As predicted, COP27 was a flop yet again

Every year, the annual UN climate conference heralds two weeks of intergovernmental pantomime.

Without fail, we are told that time is running out, that it’s one minute to midnight, and that it’s the last chance to save the world from doomsday.

There is an uncanny sense of déjà vu while global CO2 emissions continue to rise relentlessly and with no sign of slowing down.

We at Net Zero Watch have been pointing out for years that every COP passes through the same ritual stages, always ending in ultimate failure. These green away weeks have degenerated into a meaningless ritual, which makes the participants feel good about themselves but in practice achieves little or nothing.

Which is why we predicted with great confidence many months ago that there would be no breaking of the mould at COP27, and that the great conclave of climate cardinals would end in dismal failure yet again.

And how right we were. From the arrival of the very first delegates, it was just as we said it would be. Check out our updated history of the annual COP ritual, which shows how Sharm el-Sheikh 2022 has followed exactly the same pattern, exactly the same path to dismal failure as previous COPs did before this year’s talkfest.

After the annual excitement of hopes, hype and circus came the habitual 'deadlock' and finally the ‘breakthrough’ when the European Union said it was willing to create a new climate compensation fund … but only on the condition that ‘wealthier developing countries’ contribute too.

Yet the eternal question of who will actually pay the demanded $2trillion p.a. in ‘climate reparations’ has been kicked into next year’s Cop28 when a “transitional committee” will be tasked to “identify and expand sources of funding.” In other words, the endless search for climate $$trillions will go on for decades to come.

That being the case, we expect the same COP ritual all over again next year at COP28 in the United Arab Emirates.

https://mailchi.mp/074d0660af5a/as-predicted-cop27-was-a-flop-yet-again-192623?e=cc88839e92

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That Alluring Curve: The gaffe that lies at the heart of climate science

One of the central ideas underpinning climate change projection is that of the climate model ensemble. The thinking behind an ensemble is very simple. If one takes a number of models, each of which cannot be assumed to be a faithful and complete representation of the system being modelled, then the average of their projections is likely to be closer to the truth than any single one. Furthermore, the spread of projections can be used to represent the uncertainty associated with that average. This entails a well-established statistical approach in which the spread is assumed to take the form a probability density function.

However, nobody should underestimate the difficulties to be overcome by the climate modellers, since the models concerned will be subject to a number of parametric and structural uncertainties. Furthermore, the tuning of the models, and the basis for their inclusion and weighting within the ensemble, can be more of a black art than a science. Despite this, it is assumed that the resulting uncertainties are nevertheless captured by the properties of the probability distribution. The purpose of this article is to convince you that the problems are too deep-seated for that to be the case, since the uncertainties can actually invalidate the statistical methodology employed to analyse the ensemble. In reality, the distribution of projections is highly unlikely to form a true probability density function and so should not be treated as such.

To make my case I will be dividing my argument into two parts. In the first, I will introduce some basics of uncertainty analysis and explain how their consideration has led to the development of guidelines for the handling of uncertainty in system modelling. There will be no reference to climate science in this first part since the guidelines have general application. In the second part, I will examine the extent to which the guidelines have been embraced by the climate science community and explain the implications for evaluation of climate model ensembles. Finally, having made my case, I will briefly discuss the origins and significance of the climate science community’s mishandling of uncertainty analysis and what this may mean for the validity of climate change policy. The central premise is that no policy, least of all one associated with something as hugely important as climate change management, should be based upon the misapplication of statistical technique.

