Republican Platform 2016

Republican Party Platform 2016 – Climate Change

Information concerning a changing climate, especially projections into the long-range future, must be based on dispassionate analysis of hard data. We will enforce that standard throughout the executive branch, among civil servants and presidential appointees alike. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution. Its unreliability is reflected in its intolerance toward scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy. We will evaluate its recommendations accordingly. We reject the agendas of both the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, which represent only the personal commitments of their signatories; no such agreement can be binding upon the United States until it is submitted to and ratified by the Senate.

The Republican Platform 2016 is far less detailed and specific than the Democrat Platform with regard to climate change, but it offers the prospect of a more rigorous and more transparent process for the development of environmental law and regulation, with more direct congressional involvement. The specific reference to eliminating the cozy “sue and settle” approach taken by US EPA in dealing with environmental regulation signals a potential major step in the right direction. The Clean Air Act, as amended, is “black letter law”, which should not be open to broad reinterpretation by unelected bureaucrats.

The insistence on “dispassionate analysis of hard data” might well temper the wholesale “adjustment” and “re-adjustment” of data, which has been the hallmark of the NOAA / NCDC / NCEI and NASA GISS temperature anomaly products. It might also lead to insistence that  near-surface temperature measuring stations globally be brought up to the standards set for the US Climate Reference Network, since the measurements taken at these stations do not need to be subjected to myriad “adjustments”.

The insistence on “dispassionate analysis of hard data” might also lead to a more dispassionate (skeptical) analysis of the scenarios produce by the multiple climate models, which appear to be diverging from even the “adjusted” data. The models which have been in existence long enough to allow the scenarios they generated two to three decades ago to be compared against “adjusted” temperature anomalies have demonstrated little or no predictive skill.

The reference to the IPCC’s “intolerance towards scientists and others who dissent from its orthodoxy” might suggest a willingness on the part of a new Administration to fund research without regard to the likelihood that its results would support the UN / UNFCCC / IPCC narrative; or even specifically to fund research intended to aggressively test the validity of the narrative and perhaps falsify aspects of the narrative.

The identification of the IPCC as a political mechanism suggests that US EPA would be required to support new or expanded regulations based on the results of its own research, rather than on the work of the IPCC, as was the case for the CO2 Endangerment Finding.

The apparent willingness to reassert the Senate’s role in ratifying treaties is also encouraging.