The ozone hole makes a comeback
Are we witnessing a new chapter in the story of the ozone hole over Antarctica? The past three years have seen the re-emergence of large, long-lived ozone holes, which seem to be expanding. This raises questions over whether global efforts to heal the ozone layer have been successful. New findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggest that the ozone has not been recovering over the last few decades as many forecast it would.
Analysing monthly and daily ozone readings from 2004 to 2022, the researchers found that the ozone hole contains significantly less ozone than it did. “Our analysis concluded with the data from 2022, but as of today, the ozone hole in 2023 has already surpassed the size of the three previous years: by the end of last month, it exceeded 26 million square kilometres,” said Hannah Kessenich from the University of Otago.
In 1987 the United Nations approved the Montreal Protocol, banning chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), which scientists had discovered were depleting the ozone layer. It was hailed as a major environmental victory. Earlier this year a UN report projected that the ozone would return to 1980’s levels by 2040.
But it’s now becoming apparent that it’s not just CFCs at work. Some scientists have suggested ozone depletion might also be due to a low-pressure system of cold westerly winds – the Antarctic polar vortex. The pattern since 2004 is that the early spring shows indications of ozone-hole recovery, but by October the middle stratosphere is exhibiting significant ozone reduction, amounting to a 26% loss in the core of the ozone hole. Other scientists say that ozone holes have been caused by the 2019 wildfires and volcanic eruptions.
There is also the possibility that the role of CFCs has been overestimated, at the expense of decadal variations in ozone concentrations over the South Pole.
Understanding ozone variability is important because of the major role Antarctic stratospheric ozone plays in climate variability across the Southern Hemisphere. Climate change may have incited new sources of ozone depletion, and the atmospheric abundance of several CFCs has recently been on the rise.
In other words, whilst our attention was turned elsewhere, the ozone hole has been making a comeback.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/ozone-hole-makes-a-comeback
***********************************************The Ominous Rise of Climate Change Litigation
I was once in the audience at a conference when a very senior member of the judiciary of a major developed nation declared off-handedly, in a response to a question, that: “Law is relevant to every single issue of human conduct.”
It was a revealing remark and I noted it down verbatim. I often think about it. To somebody armed with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail; to the judge, every problem looks like a court case. This is, I suppose, to be expected. And at that level the statement was almost oxymoronic.
But the comment also expressed something deeply important about modern societies. The German social theorist Niklas Luhmann described such societies as being divided into distinct communicative systems (politics, law, economics, medicine, mass media and so on) wherein the environment – meaning the underlying real world – is processed by a system of code into a communicative format which is digestible to the system proper. For the legal system, that code is ‘lawful/not lawful’: everything in the system’s environment must be understood in those terms, and the whole of reality (in the eyes of the legal system) is encompassed in that dynamic. It follows of course that nothing can happen that cannot be thought of by the legal system on the basis of it being lawful/not lawful, legal/illegal. Anything and everything that has ever happened, or potentially could ever happen, is either one or the other.
Sooner or later, then, it was inevitable that the climate itself – the literal environment – would be subsumed within this logic, and that human interactions with the very world in which we live would become subject to this binary coding. And so what was inevitable has indeed come to pass, in the form of two separate suites of litigation happening at opposite ends of the world, in Europe and New Zealand respectively.
One runs great risks when discussing the ins-and-outs of litigation that is ongoing. Judges can be unpredictable buggers. And one runs even greater risks in this regard when discussing litigation that falls to be decided imminently. This post will go out on April 8th and it concerns three cases in which the judgments will be handed down on the 9th. Those of you who read the post in time will therefore be able to follow along in real time, as it were, and see how accurate my predictions were. But, as I will emphasise towards the end of the post, in one important respect it actually doesn’t really matter what the outcomes are.
New Zealand first, then – land of lamb, pinot noir and weird names for rugby positions. In the recent case of Michael John Smith v Fronterra Cooperative Group Ltd and Ors [2024] NZSC 5, the Supreme Court of New Zealand overturned the decision of a lower court to strike out a claim (meaning, to deny a hearing) to a Maori elder who wanted to sue various New Zealand companies who were involved in the emission of greenhouse gases. The idea here is that the ‘climate crisis’ is endangering lands of cultural and spiritual significance to this man’s clan, and that the emission of greenhouse gases is a civil wrong – a tort – which should provide him (and presumably his people) with a monetary remedy. It’s either a public nuisance, negligence or an entirely new tort of “climate system damage”. The NZ Court of Appeal had earlier struck out the claim as being manifestly bound to fail – reasoning, I think pretty sensibly, that:
The magnitude of the crisis which is climate change simply cannot be appropriately or adequately addressed by common law tort claims pursued through the courts. It is quintessentially a matter that calls for a sophisticated regulatory response at a national level supported by international co-ordination.