The background issues

Fundamental to an understanding of uncertainty is the ability to answer the following question: Does the uncertainty regarding the likely future state of a system have as its basis the inherent variability of that system, or is it due to gaps in our understanding of the causation behind the variability? To the extent that variability by itself can lead to uncertainty, one will be in the province of stochastic physics. Here the mathematics of randomness will apply, with the caveat that one may be dealing with a chaotic system in which the randomness stems from deterministic processes that are critically sensitive to boundary conditions. If the processes involved are fully understood, and the boundary conditions have been quantified with maximum precision, then the residual uncertainty will be both objective and irreducible. Such uncertainty is sometimes known as aleatory uncertainty, from the Latin for a gambler’s die, alea.1

In practice, however, the basis for the variability may not be fully understood. These gaps in knowledge lead to a fundamentally different form of uncertainty called epistemic uncertainty. Such uncertainty is subjective, since different parties may have differing perspectives that bear upon their understanding of the variability. It can be reduced simply by filling the gaps in knowledge. As a side-effect of the reduction of epistemic uncertainty, a consensus will emerge. However, care has to be taken when using consensus as a metric to measure levels of epistemic uncertainty, since there are also non-epistemic processes that can lead to the development of consensus.2

A simple example that can be used to illustrate the distinction between aleatory and epistemic uncertainty would be a system in which variability results from the random outcome of a thrown die. For a die of a known number of sides, the average score over time is determined by well-understood probability theory and it is a simple matter to determine the appropriate probability distribution. Furthermore, the uncertainty of outcome is both objective and irreducible – it is, after all, the titular aleatory uncertainty. However, now consider a situation in which the number of sides of the die is unknown. In this example the range of possibilities for the average score over time is greater, and there is both an epistemic and aleatory component to the uncertainty. It remains the case that the aleatory component can be defined using a probability density function but the same cannot be said of the epistemic component since it represents an entirely deterministic situation (i.e. it is a fixed number that is simply unknown). A set of probabilities can be provided representing the likelihoods for the various possible number of sides, but there can be no guarantee that the full state space is represented by such a set and there is no basis for assuming that stochastic logic applies to their allocation (as it would for the aleatory). For that reason the amalgamation of the epistemic and aleatory uncertainties cannot be represented by a true probability density function, or at the very least, such a function would not be as meaningful as that used for the aleatory component on its own.

You will also note that in both situations the likelihood (i.e. for the average score of the known die, and for the number of sides of the unknown die) has been characterised by the allocation of probabilities. This is a fundamental difficulty that lies at the heart of uncertainty analysis since probability has such a dual purpose of quantifying both variability and incertitude (between which it does not discern). Consequently, any mathematical technique for analysing uncertainty that is basically probabilistic will suffer from the same drawback, i.e. it runs the risk of conflating variability and incertitude. Yet, as I have just pointed out, only the former lends itself to a stochastically determined probability distribution. It is highly likely, therefore, that the application of such a probabilistic technique will lead to erroneous results if the epistemic and aleatory components have not been isolated prior to the positing of a probability distribution representing the overall uncertainty. As Professors Armen Der Kiureghian and Ove Ditlevsen have noted in the context of time-variant, structural reliability modelling:

The distinction between aleatory and epistemic uncertainties is determined by our modeling choices. The distinction is useful for identifying sources of uncertainty that can be reduced, and in developing sound risk and reliability models. It is shown that for proper formulation of reliability, careful attention should be paid to the categorization (epistemic, aleatory, ergodic or non-ergodic) of uncertainties. Failure to do so may result in underestimation or overestimation of failure probability, which can be quite significant (orders of magnitude) in certain cases.

‘Aleatory or epistemic? Does it matter?’, 2007

In real life, most systems are a lot more complicated than the throwing of a single n-sided die. Typically, a system’s mathematical model will have many free variables (i.e. parameters and boundary conditions) of uncertain value that will determine any projection based upon it. To handle this complexity, modellers employ a technique referred to as Monte Carlo simulation in which multiple runs of the model are aggregated to create a statistical spread of projections. Each run is based upon a random sampling of the possible parametric or boundary condition values allowed for by the model. When performing the sampling, the likelihood of selecting any particular value for a given variable is determined by the probability distribution that applies to that variable’s uncertainty. Note, however, that I used the term ‘random sampling’ here. This is because Monte Carlo simulation is a technique originally developed for the analysis of aleatory uncertainty (it finds widespread use in the field of stochastic physics). When the variable’s uncertainty is epistemic, however, random sampling is inappropriate because the actual value is subject to deterministic incertitude and not stochastic variability. For such variables, one would be sampling possible opinions of experts rather than variable states of the system. But Monte Carlo simulation doesn’t care. Give it a set of probabilities expressing a variable’s uncertainty and it will crunch those numbers merrily and provide you with a very aleatoric looking output. That doesn’t mean that it can be relied upon, however.

