How Faulty Assumptions in Climate Predictions Could Mean Big Costs for Americans

Family incomes will take a severe hit and household electricity prices will jump rapidly if policymakers use the “social cost of carbon” to justify new environmental regulations, a Heritage Foundation statistician warned during a climate change conference in Washington.
Since computer climate models are grounded in assumptions about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions, the results “can be all over the map,” Kevin Dayaratna said at the Heartland Institute’s conference.

How Faulty Assumptions in Climate Predictions Could Mean Big Costs for Americans GettyImages-1148960203-1-1250x650

How Faulty Assumptions in Climate Predictions Could Mean Big Costs for Americans GettyImages-1148960203-1-1250x650

These results then can be “rigged by policymakers” to achieve their desired results, Dayaratna said during his presentation.
The Heartland Institute is a libertarian, free-market think tank based in Illinois. Its 13^th International Conference on Climate Change was held July 25 at the Trump International Hotel in Washington.
Dayaratna, a senior statistician and research programmer at The Heritage Foundation, a leading conservative think tank, was part of a panel discussion on “Energy and Climate Economics” that probed the costs of the Green New Deal and the benefits of fossil fuels.
The statistical models used by the Obama administration to set regulatory policy are flawed because they are highly prone to user manipulation, Dayaratna told conferees.
In fact, only one of the three models in use during the Obama years considered potential benefits, but did so with “outdated assumptions,” he said.
President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency defined the social cost of carbon as the “economic damages per metric ton of carbon dioxide emissions.”
Climate models seek to measure the long-term impact of carbon dioxide emissions. Dayaratna and his team at Heritage’s Center for Data Analysis adapted and tested two of the three models.
After making “very reasonable changes to the assumptions in the social cost of carbon,” Dayaratna said, they found that costs could drop dramatically anywhere from 40% to 200%. And under reasonable assumptions, he said, costs could become negative and thus net benefits to society.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2019/08/01/how-faulty-assumptions-in-climate-predictions-could-mean-big-costs-for-americans/

How Faulty Assumptions in Climate Predictions Could Mean Big Costs for Americans

How Faulty Assumptions in Climate Predictions Could Mean Big Costs for Americans

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