In other words, if one grants that climate change is an issue which we will have to deal with in some respect (a position I agree with by and large), then that should happen through the democratic political process and not litigation. It’s a matter for parliaments, not courts. And so the case should not be heard.
The Supreme Court disagreed. Declaring, ominously I think, that “the principles governing public nuisance ought not to stand still in the face of massive environmental challenges attributable to human economic activity”, it decided that the claim should proceed to a full hearing. This does not mean it decided the issue one way or the other, but rather that said issue will now actually fall to be determined by a court (inevitably, ultimately, the Supreme Court itself). This will presumably happen later this year, although I am not familiar with the speed with which the wheels of justice turn down in Wellington.
Europe next – specifically Strasbourg, land of Eurocrats, Alsatian dogs and Franco-Prussian antagonism. The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights will on April 9th 2024 hand down its decisions in the three conjoined cases of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v Switzerland, Carême v France and Duarte Agostinho and Others v Portugal and 32 Others. In its judgments it will determine roughly the same issue as the NZ Supreme Court from the opposite direction, as it were. Whereas in Smith the dispute is in private law, and the claimant seeks compensation from the corporate defendants for the torts in question, in these cases the matter is one of public law: whether governments are breaching the human rights of their populations in failing to respond adequately to the aforementioned ‘climate crisis’.
In the first case, Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz, the applicants, a group of elderly women, have complained that the public authorities are not doing enough to prevent climate change’s impacts on their living standards and health. In the second, Carême, a former Mayor of a municipality in France is suing the state on the basis that climate change represents a threat to his right to life and right to respect for his private and family life and not enough is being done to prevent it. In the third, Duarte Agostinho and Others (which, I have to say, is possibly the most egregious example of human rights litigation that I have ever encountered, and I’ve seen a lot), a group of six Portuguese nationals aged between eight and 21 years old have brought a claim against pretty much every state in the Council of Europe, alleging that climate change will “impact their lives, well-being, mental health and their homes” due to [checks notes] increased risk of heatwaves, wildfires and wildfire smoke. This, they allege, will breach obligations they are owed with respect to their rights to [checks notes again] life, prohibition of ill-treatment, respect for private and family life and non-discrimination (on the basis that global warming will affect young people more than old).
Leaving aside the merits (or lack of such) of these four cases, what will be the outcome? The vagaries of the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights are such that it is almost impossible to predict in advance what it will decide on any given issue, and while I would once have said that the Supreme Court of New Zealand can be expected to be pretty sensible, I have to say that genuinely nothing would surprise me these days. All four cases could be laughed out of court, but, equally, all four could succeed.
What I think is most likely to happen – and we’ll find out in due course – is that the claimants in each case will fail, but that the court in question will not be able to resist the opportunity to ‘develop’ the law, and will hint that future claims, better made-out and better supported by evidence, may succeed. The New Zealand Supreme Court will say something along the lines of: “While here the claim cannot succeed, we see no reason why in principle there shouldn’t be a tort of climate system damage.” And the European Court of Human Rights will say something like: “While here the claims cannot succeed, a future claimant might do so by proving x, y and z.” And the doors will be thereby left open for further litigation.
Whatever the courts in question decide, however, the important point is that these cases are being brought and heard in the first place. Because they really shouldn’t be. Indeed, one could hardly imagine a subject which, on the face of it, is less suitable for being decided in a court of law. This is for three obvious reasons.
The first is that a court is supposed to apply, rather than make, law, and in this area there simply is no applicable law. There is no tort of “climate system damage” and nothing in the history of the law of tort resembles anything really like it. The drafters of the European Convention of Human Rights had nothing like climate change in mind when they came up with the treaty (though the Court has developed a complex doctrine, known as the ‘living instrument’ approach, or ‘evolutive interpretation’, to explain away this kind of problem). If any of these cases succeed it will be because the court in question has in effect indulged in law-making from the bench, and this is not what is supposed to happen in a properly developed legal system.
The second reason is that courts lack political legitimacy (at least outside of the U.S., where judges are either political appointments or are actually elected). They are not accountable to the electorate directly or indirectly via elected politicians. They should therefore not be the ones to be deciding important matters of policy, such as whether people who are affected by climate change (assuming causation can be proved, which is a rather large assumption) are entitled to a remedy of some kind – let alone what that remedy should be.
