requires energy.
Want a more sanitary environment for people around the globe? We need more cheap, reliable energy from fossil fuels.
4. More fossil fuels, mild global warming
For decades we have heard predictions of runaway global warming that is making our climate progressively unlivable. In 1986 climate scientist James Hansen predicted that “if current trends are unchanged,” temperatures would rise .5 to 1.0 degree Fahrenheit in the 1990s and 2 to 4 degrees in the first decade of the 2000s. According to Hansen’s own department at NASA, from the beginning to the end of the 1990s, temperatures were .018 degrees Fahrenheit (.01 degrees Celsius) higher, and from 2000 to 2010, temperatures were .27 degrees Fahrenheit (.15 degrees Celsius) higher—meaning he was wrong many times over.
In 1989 journalist Bill McKibben, summarizing the claims of Hansen and others, confidently predicted that by now we would “burn up, to put it bluntly.” Looking at the actual data on a graph, it becomes clear that he was completely wrong.
Here’s a graph of the last hundred-plus years of temperature compared to the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. We can see that CO2 emissions rose rapidly, most rapidly in the last fifteen years.
Global warming since 1850 — the full story
Sources: Met Office Hadley Centre HadCRUT4 dataset; Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged Ice Core Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography
But there is not nearly the warming or the pattern of warming that we have been led to expect. We can see a very mild warming trend overall — less than 1 degree Celsius (less than 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit) over a century — which in itself is unremarkable, given that there is always a trend one way or the other, depending on the time scale you select. But notice that there are smaller trends of warming and cooling, signifying that CO2 is not a particularly powerful driver, and especially notice that the current trend is flat when it “should be” skyrocketing.
Given how much our culture is focused on the issue of CO2-induced global warming, it is striking how little warming there has been. We’re talking tenths of a degree. Without instruments, we couldn’t perceive it. Maybe that’s why the doomsayers stopped talking about “global warming” and started using “climate change.”
5. More fossil fuels, less climate danger
Is our climate becoming more dangerous?
The key statistic here, one that is unfortunately almost never mentioned, is “climate-related deaths,” which tracks changes over time in how many people die from a climate-related cause, including droughts, floods, storms, and extreme temperatures.
The trends are shocking.
Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2013); Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged Ice Core Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; EM-DAT International Disaster Database
In the last eighty years, as CO2 emissions have most rapidly escalated, the annual rate of climate-related deaths worldwide fell by an incredible rate of 98 percent. That means the incidence of death from climate is fifty times lower than it was eighty years ago.
Clearly, as the climate-related death data shows, there are some major climate-related benefits — namely, the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization that is highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on.
Some might say the planet will soon be unlivable (though environmentalists have been saying that for 40 years) because of mounting dangers like rising sea levels. Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth terrified many with claims of likely twenty-foot rises in sea levels. Given the temperature trends, however, we wouldn’t expect warming to have a dramatic effect on sea levels. And, in fact, it hasn’t.
Read more: http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/13/9-graphs-that-prove-using-fossil-fuels-hasnt-harmed-the-planet/2/#ixzz4U8zDhKiI
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Source: U.S. EPA National Emissions Inventory Air Pollutant Emissions Trends Data
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