Climate change row as British scientists claim ‘Day After Tomorrow’ modelling is wrong
A climate model predicting a devastating ‘Day After Tomorrow’ collapse of ocean systems has been criticised for relying on ‘entirely unrealistic’ scenarios.
A Dutch team from Utrecht University published work in the journal of Science Advances this week suggesting that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) could reach a tipping point, triggering a new ice age.
The AMOC transports heat and salt throughout the world’s oceans and helps regulate the global climate, driving the Gulf Stream that keeps Britain warmer than it should be for its northerly latitude.
In the apocalyptic science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow, the ocean system is disrupted by climate change, plunging the northern hemisphere into a permanent winter.
Although ice-core data suggests the AMOC can switch off, recent sophisticated modelling has not been able to reproduce the effect, leading many scientists to think a collapse is unlikely to happen.
The new study claims to have shown that AMOC is “on route to tipping”, a prospect that the authors say is “bad news for the climate system and humanity”.
However British scientists warned that the outcome had been “forced” by using unlikely variables, such as assuming large influxes of freshwater into the Atlantic.
Prof Jonathan Bamber, director of the Bristol Glaciology Centre at Bristol University, said: “They did this by imposing a huge freshwater forcing to the North Atlantic that is entirely unrealistic for even the most extreme warming scenario over the next century.
“Their freshwater forcing applied to the North Atlantic is equivalent to six cm/year of sea level rise by the end of the experiment, which is more than seen during the collapse of the ice sheet that covered North America during the last glaciation.”
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that the AMOC is unlikely to collapse this century, and many scientists do not believe it will fail even if the climate continues to warm.
Observational data for the ocean system only goes back to 2004, making it difficult to predict, and because it spans the globe, most models cannot account for all the nuances and influences.
Commenting on the new research, Prof Andrew Watson, of Exeter University, said “They say it suggests that ‘the present day AMOC is on route to tipping’.
‘Push it quite hard’
“This sounds alarming, but it’s important to note that this is not the same as saying collapse is going to happen imminently. They have to run their model for a long time (1,700 years) and push it quite hard to make the collapse happen.
“Models are not reality. The real system may be more, or less, prone to collapse than this model suggests.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/09/climate-change-modelling-wrong-claim-uk-scientists/
****************************************************Britain’s Disastrous Path to Net Zero Is a Warning to the U.S.
At last year’s U.N. climate conference in Dubai, the Biden administration agreed to triple the world’s renewable-energy capacity by 2030.
In Britain, the impact of cap-and-trade on the cost of fuel to generate electricity is massive.
Britain was conned into net zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap renewable power. The results have been an economic disaster.
At last year’s U.N. climate conference in Dubai, the Biden administration agreed to triple the world’s renewable-energy capacity by 2030. It also joined the Powering Past Coal Alliance, pledging to eliminate coal-powered generation. This is all part of President Biden’s goal to completely decarbonize the U.S. electrical grid by 2035 and achieve net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050.
Britain has been going down this path since 2008, when Parliament wrote an 80 percent decarbonization target into law, which it raised to 100 percent, or net zero, in 2019. This luxury net-zero policy, which only the rich can afford, has been devastating for both businesses and ordinary Britons just trying to heat their homes and get to work.
A new report for the RealClear Foundation by Rupert Darwall is a timely and much-needed warning to America. It shows what would happen if Democrats and progressives get their way and inflict net-zero climate policies on the country.
British politicians boast of cutting greenhouse-gas emissions faster than any other major economy but ignore the unfortunate fact that Britain’s economy has been performing poorly since 2008.
In 2020, even before the recent surge in energy costs, everyday Britons were paying about 75 percent more for electricity than Americans, the result of a double whammy—cap-and-trade policies on the one hand and renewable subsidies on the other. And then came the Ukraine shock. During the 2022 energy crisis, electricity rates for British businesses were more than double the average paid by U.S. businesses.
In Britain, the impact of cap-and-trade on the cost of fuel to generate electricity is massive. In 2022, government-imposed carbon costs averaged $128 per megawatt hour (MWh) for coal-generated electricity and $51 per MWh for natural gas. Those costs are on top of actual fuel costs, which averaged $150 per MWh for electricity generated from coal and $160 per MWh for natural gas. These mean that it cost $278 to generate 1 MWh of electricity from coal and $211 from natural gas.
