Recent calculations by the distinguished atmospheric scientists Richard Lindzen, William Happer and William van Wijngaarden suggest that if the entire world eliminated net carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 it would avert warming of an almost unmeasurable 0.07°C. Even assuming the climate modelled feedbacks and temperature opinions of the politicised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the rise would be only 0.28°C. Year Zero would have been achieved along with the destruction of economic and social life for eight billion people on Planet Earth. “It would be hard to find a better example of a policy of all pain and no gain,” note the scientists.
In the U.K., the current General Election is almost certain to be won by a party that is committed to outright warfare on hydrocarbons. The Labour party will attempt to ‘decarbonise’ the electricity grid by the end of the decade without any realistic instant backup for unreliable wind and solar except oil and gas. Britain is sitting on huge reserves of hydrocarbons but new exploration is to be banned. It is hard to think of a more ruinous energy policy, but the Conservative governing party is little better. Led by the hapless May, a woman over-promoted since her time running the education committee on Merton Council, through to Buffo Boris and Washed-Out Rishi, its leaders have drunk the eco Kool-Aid fed to them by the likes of Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion and the Swedish Doom Goblin. Adding to the mix in the new Parliament will be a likely 200 new ‘Labour’ recruits with university degrees in buggerallology and CVs full of parasitical non-jobs in the public sector.
Hardly any science knowledge between them, they even believe that they can spend billions of other people’s money to capture CO2 – perfectly good plant fertiliser – and bury it in the ground. As a privileged, largely middle class group, they have net zero understanding of how a modern industrial society works, feeds itself and creates the wealth that pays their unnecessary wages. All will be vying to save the planet and stop a temperature rise that is barely a rounding error on any long-term view.
They plan to cull the farting cows, sow wild flowers where food once grew, take away efficient gas boilers and internal combustion cars and stop granny visiting her grandchildren in the United States. On a wider front, banning hydrocarbons will remove almost everything from a modern society including many medicines, building materials, fertilisers, plastics and cleaning products. It might be shorter and easier to list essential items where hydrocarbons are absent than produce one where they are present. Anyone who dissents from their absurd views is said to be in league with fossil fuel interests, a risible suggestion given that they themselves are dependent on hydrocarbon producers to sustain their enviable lifestyles.
Unlike politicians the world over who rant about fire and brimstone, Messrs Lindzen, Happer and van Wijngaarden pay close attention to actual climate observations and analyses of the data. Since it is impossible to determine how much of the gentle warming of the last two centuries is natural or caused by higher levels of CO2, they assume a ‘climate sensitivity’ – rise in temperature when CO2 doubles in the atmosphere – of 0.8°C. This is about four times less than IPCC estimates, which lacks any proof. Understandably the IPCC does not make a big issue of this lack of crucial proof at the heart of the so-called 97% anthropogenic ‘consensus’.
The 0.8°C estimate is based on the idea that greenhouse gases like CO2 ‘saturate’ at certain levels and their warming effect falls off a logarithmic cliff. This idea has the advantage of explaining climate records that stretch back 600 million years since CO2 levels have been up to 10-15 times higher in the past compared with the extremely low levels observed today. There is little if any long term causal link between temperature and CO2 over time. In the immediate past record there is evidence that CO2 rises after natural increases in temperature as the gas is released from warmer oceans.
Any argument that the Earth has a ‘boiling’ problem caused by the small CO2 contribution that humans make by using hydrocarbons is ‘settled’ by an invented political crisis, but is backed by no reliable observational data. Most of the fear-mongering is little more than a circular exercise using computer models with improbable opinions fed in, and improbable opinions fed out.
The three scientists use a simple formula using base-two logarithms to assess the CO2 influence on the atmosphere based on decades of laboratory experiments and atmospheric data collection. They demonstrate how trivial the effect on global temperature will be if humanity stops using hydrocarbons. After years wasted listening to Greta Thunberg, the message is starting to penetrate the political arena. In the United States, the Net Zero project is dead in the water if Trump wins the Presidential election. In Europe, the ruling political elites, both national and supranational, are retreating on their Net Zero commitments. Reality is starting to dawn and alternative political groupings emerge to challenge the comfortable insanity of Net Zero virtue signalling. In New Zealand, the nightmare of the Ardern years is being expunged with a roll back of Net Zero policies ahead of possible electricity black outs.
