Three things stand out about the climate crisis. The climate crisis is:
- An illusion.
- Not our fault.
- Nauseatingly expensive to fix.
Apart from that, it’s all perfectly reasonable [sarcasm alert]. But if you like to keep tabs on things that could bring down our civilisation, you should know a bit about it — particularly the solid reasons not to believe the alarm.
One reason for disbelief is that not a single element in weather records has yet transgressed the bounds of natural variability. Everything is normal! The IPCC admit this in their reports, although sometimes it’s tucked away and hard to find. However, I’ve heard rumours that in next year’s AR6, temperatures projected for 2100 are higher than in AR5, after decades of being reduced in each successive report.
Nightmares of vegetarian bed-wetters
If true, this is a scientific disaster, for high temperatures originate ONLY in the NOT-FIT-FOR-PURPOSE RCP8.5. This unrealistic scenario indulges the worst dystopian nightmares of Green vegetarian bed-wetters. There’s no other scenario like it, no other reason to expect dangerous temperatures and no reason to suppose that a single factor from the RCP8.5 scenario for 2100 will materialise.
In the actual world, places everywhere are setting hot and cold records at the same time (but not in the same places!), which is normal and no cause for concern. Climate is a crisis only in Dreamworld and some damp beds.
The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to carbon dioxide is proving to be very low, even though there is robust scientific debate on where in the likely range between 1.5°C and 4.5°C ECS might prove to be.
EU self-destructing
The climate crisis is so expensive to fix that the EU is right now practically self-destructing just trying to get some sort of internal agreement on a climate plan. And that’s repeated outside the EU, with nations routinely failing to agree what to do about it. Witness the condensed Paris Agreement:
“We think we can change the weather, and we promise to lower the planet’s surface temperature by 1.5°C, no worries. But China (27.2% of global emissions) and India (6.8%) don’t have to, cos they refused, neither does the US (14.6%) cos they’re pulling out. All right, we’ll try for 2°C if we can. Russia (4.7%) is the fourth highest emitter, and those top four create over 53.3% of all our emissions (psst, is that a lot?). We promise to do our best and we mean that, so we’ll come back every year and meet you all again. This whole matter is very, very important and we mean that. But we won’t make it legally binding, it’s unreasonable.
– Paris Agreement (condensed)
Hopeless. Since we might control no more than about 46.7% of the emissions, the best we can hope for is to defer maybe half the expected warming, yet people crank on about how we have to try harder, and keep trying and we can do it, we can, we can — when none of it’s true.
This Zero Carbon project isn’t a matter of belief, it’s a matter of science and engineering. Those are cold, hard disciplines not normally receptive to shouting, earnest entreaties, signed confessions, religious texts, psychology, sentiment or citing what grandad did during the Depression, WWII, Woodstock or the fall of the Berlin Wall. In other words, you need evidence and reason.
In New Zealand, Government modelling expects us to spend $200–$300 billion over 30 or more years of ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’ and reap a reward of that warm, cosy feeling of having projected our inner virtue. That’s not good enough.
The Greens will find that when they post the invoice for their Green dreams we won’t accept it because it’ll be too high.
Basically, nobody can prove it’s our fault — even the IPCC refuses to produce proof — but that doesn’t really matter, because only the whole world working efficiently for several decades without once stopping can fix it. Look at the world: does that look remotely possible? Of course not. In many countries the Greens struggle even to get into government, because when the electors finally agree with the climate nonsense, they seldom want the socialism they have to swallow too.
So if the Greens can’t rule the world, they can’t make the world fight the climate and that’s the end of that.
Dr Bjorn Lomborg
Click to enlarge
In 2017, Bjorn Lomborg concluded that the Paris Agreement would do little to tackle climate change, it was incredibly costly, it was a terrible way to do things and Trump was right to take the US out of it. The full impact of the Agreement — or rather the sheer futility of it — is shown graphically in his press release of November 2015:
Lomborg concluded that global costs of trying to defer some expected warming would be high, but have no measurable effect:
This year, the world will spend $US162 billion ($230bn) subsidising renewable energy, propping up inefficient industries and supporting middle-class homeowners to erect solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition, the Paris Agreement on climate change will cost the world from $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year by 2030. Astonishingly, neither of these hugely expensive policies will have any measurable impact on temperatures by the end of the century.
Amazing
Greta Thunberg has received the inaugural Gulbenkian Prize for Humanity of €1,000,000. That’s a lot of money, so well done her.
Thing is, we (humanity) provided that prize, which was awarded for “contributions to mitigation and adaptation to climate change [that] stand out for [their] novelty, innovation and impact,” only to discover that we ourselves are not merely “contributing” but paying everything to mitigate and adapt to climate change, which turns out to be imaginary, yet we remain unrecognized while paying a trillion times more than this merely to pretend to fix it.
