Net Zero Will Prevent Almost Zero Warming, Say Three Top Atmospheric Scientists
Recent calculations by the distinguished atmospheric scientists Richard Lindzen, William Happer and William van Wijngaarden suggest that if the entire world eliminated net carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 it would avert warming of an almost unmeasurable 0.07°C.
Even assuming the climate modelled feedbacks and temperature opinions of the politicised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the rise would be only 0.28°C.
Year Zero would have been achieved along with the destruction of economic and social life for eight billion people on Planet Earth.
“It would be hard to find a better example of a policy of all pain and no gain,” note the scientists.
In the U.K., the current General Election is almost certain to be won by a party that is committed to outright warfare on hydrocarbons.
The Labour party will attempt to ‘decarbonise’ the electricity grid by the end of the decade without any realistic instant backup for unreliable wind and solar except oil and gas. Britain is sitting on huge reserves of hydrocarbons but new exploration is to be banned.
It is hard to think of a more ruinous energy policy, but the Conservative governing party is little better. Led by the hapless May, a woman over-promoted since her time running the education committee on Merton Council, through to Buffo Boris and Washed-Out Rishi.
Its leaders have drunk the eco Kool-Aid fed to them by the likes of Roger Hallam, Extinction Rebellion and the Swedish Doom Goblin. Adding to the mix in the new Parliament will be a likely 200 new ‘Labour’ recruits with university degrees in buggerallology and CVs full of parasitical non-jobs in the public sector.
Hardly any science knowledge between them, they even believe that they can spend billions of other people’s money to capture CO2 – perfectly good plant fertiliser – and bury it in the ground.
As a privileged, largely middle class group, they have net zero understanding of how a modern industrial society works, feeds itself and creates the wealth that pays their unnecessary wages.
All will be vying to save the planet and stop a temperature rise that is barely a rounding error on any long-term view.
They plan to cull the farting cows, sow wild flowers where food once grew, take away efficient gas boilers and internal combustion cars and stop granny visiting her grandchildren in the United States.
On a wider front, banning hydrocarbons will remove almost everything from a modern society including many medicines, building materials, fertilisers, plastics and cleaning products. It might be shorter and easier to list essential items where hydrocarbons are absent than produce one where they are present.
Anyone who dissents from their absurd views is said to be in league with fossil fuel interests, a risible suggestion given that they themselves are dependent on hydrocarbon producers to sustain their enviable lifestyles.
Unlike politicians the world over who rant about fire and brimstone, Messrs Lindzen, Happer and van Wijngaarden pay close attention to actual climate observations and analyses of the data.
Since it is impossible to determine how much of the gentle warming of the last two centuries is natural or caused by higher levels of CO2, they assume a ‘climate sensitivity’ – rise in temperature when CO2 doubles in the atmosphere – of 0.8°C.
This is about four times less than IPCC estimates, which lacks any proof. Understandably the IPCC does not make a big issue of this lack of crucial proof at the heart of the so-called 97% anthropogenic ‘consensus’.
The 0.8°C estimate is based on the idea that greenhouse gases like CO2 ‘saturate’ at certain levels and their warming effect falls off a logarithmic cliff. This idea has the advantage of explaining climate records that stretch back 600 million years since CO2 levels have been up to 10-15 times higher in the past compared with the extremely low levels observed today.
There is little if any long term causal link between temperature and CO2 over time. In the immediate past record there is evidence that CO2 rises after natural increases in temperature as the gas is released from warmer oceans.
Any argument that the Earth has a ‘boiling’ problem caused by the small CO2 contribution that humans make by using hydrocarbons is ‘settled’ by an invented political crisis, but is backed by no reliable observational data.
Most of the fear-mongering is little more than a circular exercise using computer models with improbable opinions fed in, and improbable opinions fed out.
The three scientists use a simple formula using base-two logarithms to assess the CO2 influence on the atmosphere based on decades of laboratory experiments and atmospheric data collection.
They demonstrate how trivial the effect on global temperature will be if humanity stops using hydrocarbons. After years wasted listening to Greta Thunberg, the message is starting to penetrate the political arena.