Only in Britain it seems are citizens prepared to elect a Government obsessed with self-inflicted poverty and deindustrialisation. The only major political grouping committed to scrapping Net Zero is the Nigel Farage-led Reform party and although it could beat the ruling Conservatives into second place in the popular vote, it is unlikely to secure many Parliamentary seats under the U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Only a few years ago the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who thinks some women have penises, and his imbecilic Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, were bending the knee to an organisation that wanted to cut funding for the police and fling open the borders. The new British Parliament will have plenty of people who still support Net Zero and assorted woke woo woo, and the great tragedy is that they will still be found across most of the represented political parties.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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What problem is this “warming” meant to cause?
The kind of ‘warming’ that resolves when you throw money at it.
The straight answer is, of course, that some people have read in the news that some other people in places like India have died of being too warm – and they therefore think we should all do something about it.
Every country that publishes short term (weekly) mortality data shows that cooler/colder seasons coincide with increased mortality and vice versa. I wouldn’t claim nobody ever died of being too warm but the numbers are far outweighed by the count of deaths from being too cold.
India does not produce reliable weekly mortality stats. If they did I expect that cooler seasons would see higher mortality than hotter seasons. They are not well enough developed; they have only just cracked giving almost all their citizens electric power for lighting and phones – let alone enough power to run fridges to keep food safe to eat and cookers to cook it properly (though they have got a space industry).
What the policies against warming seek to achieve is incompatible with many countries’ drive to develop further. At best they’re misguided. At worst, evil.
Indeed; thanks.
I thought the bullshit reasons were to do with coastal areas being submerged by the oceans, maybe certain areas getting less rain than they used to, others more, not being able to grow what you used to grow – the kind of changes that have always happened, to which humans (and the living things that came before us) have had to adapt.
I don’t think they grow much in the way of food in Delhi. The urban heat island effect will be something fierce though. Something like 34m people in the metropolitan area:
Source
No wonder Delhi’s power consumption has hit an all-time high.
Indeed
Perhaps rather than destroying our economy they could spread out a bit more or build homes that manage temperature more efficiently
When I visited Sri Lanka in 2015. in the middle of nowhere, I was amazed that this small rural hut had a TV. They had hydroelectric Dam in the area.
Hydro seems like a smart option – always on. Don’t know what the lifespan is though and whether you get your money back over the lifespan, nor what the environmental impact is.
Most hydro installations – small or large – are custom built, and involve significant civil engineering works. So they are expensive to build. When there were subsidies for wind and solar, which hydro also received, hydro could be a successful investment, albeit with a breakeven p/kWh somewhere in the high 20’s and upwards [of which the subsidy typically provided 75%]. Hydro could still be successful now – the technology is very mature – but with electricity prices going up and down like a whore’s drawers on Navy Day, no-one will risk the capital. Certainly, no user of electricity will commit to pay >35p/kWh for 20 years when, in the last year [and despite the MSM rubbish about Ukraine and whatever latest crisis the MSM are promoting] there have been times when it has almost been impossible to give electricity away in the UK
Norway, who use a lot of hydro, seems to have reasonably low wholesale electricity prices but that might not reflect recouping the initial investment cost. It may depend on geography.
Slightly unique case – huge mountains, lots of rain, very old established infrastructure [payback achieved many years ago], low population/demand. Norway has everything!
And I believe a large sovereign wealth fund from oil & gas which they have not frittered away, yet….
The environmental impact can be very damaging if too many dams are built on one river. The Mekong is a case in point.
