Over 1,600 Scientists and Professionals Sign ‘No Climate Emergency’ Declaration
International scientists have jointly signed a declaration dismissing the existence of a climate crisis and insisting that carbon dioxide is beneficial to Earth.
“There is no climate emergency,” the Global Climate Intelligence Group (CLINTEL) said in its World Climate Declaration (pdf), made public in August. “Climate science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should openly address uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while politicians should dispassionately count the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of their policy measures.”
A total of 1,609 scientists and professionals from around the world have signed the declaration, including 321 from the United States.
The coalition pointed out that Earth’s climate has varied as long as it has existed, with the planet experiencing several cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age only ended as recently as 1850, they said.
"Therefore, it is no surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming," the declaration said.
Warming is happening “far slower” than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
“Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools,” the coalition said, adding that these models "exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases" and "ignore the fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.” For instance, even though climate alarmists characterize CO2 as environmentally-damaging, the coalition pointed out that the gas is “not a pollutant.”
Carbon dioxide is “essential” to all life on earth and is “favorable” for nature. Extra CO2 results in the growth of global plant biomass while also boosting the yields of crops worldwide.
CLINTEL also dismissed the narrative of global warming being linked to increased natural disasters like hurricanes, floods, and droughts, stressing that there is “no statistical evidence” to support these claims.
“There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. Go for adaptation instead of mitigation; adaptation works whatever the causes are,” it said.
“To believe the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. This is precisely the problem of today’s climate discussion to which climate models are central. Climate science has degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science. Should not we free ourselves from the naive belief in immature climate models?”
Climate Models and Sunlight Reflection
Among the CLINTEL signatories are two Nobel laureates—physicists John Francis Clauser from the United States and Ivan Giaever, a Norwegian-American.
Mr. Clauser has made a significant addition to climate models to dismiss the narrative of global warming: the visible light reflected by cumulus clouds which, on average, cover half of the earth.
Young demonstrators hold placards as they attend a climate change protest opposite the Houses of Parliament in central London on Feb. 15, 2019. (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
Young demonstrators hold placards as they attend a climate change protest opposite the Houses of Parliament in central London on Feb. 15, 2019. (Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images)
Current climate models vastly underestimate this aspect of cumulus cloud reflection, which plays a key role in regulating the earth’s temperature. Mr. Clauser previously told President Joe Biden that he disagreed with his climate policies.
In May, Mr. Clauser was elected to the board of directors at the CO2 Coalition, a group focusing on the beneficial contributions of carbon dioxide in the environment.
“The popular narrative about climate change reflects a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people,” Mr. Clauser said in a May 5 statement.
“Misguided climate science has metastasized into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience. In turn, the pseudoscience has become a scapegoat for a wide variety of other unrelated ills.”
“It has been promoted and extended by similarly misguided business marketing agents, politicians, journalists, government agencies, and environmentalists. In my opinion, there is no real climate crisis.”
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Central banks are fake climate heroes
The Bank of England has rejigged how it tenders for the polymer used in banknotes to reduce their carbon intensity. The UK central bank will investigate alternatives to gas-fired heating for its London headquarters and Essex printing works. Zoom calls are preferred to flights. Such are the details in the BoE’s first ‘Climate transition plan’ that was released in July and outlines how the central bank intends to reach net-zero emissions from its ‘physical’ operations by 2040.
The BoE is aiming to hit net zero a decade before the UK’s legislated goal because the central bank wants to ‘meet the standards it sets for others’ as it drives climate actions across the financial sector.
All the major central banks have adopted similar, ambitious green goals without any parliamentary or formal executive approval. Their motivation – as stated in a study released in April by the Reserve Bank of Australia – is that ‘climate change introduces new sources of risk’ for financial stability. In 2021, the European Central Bank even said it will embed environmental goals within monetary-policy decisions because wild and warmer weather can affect ‘inflation, output, employment, interest rates, investment and productivity; financial stability; and the transmission of monetary policy’.
Fired up about sustainability, central bankers are calling for net-zero targets. Warning of climate systemic risks, they talk of using their regulatory powers to enforce climate-risk-based capital standards on banks, conduct climate-change stress tests and force businesses to disclose carbon risks. To encourage such activism, governments have sought to appoint climate campaigners to leadership roles in central banks.
Many question whether it’s wise for central bankers who style themselves as above politics to tackle such a politically contentious issue. As central bankers push sustainability, two questions stand out.
