The Paris Climate Agreement Won't Change the Climate

Climatologist: Despite the Hype, Paris Climate Accord ‘Doesn’t Really Do Anything’ to Reduce Global Warming

By Barbara Hollingsworth

7 October, 2017

President Obama hailed the European Parliament’s ratification of the Paris Climate Accord on Wednesday as “a turning point for our planet”, but climatologist Patrick Michaels says despite the presidential hype, the international climate change agreement, which goes into effect on November 4th, “doesn’t really do anything” to reduce global warming.

"The truth is that the Paris Climate Accord doesn't really do anything," Michaels, director of the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science, said of the international agreement, which attempts to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2100 by drastically reducing the carbon dioxide emissions of its 191 signatory nations.

“If you take a hard look at the numbers, if every nation did what they said they will do, and they won’t, it would reduce warming between now and the year 2100 by between 0.1 and 0.2 degrees C[elsius]. That is an amount that is too small to measure,” Michaels told CNSNews.com.

“I think it’s quite remarkable that people go around clapping each on the back and congratulating each other when they know that they didn’t agree to do very much at all,” he noted.

Michaels pointed out that even if all the pledges to reduce CO2 emissions are kept, the agreement would have a negligble effect on global warming.

“The Chinese, for all of President Obama’s praise, only agreed to do what Obama’s own economists told him they would do with business as usual," Michaels continued."They said, in 2011, given the development of the Chinese economy, it’s going to be mature around 2030 and that means their carbon dioxide emissions will stabilize. And that’s what they said they would do. They said we intend to stabilize our emissions around 2030.

“India, by the way, in Paris agreed to do less than business as usual. Their emissions per capita were dropping, I don’t know, about 20 percent or something like that, and they said we are going to have our emissions per capita not drop as much by 2030. And everybody claps their hands, like they’ve done something. …

“Only the United States and the EU [European Union] are the ones that are going to cost themselves a lot of money for this Paris Agreement. Go figure.”

Obama officially joined the Paris Climate Accord when he signed an executive order on September 3rd, stating at the time that “someday we may see this as the moment that we finally decided to save our planet.”

The president agreed to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide emissions 28 percent by 2030, a goal he intends to reach by implementing his controversial Clean Power Plan, which was recently put on hold by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Under the U.S. Constitution, treaties with other nations must be ratified by the Senate. In light of this, CNSNews asked Michaels for his thoughts on the current status of the international climate change agreement in the U.S.

“It’s very unclear,” he replied. “Judging from the Supreme Court’s statement a little bit over a year ago in one of the power plant cases, and this was when [Justice Antonin] Scalia was still there, something of this magnitude, the court feels, probably should be legislated.

“Also, the Paris Agreement contains the words ‘we shall’ do this, ‘we shall’ do that as opposed to ‘we should’ do this, ‘we should’ do that. And even according to Secretary of State John Kerry, the word ‘shall’ makes it much closer to a treaty.

“And I think the Congress, when it gets back in session next January, ought to decide whether this is a treaty. And say to the president: ‘If we think it’s a treaty, you send it to the Senate for ratification. If you act on it otherwise, there’s going to be major legal problems’.”

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