In the United States, electricity prices were significantly lower for two reasons. First, no cap-and-trade policies. Second, for coal, British power stations were old and operated at much lower thermal efficiencies than in the U.S. (the U.K. has nearly phased out all coal-powered stations—although some had to be brought back during a 2023 cold snap); and, for natural gas, it is much cheaper piped (as it is in the U.S.) than liquified and shipped (as it is in Europe).
So in the U.S., the fuel cost per MWh of electricity generated from coal was $27 per MWh (versus $278 in Britain) and $61 per MWh for natural gas (versus $211 in Britain).
Britons also have to pay the cost of subsidizing politically favored wind and solar. Analysis of the renewable portfolios of Britain’s Big Six energy companies shows that the average price for wind- and solar-generated electricity between 2009 and 2020 was well over £100 per MWh, whereas the price for reliable electricity from gas- and coal-fired power stations fell from £60 per MWh in 2013 to less than £50 per MWh in 2020.
That same year, consumer subsidies of renewables helped the Big Six to earn a profit of £61 per MWh of electricity on average for the higher-cost, intermittent, demand-unresponsive and therefore less valuable renewable outputs. On the other hand, government-imposed costs forced the Big Six to take massive write-downs on their gas-fired power stations, collectively recording a staggering £1.6 billion loss in 2014 for providing the lower-cost, reliable generating capacity on which Britain’s households and businesses depend.
Unsurprisingly, these policies have led to overinvestment in renewables and underinvestment in the reliable generating capacity needed to keep the lights on—and the costs down. Britain’s unintermittent, reliable coal- and gas-generating capacity peaked in 2010, at 88.0 gigawatts (GW). It then fell by 25.1 GW over the next decade, mainly as coal-fired plants were shuttered. Over the same period, wind and solar capacity rose by 33.5 GW.
Britain has managed to keep its lights on because higher electricity prices have driven demand down. Between 2010 and 2019, economy-wide electricity consumption fell by 10.8 percent. Even so, the gap between consumption and domestic generation has been widening, causing a surge in imported electricity from its European neighbors. That’s not an option for the U.S. We cannot import the equivalent of two-fifths of Canada’s electricity output.
Energy prices comparable to those in Britain—and across much of Europe—would tear the heart out of the American economy, which relies on cheap, abundant energy. The impact on working- and middle-class Americans would be intolerable.
While it is unlikely that Congress would pass legislation like Britain’s Climate Change Act, which made net zero the law of the land after an 88-minute debate in the House of Commons, the threat of net zero is nonetheless as real as it is dangerous.
In May 2021, the White House issued an executive order on the adoption of a whole-of-government approach to climate financial-risk disclosure, demonstrating how an alliance between the administrative state and woke ESG investors on Wall Street would bring about net zero.
In August 2022, Congress passed the energy bill misnamed the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides for budget-busting, fiscally irresponsible uncapped subsidies of wind and solar, which will wreak havoc on the economics of reliable generating capacity, just as they have in Britain.
In 2023, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a proposed regulation on greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil-fuel-power generators that, if implemented, would go a long way toward achieving the administration’s economically devastating goal of entirely decarbonizing electricity generation by 2035.
Renewable energy is not a low-cost substitute for fossil fuels. Renewables are not cheap, nor can they provide the reliability that modern societies expect and on which they depend. Darwall’s report convincingly demonstrates how Britain was conned into net zero by deceptive and illusory promises of cheap renewable power. The results have been an economic disaster.
There is still time to heed Britain’s warning and instead choose the path of energy abundance and economic prosperity by developing America’s unsurpassed reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas.
https://www.heritage.org/energy/commentary/britains-disastrous-path-net-zero-warning-the-us
******************************************************The political class is only just realising that voters prefer prosperity over climate jingoism
If you want to see how the politics of climate change are shifting, compare today with late 2009. In both cases, a general election was approaching.
In October 2009, with the Copenhagen climate summit imminent, the then prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced that we had only “50 days to save the planet”. The summit failed to agree any substantive action to reduce carbon emissions. The planet survived. But let that pass: the important point for Mr Brown was political. He wanted to make his party look as green as possible for the election, countering the Conservative opposition’s offer, under David Cameron, of “Vote blue, go green”.
It is 15 years on, and we shall have an election fairly soon. Sir Keir Starmer now, like Mr Brown then, is thinking mainly about the ballot box.
After a tussle with their consciences, Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves, who, in 2021, declared at the party conference that she would be Britain’s “first green chancellor”, announced on Thursday that her exciting green investment plan, unveiled in that same speech, will, sort of, not happen. Under that plan, a Labour government would have spent an extra £28 billion every year until 2030, including “borrowing to invest”.
