How That ‘Scientific Consensus’ on Climate Change Was ‘Manufactured’
John Stossel
We are told climate change is a crisis, and that there is an “overwhelming scientific consensus.”
“It’s a manufactured consensus,” says climate scientist Judith Curry in my new video. She says scientists have an incentive to exaggerate risk to pursue “fame and fortune.”
She knows about that because she once spread alarm about climate change.
The media loved her when she published a study that seemed to show a dramatic increase in hurricane intensity.
“We found that the percent of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes had doubled,” says Curry. “This was picked up by the media,” and then climate alarmists realized, “Oh, here is the way to do it. Tie extreme weather events to global warming!”
“So, this hysteria is your fault!” I tell her.
“Not really,” she smiles. “They would have picked up on it anyways.”
But Curry’s “more intense” hurricanes gave them fuel.
“I was adopted by the environmental advocacy groups and the alarmists, and I was treated like a rock star,” Curry recounts. “Flown all over the place to meet with politicians.”
But then some researchers pointed out gaps in her research—years with low levels of hurricanes.
“Like a good scientist, I investigated,” says Curry. She realized that the critics were right. “Part of it was bad data. Part of it is natural climate variability.“
Curry was the unusual researcher who looked at criticism of her work and actually concluded: “They had a point.”
Then the Climategate scandal taught her that other climate researchers weren’t so open-minded. Alarmist scientists’ aggressive attempts to hide data suggesting climate change is not a crisis were revealed in leaked emails.
“Ugly things,” says Curry. “Avoiding Freedom of Information Act requests. Trying to get journal editors fired.”
It made Curry realize that there is a “climate change industry” set up to reward alarmism.
“The origins go back to the … U.N. environmental program,” says Curry, adding:
Some U.N. officials were motivated by anti-capitalism. They hated the oil companies and seized on the climate change issue to move their policies along.
The United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Says Curry:
The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change.
Then, the national funding agencies directed all the funding … assuming there are dangerous impacts.
The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about man-made climate change.
This is how “manufactured consensus” happens. Even if a skeptic did get funding, it’s harder to publish because journal editors are alarmists.
“The editor of the journal Science wrote this political rant,” says Curry. She even said, “The time for debate has ended.”
“What kind of message does that give?” adds Curry. Then she answers her own question:
Promote the alarming papers! Don’t even send the other ones out for review. If you wanted to advance in your career, like be at a prestigious university and get a big salary, have big laboratory space, get lots of grant funding, be director of an institute, there was clearly one path to go.
That’s what we’ve got now—a massive government-funded climate alarmism complex.
https://www.dailysignal.com/2023/08/09/fake-climate-change-consensus
************************************************Europe’s summer of climate hysteria
If the British weather were a person with bank accounts, it would by now likely find itself, like Nigel Farage, ‘de-banked’ for political incorrectness.
While the BBC has gone into hysterics over the hot summer in southern Europe, further north the British weather has stubbornly refused to co-operate with the Green warming narrative. Temperatures for much of the summer have barely reached those of a winter’s day in Canberra. Much of the British media has tied itself in knots trying to explain why, if the world just had its hottest July ever, and is, in the words of UN Secretary-General Gutteres, ‘boiling’, everyone in Britain is wearing jumpers and has the heating on.
As the media have pulled out all the stops to stir climate fear, Australians will recognise echoes of the ABC’s coverage of the 2019-20 bushfires – especially the silence about revelations that Europe’s recent ‘wildfires’ were fuelled by Green-tinged failures to backburn and were started in many cases by arsonists.
Sadly a watershed moment has been reached: you can no longer trust Europe’s weather forecasts and readings. Many of the BBC’s forecasts in mid-July for southern Europe proved wildly exaggerated. For example, on 18 July, it reported Sardinia was expected that day to see a high of 46 degrees and that ‘there are warnings that extreme heat could continue for a further 10 days’. In fact, Sardinia peaked at 40 and temperatures then fell steadily to the low-30s over the following week.
