COP28 President and Chief Executive of the UAE state oil company Adnoc, Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber let the cat out of the bag this week when he said there was “no science” that says phasing out fossil fuels will achieve a cap on global warming of 1.5°C. In an interview with the impressively self-important Irish politician Mary Robinson, he demanded to be shown a roadmap for sustainable socioeconomic development “unless you want to take the world back to caves”. You would have had a heart of stone not to enjoy the antics of the BBC green activist-in-chief Justin Rowlatt as he tried to finesse Al-Jaber’s remarks. What a creative chap to write a BBC story about it headed, ‘Is the world about to promise to ditch fossil fuels?‘
Rowlatt claims that the UAE has recognised the world has to kick its addiction to unabated fossil fuels and has decided to put itself decisively on the right side of history by trying to own the decision. “But yes, at the same time it is planning to increase capacity and sell even more oil,” he helpfully added.
Other more realistic interpretations are available. The world will need as much, if not more, fossil fuel in 2050 as it consumes today, and its biggest customers will be those who are too virtuous to drill and frack the hydrocarbons for themselves. As is usually the case, the meek are unlikely to inherit the Earth. Al-Jaber might have slightly underestimated the type of housing stock available in future ‘Net Zero’ countries – mud and grass huts are suggested in a recent United Nations report, although sustainable caves could occupy a premium niche. With money comes power and all the trophy assets vast wealth can buy. For instance, by 2050 the Gulf Arabs, along with Saudi Arabia, will be able to buy all the football clubs they want. In the end it might just be easier to relocate the entire English Premier League into state-of-the art, air conditioned local stadiums.
Al-Jaber’s remarks blew holes in a ‘settled’ science narrative that has been carefully curated over decades by collectivists aiming to transform global societies with a Net Zero project. A bewildered John Kerry, the U.S. presidential climate envoy, suggested the comments may need “clarification” and “maybe just came out wrong”. Kerry’s irritation showed clearly that Al-Jaber had undermined the fixed idea that reducing human-caused carbon dioxide will somehow stop temperature moving around in a chaotic atmosphere. Despite 50 years of trying, scientists have yet to produce conclusive proof that humans control the climate thermostat. A rival hypothesis that trace gases such as CO2 ‘saturate’ past certain levels and lose much of their warming abilities has the advantage of offering an explanation for the absence of an obvious temperature-CO2 link over the last 600 million years.
For alarmists, Al-Jaber’s linking of his remarks with the 1.5°C limit was very unfortunate. The idea that humans need to cap a rise in global temperature to 1.5°C is an invented number designed to invoke panic and concentrate the political mind. The setting of an arbitrary target is credited to IPCC lead author and former climate adviser to Angela Merkel, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. At first he set the limit at 2°C, and in 2010 he was asked by Der Speigel why he had imposed the “magical limit” to which all countries must adhere. In reply, Schellnhuber said: “Politicians like to have clear targets and a simple number is easier to handle.” The ploy was so successful that it was ratcheted down to a scarier 1.5°C to persuade politicians to sign the Paris climate agreement in 2015.
Again, none of this is based on science. The rise of 1.1°C since the lifting of the Little Ice Age is tiny in climatic terms and to be expected after hundreds of years of slowly declining temperatures. In the cyclical historical record of the last few thousand years, temperatures were similar in Medieval and Roman times, while observational evidence from the mid Holocene suggests large rises of around 3-4°C
Rowlatt’s copy is of interest since it hints at the dawning realisation that a world without the power provided by hydrocarbons is impossible to achieve. He quotes the new head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Professor Jim Skea who explains that stopping the temperature rise will mean getting rid of unabated coal completely. But, in Skea’s view, the world of Net Zero will still need 40% and 55% of its current oil and gas supplies respectively. Rowlatt picks up on the word ‘abated’, noting that the technology to do that “does not exist at anywhere near the scale needed”. This is the guiding “science” that Al-Jaber is talking about, concludes Rowlatt, at a time when the Gulf States sell huge quantities of oil and gas to power-starved Western countries leading the way to Net Zero.
For some inexplicable reason, Rowlatt fails to channel similar understanding when campaigning to ban fossil fuel exploration in the U.K. And to think of all the jobs and wealth that might have been created if frackers had got on with fracking, while an understanding press praised their scientific credentials and were happy to waffle on about unworkable abatement technologies.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Chris Morrison, have you seen this? A paper with evidence that the sun affects the climate, not carbon.
https://x.com/NikolovScience/status/1825929760175739247
And we had the recent papers by Kubicki et al that set the saturation point for CO2 to affect the atmosphere at 300ppm – we currently have 400ppm.
Which leaves ECS as the only possible “culprit” – and estimates of this get lower by the year
“it is not an effective decarbonisation tool for use in homes and buildings”——-But along the coast from where I live in a town called Buckhaven over 200 residents have been having hydrogen piped into their houses to replace gas central heating. They were given free boiler etc. One resident according to a friend who lives in that scheme has refused to accept the bribe because he did his sums and realised that the cost of the hydrogen would be excessive. There was also an article in the Herald that reported the company installing this would not release safety data. —-Go figure.
Philipsfield Secondary Modern, 1st year Physics lesson:
“Now class, today’s challenge revolves around our previous discussions about conservation of energy –
Would it be more sensible to take a highly concentrated form of energy – petrol – to directly power cars or instead use a weak and unreliable form of energy – wind – to generate electricity which would in turn be used in the highly energy-intensive process of extracting hydrogen from water, this leaky and volatile substance eventually being used to power an entire new fleet of vehicles which everyone would be obliged to buy to replace their current ones with?”