The restrictions on the applicability of Monte Carlo simulation are well-known and have led to written guidelines to be followed by mathematical modellers working within the field of risk assessment. Here, for example, is how the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has put it:

Monte Carlo simulation also has important limitations, which have restrained EPA from accepting it as a preferred risk assessment tool. Available software cannot distinguish between variability and uncertainty. Some factors, such as body weight and tap water ingestion, show well-described differences among individuals. These differences are called ‘variability’. Other factors, such as frequency and duration of trespassing, are simply unknown. This lack of knowledge is called ‘uncertainty’.3 Current Monte Carlo software treats uncertainty as if it were variability, which may produce misleading results.

‘Use of Monte Carlo simulation in risk assessments’, 1994

And here is what Professor Susan R. Poulter has to say regarding the guidelines issued by the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS):

In ‘Science and Judgment in Risk Assessment’, the NAS noted the problems with incorporation of subjective assessments of model uncertainty into probability distribution functions, suggesting that such quantitative analyses of model uncertainty be reserved for priority setting and risk trading. For standard setting, residual risk determinations and risk communication, however, the NAS recommended that separate analyses of parameter uncertainty be conducted for each relevant model (rather than a single hybrid distribution), with additional reporting of the subjective probability that each model is correct.4

‘Monte Carlo simulation in environmental risk assessment –Science, policy and legal issues’, 1998

None of this is to say that Monte Carlo simulation is a bad idea or a technique that should never be used. On the contrary, it can be an invaluable tool when analysing the effects of variability in essentially stochastic systems. The problems only emerge when epistemic uncertainty features in the system’s mathematical model and this is not properly isolated, and allowed for, when assessing the extent to which the probability distributions produced by the simulation fully capture the uncertainty.

So, the key questions are these: Is there any indication that these issues and the guidelines arising have been taken on board by the climate scientists? Have they understood that ensemble statistics can be inappropriate or very misleading when epistemic uncertainties are present? And if they haven’t, can we trust the uncertainties they attribute to climate model projections, particularly when model ensembles are involved?

The relevance to climate science

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that the issues are familiar to the community of climate modellers. For example, there is the following from Professor Jeroen Pieter van der Sluijs, of the University of Bergen, regarding the uncertainties associated with climate sensitivity:

Being the product of deterministic models, the 1.5°C to 4.5°C range is not a probability distribution. There have, nevertheless, been attempts to provide a ’best guess’ from the range. This has been regarded as a further useful simplification for policy-makers. However, non-specialists – such as policy-makers, journalists and other scientists – may have interpreted the range of climate sensitivity values as a virtual simulacrum of a probability distribution, the ’best guess’ becoming the ’most likely’ value.

‘Anchoring amid uncertainty’, 1997

More here:

https://cliscep.com/2022/11/19/that-alluring-curve/

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Pakistan: A Deluge of Bad Maths and Worse Reporting

Let’s give sanity and compassion a chance

Discussing climate stuff with your pals, it’s prudent to ask, “Is that true, or did you get it from the ABC? [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] ” Case in point: the Pakistan floods. Time and again since August, the ABC has told us that a third of the country is or was underwater. Horrific! But can that “third” be right? Isn’t a lot of the country desert and mountains anyway?

For the ABC’s ersatz tax-fed journalists, there’s no doubt about it. They show us satellite mapping with flooded parts (colored blue) clearly defined. Case closed…er, not actually. Blind Freddie can see on the ABC’s Pakistan map that the flooding is nothing like a third. Less than a tenth, more like it.

My intent is not to trivialise the terrible suffering of the subsistence villagers. But facts do matter. For example, Care organisation has been raising Pakistan relief funds from the public, claiming that more than a third of the country is flooded. Maybe they’re trusting the ABC?