Much of the hyperbole appears to have been based on a swifty pulled by the European Space Agency (ESA), on which many media outlets rely for weather forecasts. On 13 July it issued a press release claiming that the ‘air temperature’ of Sardinia and Sicily was ‘expected’ to climb to 48 degrees, ‘potentially the hottest temperatures ever recorded in Europe’. In Sicily in fact it never went above 35 degrees. Unusually, the 13 July ESA press release, updated five days later, claimed that land temperatures in the 40s and 50s had been recorded across southern Europe in the previous days. The standard measurement of temperature is that of the air, made two metres above the ground. Land temperatures will of course always be many degrees higher, as anyone who has walked barefoot on a concrete footpath in summertime Australia will know. The ESA’s 48 degree forecast of the ‘air’ temperature in southern Italy was obviously an error – in reality it was the forecast land temperature. The forecast was never corrected, went unnoticed by most in the media and was repeated around the world.
Yet despite the unrelenting propaganda, European voters continue to defy the climate lobby’s plan to make them colder and poorer. Voters over the past year have given the Green-left a bloody nose at virtually every opportunity – in national and regional elections in Italy, Sweden, Finland, Greece and Germany. The Netherlands might join that list after elections later this year – the Farmer-Citizen Movement recently came out of nowhere against the government’s Green jihad on farming and is on course to influence policy as the country’s equal-largest party. Meanwhile in Spain, the elections in July saw a major swing to the right against the ultra-eco Socialists, even if it wasn’t enough this time to unseat them.
By contrast Britain’s left defeated the Tories at two of last month’s three by-elections – largely because grumpy Conservative voters failed to turn out. But the result which has had the most political impact is the Tories’ surprise retention of Boris Johnson’s former seat in outer London, Uxbridge and South Ruislip. Fought more or less solely on London’s Labour Mayor Sadiq Khan’s planned expansion of the city’s ‘Ultra Low-emission Zone’ (ULEZ) – which would mean owners of older cars would be hit with green levies – it has allowed the Tories to glimpse a possible path to victory at next year’s general election.
While ULEZ is not directly related to the net-zero agenda, it has only now dawned on the Tories that while the vast majority of Britons want a cleaner environment, they oppose Green measures involving cost and/or inconvenience. A recent YouGov poll found that while net zero in principle attracted 70 per cent support, if net zero entailed ‘costs for ordinary people’, support fell to just over a quarter.
Since Uxbridge, Prime Minister Sunak has suddenly started portraying himself as ‘pro-motorist’, now opposing ULEZ-like schemes across the country and the proliferation of 20mph speed limits. He’s also suddenly approving new North Sea oil and gas development projects, while attacking Labour as eco-fanatics in bed with extremists like Just Stop Oil.
Over 40 Tory MPs and peers have told Sunak they want him to go further and to defer Boris Johnson’s ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 – a planned measure opposed by 83 per cent of Tory members, according to an opinion poll. Sunak and other members of the Tory establishment for the moment flatly reject this.
Yet panic if the opinion polls don’t shift could lead the Conservatives to shift more dramatically on their net-zero policies. The obvious options are to delay the looming bans on non-electric cars and gas boilers. An even bolder move would be to announce a referendum on net zero, as championed by Nigel Farage and the Daily Telegraph. That would provoke meltdown by much of the British establishment but isn’t inconceivable.
Tony Blair has implied that Labour should also shift on net zero, warning against asking the British public to do a ‘huge amount’ to tackle climate change – ‘Frankly whatever we do in Britain is not really going to impact climate change,’ he declared.
While some on Labour’s right and in the unions would probably support Blair, the party is probably too deeply in bed with the Green metropolitan left to match pragmatic shifts by the Tories.
So however little the Tories relax their net-zero policies, they still should be able to portray Labour as, by comparison, scarier eco-fanatics. Despite their multiple failures in so many areas, especially their inability to get a grip on immigration, the issue might mean the Conservatives are still in with a faint chance at the next election.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/europes-summer-of-climate-hysteria/
**************************************************Just one look
Ian Plimer
The Minister for Climate Change and Energy is well out of his depth, yet he’s ankle-deep at the shallow end of the pool. His climate policies are destroying an economy underpinned by energy and are based on an unbalanced green ideology underpinned by hysterical apocalyptic lies and not science, environmentalism, economics, common sense, or the interests of the nation.
A cheap, reliable electricity system has been replaced with an unreliable horrendously expensive system that profits foreign wind and solar companies and sounds good if one has no knowledge and asks no questions. Knowledge, experience, curiosity, and scepticism are the only way of picking the bones out of the modern information age carnage.
The Minister must have been told that no one has ever shown that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming and that ice cores show that the atmospheric carbon dioxide increased after global warming and hence could not drive warming.
