Alarmist Media Push “Opinion Survey” as Basis for CA Climate Policy vs Using Energy & Science Data • Watts Up With That?

Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

The Southern California News Group (SCNG) conglomerate published a ridiculous article (shown below) hyping the results of a public opinion survey that clueless climate alarmist media are trying to use to justify California’s flawed, ineffective and costly climate and energy laws and regulations. This absurd article notes: 

“In the wake of a historically wet winter, the survey shows Californians are a bit less concerned about water supply issues and drought than they were last year. However, the whiplash of weather extremes in recent years has left residents worried about a spike in related events, such as wildfires, floods, and heat waves.

Nearly half of Californians — and more than half of Inland Empire residents — said they’ve been affected by such an event in the past two years. That’s compared with one in three adults nationwide who in March told Gallup pollsters that they’d been impacted by extreme weather. The PPIC poll also shows that nearly three-quarters of all Californians link such events to climate change.

As a result, more than six in 10 residents told the PPIC that they believe the state’s stricter environmental laws and regulations are worth the cost, even if the rules put jobs or economic growth at risk.”

The article proposed schemes claiming that California politicians should utilize public “opinion surveys” to attempt to justify the states irrelevant global energy and climate policies versus developing competent energy and climate policy assessments based on evaluation of the most relevant and comprehensive energy and climate data (not politically contrived and four decades long failed climate alarmist models that have demonstrated their completely failed outcomes) is totally inane.

The article completely fails to make any effort to address the critical and controlling issues of global energy use and growth, global emissions outcomes and growth and reams of climate science measured data that clearly demonstrate that there is no climate emergency.

The author of this article clearly has little expertise involving science, technology, engineering, and mathematics but instead is lost in a world of politically driven climate alarmism hand waving propaganda as her basis for trying to weave her way through a misguided justification for imposing globally meaningless, massively costly, and completely irrelevant California climate schemes with these schemes representing nothing but energy and climate alarmism incompetence.

The article completely fails to even attempt to address the critically important issues of how California fits into the global energy and climate picture and in fact completely conceals the fact that assessing global energy use and emissions data is mandatory for effectively establishing energy policy determinations versus the articles ridiculous use of public “opinion surveys” as sufficient justification for determining California’s energy and climate policy decisions. 

The Energy Institute recently released its statistical assessment of global energy use and emissions in June 2023 updating global energy and emissions statistical data through year 2022 as shown below.

Table 1 presented below shows the World’s CO2 emissions increase (measured in million metric tons) that occurred between year 2021 and the new reports year 2022 updated data as well as the increase in the World’s energy use (measured in exajoules) that occurred in 2022.

Table 1 clearly shows that as the world’s global energy use grew in 2022 so did the worlds resulting CO2 emissions. Table 1 establishes that the non-OECD developing nations led by China and India dominate all global energy use and emissions as they have done for nearly two decades. 

Table 1 indicates that in 2022 global CO2 emissions climbed by 321.9 MMT with the Non-OECD nations contributing 87.54% of that increase because of these nations consuming 61.16% of all global energy use in year 2022 while the rest of the world’s nations accounted for only 12.46% of the year 2022 CO2 global emissions increase. 

The OECD developed nations led by the U.S. and the EU have been completely overwhelmed by the non-OECD nations in energy use and resulting emissions since 2005 as noted in Table 1A shown below. The Non-OECD nations completely dominate and control global energy use and CO2 emissions with these nations now accounting for 66.95% of all global CO2 emissions in year 2022.

While the U.S, EU and other OECD nations reduced CO2 emissions by over 2 billion metric tons between 2005 and 2022 the non-OECD nations hugely increased CO2 emissions by over 8.2 billion metric tons during this period resulting in the world’s emissions climbing by over 6.1 billion metric tons between 2005 and 2022. 

The SCNG article incompetently conceals and doesn’t even attempt to identify that global energy use and resulting emissions are completely dominated and controlled by the world’s non-OECD developing nations that are committed to continued use fossil fuels with priority on use of more coal.

California’s CO2 emissions are trivially insignificant compared to the global non-OECD nations emissions levels with their huge growth completely concealed by SCNG’s ridiculous and incompetent article addressing “opinion surveys”.

California’s total CO2 equivalent emissions are shown below from the state website. The states CO2 emissions represent about 80.2% of the total CO2 equivalent emissions as noted here with the states total CO2 emissions therefore being only about 296 MMT.