Here’s the real deal. UN disaster agency OCHA reported,

Satellite-detected water extents mapped by the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT) indicate preliminarily that of 793,000 km2 of lands in Pakistan analysed between 1 and 29 August, around 75,000 km2 [9.5%, or 8.5% for all Pakistan, TT] appear to be affected by floodwaters…

The ABC formula, as here, is (hat-tip to John Ridgeway at Cliscep.com)

# a heart-rending cameo of suffering mums and kids

# such weather events are “unprecedented”

# global warming’s the cause (no evidence required), the West’s to blame and net-zero’s the solution.

Works every time, as our Teal electees would agree.

Exaggerating the floods also bolsters the ABC’s new campaigning narrative that Australia and the West should hand over squillions to Third World corruptocrats.[1] Those squillions are for alleged loss and damage from global warming allegedly caused by the wealthy West (although China’s emissions now dwarf those of all the West combined.)

Columbia (pop. 52m) at Cop27 demanded $US800 billion per year compensation, that’s $A22,000 per Columbian p.a. for life. About 130 other third-world basket-cases are queued for the West’s money. After the all-night Cop27 deliberations, NZ plunked down a laughable $NZ20m, with Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Scotland offering similar small-change amounts. This ABC campaign for taxpayers to fund third-world compensation is as crazed as its CO2 net-zero fantasies and the urged destruction of our power grid by intermittent renewables aka ruinables. You can rely on the tax-fed ABC tribe to put the national interest last.

The BBC, even more woefully woke than the ABC, has nonetheless already corrected its “one third” flooding reports. It did this fix sneakily by interviewing a Dundee University academic, Dr Simon Cook, who set out the correct picture: “The scale of the disaster is huge, but is a third of Pakistan really under water?”

But the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency website still recycles the “one-third” nonsense, once again demonstrating the untrustworthiness of the world’s top climate “authorities”. [2]

For the ABC to properly correct its howlers, it’ll have to tack “We Were Wrong” notes to programs ranging from smarty-pants climate warrior Phillip Adams on Late Night Live, to TV and News, Radio National, and RN Breakfast, which said, “It [fund-raising] comes as new satellite images confirm a third of the country is underwater.”

The ABC’s most shocking abuse of its charter for accuracy and impartiality was on BTN i.e. Behind the News. These are the same ABC educationists who deluge schoolkids with 19 episodes of would-be Aborigine Professor Bruce Pascoe’s blather about pre-colonial indigenous agronomists.[3] BTN is

an educational news program aimed at 10-13 year old kids. It unpacks and explains news and current affairs to young people in a dynamic and creative way. A range of opinions are presented [but none right-of-centre] so students gain a greater awareness of differing points of view [What? Like warming skepticism and border controls?]. Through watching BTN Classroom, students increase their understanding of complex political, economic, environmental and social issues.”

I tuned into BTN’s Pakistan floods episode, produced by an Amelia Moseley. After referencing the “one third” meme, an unidentified female voice-over continued,

Hundreds of thousands of people are living in roadside camps, and now Australia’s being urged to increase its donations to Pakistan… Experts say this season (monsoon) is more intense because of climate change.

Oh really? They bring on an unidentified “expert”, a handsome young sciency-looking guy who tells kids, “The warmer climate means you have more intense rainfall and also warmer climate means glaciers are likely to melt and collapse quicker. Both of these things came together in this tragic event.”