The first is whether central bankers can achieve anything. Advocates say standardising climate-related disclosures and making them mandatory improves the pricing of climate risks. They say central banks highlighting the long-term financial risks of climate change will marshal public support towards net zero. They claim central banks can protect the financial system by limiting crises triggered by changed weather. They say central banks elevating climate risks would make commercial banks more wary of adding to – even reduce – the US$4 trillion lent to the fossil fuel industry.
Central bankers, however, might achieve less than activists hope. For one, climate change seems to pose little risk to financial stability. Bushfires, droughts, heat waves, rising and warmer oceans, storms and the like have never in modern times triggered a systemic crisis.
Second, the industries that lose from the shift to a low-carbon economy (‘stranded assets’) are unlikely to imperil the financial system. It’s usually the next big things that bubble to the point of crisis. Studies find that excessive debt is the common cause behind centuries of financial crashes, not weather patterns or passé things.
A third reason is banks don’t appear to be threatened by climate change and seem capable of judging such risks. Studies find no link between bank stability and disasters, even one on banks in the hurricane-prone Caribbean. A 2021 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found banks even gain from calamities due to lending for rebuilding.
Another disappointment for activists is that central bank climate activism is unlikely to trouble fossil fuel companies. The fact is that when commercial banks shun fossil fuel companies, private firms buy these businesses cheaply. The Economist estimates private equity firms have swooped on at least US$60 billion of ‘dirty’ assets in recent years.
The fifth problem is that central banks have little legal basis on which to act along green lines. Central banks lack authority to direct bank lending. As there is no link between interest rates and meteorological events, central banks can only target net zero indirectly by using regulatory powers.
The other overarching question is whether central banks might stir risks when they pursue sustainability. The answer is yes. The biggest risk is that climate-risk management clashes with mandates to control inflation. The problem is that a shift to net zero stirs ‘greenflation’. This is the term for when the price of fossil fuels jumps because their supply falls before demand does. It’s rife.
The second hazard is that central banks are adopting an explicit role of capital allocation, which breaches their principle of ‘market neutrality’. Climate stress tests, for example, apply pressure on banks to shun lending to fossil fuel companies. While central banks control the quantity of money, the allocation of money is a choice for the political sphere. Smudge the roles of central bankers and politicians and central-bank credibility and independence could be dented.
Another risk is central banks might encourage a green investment bubble, one that could metastasise into a systemic threat. Another concern is central banks might engage in ‘mission creep’. What, for instance, stops central banks pursuing other social goals such as reducing inequality? Another problem with central bankers sanctioning progressive causes is that it might encourage banks on similar frolics. Some bankers, for instance, might think it OK to ‘de-bank’ customers for their views on climate change.
The little central banks might accomplish through climate activism and the risks they stir as they try is another example where the use of public regulatory powers is a poor substitute for political solutions. Rather than become politically tainted, it’s best central bankers push aside climate-change concerns and focus on their legislated tasks, at which, as today’s elevated inflation shows, they are failing.
Now, central banks recognise that executives and parliaments have ‘primary responsibility’ to act on climate change and that their contribution might be modest. Then why speak up? It’s true that government action on climate could hurt the economy to the point of creating financial instability. But that’s different from saying the weather or stranded assets could.
Perhaps the true green vocation of central bankers is to warn the public of the risks (above all on inflation) that politicians are taking with their climate actions. Their efforts to have greener office blocks and climate-friendly banknotes are worthwhile if they boost their credibility to do that.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/09/central-banks-are-fake-climate-heroes/
***********************************************Net Zero Watch slams British Government’s ‘desperate’ and ‘unethical’ heat pump proposals
Campaign group Net Zero Watch has ridiculed the Government’s decision to remove consumer protections relating to the installation of heat pumps in homes.
Faced with a widespread consumer boycott of the technology, ministers are hoping that they can kickstart a heating revolution by removing the requirement that properties be adequately insulated before gas boilers are removed.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
"The insulation requirement was put in place to ensure heat pumps were only installed where they were likely to work. Removing a key consumer protection is hardly going to help the Government’s cause."
Mr Montford points to a recent study of heat pump economics, which shows that, even in a well-insulated property, most heat pump installations do not give lower bills, let alone justifying the substantial capital costs. This is because electricity is four times the price of gas.
Mr Montford said:
"The contradictions in Government policy are becoming clear. Renewables are incompatible with heat pumps because they make electricity so much more expensive than gas. In their desperation to persuade consumers to switch anyway, ministers are proposing steps that would be foolish, are arguably unethical, and would certainly be counterproductive. This is a brand of fanaticism as dangerous as Mr Khan’s ULEZ obsession."
