As most are aware, the Washington Post (WaPo) has become known as a major purveyor of climate fear mongering propaganda.
And this recent article is a perfect example of their predilection to do so, especially in regards to human CO2 emissions and the very speculative catastrophic global warming climate change said emissions will have.
But, if growing human-based CO2 emissions are the primary cause of disastrous climate change, why aren't they the primary cause for changes in atmospheric CO2 levels? (more on that later.)
Below is a quote from this article that exemplifies the propaganda that the world needs to drastically cut global emissions or ELSE.
“We are in trouble. We are in deep trouble with climate change,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said..."It is hard to overstate the urgency of our situation,” he said. “Even as we witness devastating climate impacts causing havoc across the world, we are still not doing enough, nor moving fast enough, to prevent irreversible and catastrophic climate disruption.”
The article is mostly void of any facts but certainly has plenty of fringe green activist estimates, projections, speculations, and "expert" opinions masquerading as facts. Observed empirical climate evidence was not a mainstay of the article.
One of their key "facts" presented at the beginning of the article is that global emissions for 2018 are projected to be 2.7% larger than 2017. Certainly sounds like an authoritative scientific fact until one reads much later in the article that maybe the 2018 emissions could be a much smaller global increase of only 1.8%.
Then again, maybe the final number will be +1.5% or maybe even +1.2%. Truth be told, no one knows for sure what the real number is at this time, although a more accurate number will likely be known by mid-2019.
Of course, the WaPo hopes that readers will walk away from this article with the thought that the estimated CO2 emission growth will lead to much higher CO2 atmospheric levels, thus resulting in the Earth suffering "calamitous" global warming outcomes.
Their hope is that readers will simply believe and not bother to check or question the lack of factual evidence supporting the underlying causation assumption.
When one does check the empirical evidence for the impact of annual CO2 emissions change on atmospheric CO2 levels an obvious disconnect becomes apparent - there is no significant impact of a specific percent increase in CO2 emissions and a subsequent percent increase in CO2 atmospheric levels (ppm).
In fact, as the above chart reveals, the correlation between the annual % increase of CO2 emissions and annual % rise of CO2 atmospheric levels is a ridiculously low with a r2 of +0.002. That is basically zero over the 53-year time span from 1966 through 2018 (assuming the WaPo 2018 estimate of 2.7% is correct).
The chart also depicts a declining linear trend for CO2 emissions while there is a slight increasing trend for CO2 levels, which is another indication that a positive correlation relationship between human emissions and CO2 levels is rather suspect.
For the WaPo's climate fear mongering apostles and recent converts, the lack of correlation seriously undercuts their faith in the 'CO2 Control Knob' hypothesis of climate change: the dogmatic faith that government bureaucrats can just turn a dial knob that decreases CO2 emissions by a certain percentage; the result being that atmospheric CO2 levels will respond by a certain lower percentage increase; and thus the desired climate result being less global warming.
If the "control knob" on CO2 emissions does not correlate at all with atmospheric CO2 levels, it's not very likely to correlate well with a specific percentage change in global temps.
Another way to examine the same datasets is plotting the annual changes of human emission CO2 tonnes versus the annual change in CO2 atmospheric levels (ppm). Again, the correlation might as well be zero due to an r2 of +0.041. (see below)
Again, how can this be if the control knob hypothesis relies on a strong change relationship between CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 levels?
The empirical evidence does not lie, but since it is inconvenient, WaPo "journalists" just make it go away no matter the serious consequences. Just another case of those hated stubborn facts.
Conclusion: Bad journalism combined with bad science will kill democracy from the baseless fear mongering.
Note: Datasets used for Excel plots in above charts: CO2 tonne (metric ton) emissions and CO2 atmospheric levels. Link to research article on correlation between CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2 levels (h/t Thongchai Thailand).