Oh did they? Has someone been measuring the rate of glacier “collapse” up in the Himalayas, in real time and distinguishing alleged increased glacier flows from the worst monsoon downpours since 2010? Pakistan’s Flood Control Agency report of 2020 (p37) said merely that “the increasing temperatures in the northern mountains of the country are likely to result in glacier melting, thereby affecting the flows of Indus River System.” The ABC fails to mention the direct cause of the floods – a triple dose of powerful and natural el Nina events coupled with tropical cyclones.[4]

https://cliscep.com/2022/11/20/a-deluge-of-bad-maths-and-worse-reporting/

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New Greenie plan to take gas out of Australian kitchens

At a time when the electricity grid is under great strain from Greenie meddling, this is insane. I personally remember occasions when my gas stove allowed life to go on unimpeded during an electricity blackout. These days I have multiple oil lamps in addition to my gas stove. I did use them during a late-night blackout recently

I have also noted that most chefs seem to prefer gas stoves. They give immediate and visible temperature control

They’ve been a staple of our kitchens for generations, and it seems Aussies will not give up their gas appliances without a fight.

On Tuesday, property firms Lendlease and GPT Group will come together to help launch the Global Cooksafe Coalition, with plans to phase out gas ovens and stovetops, citing health and environmental concerns.

The property giants have plans to stop installing gas kitchen appliances in new builds in all OECD countries by the end of the decade, and to only do all-electric retrofits in existing properties by 2040.

The campaign has the support of high-profile chefs including Neil Perry, Darren Robertson, Palisa Anderson, Rob Roy Cameron, William Gleave and James Edward Henry. At least one other major Australian property developer is expected to join the Coalition in the next few months, sources said.

But readers have rejected the idea, with a masive majority saying people have the right to use natural gas in their own home.

With more than 1900 readers voting in our online poll by 11.30am AEDT, more than four in five (83 per cent) said they opposed the plan to phase out gas kitchens.

Just 11 per cent said they were in favour of the campaign, while 6 per cent of readers said they were undecided on the issue.

Readers also expressed their opposition to the gas plan in comments, with some labelling it “insane” and “idiotic”.

One reader commented that gas “has been the saviour of many people duting the floods when power was out”, and that “we demonise everything these days”.

Some 76 per cent of poll respondents said they cooked with gas at home - slightly higher than the estimated 65-70 per cent of Australians who use gas domestically.

Chef Neil Perry said electric was “definitely the future of cooking” in both homes and commercial kitchens.

“It’s just cleaner, it’s more efficient and it’s definitely more beneficial for the environment. Everything tends to be neater and cleaner without gas,” he said.

Lendlease Global Head of Sustainability Cate Harris said electrification across operations was “essential” for the company to hit its goal of absolute zero carbon emissions by 2040.

“While the transition to electric cooking powered by renewables will take time, it’s already underway at our new commercial development Victoria Cross Tower in Sydney, and we’re looking forward to working alongside our Coalition partners to drive and accelerate industry change,” she said.

Dale O’Toole from GPT said all-electric kitchens “potentially present financial savings in new developments” and suggested moving away from gas would protect owners from having outdated appliances as the transition to renewable energy picks up momentum.

While the Global Cooksafe Coalition targets appliances in the kitchen only – so gas hot water or heating in the home would still be possible – several Australian jurisdictions are aggressively pursuing plans to electrify homes completely.

From next year, ACT infill developments will not be connected to the network, while Victoria has plans to take gas out of schools and hospitals, and from 2023 it will drop incentives for gas home appliances.

Why the moves against gas

The moves have been prompted by concerns over the health impacts of gas in the home, as well as the greenhouse emissions caused by natural gas.

Dr Kate Charlesworth from the Climate Council said cooking with gas was estimated to be responsible for up to 12 per cent of the childhood asthma burden in Australia, and a recent California study showed home gas stoves were associated with elevated levels of benzene, a known carcinogen.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/national/new-plan-to-take-gas-out-of-aussie-kitchens/news-story/0e2a9c743a769b12c20000e87ce13058

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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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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/loss-and-damage-fund-a-cop27-success/news-story/cc9e16121a609c104f2e6cc7218d5db2

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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.

https://heartlanddailynews.com/2022/11/climate-change-weekly-453-climate-catastrophism-is-worse-than-climate-change/

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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.

https://climaterealism.com/2022/11/wrong-abc-news-climate-change-isnt-threatening-cocoa-bean-production/

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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.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/canadas-nuclear-power-turns-heat-up-on-energy-ignorance/news-story/616c752327aaeb4bc07b979d7da55c05

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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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FRIDAY RAVE. Do as I say, not as I do

Andrew Stewart

Let’s hope that people are waking up to the manmade climate change fear campaign, that the globalist elite themselves don’t subscribe to, as evidenced by their hypocritical actions at COP27.