As late as Tuesday, Sir Keir was still clinging publicly to the £28 billion figure. He said he was “unwavering”. But on Thursday he waveringly tried to defuse his own tax bombshell. He had decided, though of course he did not put it like this, that voters care more that Labour should be safe with the economy than it should save the planet.
Since July last year, when Labour failed to grab Boris Johnson’s old Uxbridge seat at a by-election, its leadership has finally noticed that the link in the public mind between the words “green” and “prosperity” has become tenuous. In that by-election, Sadiq Khan’s Ulez is thought to have worked its negative magic. Voters felt the pain of green policies, not the gain.
It follows that looking green is no longer a clear electoral plus. The Tories saw this slightly earlier than Labour last year. They stole a march by lessening the net-zero torture, extending the lives of the internal combustion engine and gas boilers. Probably Rishi Sunak intended no revolution of policy, only its softening, but the effect is marked. Once people realise you can have prosperity or an energy system dominated by renewables, but not both, they will choose prosperity. That realisation has big political consequences. I believe it makes net zero by 2050 unachievable.
A comparable cost-related disenchantment is visible in business. Last September, no bid was received for the government auction of offshore wind acreage. The subsidy was not big enough to make it worth bidders’ while. Before Christmas, Siemens Energy, one of the world’s biggest wind turbine companies, faced a collapse in its share price. Its chairman warned in January that the green transition must be paid for by higher energy bills: anything else was net zero “fairy-tale” thinking, he said.
Business wants green energy only if it is “de-risked” – in other words, if it is subsidised for the life of the asset. It is supposed to be “sustainable”, yet often only taxpayers’ money can sustain it. In short, it is unprofitable. And now, thanks to Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (a title as good as The Ministry of Truth in Orwell’s 1984), businesses will try to extort higher subsidy here and buzz off to America if they cannot get it.
Thursday’s press reported that Ørsted, the gigantic Danish developer of offshore wind in Britain (and elsewhere), is sacking hundreds of workers and abandoning markets after losses of £2.2 billion in 2023. The day before, the new boss of BP, Murray Auchincloss, predicted resurgent demand for fossil fuels, especially gas, and is leading the company in that direction.
This is the same Mr Auchincloss who, under his now disgraced predecessor, Bernard Looney, had been a leader in the company’s plan to move away from fossil fuels in favour of renewables, which he described as the new “upstream oil and gas”. BP lost competitive edge against its rivals. We don’t hear about that plan any longer.
Part of the Looney case was that the switch to renewables was “grounded in economic reality”. We have now been with green energy and government attacks on fossil fuels long enough for people to wonder if that is true.
As is well set out in Rupert Darwall’s new short book, The Folly of Climate Leadership (RealClear Foundation), the increasing costs have been relentless. They are particularly high here because of what Darwall calls Britain’s “climate jingoism” – our vainglorious desire to get ahead in what successive governments have decided is a race to net zero.
Our Climate Change Act of 2008 mandated an overall cut in greenhouse gases of 80 per cent of the 1990 baseline by 2050. That was under Labour, led by Mr Brown. In 2019, that percentage was upped to 100 per cent (“net zero”) and became law after only 88 minutes’ debate in the Commons. That was under the Conservatives, led by Theresa May. In 2020, we were told that Britain would become “the Saudi Arabia of wind power”. That, of course, was under the Conservatives, led by Boris Johnson.
Our heroic example did not inspire others. Between 2008 and 2019, our CO2 fossil-fuel emissions fell by 33 per cent, but those from the rest of the world rose by 16 per cent, wiping out in 140 days, Darwall calculates, the reductions we achieved over 11 years.
There is a high price for setting this pace: by 2020, our citizens were paying about 75 per cent more for their electricity than were Americans. Darwall points out that, from 2008-22, Britain has experienced its lowest underlying growth rate since the 18th century.
The two phenomena are related. Competitively priced energy is essential for robust economic growth. By the 1990s, with Arthur Scargill well beaten and privatisations accomplished in the previous decade, Britain had achieved a good and secure energy mix on the “gas to nuclear” track, rendered more efficient by letting price signals drive changes. Natural gas is a fossil fuel, but a relatively clean one. Today our energy system is expensive, creaky, insecure, teetering on the edge of serious power cuts and, since the invasion of Ukraine, vulnerable to the malevolence of Vladimir Putin.
If you survey this history, two thoughts arise. One is the uniformity of error across the political spectrum. How was it that most people in all main parties thought they had to think the same things about the complicated and uncertain subject of climate change? Why did they unquestioningly accept ideas like the uniformity of “the science”, the concept of “emergency” in relation to policy, or the ability of governments, rather than businesses and consumers, to make the most efficient choices?