Could life become any more futile?
h/t Prof Tom Sheahen
Views: 6
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/bjorn-lomborg-false-alarm-joseph-stiglitz.html
The thesis of Bjorn Lomborg’s “False Alarm” is simple and simplistic: Activists have been sounding a false alarm about the dangers of climate change. If we listen to them, Lomborg says, we will waste trillions of dollars, achieve little and the poor will suffer the most. Science has provided a way to carefully balance costs and benefits, if we would only listen to its clarion call. And, of course, the villain in this “false alarm,” the boogeyman for all of society’s ills, is the hyperventilating media. Lomborg doesn’t use the term “fake news,” but it’s there if you read between the lines.
As with others in Lomborg’s camp, there’s the pretense in this book of balance and reference to careful studies. Yes, climate change is real. Yes, we should do something about it. But, goes his message, let’s be real, there are other problems, too. Resources are scarce. The more money we spend on climate change, the less we have to grow the economy; and as we all know (or do we?) everybody benefits from growth, especially the poor. And besides, there’s not much we can do about climate change.
He’s not completely fatalistic. He urges imposing a carbon tax and investing much more on innovation, both good ideas, although neither is a panacea, especially since the carbon price he suggests is far too low. Among the many contradictions within the book is that while he seems to say that innovation may be our savior, he also suggests that the model he relies on shows that we’ve invested all we wisely can in innovation. We’ve done all we should. Evidently, we’re supposed to pray that nature be more forgiving as it bestows good fortune on our research efforts. [continues]
New research suggests that the equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely between 2.3 and 4.5 K, and very likely to be between 2.0 and 5.7 K.
https://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/abs/sh02800e.html
Yes, suggest it they do. Sherwood and Watanabe are quoted in The New York Times commenting on their new paper. Also Andrew Dessler, not an author, who tries to tell us they used evidence to predict future temperatures. My first thought was, “Have they found evidence from the future?”
But no, the modelling fairies have just been running their models again. Somebody needs to drive into their silly heads that the output of unverified models is no kind of evidence. Unverified means untrusted, unskilled, wrong, biased in many dimensions. If a verified climate model existed, all of the teams except one would ditch their own model and use the correct one. For ever. And we’d believe it.
So coming here and repeating earnestly “the equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely between 2.3 and 4.5 K, and very likely to be between 2.0 and 5.7 K” is supremely unimpressive. Who cares what the model says? Do you have any idea what myriad assumptions were given to the models they used? Do you realise that no model calculates the climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide, but it is parameterised, as is the production of clouds (though the IPCC still doesn’t know even the sign of cloud feedback to warming).
Don’t get me wrong, models are useful. But in niche areas not in getting our knickers in a knot about predicted temperature around 2100. I need a lie-down.
This paper that you refer to does not say that Simon.
You always want the worst outcome don’t you ?
It states that climate sensitivity is likely between 2.3K and 4.5K .
Read the paper Simon, they have narrowed the climate sensitivity downwards but they also admit they don’t really know that much .
They are still guessing and using models and as they can see their models are running far to hot they have come up with this and are tuning them to a lower climate sensitivity.
It does not say very likely 2.0 to 5.7 but they are closer to actual science on the lower figure of 2.0k or even lower .
Graham
CD, I’m not sure what you’re saying here. Lomborg’s all right, perhaps, but not entirely solid? Too much scepticism evident?
What do you mean by [continues]?
Hitting the pockets of the people in the ‘developed’ countries of the world was always the UN climate alarmists’ plan. Leading IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer let the cat out of the bag on 14th November 2010 in a now-famous interview reported by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Here are some telling quotes from it:
“Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War….”
“But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy….”
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore,…”
How does the UN intend to achieve the redistribution of the 1st World’s wealth to the 3rd World? By voluntary donations, perhaps? Not according to Edenhofer. As Jo Nova observes (with a quote from another part of the interview):
“Remember how carbon trading is going to make us rich, provide jobs and grow the economy? Edenhoffer, economic advisor to the UN, admits the problem is that countries will be better off if they don’t sign up for the UN climate deals, and that’s why they need ‘penalties and incentives’.”
‘penalties and incentives’ means ‘carrot and stick’, i.e. manipulation and coercion! Read the interview at the link (fear not, it’s quite short) and you will see that Edenhofer considers this tyrannical approach to enabling the UN to achieve its globalist wealth-redistributing goals to be perfectly ethical.
You couldn’t make it up, could you?
Thanks, Rick. I’ve had people recently assuring me of the essential good will of the United Nations. You remind us that their actual intentions are solidly anti-democratic and they have no kindred feelings whatsoever.
Graham,
Simon says,
There seem to be two main aims behind Simon’s remarks here. One is, as you suggest, to highlight the alarming, worst-case possibilities in events and research. But the other is simply to goad sceptics. He’s never answered our substantive questions and especially not those that might damage the UN global warming theories. He turns away every time, even though he appears to have some good scientific and, I think, mathematical knowledge. But at least he talks to us.