And the third reason is that courts lack expertise in complex matters. I don’t mean this only in the sense that judges are not climate scientists; a committee of climate scientists would lack expertise in this regard too. This is because the issues involved are ‘complex’ in the strict sense – they encompass a range of fields (science, economy, law, health, etc.), a range of sub-domains within those fields, a range of competing values, and a range of different priorities, and all of these different factors influence each other in unforeseeable ways. Not only is it the case, then, that no single body of men and women could properly ‘expertly’ evaluate the issues involved. It is also the case that many of those issues (particularly underlying questions about values and morality) cannot reasonably be described as being subject to expertise at all. No human being can be more of an expert than any other in what it is appropriate to value. The matters being litigated are, in other words, matters of politics par excellence – and politics is something that courts are very poorly equipped to do.
But this brings us, with a bump, back to Niklas Luhmann. Luhmann was an obscurantist and an elitist and he made his writing deliberately inaccessible (even for those with a good command of academic German, which I certainly do not have). And I will here therefore somewhat bastardise and bowdlerise him to make an argument I am sure he would not have endorsed. But I will do this to draw out what I think, lurking in the background, was one of his important messages: that modernity would witness a kind of withering, or shrinking, of politics and its replacement by, among other things, law.
We can think of the political as the realm in which decisions are made through the application of power. If we’re lucky, that power derives from democratic legitimacy; it could of course just as well derive from the might of an autocrat. The point, though, is that the power is executive: a wide range of factors – ideally all relevant factors – are weighed up, and a decision is reached on the basis of what is thought ‘best’, with what ‘best’ would look like being determined by the holder(s) of power. Obviously, ideally, they have a good hold on what would actually be ‘best’ and exercise their decision-making power accordingly – they may very well not do.
Yet we live in societies in which the vast complexity of the underlying reality (the things that are actually present, that are actually happening) is absorbed into functionally differentiated social systems which repackage them on the basis of simple binaries: the legal system categorises everything into lawful/not lawful; the mass media system categorises everything into news/not news; the scientific system categorises everything into true/not true; the medical system categorises everything into healthy/not healthy, and so on. The space for politics becomes smaller and smaller as a result, because the requirement for political decision-making as such is squeezed out in the face of the imperatives of the other social systems.
The classic example of this is of course COVID-19, in which, as you will remember, a new ‘happening’ bubbled up from the environment (the virus) and within a matter of weeks everybody seemed to ‘know’ about it in terms of what was news (wet market, terrible threat, new normal) and was not news (lab leak, early spread); what was ‘true’ (everybody is equally vulnerable, social distancing works) and what was ‘not true’ (old people are much more vulnerable than young people, social distancing is just theatre); what was lawful (stay at home) and what was not lawful (sunbathe, sit on a park bench, hug your grandmother at a funeral).
And all of this seemed to happen not on the basis of political decision-making in the sense that I outlined it earlier, but rather on the basis of a kind of collective communicative freak-out which encompassed politicians and non-politicians alike. Politicians were not absent from the picture but they did not wield politics as such; they rather were blown about and buffeted by a whirlwind of intense communication (opinion polls, scientific reports, modelling forecasts, tweets, etc.) that overcame them. The result was that the media, legal, medical and scientific systems staged a kind of undeclared revolt and went off on a wild frolic of their own – with the politicians trailing in the distance, trying to somehow keep up.
https://dailysceptic.org/2024/04/08/the-ominous-rise-of-climate-change-litigation/
***************************************************Analysis: Even The IPCC’s Latest Report Doesn’t Support Climate Activists’ Lies
Climate campaigners and their political and media allies often tell us that their frightening forecasts are backed up by the best available science.
In particular, they point to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that they tell us are the gold standard of climate science research. If the IPCC said it, it must be true, they proclaim! [emphasis, links added]
The late Dr. Jay Lehr and I have often written about the serious flaws in the IPCC reports. Indeed, much of the IPCC science is wrong, leading many participating scientists to resign from the body.
As documented in the Climate Change Reconsidered series of reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (the most recent of which is here), there are thousands of scientists across the world publishing in leading peer-reviewed journals who show that much of what the IPCC concludes is incorrect.
Consequently, basing our nation’s climate and energy policies only on what the IPCC says would be irresponsible, even reckless.
But in many cases, climate campaigners are not even following the IPCC’s conclusions.
In this article, I will discuss what the IPCC actually said in its reports and show some examples (there are many) where even the UN body itself contradicts what alarmists tell us.
First, it is important to understand what the various confidence levels used by the IPCC mean. They are:
Very Low: Indicates very limited evidence or low agreement.
Low: Suggests limited evidence or agreement.
Medium: Represents moderate evidence or agreement.
High: Signifies substantial evidence or high agreement.
Very High: Implies robust evidence or very high agreement1 2.