State emissions data shows that in the period since 2005 California reduced its CO2 emissions by about 87 million metric tons while the world’s developing nations were increasing global emissions by over 8.2 billion metric tons (shown in Table 1A) with the state’s politicians and climate alarmist media idiotically and loudly proclaiming the state is “fighting climate change”.  

California’s phony claim of “fighting climate change” is totally absurd as clearly demonstrated by the non-OECD nations increased CO2 emissions since 2005 being nearly 95 times greater than the states puny CO2 reduction since 2005. The stupidity of the states “fighting climate change” hoax is clear for all to see.      

Additionally, the state has committed to even more energy and climate policy global folly by proceeding with a completely irrelevant and massively wasteful net zero politically contrived initiative to reduce its emissions by 85% no later than year 2045 as shown below.

As Table 1 above clearly shows the non-OECD nations increased CO2 emissions between year 2021 in year 2022 by 281.8 MMT which in a single year exceeded the entire present California CO2 emissions total inventory of 269 MMT with the state committed to spending many hundreds of billions of dollars to reduce these emissions by 85% by no later than year 2045. 

The state’s proposed net zero initiative is idiotic because the states goals of reducing CO2 emissions by a completely insignificant few hundred million metric tons by 2045 are completely overwhelmed by the non-OECD nations present, dominate and growing 22.78 billion metric tons per year of CO2 emissions that will likely continue to grow at yearly rates that exceed California’s entire existing CO2 emissions inventory.  

Furthermore, Table 1A clearly establishes that the worlds non-OECD nations took complete control of future global energy use and emissions growth nearly two decades ago with the OECD nations becoming nothing but irrelevant spectators in these future energy use and emissions outcomes.      

It is pathetic that the SCNG article written by someone that is so clearly deficient in energy and science expertise failed completely to address the absurdity of the state’s massively expensive, trivial, and completely meaningless role in having any consequential outcome on global energy use and emissions and deceptively concealed this reality from view. 

The article instead offers nothing but hand waving “opinion survey” alarmist propaganda claims and erroneous climate fear mongering hype to try and justify California’s energy and climate net zero idiotic policy debacle.   

Table 2 shown below further exposes the ineptness of SCNG article by establishing that global energy use and emissions reality is driven by fossil fuels which continue to hugely dominate global energy use while climate alarmists incompetently hype net zero schemes costing globally trillions of dollars that have resulted in only small amounts of global energy use from politically mandated solar and wind.

Higher emissions and lower efficiency coal fuel is the primary fuel used by both China and the Non-OECD nations to meet their 2022 energy needs with China further increasing its use and share of global coal to 54.75% while the non-OECD nations were further increasing their use and share of global coal to 82.1%.

China increased coal fuel use by 59.4% between 2005 and 2022 while the non-OECD nations increased coal fuel use by 61.81% during this same period. 

China and the non-OECD nations have told the Democrat’s climate alarmist buffoon John Kerry to “take a hike” regarding fossil fuel emission reductions at his most recent failed mission as noted in the article below.

However, U.S. use of coal fuel declined to only 6.1% of global coal use in 2022 (a reduction of 56.8% from 2005 to 2022) while increasing use of higher efficiency, lower cost, and lower emissions natural gas by over 48% between 2005 and 2022 despite incompetent efforts by Democrat politicians to cripple use of U.S. natural gas while mandating use of unreliable and high-cost wind and solar.       

Table 3 shown below provides year 2021 total energy use and CO2 emissions data for California exposing and demonstrating how ridiculously insignificant the state’s role is on the global stage and how incredibly over-hyped California politicians propaganda is regarding the states politically contrived net zero campaign and their completely incompetent claims of the state “fighting climate change”.

Table 4 shown below provides data clearly demonstrating that California like the rest of the world, even after decades of incompetent politically mandated use of wind and solar, relies heavily upon the use of fossil fuels to meet its energy needs and that the climate alarmist contrived “net zero wind and solar contribution” remains extremely modest.

The SCNG article fails to provide any data or analysis that present the insignificant role of California’s energy and emissions on the global stage or the fact that California heavily depends and relies upon fossil fuels for the great majority of its energy despite the states over-hyped emissions reduction and net zero Democratic Party-political propaganda of the past two decades. 

The SCNG article also completely fails to address the massive cost increases, particularly in retail electricity prices, that California’s absurd energy and climate policies have created for California electricity prices which are now the highest in the continental U.S. and more than twice as costly as the other western U.S. states as clearly described in the article shown below that exposes the state’s energy policy failures and incompetence.

