A couple weeks ago, when we were laughing at how Legates and Maue cratered their credibilty by joining the violently seditious, white supremacist Trump administration, only to get caught posting denial without approval, the pamphlet author Dr. Roy Spencer was mad enough about being labeled by us (and the New York Times) as a denier that he posted a rebuttal claiming otherwise.
Dr. Spencer acknowledges that fossil fuels are causing warming, and that he expects warming to be on the low end of IPCC projections. He then claims that it’s because of his support for fossil fuels for “the world’s poor,” that he has been “declared evil.”
Two days after claiming not to be a denier and being offended at such a notion, Dr. Spencer posted about his upcoming talk with Friends of Science, a Canadian climate denial organization, about “why there is no climate emergency.” Then, on January 21, he posted about part of his presentation, in which he cooked up a chart to claim that Canada is only warming half as much as model simulations. It's essentially a sequel to his buddy John Christy’s popular (and debunked) US version that, well, we’ll just say will probably never pass peer review.
Next, Dr. Spencer posted about President Biden’s move to end fossil fuel subsidies and re-join the Paris Agreement, and wouldn’t you know, it’s just chock full of more denial!
After saying he actually supports removing all federal subsidies, because really (per unit of energy produced) renewables get more than fossil fuels anyway, he kicks into denier mode. Because the US “now produces less than 15% of the global total greenhouse gas emissions,” he argues, even if the US zeroed out emissions, “the impact on global temperatures by 2100 would be small.” Therefore, the Paris Climate Agreement, he continues, isn’t meaningful, because it would only reduce warming by 0.2°C by 2100.
The problem is that the end-of-century impacts of initial Paris emissions reductions are a straw man holding a red herring. Under the Paris Agreement, national commitments were designed to start low and ramp up, so comparing current pledges to 2100 is like judging the top speed of a racecar when they’re still in first gear.
There's no telling if Dr. Spencer knows precisely how disingenuously misleading he's being about the Paris Agreement, but here’s a thing Dr. Spencer most certainly understands: The world needs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero to stop the warming, which means no matter what U.S. emissions are, they've still got to be brought down. (Also, for the record, the U.S. is by far the world's largest cumulative CO2 emitter and is still the second biggest polluter annually, so the idea that the U.S. is somehow off the hook because it "now produces less than 15% of the global total greenhouse gas emissions” is spurious, at best.) As for the Paris Agreement, the same logic applies. If the U.S. isn’t willing to entertain even the modest cuts necessary to meet initial Paris goals, we can't expect other countries to reduce their emissions either.
If rejecting the reality that every country (including especially the world's biggest historical polluter) needs to get to net zero emissions is not enough to justify calling Dr. Spencer a denier, consider his next point: “no one wants to talk about the social benefits” of CO2 emissions. “Nature loves the stuff,” wrote Dr. Spencer, embracing one of the oldest tropes of organized climate denial, literally suggesting that the carbon pollution he insists he acknowledges causes warming is actually a good thing.
Now, of course every time anyone talks about the social cost of carbon they’re implicitly including the benefits, because those are considered as part of the process known, after all, as a cost-benefit analysis. It’s just that the benefits are swamped by the costs, so any focus on benefits is like being pleased you can save on your heating bill by turning down your furnace on a cold winter night because your house is on fire.
To top it all off, why not include a little baseless China-bashing? Dr. Spencer claims their 2060 carbon neutrality goal “is just political posturing” based on the fact that they’re liars whose “political culture is to say anything necessary to nominally appease other countries, and then do just the opposite if it suits their national interests.” (Sounds like literally every country to ever exist, but why pass an opportunity to stoke some xenophobia?)
To summarize: after complaining about being called a climate denier for producing climate denying materials that was published by climate deniers in the violently seditious Trump administration, Dr. Roy Spencer then produced another piece of climate denial for a different climate denial organization, then denied that reducing greenhouse gas emissions would make a difference to the climate, and then denied the fact that warming is a net negative.
So if you want to know why you’re labeled a climate denier, Dr. Spencer, consider reading the content at DrRoySpencer.com.
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