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Net Zero becomes all dissonance and no cognition
Politicians have trapped themselves into waging a crusade voters say they want but won’t pay for.
The fault, dear Olaf, lies not in ourselves but in our voters.
That, with apologies to Shakespeare, is starting to look like an explanation for the net-zero agonies now engulfing German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and many other Western politicians. It’s both fun and accurate to lambaste our political class for its many climate hypocrisies and idiocies. But as climate policy becomes more expensive and less coherent by the week, voters deserve more and more of the blame.
A clue lies in a report released this week by the Ifo Institute, a think tank in Germany. Some 55% of respondents said they believe their country should play a leading role in the global effort to combat climate change, in a poll of Germans conducted last September. Considerably fewer were willing to pay anything for it. Asked their preferred measures for achieving net zero, only 16% supported mandates such as a ban on natural-gas-fired home heating that would impose direct costs on households. Eight percent supported an explicit carbon tax, the most economically efficient way to reduce emissions.
The punch line is that Germans’ most popular option for addressing climate change was “targeted subsidies for climate-friendly measures,” which 28% of respondents supported. Note the timing. This poll was conducted before a constitutional court ruling in November disallowed Berlin’s preferred method for using off-balance-sheet government borrowing to fund climate-related subsidies. Germans supported climate subsidies when it looked like free money.
Not anymore. The admission that subsidies must be funded by tax increases or offsetting spending cuts has cast Mr. Scholz’s administration into a crisis from which it might not recover. Case in point: A mass protest—by farmers, as it happens—erupted when Berlin tried to inch toward a policy vaguely resembling a carbon tax. The administration had to backtrack. Whatever else voters say they want on climate, people really, really don’t want to redistribute the costs of mitigation toward those who emit more carbon—at least not if Johann Q. Publik thinks he might be the emitter in question.
I don’t mean to pick on the Germans, as rich a vein as that is. Everyone else is confused, too. A December poll in Britain found that 85% of respondents described climate change as “an important problem” facing the U.K. (with 46% of respondents describing it as the most important or one of the most important problems). Forty-one percent said they’d be more likely to vote for a party that promised strong action on climate change vs. 33% who said they’d be more likely to vote for a party promising to slow down on climate policy.
Do they mean it? Of course not. The same poll found less than a quarter of respondents saying climate-change or net-zero policies would be “very important” in determining their votes in the election due this year. In a question for which respondents could choose more than one answer, 57% said they would vote based on policy promises concerning the National Health Service and healthcare, and 55% said they’d focus on the parties’ approaches to inflation.
Surveys in several large European economies in August found at least two-thirds of respondents in each country were worried about climate change—and totally unwilling to pay any personal costs to mitigate it. In: planting trees, subsidizing home insulation, taxing heavily emitting companies. Out: banning internal-combustion cars, limiting meat and dairy consumption, increasing fuel taxes. Hilarious: Voters support a frequent-flyer tax as long as they don’t think they’ll have to pay it themselves, since taxing all flights remains deeply unpopular.
Squaring the circles of our many and varied cognitive dissonances is what we as voters pay our politicians to do. The problem is that for years politicians have been leaning into the dissonance rather than the cognition.
By promulgating apocalyptic rhetoric about climate change, the climate-industrial complex in politics, academia, green tech and the media has persuaded voters that climate change is an existential danger. This is why 77% of Britons can tell a pollster that climate change is “a serious global threat” and Germans can come to view their global leadership on this issue in quasimoral terms. We don’t even talk about our beloved entitlements this way, let alone any other policy with the possible exception of immigration.
What a crash, then, as voters start noticing what net zero might cost them personally. Knowing that they can’t or won’t bear the costs themselves but also unable or unwilling to drop the moral crusade, voters instead demand ever more creative expenditures of someone else’s money to achieve climate goals.
This explains the reluctance of even moderately sensible politicians to admit what they’re so obviously doing: abandoning the climate project. Rollbacks of the most expensive, least popular climate measures, such as electric-vehicle mandates or agricultural-vehicle taxes, invariably are accompanied by pledges to keep doing something else for the climate at someone else’s expense.
It’s a note of caution for those of us breathing a sigh of relief at recent net-zero reversals. Voters are growing clearer-headed about what they aren’t prepared to pay to avert climate change. Yet true sanity won’t arrive until they’ve decided they also don’t care.
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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
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