By Joe Wilson
WASHINGTON – The U.S. government spent nearly as much fighting “climate change” between 1993 and 2014 as was spent on the entire Apollo program between 1962 and 1973, according to a new report.
A May 2017 report from the Capital Research Center (CRS) states that “from FY 1993 to FY 2014 total U.S. expenditures on climate change amount to more than $166 billion.”
The total includes more than $26.1 billion from President Obama’s 2009 stimulus bill, as well as regular annual budget amounts and federal tax credits distributed over a period of 21 years.
In comparison, the U.S. spent $200 billion, adjusted for inflation, on the Apollo space program, which ran from 1962 until 1973 and flew 17 missions, including Apollo 11, which put a man on the moon for the first time. Through the program, the U.S. sent seven men to the moon and back.
The CRS report comes just as President Trump has announced that the U.S. is withdrawing from the Paris climate accord. Under the agreement, the U.S. would have been obligated to pay $3 billion to a green fund by 2020, among other expected contributions.
The report shows that annual expenditures on climate change have increased 490 percent since 1993, and the annual amount going through the U.N. for combating climate change internationally has climbed by 440 percent.
Most of the money is not going to climate-science research but to control CO2 emissions based on inadequately tested hypotheses dating to the 1970s. The amount of money spent on further research and experimentation in climate science is $42.49 billion, according to the report. It’s little more than 25 percent of total expenditure on climate change, meaning that 75 percent of the U.S. climate-change budget is dedicated to “efforts to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and their presumed, but not demonstrated, effects.”
The U.S. justification for such spending combating CO2 emissions is based on the 1979 Charney Report, published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The Charney Report theorized that if CO2 in the atmosphere were to double, the earth’s surface temperature would increase by roughly 6 degrees Fahrenheit, with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 degrees. However, the Charney Report also predicted a more powerful warming trend caused by an increase in water vapor, earth’s dominant greenhouse gas.
The CRS report states: “In 1979, scientists lacked any comprehensive measurements of atmospheric temperatures, so the Charney Report’s guesses could not be confirmed or denied. But to cause this ‘top-down warming,’ the warming trends in the atmosphere would have to be more pronounced than surface warming trends.”
That’s because much of the energy from atmospheric warming is lost in space and doesn’t not affect surface temperature.
Despite the fact that the Charney Report’s data was unconfirmed, it heavily influenced the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed by President George H.W. Bush and ratified, with stipulations, by the Senate. The treaty’s main goal was “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”
The UNFCCC aimed to combat the rise of greenhouse gas, even though insufficient data had been gathered to confirm the Charney Report’s hypothesis that greenhouse gases were contributing to global warming.
Meanwhile, “independent researchers have tested the Charney Report’s hypothesis against atmospheric temperature data, which now extends over 37 years, and found the hypothesis wanting,” the CRS report states.
New methods and equipment have been developed to test the hypothesis, and the data does not confirm it. As the report declares, “the hypothesis needs to be modified or discarded.”
However, the U.S. government continues to fund projects based on the faulty hypothesis.
Although it seems clear that the bulk of U.S. climate-change funding should go into research so that the actual cause of climate change, as well as its potential impact can be ascertained, more than $104.25 billion goes to projects other than scientific research, compared to only $42.49 billion sent to research projects.
Annual expenditures in research have increased by 200 percent since 1993, while other climate change-related expenditures have gone up by an astounding 850 percent. The combined cost of climate-change policy has been $166 billion from 1993 to 2014.