Climate alarmists often tell us that we should expect to see increases in flooding due to man-made climate change. However, the IPCC finds no trends in flooding globally. Specifically, the IPCC writes on p. 1569 of the latest Assessment Report, the sixth:
“In summary there is low confidence in the human influence on the changes in high river flows on the global scale. In general, there is low confidence in attributing changes in the probability or magnitude of flood events to human influence because of a limited number of studies, differences in the results of these studies and large modelling uncertainties.”
Similarly, in the Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC wrote:
“There continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”
Note that they don’t even feel confident enough to conclude that floods are increasing or decreasing!
It seems that after every intense rainfall event, we are told that we will see even more of these due to man-made climate change, and these are responsible for more flooding. But the IPCC says:
“Attributing changes in heavy precipitation to anthropogenic activities (Section 11.4.4) cannot be readily translated to attributing changes in floods to human activities, because precipitation is only one of the multiple factors, albeit an important one, that affect floods.”
Even the Trudeau government’s left-leaning Environment and Climate Change Canada, in its 2019 climate report, said,
“There do not appear to be detectable trends in short-duration extreme precipitation in Canada for the country as a whole based on available station data.”
OK, not more rain. So there must be more drought, then, right? No, the latest IPCC report says:
“There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.”
Oh, but hold on. Activists tell us we will have more and more heat waves across the US and Canada due to man-made (anthropogenic) climate change. No, the IPCC says we don’t know.
In particular, the IPCC indicates low confidence (~20%) in the detection of trends in extreme heat and the attribution of such trends to human causes for both central and eastern North America.
But what about more and more intense storms? For example, the derecho (which is a line of intense, widespread, and fast-moving windstorms, and occasionally thunderstorms, that moves across a great distance and is characterized by damaging winds) a year ago in Ottawa, Canada, and other extreme winds and storms that are blamed on anthropogenic climate change.
Concerning extreme winds (between 60S and 60N), the IPCC says:“
the observed intensity of extreme winds is becoming less severe in the lower to mid-latitudes while becoming more severe in higher latitudes poleward of 60 degrees (low confidence)”
Note: cities at or north of 60 degrees latitude include Reykjavik, Iceland, (64°N), and Helsinki, Finland (60°N). OK, so Fins and Icelanders might have a reason to worry about stronger winds, but not us.
The IPCC also shows no upward trend in landfalling hurricanes, including the strongest storms.
How about winter storms that are often blamed on anthropogenic climate change? The IPCC says, concerning winter storms:
“There is low confidence in observed recent changes in the total number of extratropical cyclones over both hemispheres. There is also low confidence in past-century trends in the number and intensity of the strongest extratropical cyclones over the Northern Hemisphere…”
But what about tornadoes, hail, and lightning? Surely those are increasing because of man-man climate change, or are at least happening differently now to how they were a decade ago, right? No, the IPCC says:
“observational trends in tornadoes, hail, and lightning associated with severe convective storms are not robustly detected due to insufficient coverage of the long-term observations”
“But, but, but, more forest fires are caused by climate change, OK?” environmentalists sputter.
The IPCC is not very confident about this. They write:
“There is medium confidence [in contrast to ‘high’ or ‘very high’ confidence] that weather conditions that promote wildfires (fire weather) have become more probable in southern Europe, northern Eurasia, the US, and Australia over the last century.”
Interestingly, the Royal Society wrote in a 2020 blog post:
“Fire activity is on the rise in some regions, but when considering the total area burned at the ground level, we are not seeing an increase an overall increase.”
In summary, Working Group 1 of the Sixth Assessment Report had “low confidence in the direction of change” of most of the climate impacts that most excite activists, sensational media, and politicians, namely precipitation, drought, fire weather, cyclones, and hurricanes, snow and ice, sea levels, coastal erosion, and ocean acidity, you name it.
Generally, it also has “low confidence” that a wider range of detrimental climate impacts will occur beyond 2050, except under “worst-case” scenarios.
Finally, it should be noted that the terms ‘climate emergency’ or ‘climate crisis’ are only mentioned once in the latest IPCC assessment reports, and that is merely regarding media coverage, not what the IPCC says is real. Specifically, the IPCC writes:
“Also, some media outlets have recently adopted and promoted terms and phrases stronger than the more neutral ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming,’ including ‘climate crisis,’ ‘global heating,’ and ‘climate emergency’ (Zeldin-O’Neill, 2019).”
So, when you next hear politicians, media, and activists claim that their proclamations are backed up by the IPCC, have some fun with them and insist that they show you where the IPCC says what they say they say.
And then sit back and watch them sputter and bluster and do their best to avoid the question.