Time with real people would have led the Minister to conclude that we are living in times of mass delusion, universal political and bureaucratic deceit, and censorship. For example, a ‘fact check’ on August 1, 2023 by Facebook declared that my latest book which was being printed at that time was fraud. Either the fact checker was psychic or someone was telling porky pies.
Maybe if the Minister read rigorous science at university rather than the dismal science, he might have absorbed some basics. The past can be understood using sedimentary rocks, fossils, and mineralogy. These give a window into past and present surface processes.
Undergraduate geology shows that all past climate changes have been driven by the position of the continents, the Earth’s orbit, and the energy released by the Sun. The planet’s climate was boiling until oceans formed some 4,000 million years ago. In the past, carbon dioxide has not driven climate change, as shown by the diagram (after Berner). Why should it now?
Over the last 542 million years, despite five major mass extinctions and more than 20 minor mass extinctions of multicellular life, the number of species on Earth has increased. The number of species is still increasing despite frequent extinctions.
Species turnover by extinction is normal whereas conservation of species is not. We humans will join the 99.9 per cent of the other multicellular organisms that have become extinct. The best solution is to mutate now and avoid the rush. Extinction Rebellion will be out of a job, which is not possible as they are unemployable.
The planet has been cooling for the last 50 million years. We have been in an ice age for 34 million years which will end when the continent of Antarctica fragments into micro-continents or moves from the pole. Don’t wait up.
There have been 4 major ice ages over the last 500 million years. Before that, the atmosphere contained 20 per cent carbon dioxide and, during three major ice age events, there were kilometre-thick ice sheets at the equator at sea level. The current and previous ice ages were all initiated when there was far more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than at present. Carbon dioxide did not drive past global warmings. Why should it now?
Since the appearance of multicellular animals and plants 542 and 470 million years ago respectively, there has been a drawdown and sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide into limey rocks, shells, reefs, organic-rich sediments, oil, gas, and coal.
Over the last 500 million years, the atmosphere has decreased from 0.7 per cent carbon dioxide to 0.04 per cent carbon dioxide. During this decrease, plants tried to adapt and C4 plants such as maize and sugar cane evolved to live in an atmosphere with a lower carbon dioxide content.
If the atmospheric carbon dioxide content halves again during one of the future inevitable orbitally-driven glaciations, there would not be enough carbon dioxide in the air to keep plants alive. Do vegans know this? With no plants, there will be no animals and this future extinction will be greater than the largest mass extinction of multicellular life 251.2 million years ago when 96 per cent of all species became extinct.
Will we see the appearance of yet unknown C5 and C6 plants or the evolution of the Earth’s fourth atmosphere comprising inert nitrogen and argon with little or no carbon dioxide and oxygen? Who knows? The ultimate survivors, bacteria, will live on.
When the major coal deposits formed 300 million years ago, there was a huge decrease in atmospheric carbon dioxide and, by burning coal, we put carbon dioxide back to where it came from to be recycled again as plant food. This is environmentally responsible.
Another way to put carbon dioxide back into the air is to drink a fermented fluid. I urge Spectator Australia readers to take this plant-assisting environmentally responsible action as many times as possible. Extinction could be just around the corner and there’s no point in shuffling off with a full cellar or drinking heated wine that has suffered climate boiling.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/just-one-look
****************************************************The lithium delusion: a big problem with big batteries
The development of lithium-ion batteries has changed the concept of energy storage. As their use expands, a potential downside is becoming more apparent, with resulting fires proving difficult to control and human lives being put at risk. House fires, car fires, and ship fires emphasise the scale of the problem.
A recent fire on the Japanese cargo ship Fremantle Highway demonstrated the potential threat. The ship, which was carrying 3,793 cars of which 398 are EVs, burst into flames on July 26. One crew member died and 20 of 22 required hospitalisation. The fire, although its source is yet to be confirmed, is suspected to have come from lithium-ion batteries. It burned for 5 days, but fortunately the damage did not extend below the waterline. The stricken vessel has been safely towed to port. Fighting these fires on land is difficult enough, but in the confines of a ship, is hazardous in the extreme.
This is not an isolated example. There were 209 ship fires in 2022, an increase of 17 per cent in 2021, 13 were car carriers although not all had electric vehicles onboard. An estimated 8 ships have sunk recently with battery fires suspected of playing a role, including the Felicity Ace, with 4,000 cars on board, that sank in 2022. These events compare with around 50 ships sinking each year of varied causes. Insurance premiums are rising and specific measures for EV fires being mandated.