Maybe but in actual fact there is nothing at all unusual about current temperature or climate. —–Climate is just the excuse for the policies that seek to control the worlds wealth and resources amidst concern about population growth. ——-There is this Malthusian type of fear that there are too many people in the world using up a finite fossil fuel resource in the ground, and the western world who have used up mor than their fair share of that are to stop doing that first and use wind and sun instead. This ofcourse involves a huge lowering of living standards for the wealthy western populations, and therefore a massive propaganda exercise is required by politicians and their supporting media to convince us all there is a “climate emergency” where real world data indicate there is NONE.
The problem of “the little people” having a living standard which the self-selecting “Elite” thinks is too good for them.
Loved this – a tour de force!
The problem is the relentless nature of the propaganda that the planet is warming and we’re all doomed. It comes from (nearly) all politicians, broadcast media, schools and colleges, big corporations, “luvvies” et al. Most people seem to have an unshakeable belief in this false “consensus”. How we open more peoples’ eyes – and quickly – is the challenge.
They must open their own eyes. And there are as many triggers as there are people on the planet. But I have come to see that using calm, reasoned argument is never one of those triggers.
It’s easier to fool someone than to convince them they’ve been fooled.
No man-made global warming, instead a man-made scientific wilderness. Faith and belief seemingly more important than empiricism and observation; egotism, self, and ‘my truth’ have become the mainstream. As I reflect on my life, I was one of those given hope by Wilson’s speech in the early 60s about harnessing the white heat of technology. What we did not see, did not realise, was that there was another group harnessing the dead hand of stupidity. During the 60s the philosophies of the followers of the Frankfurt School and individuals such as Gramsci and Derrida, were insidiously influencing the teacher training colleges and the humanities departments of our universities with the results that we see today. Yesterday’s attack on Stonehenge is just one graphic example of how far we have fallen.
A huge part of the problem is that there’s no political choice to be exercised on the issue. Climate change was decreed an important issue to be dealt with and End use of fire by humans! was decreed to be the solution to it by legal fiat. Hence, all activist astroturfers need to do is to collect money for lawfare actions from well-oiled international NGO and put them in front of the usual political judges to get another Fiat justicia, pereat mundus! verdict.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cxwwzmn12g9o
The simple way to handle this problem (and quite possibly, the only way) would be to pass a bill of attainder against Tony Blair and decree everything ever done by any New Labour government against the law of the land, effective today at noon. Any attempt to continue any of these politics by anyone to be dealt with by forced shipment to the colonies. The UK has enough overseas territories left to keep thousands of loons busy with subsistence agriculture for the remainder of their lives.
‘Ere! What have the colonies ever done to you?
The people living on the Falklands probably wouldn’t be very happy about this and rightfully so. But that was figuratively spoken and supposed to mean It must be made absolutely clear that future attempts to waste trillions of pounds of other people’s money to try to do something that’s impossible in order to accomplish something that’s not going to matter will not be tolerated.
Insofar the UN was concerned, we’d still all be running around with face masks all day, would still all be doing regular proactive Sars-CoV2 PCR tests and would all line up for a new COVID shot every three months. What stopped them was a resolute We won’t be doing this! in January 2022. And the Global Boiling Project needs to be dealt with in the same way.
The Supreme Court here reversed the 2 lower courts decisions. What can one do when the judges on the Supreme Court go woke. Legatt who gave the main judgement educated at Eton, son of a rather old school Court of Appeal judge, barrister in top commercial chambers, seemed quite sensible when junior counsel in a case I was involved with.
The people that started all this in the Club Of Rome are all dead, but don’t assume the intentions have changed. Like with the Rockefellers’ their legacy is past down.
On the end of GB News last night Adam (think that’s his name) the Pub owner mentioned that the Planet warms in cycles, and Becky to his left said “do you deny climate change”. This stupidity is what we’re up against.
That’s not really stupidity. It’s thoughtlessness, ie, people repeating something which has been hammered into their brains through endless repetition.
But the entire Green charade isn’t about warming and it never has been. It is Eco Socialism pure and simple and here in the UK and all across the western world our parasite politicians (except Trump) are pandering to the UN Sustainable Development Agenda.