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New Paper Finds Effect of Human-Caused Carbon Emissions on Climate is “Non-Discernible”
Every now and then, a giant of modern science should be allowed to express himself in language that we all understand. In the informative Climate: The Movie, the 2022 Nobel physics laureate Dr. John Clauser thundered: “I assert there is no connection whatsoever between climate change and CO2 – it’s all a crock of crap, in my opinion.” While not expressing himself in such forthright terms, the Greek scientist Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis might agree. He recently published a paper that argues it is the recent expansion of a more productive biosphere that has led to increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere and greening of the Earth. It is widely argued that changing atmospheric carbon isotopes prove that most if not all recent warming is caused by the 4% human contribution from burning hydrocarbons, but such anthropogenic involvement is dismissed by Koutsoyiannis as “non-discernible”. Koutsoyiannis is Professor Emeritus of Hydrology and Analysis of Hydrosystems at the National Technical University of Athens.
The isotope argument has been around for some time and has been useful in closing down debate on the role of human-caused CO2 and its supposed effect in causing a ‘climate emergency’. The carbon in living matter has a slightly higher proportion of 12C isotopes, and recent lowering levels of 13C, which accounts for 99% of carbon in the atmosphere, are used to promote the idea that it is caused by burning hydrocarbons. But Koutsoyiannis argues that the more productive biosphere has resulted in “natural amplification of the carbon cycle due to increased temperature”. He suggests this may be a “primary factor for the decrease in the isotopic signature 13C in atmospheric CO2”.
Clauser’s remarks, along with contributions from a number of other distinguished scientists, have led to widespread attempts to shadow-ban Martin Durkin’s Climate: The Movie in mainstream and social media. If Clauser and scientists like Koutsoyiannis are correct, there is no need for the Net Zero global collectivisation. Trillions of dollars can be taken back from the Climate Industrial Network to be used to solve more pressing environmental and social problems. In such circles, the idea that humans control the climate thermostat is regarded as little short of pseudoscience. In the film, the former Princeton professor William Happer says he can live with the descriptive suggestion “hoax”, although he prefers the word “scam”. Disregarding the role of natural forces and promoting a 50 year-old hypothesis – science speak for ‘opinion’ – that can’t even agree on the degree of warming caused by higher levels of CO2 – holds little attraction for these sceptical science minds.
During the course of the Durkin film, the evidence mounts that the warming ‘opinion’ can’t explain any of the climate change observations seen over the last 500 million years of life on Earth. As the Daily Sceptic has noted on numerous occasions, it would help if there was at least one peer-reviewed paper that proved conclusively that humans caused all or most changes in the climate. A politically-manufactured ‘consensus’ and appeals to UN authority do not count.
Koutsoyiannis provides some of the historical background to the evolution of the isotope story, and its use to promote the ‘settled’ science narrative around CO2. The generally accepted hypothesis “may reflect a dogmatic approach or a postmodern ideological effect, i.e., to blame everything on human actions”, he observes. Hence, he says, the null hypothesis that all observed changes are mostly natural has not seriously been investigated. To add weight to his contention, Koutsoyiannis repeats the infamous claim made recently at a World Economic Forum meeting by Melissa Fleming, Under Secretary-General for Global Communications at the United Nations: “We own the science, and we think that the world should know it.”
The Koutsoyiannis paper is long and detailed and he uses data obtained from the California-based Scripps Institute that has been measuring isotopic signatures since 1978, along with proxy data going back five centuries. The complex workings can be viewed in the full paper with the author concluding that instrumental carbon isotopic data of the last 40 years shows no discernible signs of human hydrocarbon CO2 emissions. He also found that the modern record did not differ in terms of net isotopic signature of atmospheric CO2 sources and sinks from the proxy data, including Antarctica ice cores, going back 500 years.
The lack, or otherwise, of a discernible human-caused carbon isotope signature is an interesting branch of climate science to investigate, although, as we have seen, it is constrained by the political requirements governing the settled science narrative. In 2022, three physics professors led by Kenneth Skrable from the University of Massachusetts broke ranks and examined the atmospheric trail left by the isotopes. They discovered that the amount of CO2 released by hydrocarbon burning since 1750, “was much too low to be the cause of global warming”. The scientists found that claims of the dominance of anthropogenic fossil fuel in the isotope record had involved the “misuse” of statistics. They stated that the assumption that the increase in CO2 is dominated by or equal to the anthropogenic component is “not settled science”.
They warned that “unsupported conclusions” of human involvement “have severe potential societal implications that press the need for very costly remedial actions that may be misdirected, presently unnecessary and ineffective in curbing global warming”.
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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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