Monday, November 21, 2022
Loss and damage fund a COP27 ‘success’(?)
A favourite breakfast dish in Egypt is fool or foul made from fava beans and many will argue that both wealthy and developing nations were given a full serving at the COP27 climate conference at Sharm el-Sheikh.
Talks limped across the line two days behind schedule in the early hours of Sunday, Egyptian time, after convening for a final session at 3am.
The executive and government jets were finally scrambled from the Red Sea resort town to let it get back to what it does best, hosting sun-seeking tourists for snorkelling with dolphins, climbing the nearby Mount Sinai and quad biking in the desert.
Delegates agreed that nothing came easy at the COP27 talks.
But a breakthrough agreement was claimed on the issue that was always at the centre of negotiations, the establishment of a “loss and damage” fund through which rich nations can assist vulnerable developing countries cope with the impacts of climate change.
Developing nations are expecting about $US2 trillion a year but there is no agreement on who will pay, how or how much.
Rich countries led by the European Union and the United States are determined that China will be a contributor nation to the fund in cash, something China – the world’s biggest emitter but also a developing country – is not ready to agree to.
Climate activists want a levy put on all fossil fuel production worldwide to feed into the fund, and hasten the demise of the fossil fuel industry.
The G7 wants to reform existing structures such as the World Bank to administer climate funding, including as grants, soft loans and debt forgiveness.
Developing countries want grants not loans and, if the Green Climate Fund is any guide, lax rules on how the money is allocated and spent and by whom.
In Sharm el-Sheikh, getting the fund officially onto the agenda and now accepted is considered a big success.
Australia’s climate change Minister, Chris Bowen, played a role in making it happen. The Albanese government supported loss and damage being put on the formal agenda.
The issue has simmered in the background for 30 years with developed nations reluctant to agree to anything that could expose them to open-ended litigation and compensation.
Australia changed its mind in line with a new consideration for the concerns of Pacific neighbours who, as part of a group of small island states, hold a special place in the UNFCCC process.
Pacific Island nations have a lot to gain from a special purpose loss and damage fund and the issue will no doubt be a big feature as Australia bids to host COP31 with Pacific Neighbours in 2026.
A competing bid to host the COP that year has been lodged by Turkey.
Aside from loss and damage, the other outcome from COP26 was the preservation of what was agreed at COP25 in Glasgow. This includes keeping the target for future warming to the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious target of 1.5C.
This is despite the fact that global CO2 emissions continue to grow and fossil fuels continue to power the world.
The Glasgow COP agreed to phase down the use of unabated coal but rejected an outright ban.
Demands to strengthen the push against coal to include a phase down of all fossil fuel production was rejected in Egypt.
Economist Niki Hutley from the Australia’s non-government Climate Council said: “The fact that there is relief that the 1.5C goal has been kept, rather than seeing much stronger commitments from big emitters on emissions reductions during the past two weeks, tells the real sad tale of COP27.”
But UN Development Programme Head of Climate Policy Cassie Flynn said in a year constrained by competing crises including the Covid pandemic, inflation, a rise in energy and fuel prices, and the war in Ukraine, the outcome of COP27 had been “hard-fought”.
Greenpeace said the establishment of a loss and damage finance facility marked a “new dawn” for climate justice.
But exactly how it will work in practice remains to be seen.
COP delegates will regroup next year in Dubai Expo City in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, the world’s third-richest country courtesy of carbon intensive industries petroleum, petrochemicals, aluminium and cement.
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Climate Catastrophism Is way more damaging than Climate Change
Earlier this week I noticed an editorial in the Colorado Springs Gazette describing the harm being caused by “climate change catastrophism,” which I think of as climate alarmists’ equivalent of the Chinese water torture: mainstream media platforms’ daily drip, drip, drip of demonstrably false or grossly exaggerated claims about potential harms from climate change. My colleague Linnea Lueken, a research fellow with The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, wrote about the editorial for Climate Realism after I brought it to her attention.
Essentially the editorial and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) article on which it is based make a critical point, as the Colorado Springs Gazette states: “Enough with climate-change scare tactics. They hurt people, possibly more than they will suffer from climate change.”
This truth echoes what we have said repeatedly at Climate Realism, Climate at a Glance, and Climate Change Weekly: the data does not support claims that extreme weather events are becoming more severe or more frequent. Policies to prevent a climate disaster that will never arrive are likely to produce worse harms than climate change itself. Prominent authors made the same points in three bestselling books released in the past couple of years: False Alarm, by Bjorn Lomborg, Ph.D.; Unsettled, by Steven Koonin, Ph.D.; and Apocalypse Never, by Michael Shellenberger.
In the meantime, these claims are doing untold damage. Children’s psyches are being horribly scarred as climate catastrophism has created whole new category of psychological disorder, “climate grief,” generated by fearmongering politicians, activists, and the mainstream media. This condition has spawned a new area of psychological practice: “ecopsychology.” Meanwhile, slavery, child labor, and environmental destruction are the foundations of the green energy technologies being pushed to replace fossil fuels to prevent climate disaster.
