Earlier this afternoon in the Rose Garden, President Obama celebrated the ratification of the Paris Agreement. I had this to say in response:

President Obama was a bit less than candid in his speech about the adoption of the U.N.’s Paris Agreement. Using realistic assumptions about role of carbon dioxide in climate change, the Agreement will prevent 0.1 to 0.2°C of global warming by the year 2100, not the inflated figure the U.N. gets by assuming all warming since the Industrial Revolution is caused by human emissions of carbon dioxide. Few, if any, climate scientists would defend that. It also assumes that emissions will—without the Paris Agreement—increase much faster than the average increase used in climate simulations. In reality, the UN’s own Climate Panel states only that carbon dioxide is causing more than 50% of the warming observed since 1950, not 1800. Further, the switch from coal to natural gas for electrical generation has already invalidated the UN’s assumptions about the growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

He is also a bit optimistic about China, which has said it will stop increasing carbon dioxide emissions “around” 2030. This is exactly the time that researchers in Obama’s own Department of Energy said, in 2011, that their emissions would level off due to their maturing economy, and without any explicit policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, best known as “business as usual.”