Many of the ‘Climate Experts’ Surveyed by the Guardian in Recent Propaganda Blitz Turn Out to be Emotionally-Unstable Hysterics
The Guardian last week published its survey of ‘climate experts’. The results are a predictable mush of fire-and-brimstone predictions and emotional incontinence. This stunt may have convinced those already aligned to the newspaper’s ideological agenda to redouble their characteristically shrill rhetoric, but encouraging scientists to speculate and emote about the future of the planet looks like an act of political desperation, not scientific communication.
For the purposes of creating this story, the Guardian’s Environment Editor Damian Carrington contacted 843 ‘lead authors’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports (IPCC) and 383 responded to his questions. The actual substance of the survey does not seem to have been published by the paper, but the main response Carrington wanted to get from his respondents was an estimate of how much global warming there will be by the end of the century. “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5ºC target,” claims one headline. A graphic in the article shows the responses:
The obvious problem this raises is that such a wide range of views on the next three quarters of a century discredits the notion that the IPCC represents a ‘scientific consensus’ on climate change. The ‘consensus’ – the putative expression of agreement by the worlds ‘top climate scientists’ – is the lynchpin of the narrative, epitomised by the Guardian, that the climate debate is between scientists and denialists. “Seventy seven per cent of climate scientists expect a rise of at least 2.5ºC,” explains the chart. Well, yeah, but 23% of climate scientists do not. And a good number of those connected to the IPCC believe that there will be just 1.5 degrees of warming – a third less warming than is anticipated by their colleagues at the other end of the spectrum. Clearly, there is, or needs to be, a debate.
This in turn raises the question of why this survey was necessary at all. The IPCC’s main output is an Assessment Report (AR), of which six have so far been produced since 1990. Each AR consists of three main volumes, each produced by a Working Group (WG), whose focus is on assessing the available research on “the physical science” (WG1), impacts and vulnerabilities (WG2), and mitigation options (WG3). A Guardian opinion survey is hardly going to shed any light on science that these scientists, who authored the reports, have not already published. It would seem rather silly to ignore the thousands of pages of summaries of the state of scientific understanding that hundreds of scientists and other experts have compiled and substitute it with a DIY opinion poll.
Opinion isn’t science. Even scientific opinion is not science. Yet Carrington seems to believe that tapping into the emotions of scientists is of greater value than reading their work. And all sorts of mush seems to have been unleashed by his project. “‘I am starting to panic about my child’s future’: climate scientists wary of starting families,” claims one headline based on the survey. According to the article, the victim of the panic is a Professor Lisa Schipper, whom Carrington describes as “an expert on climate vulnerability”. Schipper’s profile, however, reveals her actual occupation: “I am particularly interested in socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability, including gender, culture and religion, as well as structural issues related to power, justice and equity.” I’m smelling a rat here, and more than a whiff of humbug. Schipper is not a climate scientist at all, as Carrington seems to imply in both his headline and his article.
Another article – an interactive page on the Guardian website – claims: “We asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future.” The article quotes, among others, Lorraine Whitmarsh from the University of Bath, who tells Carrington:
[Climate change] is an existential threat to humanity and [lack of] political will and vested corporate interests are preventing us addressing it. I do worry about the future my children are inheriting.
But Whitmarsh is not a climate scientist either. According to her academic profile at Bath, She did a BA in Theology and Religious Studies with French at the University of Kent, graduating in 1997. She followed this with a Masters in ‘Science, Culture and Communication’, before completing a PhD in Psychology in 2005. Now Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), Whitmarsh researches “perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport” and “regularly advises governmental and other organisations on low-carbon behaviour change and climate change communication”.
I have discussed the nature of climate psychologists’ work before in the Daily Sceptic. And of course, CAST is of that lofty academic milieu which wraps naked Stalinism in motherhood-and-apple-pie. “We want to work closely with people and organisations to achieve positive low-carbon futures — transforming the way we live our lives, and reconfiguring organisations and cities,” says the group’s website. What it doesn’t have an answer to, however, is people who do not share CAST’s radical ideology and do not want their lives, cities or organisations transformed or reconfigured by self-regarding shrinks – who are manifestly the ones in need of help.
