Cliff Mass: WA’s Climate Commitment Act has ‘no benefit for mankind’

Months after Washington Governor Bob Ferguson signed a bill that increased the transparency regarding the Climate Commitment Act, many within the state still debate the legislation’s effectiveness.

Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington (UW), believes the Climate Commitment Act “is not a good investment” for the state or its residents.

“The impact of what we’re doing here in Washington state, it doesn’t make any sense at all. And that’s the truth,” Mass said on “The John Curley Show.” “The impact [towards global warming] of the U.S. is only like 15% of the total problem, and Washington state is way, way, way, way less, like 10% or less. So we’re not the problem, and the Climate Commitment Act will have no benefit for mankind.”

Curley provided Mass with a frequently-used counter-argument, that we all have to do our part in order to make substantial change.

“If we don’t do anything, then no one else does anything, then nothing happens,” Curley said. “But if we’re all in it, doing our part, it will help save this planet, the only planet that we have, from existential disaster.”

“There are a lot of weaknesses in that argument,” Mass countered. “First, global warming, even continuing what’s happening right now, is not an existential threat. It’s not even close to an existential threat. So that whole argument is false. Mankind can easily handle the moderate warming that’s going on.

“Secondly, the way to get out of this business is technological,” Mass continued. “In the end, we can use nuclear power, and we can use fusion power, which will eventually be available. Once we have that, the game is over. We will have unlimited energy that will put no CO2 in the atmosphere. In fact, it’s even better than that. Once we have large amounts of nuclear or fusion power, we can actually pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, if we choose to do that. So this is not a threat of any significant nature. And in any case, the way to fix this problem is not by putting a few more windmills up, or something which don’t really help that much.”

Many climate activists are hesitant, or simply do not accept, nuclear power as a climate-friendly alternative, citing nuclear waste, accidents, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, the damage to local ecosystems, cost, and the amount of energy required as reasons against it.

“Well, I think the environmental activists, for some reason, have decided that nuclear is no good. It’s not a rational decision,’ Mass said. “We need a more rational approach to energy. And again, nuclear is definitely very, very useful. Fusion power, it will come, that is very useful. If we do have modest changes in climate, we can adapt to that.”

New study disputes claims that sea levels are rising

In a new peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, “A Global Perspective on Local Sea Level Changes,” Dutch engineer Hessel Voortman and researcher Rob de Vos found that the models for rising sea levels are wrong —  worldwide sea levels have not been rising any faster than they were a century ago.

“Well, it turns out that this information is not secretive,” Mass said. “I mean, I blogged about the same thing myself. If you actually look at the data, the sea level rise data, you’re stunned to see that there’s no acceleration upward, that the sea level has been rising steadily and slowly for over a century. And so this question about global warming, whether it’s causing the sea level to rise more rapidly, we know the answer — it’s not.”

Listen to the full conversation here.

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