In the United States, the Net Zero project is dead in the water if Trump wins the Presidential election. In Europe, the ruling political elites, both national and supranational, are retreating on their Net Zero commitments.
Reality is starting to dawn and alternative political groupings emerge to challenge the comfortable insanity of Net Zero virtue signalling. In New Zealand, the nightmare of the Ardern years is being expunged with a roll back of Net Zero policies ahead of possible electricity black outs.
Only in Britain it seems are citizens prepared to elect a Government obsessed with self-inflicted poverty and deindustrialisation.
The only major political grouping committed to scrapping Net Zero is the Nigel Farage-led Reform party and although it could beat the ruling Conservatives into second place in the popular vote.
It is unlikely to secure many Parliamentary seats under the U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system. Only a few years ago the Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, who thinks some women have penises, and his imbecilic Deputy Leader Angela Rayner, were bending the knee to an organisation that wanted to cut funding for the police and fling open the borders.
The new British Parliament will have plenty of people who still support Net Zero and assorted woke woo woo, and the great tragedy is that they will still be found across most of the represented political parties.
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UK: Net Zero Watch welcomes British Leftist Net Zero retreat
Net Zero Watch has welcomed Labour’s decision to abandon the Conservative 2035 deadline for banning installation of gas boilers in new build homes. But the campaign group warned that Ed Miliband’s pledge to focus on incentives instead of targets still means higher heating bills.
Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford said:
Ed Miliband’s incentives could be getting gas boiler owners to subsidise heat pump purchases for other people, or getting them to pay for the billions of pounds of windfarm subsidies. It probably means both. This is unavoidable under Net Zero. Any party pledged to decarbonise is going to give you higher heating bills.
Mr Miliband’s decision is Labour’s second u-turn on Net Zero. In February, it abandoned a pledge to spend £28 billion per year on Net Zero measures:
Mr Montford said:
Net Zero is becoming a poisonous concept in the minds of the public. Expect the u-turns to come thick and fast in future.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/campaigns/view-email/cHs6rNmBDFhrRWxn4vKSRmproR3WpBpTIU0wz_9glpe2qnqU0fJ85kk6ysBEs5AxYxD9N9UtH2unXQGiv0uqK_txZrVvMq0x7V1gPbaKCbHC_87fz8V253bjuXZqInNgtPfQGTv_K5dwl4oRa2-FAhka-laRiYjCcFyWng== ?
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EU drafts plan to exempt long-haul flights from new emissions rules
The European Commission has drafted plans to exempt long-haul flights from rules on monitoring their non-CO2 emissions, after international carriers lobbied for an opt-out, documents seen by Reuters showed.
The EU is developing plans to require airlines to track and report their contribution to climate change from January 2025 – not only from carbon dioxide, but also soot, nitrogen oxides and water vapour.
Airlines’ non-CO2 emissions have at least as important an impact on global warming as their CO2 output, according to the EU’s aviation safety authority.
A draft Commission proposal for the new rules, seen by Reuters, would exclude international flights – defined by the EU as those departing or landing in Europe from non-European destinations – from the emissions disclosure rules for two years, limiting them until 2027 to only flights within Europe.
“Such reporting shall only be required in respect of routes involving two aerodromes located in the European Economic Area,” it said, adding that flights from the EEA to Switzerland or Britain would also be covered.
It did not give a rationale for the exclusion. The exemption mirrors current EU rules that require airlines to disclose and pay fees for their CO2 emissions produced on flights only inside Europe, although those rules are due to be reassessed in 2026.
The proposed new rules have split the industry, with lobby group the International Air Transport Association seeking an exemption for long-haul flights, while low-cost European carriers Ryanair and Easyjet say all flights – including long-haul international trips – should be included.
IATA has said it is not currently possible to accurately monitor a flight’s non-CO2 emissions, and that the EU’s emissions monitoring requirements should be voluntary and exempt international flights.
“Any intention of expanding the scope to extra-EU international flights would raise legal concerns,” IATA director general Willie Walsh said in a letter to the European Commission in April, seen by Reuters.