There are of course a number of respondents with scientific backgrounds who have replied to Carrington. But these scientific credentials do not seem to have made those who own them any more rational. “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” says climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who at least appears to have a PhD in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, “after all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change…”
But perhaps Cerezo-Mota forgot to read IPCC AR 6 in which her colleagues conclude that any detectable increase in floods and meteorological and hydrological droughts cannot be attributed with confidence to anthropogenic climate change. And perhaps she forgot that two decades of wildfire data in all regions of the world show significant declines.
I think it is probably for the best that such nervous wrecks do not reproduce. Their grasp on the data is particularly myopic. Despite their apparent belief that the climate crisis is upon us, life for children born in recent years is immeasurably better that of earlier generations. Rather than being dominated by the weather, today’s children are not only far more likely to survive their fifth birthday, they are going to live longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any generation before them.
That is, unless these crazy climate scientists get their way. Because they would strip away every last benefit of industry, capitalism,and freedom to ‘save the planet’, and deny those children the abundant and affordable resources that has created their historically unprecedented position.
It goes further than humbug. I sense very little data and science underpins their anti-natalism, but a great deal of ideology and manipulation. So how can we explain these scientists’ views, if we don’t believe that they emerge from science?
One answer might be that, for nearly 40 years now, green ideology has been poured into classrooms throughout the world, without any care for the consequences. It has largely bounced off most people. But several generations of children have now come up through this system into the adult world, through higher education. The institutions of climate and environmental science have increasingly become the centres to which unhinged individuals are drawn. Emotionally unstable people naturally seek reasons to explain their dysphoria and believing there is a crisis unfolding in the skies above their heads (rather than in them) is a way to explain their anxieties. After all, if you were not a climate loon, why would you volunteer your time to the IPCC? Gradually, rational views have been weeded out of these institutions.
I believe that is the implication of Carrington’s series of Guardian articles and his survey. It shows that people with no scientific expertise to speak of are nonetheless routinely presented as ‘scientists’ and experts. It shows that even those with scientific expertise will happily and radically depart from both the consensus position and the objective data on both meteorological events and their societal impacts. And it shows they have no reluctance to use their own emotional distress as leverage to coerce others. Carrington thinks that showing us scientists’ emotional troubles will convince us to share their anxiety. But all it shows is that it would be deeply foolish to defer to the authority of climate science. It’s an unstable mess. Science must be cool, calm, rational, detached and disinterested, or it is just a silly soap opera.
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Concerns Mount Over Exploding Electric Vehicles
Safety concerns around electric vehicles continue to mount with Australian fire and rescue services in New South Wales stating they might have to make a “tactical disengagement” of a trapped car accident victim if the battery is likely to explode.
Australian journalist Jo Nova covered the story, which was first mentioned in the EV blog The Driven, and commented: “They say the first responders need more training as if this can be solved with a certificate, but the dark truth is they’re talking about training the firemen and the truck drivers to recognise when they have to abandon the rescue.”
The Driven, a widely-read blog that seems highly sympathetic to a rollout of EVs, was reporting on recent testimony given to the NSW Government’s Electric and Hybrid Vehicle Batteries Inquiry. The writer suggested that first responders did not have adequate training to deal with electric vehicle collisions, and in the most serious cases, crews could be forced to abandon rescues.
One particular area of concern seemed to revolve around the need to extract a trapped casualty quickly after a crash by dragging the person out in a “very undesirable manner”. Fires are a grave risk in any vehicle accident, but they can be quickly brought under control in an internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle.
Worries about the potential dangers inherent in EVs is likely to grow as numbers on the roads continue to rise. EV battery explosions can occur very quickly, triggering the release of highly toxic gases. When they roar into thermal overdrive, they create very high temperatures and are very difficult to extinguish.
The explosion can occur after almost any collision, or be due to a fault in the initial manufacture. The fire often takes hours to control and it can reignited days after it was thought to be out. With Net Zero fanatics desperate to drive ICE cars off the road in short order,
EVs are the only mass private transport solution offered. Many of the issues, including safety, that make them an inferior product compared to petrol-powered combustion cars are often ignored.