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The astonishingly woke Australian Academy of Science
Peter Ridd
The Australian Academy of Science (AAS) recently released a report Reef Futures Roundtable, which is ostensibly about the doomed Great Barrier Reef. However, the report only demonstrates that the AAS, Australia’s peak science body, has become not just unscientific, but anti-scientific. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it has also become astonishingly Woke.
The AAS report predictably concluded that the Great Barrier Reef could already be ‘irreversibly’ damaged. The fact that UNESCO has just declared it not endangered did not rate a mention, and neither did the latest two years of statistics showing the reef is at record high coral levels. Remarkably, the report does not contain a single fact or figure to support any of its claims about the reef – except the area of the reef is 340,000 square kilometres. There are no figures, no percentages. Nowhere does it mention that coral grows 30 per cent faster for every degree increase in water temperatures. Or that there is 100 per cent more coral on the reef today than in 2012. Or that just 1 per cent of the reef has the potential to be impacted by farm sediment, fertiliser or pesticides, even in the slightest way. Or that the sea level has fallen by 1 metre in the last 5,000 years.
The problem with this completely unanalytical approach is seen in the ‘interventions’ it recommends to fix the reef. Their impracticality is breathtaking. For example, it suggests ‘solar radiation management’ – shading the reef from the sun with man-made fog and clouds to prevent the water heating up and causing coral bleaching. The only number cited in the entire report – the area of the reef, which is as big as Germany – should have given them a hint that this is crazy. How are you going to make a cloud as big as Germany and keep it anchored over the reef for the whole summer over the next few hundred years? And you will also have to stop hot water flowing into the reef from the Coral Sea at the same time. That would require a dam 2,000 kilometres long and 100 metres high.
While a simple calculation is all that is required to reveal the absurdity of this idea, modern science is full of people who are almost completely non-quantitative and, as such, impractical and virtually useless as scientists.
Next there is rubble stabilisation. The supposed experts worry that the Great Barrier Reef will break up from climate change. Each of the 3,000 reefs is an almost solid lump of calcium carbonate rock (fragments of coral glued together over eons) a few kilometres wide and 100 metres high. How this is going to be broken up by some climate change magic is unexplained. But even if that were to happen, are they seriously suggesting we can wire it back together with steel reinforcing and concrete? Just do the calculation on how much concrete and steel this would entail.
The unscientific nature of the AAS report is largely a result of its anti-scientific approach. The report is actually a parody of wokeness and romantic mythology. This starts with the way the roundtable committees of ‘experts’, whom they questioned about the reef, were formed. Each roundtable had two chairs, a non-Indigenous chair, and a specially selected Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander chair. The romantic mythology about the special knowledge of any person with Indigenous heritage pervades the entire document, and starts in the foreword by the head of the AAS.
As the Academy approached the task of planning this project it became immediately obvious that there was no separating nature and culture when it comes to the GBR. Land and sea cannot be separated. No priority can be selected on an ecological basis alone. Having a Traditional Knowledges co-Chair in each roundtable allowed for different sources of knowledge to be shared and to form a basis for a number of the observations featured in this report.
Having a diversity of ideas and scientific thought would have gone some of the way to curing the AAS of the groupthink which renders its report risible. And the views and experience of people from the coral islands of the Torres Straits and northern Great Barrier Reef could have been used to great effect. These people tend to be deeply practical about the reef – like almost all seafaring people who live and work on the reef. And practical people know you cannot bolt the reef, which is the size of Germany, down to the seafloor. But selecting people for their ‘roundtables’ on the basis of their ethnicity rather than their scientific or real-world experience is a fundamentally anti-scientific approach.
But it gets worse. The dearth of statistics about the reef are made up for by an abundance of data on the gender identification of all those who participated in the ‘roundtables’. There is also the Indigenous percentage. And not just of those who participated, but also of those who were invited to participate but did not. One could quibble and point out that those claiming to be male or female added up to exactly 100 per cent in all categories, indicating a terrifying lack of diversity on the LGBQTI+++ spectrum. But there is no question, on the important matters for the Woke brigade, that this report is brimming with instructive statistics.
The AAS ascribes such importance to facts and figures on gender and race, but not to scientific facts. This demonstrates it is anti-science. Science is about evidence and logic. It does not matter whether one is male or female or whatever else, it is still impossible to make clouds as big as Germany for the next hundred years. That is called a fact, and facts do not vary with race, gender, or any ideology.
I have been saying for some time that many of our science institutions have become totally untrustworthy. By its wilful abandonment of quantitative analysis, the AAS has destroyed its reputation as a source of useful scientific advice. The media loves a bad news story – they should focus on what has happened to a once-esteemed organisation.
The Australian Academy of Science is now a joke.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/08/the-astonishingly-woke-australian-academy-of-science
***************************************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
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