The teacher looked at the sea of bemused faces before cracking into a broad grin “Trick question, of course!”
Green hydrogen will be created by the electrolysis of water using “spare” wind and solar electricity. Then it will be stored to provide ‘battery’ back-up when the wind and solar electricity is not available, whereupon the green hydrogen will be burnt in gas-fired power stations to produce electricity…. emitting ‘green’ CO2.
Now class: write a 200 word essay on the scientific and economic idiocy of this project.
My essay: The whole concept is fantasy, science fiction and economic nonsense! There my synopsis powers must be great! The other 190 odd words would simply describe the idiots behind all this in very unpleasant terms.
Re stratospheric water vapour … surely we just need to develop a satellite constellation of giant dehumidifiers and put them into orbit … powered by solar panels … pipe the captured water back into the ocean. C’mon man, use science creatively!
No, no!. There’s too much water in the Pacific already. António said so. Have to pipe it to the Moon instead.
Already in hand. Those ‘planned’ huge orbiting solar panels can be used to focus on the stratospheric water vapour and boil it off into space.
Water vapour in the stratosphere would gradually form huge clouds of ice and already be there. There is no water vapour at -60C or lower! All the water collects at about 20,000 feet or less as you will have noticed if you travel by plane. Water state changes are controlled by temperature, ie. steam, water vapour, liquid, ice. The air is very dry when the temperature is below zero, now why is that? Because water vapour condenses to water at 0C.
Let us imagine that the UK solves the problems of making Green hydrogen, and the problems of distributing it and burning it safely and creates working hydrogen storage caverns (oh come on, that’s only three impossible things and you should have finished breakfast already)…
Brilliant: we’ve solved our ‘fossil fuel problem’.
However, what of the rest of the world? Many countries won’t be as lucky as the UK to have geology suitable for hydrogen storage. They will either have to give up the Green madness* or they will develop some other as yet unknown technical ‘solution’ to energy generation, distribution and consumption. If we go down the salt cavern storage road we’ll be in a technological dead end; we need to adopt a ‘solution’ which can be applied worldwide.
The new technology to pursue is fusion – it’s only 30 years away they say. Meanwhile we have a good working technology in natural gas.
*Of course, to actually give up the Green madness other countries would have to have been paying a bit more than lip-service to it.
Fusion has been ‘only’ 30 years away every year of my life since I was about 15 years old – I’m now 71. It is the energy of the future and always will be.
Spot on. 🙂
But fusion power is more realistic than hydrogen storage under Cheshire.
You have to handle hydrogen with extreme care to get it to explode. Let it loose in the atmosphere and it’s so light it will escape the Earth into space. The Hindenberg burned it didn’t go boom. People typically trap it in an upside down test-tube to create an explosive mixture of hydrogen and oxygen.
Such anti-science alarmism.
The alternative version of the Hindenberg is that it was shot at with an incendiary bullet, fired by a Moe Berg.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319922056440
The linked article seems to suggest that it is fairly easy to ‘get it wrong’ with hydrogen.
Must have taken a lot of fire-lighters then to get the Sun going.
Hydrogen gas is highly flammable and forms an explosive mixture in air in concentrations of between 4% and 74%.
In a confined space such as a kitchen or living room – I think you will get your ‘boom’ due to the rapid compression of the air, should it ignite, just as you do with natural gas, but it will ‘boom’ at lower concentrations in air than natural gas.
Hydrogen gas cannot defy gravity and fly off into space: Exhibit A – that big ball of hydrogen in tte sky called the Sun.
“Blackouts and severe rationing will be inevitable”.
Rationing is a feature of the system, not a bug.
And what has this to do with green hydrogen? Is hydrogen from other sources and better?
Tomorrow we will reveal how organically grown tobacco damages your health.
a modern industrial society
The mistake is to think that this is what Militwat wants.
And from this article clearly the Millipede has no clue whatsoever about how his utopia can be achieved.
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/stark-sends-out-sos
It is a mistake to assume Socialists want to replace what exists with something better – destruction of what we have is the reward.
Just like vandals who destroy a bus shelter or park bench, they don’t want to replace them with something better, it’s just the sheer joy of destroying that thrills.
All in all, hydrocarbons look like a good alternative to renewables. Better cars and lorries, there when needed, less environmental impact, way cheaper, tiny footprint, pipework there for gas, grid there for electricity.
This is huge, surely! How can the media not be shoving this under the nose of glazed-over nutcases like Miliband? But they won’t – and even if they do, the glow of the Soros billions will outshine it.
If there is no climate emergency, why even bother to discuss hydrogen?
‘There is no cost effective, feasible, reliable and scalable replacement for hydrocarbons.’ Eh? Has CM never heard of Small Modular Reactors? They tick all his boxes. Oil for most forms of transport, gas for heating and cooking, SMRs to produce electricity – job done.
Good article, but those of us who say this kind of thing to Government are regularly cancelled. The lack of scientific knowledge in Government, the CS etc. is astounding, and the lack of interest even worse. This should all be put to Millibrain in a prime time TV programme at least half an hour long, so that he might understand! No chance the BBc though, they are worse if that is possible.
Marvellous article. Another dead end for the Net Zero madness.
Bravo.
Superb article clearly showing the deliberate catastrophe being engineered by these fraudsters.
For anyone interested, here’s a link to the many graphs etc I have collected re AGW over the years
https://www.mediafire.com/file/uo35er4g4lzni0e/Images.zip/file
And also Javier Vinos series on the sun and climate, published on Judith Curry’s blog
https://www.mediafire.com/file/dnvi9tpchuddyl5/NatureUnbound.pdf/file
323 pages long – but written with the lay person in mind