Just what can be involved in putting out a fire in an EV was dramatically detailed in a recent press release from the Wakefield Fire Dept in Massachusetts. It was called out to deal with a burning Tesla on a snowy Interstate 95, and reported:
Wakefield Engine 1 and Ladder 1 initiated suppression operations, applying copious amounts of water onto the vehicle. Multiple surrounding mutual aid communities responded as well to support firefighting operations and to create a water shuttle to bring water continually to the scene. Engines from Melrose, Stoneham, Reading,
Lynnfield as well as a Middleton water tanker assisted. Firefighters had three 1¾-inch hand lines as well as a ‘blitz gun’ in operation to cool the battery compartment… Lynnfield crews established a continuous 4-inch supply line from Vernon Street up to the highway. The fire was declared under control and fully extinguished after about two and a half hours…
The vehicle was removed from the scene after consulting with the Hazmat Unit… The crews did a great job, especially in the middle of storm conditions – on a busy highway.
There is little doubt that EV fires are on the rise. In the U.K., CE Safety runs Freedom of Information checks on local fire brigades and its latest survey shows an alarming rise in conflagrations. In Greater London in the 2017-2022 period, there were a reported 507 battery fires from a number of EV types, but CE Safety found a “gigantic” 219 conflagrations in 2022-23 alone.
Lancashire was said to rank second with 15 EV battery fires, but this was 10 more in a single year than recorded in the five years between 2017-2022. Overall “it was concerning” to discover that the number of electric battery fires during 2022-2023 was higher in most areas than the data showed over five years from 2017 to 2022. During that year, 14 buses suffered battery fires.
There was a substantial increase in the number of e-bikes catching fire, with CE Safety noting that lithium is highly flammable and reactive. “Over-charging presents a massive risk to households with lithium-powered vehicles,” the safety organisation observed.
Concern is also rising over the transportation of EVs on car ferries. Recently, Havila Kystruten, which operates a fleet of car ferries around the coast of Norway, has banned the transportation of electric, hybrid and hydrogen vehicles.
According to a report in the Maritime Executive, it is the latest step by the shipping industry, “which has become acutely aware of the increasing danger of transporting EV and other alternate fuel vessels”.
Havila’s Managing Director Bent Martini said a risk analysis had shown a fire at sea in a fossil fuel vehicle could be handled by on-board systems. “A possible fire in electric, hybrid or hydrogen cars will require external rescue efforts and could put people on board and the ships at risk,” he said. That of course is the nightmare scenario.
If fire breaks out on a ferry making a 20-mile crossing in good weather, the chances of all passengers and crew surviving are good. Less good, perhaps, if fire was to break out and fill the ship with toxic smoke in the middle of a stormy November night while crossing the Bay of Biscay. Chances of survival would be diminished if the high temperatures caused nearby EVs to explode.
Mercifully, we are less and less likely to see such accidents. The list of disadvantages of EVs is lengthening by the day. Environmental concerns about the manufacture and mining of raw materials have been raised, while ‘range anxiety’ is common among drivers. EVs are more expensive than ICE cars, while knackered batteries mean that second-hand values are very poor.
https://principia-scientific.com/concerns-mount-over-exploding-electric-vehicles/
***************************************************Recent past a poor guide to climate future
Don’t look to the recent past to understand near-term global warming, “the spatial pattern of global warming in the most recent 40 years doesn't look like the long-term pattern we expect in the future. The recent past is a bad analogue for future global warming,” according to Kyle Armour, of the University of Washington.
Instead it is the more distant past that might hold important clues about the warming we may expect by the end of this century. Short-term climate cycles like those we have recently experienced, coupled with the effects of atmospheric pollution, suggest that we can’t use recent data to reliably predict the rest of this century.
The caution is expressed in a new study published in Science Advances. It doesn’t alter the best-case warming scenario from doubling CO2 — about 2°C – but it does reduce the worst-case scenario from 5°C to 4°C.
This climate sensitivity estimate comes from looking at the recent paleoclimate record – a few tens of thousands of years ago – that includes long periods that were much warmer or colder than our current climate. This was caused by many factors, such as the influence of large ice sheets and greenhouse gases. Scientists take an interest in these past times because knowing, however roughly, what the past temperature changes were and what caused them, sheds light on what to expect in the future.