We think of batteries as solar or wind renewable energy storage, but these batteries are now incorporated in a range of devices, including mobile phones, computers, power tools, garden tools, domestic appliances, even torches. In 2021, a torch battery fire was suspected of leading to the loss of a house in Australia. The push for electric vehicles means their number is increasing, with hybrids having a similar risk to full electric vehicles. And it is not only cars. There has been a number of E-scooters and electric skateboards, many cheap with unknown quality controls during manufacturing, sparking fires. The reality is that charging equipment should not be left unattended, although that is a demand unlikely to be fulfilled.
The ACCC is currently investigating product standards, with some imported brands recognised as having an increased risk of overheating and catching fire. A survey of 5,000 homes revealed 2,900 contain potentially risky battery brands and other problems with their overcharging. A further 10,000 batteries were found in need of replacement by the manufacturers, many of which were being used for solar storage. The question of their disposal is also uncertain, with landfill fires a risk. Fires have even been reported in the garbage trucks taking them to the tip, and there are concerns we could see special storage facilities catch alight.
Many Australian stores, such as Aldi, Bunnings, OfficeWorks, and Woolworths have collection points for old batteries, but the potential risk is unappreciated. 99 per cent of lead-acid batteries are recycled, the figure for lithium-ion batteries is roughly 10 per cent, with lithium waste growing by 20 per cent each year. This accumulation is expected to reach 136,000 tonnes in Australia alone, with what risk coming from these storage facilities?
In America, where the standard is being set, figures from New York show the number of battery-related injuries from popular e-bikes is increasing, 13 in 2019, rising to 79 in 2021, and already 114 in 2023. There have also this year been 74 injuries and 13 deaths. In Vancouver, a similar tale is emerging, with battery fires increasing 5-fold since 2016.
Australian figures are also on the rise, with lithium-ion batteries being responsible, in 2022, for 180 fires in NSW, 120 in Victoria, 72 in Queensland, and 59 in WA, countrywide over 450 fires in 18 months. The scale of the risk is increasing dramatically, compounded by 75,000 E-scooters sold in 2022, some of dubious quality, with battery contaminants increasing the threat.
The fire risk occurs primarily, but not only, when batteries are recharging. Other risk factors include storage in hot or wet environments – a hot summer or submersion by flood is sufficient – or physical damage, leading to leakage of the pressurised flammable electrolyte. They are also sensitive to salt in the air during sea voyages. The usual predisposition is overcharging, particularly when using so-called fast chargers, with heat leading to thermal runaway and temperatures up to 500C.
Water is much less effective in controlling these blazes, as much as ten times more, around 150,000 litres, is needed to suppress the flames from a car battery, cool the battery, and prevent the spread to adjacent cells and explosion. Having put out the fire, spontaneous re-ignition has occurred, up to 22 hours later. High performance EV cars can keep catching on fire a week after a crash. As explosions from these types of fire throw burning fragments over 10 metres, it is necessary to store the doused battery at least 20 metres away from other flammable materials.
A new, expensive fire extinguisher, which also works on standard fires, is more effective. The F500 model contains an ‘encapsulating agent’ which interrupts the ‘free radical chain reaction’ – it works! For vehicle fires, a Swedish company suggests an ultra-high pressure water lance, penetrating the battery shell, this may prove an effective alternative.
There have also been problems with giant storage batteries being collected from solar and wind farms. Whilst building the Victorian big battery in 2021, coolant leaked out, and the resulting fire destroyed 2 of the 212 energy storage units. There have been fires at AES facilities in Arizona, the first was in 2019 and the second in 2022, lasted for ten days. A few days ago, a fire at a lithium-ion, solar farm storage facility in New York took 4 days to bring under control. With the highest per capita level of battery storage, and 33 large batteries, Australia is technologically well advanced but, as these facilities become the major back-up for electricity grid stabilisation, the fire risk assumes greater importance.
Unsurprisingly, fires are also occurring at lithium battery factories and storage warehouses. In January this year, an explosion took place at a French lithium battery warehouse, containing 8,000 batteries, in Rouen. In Gothenburg, Sweden, a fire in a container containing 9,000 kg of standard lithium batteries took several days to control. In Jacksonville, USA, in May, a fire started by a 9,000 kg mega-battery took several days to extinguish, consuming the factory it powered.
One solution being explored is a lithium/iron/phosphate battery. LFP batteries are less energy dense than lithium-ion, but appear more stable and safer to charge, with less risk of thermal runaway, and fire. They last longer but unfortunately, as they do not contain valuable cobalt, they are even less likely to be recycled.
