In a just world the United States would pay back the $4 trillion dollars it owes, according to new research, for trashing the climate.Chaser:
Global warming wasn’t created equal. Rich, industrialized nations have contributed the lion’s share of the carbon pollution to our currently-unfolding catastrophe—the more CO2 in the atmosphere, the hotter it gets, of course—while smaller, poorer, and more agrarian countries are little to blame. The subsequent warming from our carbon-stuffed skies will, naturally, impact everyone, often hitting the poorer countries harder. So, since the rich fueled the crisis that’s about to soak the poor, they might help chip in to soften the blow.
That, in super-basic terms, is the concept of climate debt, which guides current emissions negotiations and efforts to distribute funds for adaptation to nations most affected by climate change. If you acknowledge, as the UN does, that there’s a carbon budget—an amount of greenhouse gas pollution the world can collectively churn out before we land in dangerous warming territory, currently figured at a 2˚C threshold—then it follows that nations that have overstepped theirs should pay back those who haven’t.
The long and model-unpredicted Great Pause of 18 years 8 months in global mean lower-troposphere temperature as recorded in the RSS satellite monthly dataset is inexorably driving down the longer-run warming rate, when the IPCC’s predictions would have led us to expect an acceleration.So the USA owes the world $4 Trillion because SCIENCE™! but the IPCC "scientific" climate models are mystified as to why it's been almost 20 years with no warming.
The graph shows the entire RSS lower-troposphere satellite dataset for the 440 months January 1979 to August 2015, with the bright blue trend on the entire series equivalent to just over 1.2 C°/century. Overlaid graph in green is the zero trend in the 224 months since January 1997 – more than half the entire 440-month record.
Seriously, this whole Global Warming thing is nothing but phlogistonated luminiferous aether.