The researchers looked at the Last Glacial Maximum, a period 21,000 years ago when the Earth was on average 6°C cooler than today. Ice core records from the time show that atmospheric CO2 then was less than half of today’s levels, about 190 parts per million. Using new statistical techniques, the researchers have incorporated the paleoclimate data into climate models, producing temperature maps of the time.
The study shows that CO2 played a lesser role in influencing ice age temperatures than was thought. This suggests that the most extreme predictions for global warming from rising CO2 are less likely.
Cloudbase conundrum
In other recent research, scientists note that clouds are a major source of uncertainty in climate models. Some make the Earth warmer by trapping heat, others make it cooler by reflecting sunlight. Exactly which type of cloud influences climate is a major problem. In some cases it is unknown if they cause overall cooling or warming.
New remote-sensing measurements could provide a way to estimate droplet concentration in clouds, which will enable scientists to gain insights into how changes in atmospheric aerosol levels could affect clouds and climate.
They have made the first-ever remote observations of the fine-scale structure at the base of clouds. The results have just been published in Nature Climate and Atmospheric Science and reveal that the air-cloud interface is not a perfect boundary, but is a transition zone, where aerosol particles suspended in Earth’s atmosphere give rise to the droplets that form clouds. Most cloud droplets initially form at the cloud base, in the so-called ‘droplet activation zone’, and the number of them will affect the properties of the cloud later on, including how much sunlight it reflects.
To investigate this zone, scientists fired laser beams into the atmosphere and measured the backscattered reflection from molecules, aerosols, and cloud droplets. Recently, a new higher-resolution laser, firing at 20,000 pulses a second, has focused in on this important area. Cloud microphysical properties and processes are crucial to understanding weather and climate and this new technique may provide a valuable contribution.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/recent-past-a-poor-guide-to-climate-future
****************************************************UK: The Net Zero juggernaut grinds relentlessly onwards
Did you know that there is an Interministerial Group for Net Zero, Energy and Climate Change?
Hardly anyone does. But there is such a thing, comprising representatives of the UK Government, the Welsh Government the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive, which together form the UK Emission Trading Scheme Authority, and it issues, in the style of aristocratic, haut en bas, international diplomacy, occasional ‘Communiqués’ on its meetings.
The latest, reporting a discussion on the 21st of February, was released on the 2nd of May. In spite the long interval the substance of the public statement is brief and can be quoted in its entirety:
What was discussed
The Interministerial Group discussed the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, specifically the UK ETS Authority’s plans set out in July 2023 for expansion of the scope of the scheme to additional sectors of the economy.
Is that it? you ask. Yes indeed; that’s all you are allowed to know about a discussion and perhaps a decision that will add further industries to the UK ETS, and bring yet more of the economy under the low-carbon whip, loading consumers with still further costs. But it will not be the last of such opaque and ridiculously brief ‘communiqués’ from the four governments on this and many other matters related to Net Zero.
If the man and woman in the street said that this looks more like bureaucracy than democracy, it would be hard to disagree. The low-carbon policy agenda is now deeply embedded within the process of UK government, binding the four devolved authorities together in the collaborative development of policies to deliver one agenda – Net Zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. The policy and the process are now indistinguishable, and in spite of the turbulence affecting the Net Zero plans here and abroad, the green juggernaut grinds relentlessly onwards behind closed doors and away from prying eyes. The public may think that the Prime Minister is responding to concerns about the costs, and he may even think this himself, but the truth is that the ‘Interministerial’, and other similar Net Zero delivery agents such as Ofgem, carry on their work relatively undisturbed by such external criticism.
This matters a great deal. Direct income support subsidies to renewable generators are now well-known, and controversial. The OBR estimates that the Renewables Obligation will cost consumers some £8 billion in the current year, the Contracts for Difference scheme some £2.1 billion, the Capacity Market some £1.4 billion. The Feed-in Tariff for small scale generation adds a far from small scale £1.73 billion.[1]
But the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, which the ‘Interministerial’ communiqué is preparing to expand, already adds at least another £6 billion a year to consumer costs, equivalent to about half the other green levies in total. This cost is incurred by companies to purchase permits to emit carbon dioxide, the funds being received by the government. To avoid these costs, emitters must reduce their emissions by adopting low-carbon technologies. But this is not a cost-free option, since low-carbon energy supply is, and in spite of government propaganda, much more expensive than unpenalised fossil fuels.