The Colorado Springs Gazette sums up the PNAS article thus:
In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the scientists warn of too much focus by the scientific community on unlikely worst-case scenarios—including imminent extinction of human life—rather than more plausible outcomes that fall between Armageddon on one extreme and “no worries” on the other. Alarmism, they explain, leads to impossible goals of ending all fossil fuel consumption by mid-century, social disarray, and mental health problems.
Specifically a team of three international researchers wrote in the peer-reviewed PNAS,
[H]istory also shows risks in overemphasizing the likelihood of calamity. Mindful of this, we argue Kemp et al. understate the degree to which recent scientific and public discourses already prioritize catastrophic climate scenarios. …
Simultaneously, IPCC reports also overemphasize catastrophic scenarios, as does broader discourse. …
Overemphasized apocalyptic futures can be used to support despotism and rashness. For example, catastrophic and ultimately inaccurate overpopulation scenarios in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to several countries adopting forced sterilization and abortion programs, including China’s one-child policy, which caused up to 100 million coerced abortions, disproportionately of girls. Past and present fascist and neofascist movements frequently use fears of environmental catastrophe to promote eugenics and oppose immigration and aid.
The PNAS article then discusses one fact that is truly alarming: surveys show the overemphasis on apocalyptic climate projections has resulted in 45 percent of the world’s youth feeling climate change is negatively affecting their lives, and because of that, approximately 40 percent of the youths surveyed say they are considering not having children. That is truly tragic.
Whether people choose to have children is none of my business. However, an entire generation should not be misled into rejecting having children based on a false climate alarm suggesting that any kids they have will be a burden on the Earth or be condemned to a lifelong struggle in an environmental wasteland. Both of those claims are lies. All the available evidence suggests the future for humans and the environment will be better than the past.
I’ll conclude with a quote from Lueken I think sums up the issue quite well:
Climate alarmists exaggerate the rate of recent warming and the risks of extreme weather to motivate radical political actions. The editorial board of the Colorado Springs Gazette and the PNAS should be thanked for making this point. The Earth’s climate does change, and will continue to do so, and it is wise to meet this change with realistic mitigation efforts. An overcorrection imposed by world governments, like banning fossil fuels, is likely to cause far more harm and destruction than climate change itself.
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Wrong, ABC News, Climate Change Isn’t Threatening Cocoa Bean Production
This scare seems to pop up amost every year
A Google news search for the term “climate change” today discovered a story published by ABC News which claims climate change is threatening cocoa bean production. This is false. Similar to the results for most other crops, cocoa bean production has been increasing, indeed, often setting new records amid the modest warming of the past 30 years.
In the story on ABC News, titled “Cocoa farmers fear climate change lowering crop production,” Associated Press reporter Hilaire Zon links climate change to this year’s sporadic rainfall in the Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivorie). Small farms in the Ivory Coast produce almost half of the world’s cocoa beans. The farmers that Zon interviewed expressed concern climate change may make rainfall less predictable making it harder to produce cocoa. Zon writes:
For more than 40 years, Jean Baptiste Saleyo has farmed cocoa on several acres of his family’s land in Ivory Coast, a West African nation that produces almost half the world’s supply of the raw ingredient used in chocolate bars.
But this year Saleyo says the rains have become unpredictable, and he fears his crop could be yet another victim of climate change.
“When it should have rained, it didn’t, it didn’t rain,” Saleyo said as he inspected the ripeness of one of his cocoa pods. “It’s raining now, but it’s already too late.”
Farming is always dependent on the weather and, ask any farmer, the weather is fickle—weather patterns are not consistent each year. Droughts come and go, and a single year’s “unpredictable” rainfall is not an indication of climate change. As pointed out at Climate Realism in multiple articles, here and here, for instance, weather is not climate and it is illegitimate to conflate them.
Just as there is no evidence the weather in Ivory Coast this year has been altered by climate change, there is also no evidence that climate change is hampering cocoa bean production. Indeed, real-world data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that cocoa bean production grew considerably between 1990 and 2020, even as the earth warmed modestly, setting new records for production multiple times in the Ivory Coast and globally.
FAO data show that between 1990 and 2020:
Cocoa bean production increased by nearly 173 percent in the Ivory Coast, setting new records for production 16 times;
Cocoa bean production grew more than 127 percent worldwide, setting new records for production 17 times.
As farm experience indicates and FAO data confirm, cocoa production waxes and wanes from year to year, due to weather, market, economic, and sometimes, political conditions. This is true for other crops as well. However, also, like almost every other crop, the long term production trend for cocoa shows an increase as the climate has changed. This is not surprising, because the fertilizing effect of higher global carbon dioxide levels has boosted plant production and improved rainfall conditions, as explained in dozens of articles posted at Climate Realism.
Rather than stoking climate alarm with misleading anecdotal claims, the Associated Press and ABC News should check the facts about cocoa production, in particular, and crop production, in general. That’s what good news outlets and the journalists writing for them do. Had they checked the facts before going to press, they would have found there is no cause for alarm, cocoa production is benefitting from climate change.
