Throwing down the gauntlet...
Can the climate alarmists justify their demonisation of CO2 and other GHGs?
There actually is an emergency relating to the climate, but it is not the one that they tell you about on the BBC or in the mainstream newspapers.
The emergency is that people are not screaming the house down about the insanity of the ‘centrist’ Net Zero strategy that the establishment is foisting on this country.
Because there is nothing ‘centrist’ - or pragmatic - about pursuing policies that are unachievable, will bankrupt the country and destroy our energy security. Nor is there anything rational in being ‘absolutely committed’ to Net Zero, as our Prime Minister recently proclaimed. This is an especially acute issue when the underlying justification for said policies is based on a flawed sacrament, namely that man-made emissions of CO2 (and other GHGs) are creating a climate catastrophe.
Those that still nod along to the mantra that CO2 is pollution - or that man-made GHGs are causing a climate catastrophe - are essentially supporting those that wish us to ‘drink the kool-aid’.
It really is a great mischief that is being perpetrated.
The climate alarmist creed is riven with the deepest of contradictions, and it is telling that the proponents of this creed seem to shriek ever louder at us ‘deniers’. Centrists - perhaps not willing (or too comfortable?) to stand up to the ‘consensus’ - seek to water down the worst excesses by playing along, hoping to cushion the blows. But in doing so they are just entrenching the unjustifiable. Which bullies were ever successfully challenged by complicity?
My latest piece in Reaction outlines in straightforward terms:
How climate and weather reporting has been hijacked to twist the message and promote vested interests;
How even the latest modelling and scenario planning from the IPCC expect a benign outcome for the rest of the century, i.e. a gentle temperature rise;
That this temperature rise - even if we are lucky enough (!) for it to come to pass - is by no means guaranteed, as these models have been both consistently wrong and are being shown to be flawed;
That recent history indicates that the risks are still to the downside, i.e. that rapid drops in temperature are what we should be worried about;
Yet more evidence (adding to that presented previously) that casts doubt on GHGs being the main causative effect of climate changes since the industrial revolution; and
Some robust rebuttals of some very weak ‘ad hominem’ / ‘guilt by association’ attempts to discredit my arguments carefully laid out in previous articles.
Regarding that last bullet, a line that didn’t make it into the final version was this:
“All I have to say is that usually the only reason for playing the man is that you are not skilful enough to play the ball”.
Man-made CO2 is not guilty. Ditto for other man-made GHGs, e.g. by-products of burning fossil fuels as well as methane releases.
As someone who spent over a year of my life working for a menial wage as a sub-sub-junior technical assistant working on one of the most genuinely exciting low carbon and renewable energy generation technologies (nuclear fusion via magnetic confinement of plasma), and who is (somewhat hopelessly) idealistic about stewarding natural resources, protecting ecosystems and ‘looking after our planet’, I am appalled at the damage being done by GHG-demonising climate alarmists. It is akin to cult behaviour: whales emit CO2, so they must be culled. Germany switches off perfectly functioning nuclear power stations and then restarts filthy brown coal-burning power plants.
These things do not make sense. And they do not make sense because they are based on pseudo-religeous death-cult belief in a flawed doctrine, a McNamaran fallacy of the highest order: to save the planet, we need to destroy ourselves.
Yet we are saving ourselves not from oblivion, but - according to the IPCC, no less! - from a more benign future than we currently inhabit, as per accepted historical fact:
In the context of the last 10,000 years – noting the Medieval Warm Period (1 degree warmer, a millennium ago) and the Climatic Optimum (2.5 degrees warmer, 5-8 millennia ago), the newly reduced IPCC temperature prognosis for the end of the century is a relative triviality.
… the Medieval Warm Period was a time of relative plenty in the UK. Robert Tombs describes a Shakespearean “well good land”: “The population tripled in 200 years, reaching… a level not attained again until the eighteenth century…people on average were taller than in the early nineteenth century (the low point) but slightly smaller than today…this reflects diet and health throughout childhood”. He goes on to describe what happened next: “In the second half of the thirteenth century, a disastrous fall in global temperature began, whether due to a series of volcanic eruptions or changing solar activity. It caused extreme weather fluctuations and poorer harvests round the globe”.
The inference here is that the risk is to the downside. A sudden drop in global temperatures would be catastrophic, and as Tombs points out, temperatures can – and have – fallen rapidly and disastrously, whatever today’s self-proclaimed climate ‘experts might claim. The current scientific projections of a gentle increase in temperatures by 1.5 (or even 2) degrees should elicit a shoulder shrug, an appreciation of a greening world (good for crop yields!), and some sensible contingency planning, not societal self-immolation while the rest of the world looks on, chuckling to themselves at our stupidity. As others have pointed out, it is only the West that is tossing away energy security. The poorest will suffer the most.
I agree entirely with John Sullivan - a 40 year energy industry veteran - who has written an open letter to the Prime Minister, spelling out in stark terms what befalls us if we do not radically change course:
Net Zero is unachievable, by 2050 or by any date this century. In theory, a programme to achieve Net Zero would cost the UK the astronomical sum of £2.5 Trillion, doubling our national debt in the process. In practice however - as an undertaking at least 2 orders of magnitude (100x) more complex that the HS2 farce - it is completely undeliverable. At present, we do not even have the core of a credible plan.
The entire thing is a fiction cooked up long ago… It was based on a kernel of truth - that CO₂ is a greenhouse gas - but there is, and has never been, any genuine evidence either that CO₂ is the principal driver of climate or that a small increase in global temperature will be exclusively (or even primarily) a bad thing.
Please start the debate with your friends, family and colleagues, and galvanise a proper pushback. “Let’s just implement the madness on a slightly longer timetable” is not going to be enough to avert disaster.
The JET Tokamak: the future of energy generation (nuclear fusion - clean, safe and plentiful!)
Sensible as ever. I do discuss this regularly but with the exception of one family, find I am preaching to the converted....but I fear for the children currently being taught in schools. They are being force fed a diet of lies and alarmist nonsense, and I fear many parents (unlike us) fail to correct the indoctrination at home.