Of course it is true that, in an otherwise undistorted market, companies would only choose to avoid emitting carbon dioxide if that were cheaper than buying emissions allowances. But the UK economy is not otherwise undistorted, and company directors are under considerable legal and media pressure to adopt Net Zero measures, regardless of cost and in anticipation of an emissions-free economy in 2050. My own paper, A Little Nudge with a Big Stick (2021),[2] discusses one of these, the embedding of the Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting Framework within the Companies Act, thus making it a criminal offence for directors to fail to report or to misreport their emissions and energy consumption and best efforts to reduce them.
The costs of the UK ETS to the consumer, then, is in two parts. Firstly, the cost of permits purchased by companies that cannot avoid emitting carbon dioxide. Secondly, and obscurely, the cost of low-carbon technologies and fuels adopted to avoid the ETS penalties. Government revenues may fall as the ETS drives the economy towards Net Zero, but consumer costs will only fall if the low-carbon alternatives are cheaper, and there is no evidence that this is generally the case.
It is rational to infer that expansion of the ETS to the domestic maritime sector from 2026, to waste and incineration, including energy from waste, and the inclusion of emissions from carbon dioxide venting by the upstream oil and gas sector, will all eventually load additional cost on to the consumer, and it is this which the Interministerial was discussing in secret.
In addition, to make the UK ETS fully Net Zero consistent, the UK ETS Authority, which is comprised of the four governments making up the Interministerial, will reduce the number of emissions allowances by 30% by 2030. Even the authority itself admits that this is ‘ambitious’, [3] implying a steep rise in the cost of permits.
The governments are aware of the dangers of expansion of the scheme and a reduction of allowances, and in their jointly authored 2023 Review of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, they announced a smoothing measure, redistributing allowances from existing reserve ‘pots’ of allowances between 2024 and 2027. Just over 50 million additional allowances will be released, which will in part but only in part offset the effect of introducing the Net Zero consistent pathway and the expansion of the scheme, ‘reducing the risk of upward price shock’.
This smoothing effect probably explains the projected falls in revenues from the ETS over the next few years. The OBR estimates ETS revenue will drop from £6.1 billion in 2023/4 to £3.6 billion in 2024/5, with further falls bringing the annual cost to £1.6 billion a year in 2028/9.[4]
But as we have seen, a fall in government receipts from the ETS does not necessarily result in a fall of costs to consumers. The low-carbon alternatives required to prevent emissions may not be much cheaper than the ETS at its height, and may even be more expensive.
Thus, while the OBR’s figures suggest that the costs of Net Zero are falling, this is an almost certainly in part an illusion. While companies are buying emissions allowances, the policy costs are explicit; when companies avoid those costs by turning to low-carbon energy, perhaps through corporate power purchase agreements, the costs are internalised and buried in the overall cost of doing business. One could in principle laboriously extract them from company reports, but these Net Zero costs will no longer be on the government books.
The main take-home here is that the full, actual cost of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme as it is expanded and as allowances are cut to put it on the Net Zero consistent trajectory is very hard to determine. If you believe, as Lord Callanan, the well-meaning UK government representative on the Interministerial apparently does, that low-carbon fuel costs are low, then you will think the costs will fall. But if you judge, from a host of empirical indicators such as audited wind farm accounts, industry demands for subsidy, and underlying physics, say, that the costs are extremely unlikely to be low, then you will guess that the actual cost to consumers over the coming decades will be considerably upwards of the £6 billion a year that the ETS generated in revenue in 2023/4 and 2024/5.
This is a non-trivial cost, and it would be extremely interesting to know whether the members of the Interministerial, effectively the UK ETS Authority in full session, showed any awareness of this risk in their discussions on the 21st of February. Net Zero Watch will submit an FoI for the full minutes of this meeting in the public interest.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/all-news/ukets-interministerial-group
***************************************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)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://awesternheart.blogspot.com (THE PSYCHOLOGIST)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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