As was the case with the big battery fire in Victoria, the media’s almost total disregarding of what is an increasing threat to life and property seems to have but one explanation – in the climate ‘crisis’ electric cars are good, battery storage of solar and wind is good; any problem remains unreported. The consequences of increased mining and manufacture exacerbating CO2 emissions, and the lack of recyclability, do not fit the climate agenda and are ignored. We can but hope that the ACCC review shines a spotlight on what is a ticking time bomb, with echoes of the hundreds of fires of the belatedly cancelled Pink Batts fiasco.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/the-lithium-delusion-a-big-problem-with-big-batteries
********************************************************Why do climate zealots hate debate?
A man goes to the GP for his test results. “Bad news, I’m afraid,” says the doctor, looking at his watch. “You’ve only got three minutes to live.”
“Three minutes?” the man cries. “Surely there’s something you can do for me?”
“Well I could boil you an egg,” says the doc.
I was put in mind of this delightful old joke last month by the lugubrious face of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres (an honorary doctor nine times over) as he introduced the latest increment of climate concern, announcing, with deadpan comic timing, that we have now entered “the era of global boiling”.
It wasn’t immediately apparent what precisely will be boiling if the Earth’s temperature increases by one or two degrees over the next century (the thermal equivalent, by my unscientific calculation, of moving from Sydney to Port Macquarie). The oceans? The planet itself? Molten rock as it flows out of a volcano looks inhospitable enough, but boiling? Ouch, that’s seriously warm. Are you proud of yourself, Antonio? The sight of a grown man spouting such drivel in an attempt to frighten the simpletons among us is as ludicrous as it is contemptible.
The irritating thing is that by pointing out that nonsense, countenancing even the slightest deviation from the alleged consensus, you are damned by the zealots. God forbid you should suggest, with Bjorn Lomborg, that it might be smarter – and cheaper – to adapt to whatever climatic perturbations might inconvenience us (as Alfred Wainwright, who wrote the definitive walking guides to England’s Lake District, used to say, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing”). Fail to applaud and indulge the grandiose ambition to change the world’s climate and no matter how much you treasure and respect nature, you’re treated as though you’re announcing a plan to pack the throats of loggerhead turtles with plastic bags.
What happened to civilised debate, the tacit agreement that it’s possible for decent, thoughtful people to hold a different view from yours that isn’t motivated by malice? We see the same attitude towards those who question the wisdom of establishing a permanent Constitutional voice as the most effective mechanism to address Indigenous disadvantage. Much easier to dismiss them as racists than engage with their arguments.
Meanwhile, follow the money back to the cynical beneficiaries – ni hao, Xi Jinping! – of our misplaced pieties. In Scotland, it was revealed this month, 16 million trees – you know, the tall, pretty things that soak up the carbon dioxide Antonio is worried about – have been cut down to make way for Chinese-built wind farms. Saving the planet; just not the wooden bits. Or here, where we scythe vast corridors through native bush and across lovingly tended farmland to accommodate transmission lines for “renewable” energy projects. (These are designed to spare us from using the coal and iron ore we’ve just dug up and sent thousands of kilometres so an environmentally irresponsible communist state can turn them into wind turbines, solar panels and electric cars, and sell them back to us at an inflated price; who could fault that logic?)
Sorry Antonio, but it pains me to say I find it increasingly difficult to summon up any respect for politicians and their lemming-like schemes these days. Perhaps it’s a function of a lifetime in this job. One of the downsides of the otherwise amusing trade of journalism is that it can, if your attention slips for a moment, put you in unpleasant proximity to our political class, who, with a few rare exceptions, are deeply unimpressive people, unremarkable for anything beyond their family-size vanity and unwarranted self-belief.
Or maybe this disenchantment is a broader, unadvertised side-effect of growing old, a creeping disappointment as you watch charlatans and liars stuff themselves for decades at the trough of public office, then anoint equally talentless sycophants to replace them on the never-ending carousel of lucrative uselessness.
As for Antonio’s brooding message of doom, it will come true one day, but not just yet. Astrophysicists predict the Earth will be a cinder block, its atmosphere boiled away by a red-giant Sun, in four billion years or so; but even though I’m determined to moderate my drinking, I’m not confident I’ll still be around to see it.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
1 comment:
Glad your feeling a bit better
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