Sure, all the silly brainwashed activist groups run around throwing paint and soup at things because they have no clue about climate or energy and have swallowed the whole climate emergency propaganda down like a Herring Gull with your cheeseburger, but from the very start as the Club of Rome put it “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that famine, water shortages and global warming would fit the bill”
Since then the entire political class via the IPCC which was set up in 1988 have sought out and cherry picked everything that would seem to indicate a human influence on climate whist ignoring all of it that didn’t. It is “Official Science”, not “Science”.
The thing that powers Industrial Capitalism is cheap abundant energy, and in order to reshape the world away from the capitalist system the fossil fuels that power the world have to be removed. We see that in the pronouncements of the likes of Klaus Schwab when he talks about it being “our responsibility to bring about the collapse of Industrial Society”.
Just think about that for a second———THE COLLAPSE OF INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY—WOW. ———–Wake up people. It isn’t about the climate——IT NEVER WAS. ——Global warming is “the enemy to unite us”
Totally agree. I first noticed it in early 2000’s as an obvious route to subvert capitalism.
Interesting how the MSM or even GBN will talk about all the policies, yet when George Galloway sparks a chilling prediction, that we would see war in six months with Labour, nobody is picking up the batten apart from Dewbs on GBN for five minutes. If a hot war is n the cards, they would need to reverse the green agenda sharpish!
Net Zero is impossible. Politicians know it is, which is why they had no debate and no discussion of cost. There was not even a vote. They just waved it through in 2019. —–So a policy that affects every aspect of our lives, our prosperity, our health and well being, our life span, our ability to heat and power our homes, what we can eat or drink, where we can and cannot travel etc etc has all been decided by a Political Class poisoned with contempt for the people who vote for them and they went ahead with this eco socialist fraud regardless of what any of us think. We are to have GREEN forced on us, our energy rationed by the smart meter, our gas central heating removed, our perfectly good cars scrapped, our travel in planes stopped, our food intake decided by the carbon emissions it produces and on and on and on but they didn’t even discuss it of vote on it————————-How are they getting away with this? Are the public insane?
I love the comment ‘buggallology’ and Swedish doom goblin. I will remember and use them. Thank you Chris
Yes, an unusually aggressive style: I like it. “Buggerallology” – difficult to spell!
“Only in Britain it seems are citizens prepared to elect a Government obsessed with self-inflicted poverty and deindustrialisation.”
——–
It’s currently impossible to elect a Government which doesn’t intend this. I suppose, in theory, if everyone abstained and refused to vote there would not be a Government but in practice, if even one person voted for one of the Westminster Uni-Party candidates that person would “win.”
But as today’s Supreme Court judgement demonstrated, Blair/Brown’s politicised Big State will over-rule any policy which doesn’t conform to the Globalists’ Agenda and there isn’t a hope in hell of the Not-a-Conservative-Party doing anything about it ….. which is why it’s going to be obliterated on 4 July. It has made itself obsolete.
The best we can currently hope for is that Trump wins and stops the nonsense in the USA. The far less passive populations in continental Europe kick off big-time and the EU is forced to back-track. And the British people, when the Net Zero pain really starts, demonstrate their ability for passive resistance and dig their heels in.
Great article. You are doing such a good job, Chris, in promoting real science to counter the political science we are insulted with everywhere else.
Our half asleep, naive, gullible, brainwashed public suck up this group think climate crisis garbage and still don’t understand that this is not about saving the planet; it’s about money and control.
Carbon credits and bird flu coming down the tracks.
Another excellent article by the excellent Chris Morrison just a pity so few people are taking his arguments on board. “And some seed fell on stony ground” springs to mind except in this case it’s probably “most”.
Great to see some proper scientists wading in.
I have often marvelled at the way the world balances all its many aspects , and wonder if society’s ignorance will be compensated for by a demo of how serious things can really get if you push the envelope too far
Great article as usual Chris. I’m definitely adopting the phrase “with university degrees in buggerallology” by the way. Pure genius