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The ‘Climate Crisis’ Fades Out
The 2015 Paris Agreement aspired to “reduce the risks and impacts of climate change” by eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions in the latter half of this century. The centerpiece of the strategy was a global transition to low-emission energy systems.
After nearly a decade, it’s timely to ask how that energy transition is progressing and how it might fare in the future. A useful framework for that assessment is the “issue attention cycle” described in 1972 by Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs. The five phases of that cycle mark the rise, peak, and decline in public salience of major environmental (and other) problems. It’s spooky to see how closely the energy transition has so far followed Downs’s description.
During Phase I, the issue of “global warming” bubbled among climate scientists through the 1980s with little public attention. Phase II began about 35 years ago when the issue—eventually rebranded “climate change”—burst into public consciousness, with global media coverage growing tenfold over the past two decades. Those years were marked by a fervor for doing something to “solve” the problem.
But the significant global emissions reductions envisioned in Paris are now a fantasy. Emissions grew to an all-time high in 2023, with consumption of coal, oil and natural gas each near record levels, driven in large part by the energy needs of the developing world. Despite global renewable-energy investment of almost $12 trillion in the nine years ending in 2023, fossil fuels continue to provide about 80% of the world’s energy. The latest United Nations emissions report projects that emissions in 2030 will be almost twice as high as a level compatible with the Paris aspiration.
The challenges in reducing emissions have long been evident to the few who cared to understand demographics, economics and energy technologies. As more people have come to appreciate those factors, there are signs that the “climate crisis” has entered Downs’s Phase III, when ambitious goals collide with techno-economic realities.
In Europe, consumers are rebelling against measures to reduce emissions (fiascoes of home heating requirements had electoral consequences in the U.K., Germany, and the Netherlands), and industry is decamping in search of cheaper energy. Despite generous subsidies, U.S. deployment of low-emission technologies can’t meet near-term goals, let alone the projected surge in electricity demand owing to data centers, artificial intelligence and electric vehicles. “Green” investments aren’t yielding competitive financial returns, and the annual cost of a 30-year decarbonization effort, estimated to be upward of 5% of the global economy, weighs on national budgets. Simultaneously, the scientific rationale for the transition is weakening as expectations of future warming are moderating.
What could revive this flagging transition? Perhaps connections between human influences on climate and the disastrous effects of more frequent severe weather. But despite claims to the contrary, the U.N. finds such connections haven’t emerged for most types of weather extremes. The complexity of climate science makes it unlikely that will happen anytime soon. The transition could also be reinvigorated by the development and deployment of reliable, cost-competitive low-emission energy systems. But there are fundamental reasons why energy systems change slowly.
The energy transition’s purported climate benefits are distant, vague and uncertain while the costs and disruption of rapid decarbonization are immediate and substantial. The world has many more urgent needs, including the provision of reliable and affordable energy to all. It’s therefore likely that Downs’s Phase IV will begin as “climate fatigue” sets in, “climate action” fades into the background, and public attention shifts to a different perceived threat (such as artificial intelligence). This would be followed by the long twilight of Phase V, when the issue of decarbonization flares sporadically, but the associated regulations and institutions endure, such as carbon pricing, border adjustments, and clean power standards.
U.S. and European governments are trying to induce an energy transition by building or expanding organizations and programs favoring particular “clean” technologies, including wind and solar generation, carbon capture, hydrogen production and vehicle electrification. Promoting technological innovation is a worthy endeavor, but such efforts face serious challenges as costs and disruptions grow without tangible progress in reducing local, let alone global, emissions. Retreats from aggressive goals are already under way in Europe, with clear signs of mandate fatigue. The climbdown will be slower in the U.S., where subsidies create constituencies that make it more difficult to reverse course.
We should welcome, not bemoan, the energy transition’s passage through the issue-attention cycle. It means that today’s ineffective, inefficient, and ill-considered climate-mitigation strategies will be abandoned, making room for a more thoughtful and informed approach to responsibly providing for the world’s energy needs.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-crisis-fades-out-5944bd44
***************************************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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