EIA data shows California’s average retail electricity price in 2021 was 19.65 cents/kWh versus only 11.10 cents/ kWh being the average retail electricity price across the total U.S. as shown in EIA data below. Only the geographically isolated states of Alaska and Hawaii were higher than California. The other 10 western U.S. states average retail electricity price was only 9.19 cents per kWh. Climate alarmists in the state conceal the state’s electricity price data from view just as they do with the global energy and emissions data showing how pathetically insignificant California’s role is on the global stage.

The SCNG article also makes the usual false and unsubstantiated climate alarmist propaganda claims of “extreme weather”, “heat waves”, “droughts”, “wildfires” and “floods” being caused by climate change but completely fails to provide any measured climate science data that supports and rationally addresses these phony hyped alarmist claims. This deficiency is consistent with the articles complete failure to provide any global energy and emissions data as previously presented and described in detail in this essay.

Global and regional temperature anomaly trends do not represent a “climate emergency” as falsely claimed by climate alarmists’ propagandists and their incompetent media advocates.

NOAA’s surface station and most recent global temperature anomaly data shown below clearly establishes that in the period from January 2016 through June 2023 the measured global temperature anomaly is declining at a rate of -0.94 degrees C per century in complete contrast to the recent phony hyped claims of record high global temperature trends which are politically contrived, flawed and false.

More extensive satellite global temperature anomaly data shown below from the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) demonstrates that the global temperature anomaly is declining at a rate of -2.02 degrees C per century since the prior global anomaly peak occurred in 2016. Furthermore, this declining trend line since 2016 of the UAH satellite temperature anomaly measurements is not consistent with the increasing trend of global CO2 atmospheric concentrations during this period with this result contrary to what climate alarmists claim should be happening.

Additionally, NOAA’s measurement of the maximum temperature anomaly trend across the Continental U.S. using its most reliable and updated measurement system (the USCRN system that began operating in 2005) shows no increasing maximum temperature anomaly trend across the U.S. through June 2023 as shown below despite all the recent climate alarmist media flawed and phony claims to the contrary.

Furthermore, EPA data shown below regarding the occurrence and intensity of heat waves across the U.S. going back to 1895 shows no increasing trends of extreme heat waves events across the U.S. with the peak occurrence of such events clearly occurring in the period of the 1930s dust bowl era.

Another phony claim made by U.S. climate alarmist media was that the recent July 4, 2023 weekend was the highest temperature ever recorded. However, NOAA addressed this media debacle (there is no doubt that the climate alarmist media will continue to grossly misrepresent climate issues as exemplified by this SCNG article) noting:

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) quickly put out a notice as the erroneous claim was going viral, stating that the reanalyzer is “not suitable” for the purpose of cataloguing real-world temperature. It is not an official NOAA product, and the University of Maine’s reanalyzer website itself put up a notice saying that it should not be considered an official observational record.”

Of course, there were no climate alarmist acknowledgements or retractions by incompetent media of these flawed “highest temperature ever recorded” phony articles.     

EPA data tracking of drought durations and severity across the U.S. also shows no increasing “climate emergency” trends that are so ridiculously and falsely hyped by this SCNG climate alarmist propaganda article with the EPA drought data shown in the graphs below.

The SCNG article also falsely claims increasing floods due to climate change are occurring but both the United Nations IPCC 5 Climate Report and NOAA flood data clearly dispute SCNG’s  flawed and sloppy increasing floods claim noting as follows:

The SCNG articles unsubstantiated claim of increasing wildfires being caused by climate change are also flawed as exposed by analysis that such recent claims were shown to use hugely cherry picked and truncated national wildfire data to fabricate these increasing wildfire conclusions as shown below.

Flawed claims have been made repeatedly by climate alarmists about increasing extreme weather occurrence and strength of U.S. hurricanes. These phony claims are unsupported by NOAA data as shown below.

Similarly, hyped climate alarmists claims have been made alleging increasing severity and occurrences of U.S. tornadoes blamed on “climate change” but again NOAA data does not support and in fact refutes such propaganda claims as shown below. 

This SCNG article represents a clear example of energy and climate science incompetence employed by politically driven climate alarmism advocates.

The article also demonstrates the complete failure of the news media to reveal and present any of the extensively available global energy and climate data that define the reality of the non-OECD nations complete control of global energy and climate science issues.     

For more on the state of the climate as it really is, go to EverythingClimate.com