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Canada’s nuclear power turns heat up on Australia's energy ignorance
Late last month, energy company AGL lodged an application to blow up its Liddell coal-fired power station in NSW. It’s a shame it can’t be dismantled and packed into shipping containers because the Germans would take it in a flash.
At Garzweiler, near Cologne, the demolition crews are chopping down wind turbines to get to the coal beneath the ground. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz has announced the reopening of five power plants burning low-grade lignite. The life of three nuclear generators is being extended.
Yet Australia, apparently, has so much energy to spare that it can close its fourth-largest coal generator in five months’ time and the lights won’t even flicker. We’ll see.
In June we witnessed a dress rehearsal of Liddell’s closure. A series of outages by coal generators coinciding with rising winter demand brought the National Energy Market to the brink of collapse. The situation was so dire that NSW Energy Minister Matt Kean went on the radio to plead with customers to avoid using their dishwashers until after the evening peak.
At 6.55pm on June 12, the Australian Energy Market Operator ordered Queensland coal generators to turn up the throttle. By 6.30 the next morning, the interconnector from Queensland to NSW was running red hot. At 7am electricity was flowing at three times the safe capacity.
As the sun rose, solar panels offered some relief, but the emergency was far from over. At 6.30pm on June 13, desperate for every megawatt of dispatchable power it could muster, the AEMO ordered Snowy Hydro to crank up its turbines at Colongra on the NSW Central Coast. In normal circumstances, Colongra runs on natural gas. Since the price of gas had gone through the roof, however, the turbines were running on diesel.
READ MORE:State’s coal export bonanza to thrive until at least 2050|‘Don’t go there’: PM warned on new tax|Gas crisis forces Germany to flatten wind farm for coal mine
So much for a smooth transition from hydrocarbons to clean energy. NSW avoided blackouts last winter by turning to one of the dirtiest forms of fuel available. What happened on June 13 was far from an isolated incident. At the peak of the grid crisis in the second week of August, diesel was generating 2 per cent of dispatchable power in the NEM.
If any grounds remain by which the federal and NSW governments can prevent AGL committing this act of industrial vandalism then it must use them, because even if Liddell stays open, the grid will be stretched to the limit. Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen should insist demolition is postponed until AGL replaces like with like. Instead, we’re being fobbed off with puffery about AGL’s investment in wind and solar and its plans for green hydrogen.
AGL scrapped its plan to install gas generators on the site some years ago but it isn’t abandoning Liddell completely. The company has promised to install a 500MW lithium-ion battery in partnership with Andrew Forrest’s Fortescue Future Industries.
Even if it were up and running by the time Liddell closes, which it won’t be, it will be virtually useless in the kind of emergency that came close to blacking out NSW in June. A 500MW battery stores the equivalent of 0.01 per cent of NSW’s weekly energy consumption.
Blowing up Liddell will be just the start of our woes. In August 2025 the country’s largest generator at Eraring will be replaced with another fizzer of a battery. Others must follow if the AEMO is to stay on track with its plan of retiring 60 per cent of coal capacity by the end of the decade.
For a moment, let us put scepticism aside and assume Bowen’s plan to install 64 million solar panels, erect 3800 wind turbines and string up 28,000km of transmission lines is the solution. But unless he can get them up and running by April, Bowen must abandon wishful thinking and face facts. The laws of physics and the challenges of engineering mean the near-instant shift to zero emissions many expect simply cannot occur. The modern world was built to run on hydrocarbons and transition will take much longer than we have so far imagined, if it can be achieved at all.
Not every Western country is making such a hash of things. The government of Ontario announced the closure of its coal-fired power plants in 2003. The Thunder Bay Generating Station, the final coal plant in Ontario, stopped burning in 2014. Today the province remains the powerhouse of the Canadian economy and a centre for manufacturing.
Ontario seized the advantage by investing in nuclear power and a relatively light touch with wind and solar. The province is home to five of six Canadian nuclear reactors including the largest nuclear power station in the world.
Ontario has become an early adopter of small modular reactors, the first of which is under construction at Darlington Point, adjacent to an existing nuclear reactor. The first SMR could be in operation by 2028 and will have a life of 60 years. Australia’s wind and solar infrastructure will need to be replaced three or four times in that period, if we were foolish enough to persist on that path.
SMRs would be the best possible replacement baseload generators for Australia’s remaining coal-fired power plants if we had a government bold enough to rise to the challenge. Four SMRs, stacked in sequence at Liddell covering as little as 18ha, would comfortably cover the gap left by the withdrawal of coal.
Bowen claims the adoption of nuclear would push up power prices and crowd out cheaper and cleaner technologies, insisting that firmed renewables are quicker to build and cheaper to operate. “Those who say otherwise are either dangerously ignorant or simply seeking to perpetuate the climate wars,” he says.
In fact, the retail electricity price in Canada was about the same as the price in Australia in 2005 before the renewable energy investment boom began. Today, Canadians are paying half as much as Australians and enjoy the third-lowest prices in the OECD. Energy ignorance runs deep.
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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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