Using rational thinking, how can anyone take the climate crisis seriously when:

1. There is NO empirical data (without cherry picked starting dates) supported with evidence, of a manmade climate change catastrophe.

2. Those who tell us to take it seriously show no evidence of taking it seriously.

So concerned (not) about the impact of their carbon footprint contributing to a global warming catastrophe, the globalist elite, including politicians from around the world who recently met at COP27 (27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), couldn’t even pretend to set an example for the rest of us. Us, the masses, who they want to impoverish with their globalist political agenda, which rides on the back of the manmade climate change catastrophe hoax.

Please don’t forget what Klaus Schwab founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum told us “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy”.

So concerned about CO2 emissions causing a catastrophic temperature rise, the globalist Marxist elite hypocrites, are reported to have arrived in their four hundred private jets into Egypt during COP27 to:

1. lecture us over emissions and the sins of wanting affordable heat, food and travel.

2. Discuss wealth redistribution from the West, which is at the core of the Globalist Marxist, Paris Agreement of 2015.

So concerned about a catastrophic temperature rise, the globalist Marxist elite hypocrites, , didn’t have a bug or worm on their plate, as they gorged themselves on what they tell us to eat less of.

Are you aware that the globalist Marxist elite and their dodgy climate change scientists are trying to tell us that we need to consume less meat, as cow farts are contributing to destroying the planet? Reduce meat consumption is an agenda from the 1968 Club of Rome, as was open borders, depopulation and the use of global warming as a world crisis to achieve global governance.

Scottish author and political commentator Neil Oliver (who I featured in last weeks #FridayRave said: “They’ve come to lecture us about eating less meat while they sit down to menus featuring beef, chicken, salmon, and sea bass and cream sauces. This is not leadership that we are seeing now, it’s desperation, it’s trolling us proles on a galactic scale”.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/.../Cop27-Egypt-Activists-hit ...

https://www.breitbart.com/.../cop27-hypocrisy-globalists.../

which I hope challenges those deceived, to start caring for the people who are living now and stop supporting the globalist agenda of the religion of climate change.

“Expensive energy is not a problem for those with private jets; it’s a nightmare for the impoverished”.

and

“The poorest in the world are already suffering to appease the guilt of the richest that fly around the world in private jets from their mansions and penthouses. The super-elites are the world’s greatest personal polluters but feel no guilt as they outsource the burden of living carbon net zero to others, with their get-out-of-jail Monopoly carbon credit swaps.

It’s hard to take seriously a celebrity who thinks climate change is such a crisis that he or she buys a beachfront property (sea levels rising?) and make no meaningful changes to address his or her’s duplicity. It’s the poor who should change, not us! How can this level of hypocrisy continue?”

For those who are still deceived by the manmade climate change catastrophe hoax, surely the hypocrisy shown by the Globalist elite at COP27, is stirring the brain cells to question, their actions, which expose that they really aren’t serious about manmade climate change catastrophe.

Worth reading Glenn Beck’s “The Great Reset” if you want a further insight to the real agenda, as it’s not about saving the planet from C02 (also known as plant food).

If you are from the left side of politics and want to read a book from a lefty exposing the fraud, it is worth reading Michael Shellenberger, author of Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.

Shellenberger, recently pointed out: “UN climate talks aren’t about the rich helping the poor. They’re about bribing corrupt leaders in poor nations to leave their fossil fuels for rich nations.”

According to Mr Shellenberger, “fanatical elites” are not pushing the climate agenda because they want to save the planet but because “they are against cheap energy and industrial capitalism because they lift up ordinary people and close the gap with the elites, who want distance and inequality.”

Further reference used in this rave

James Morrow: No time for concepts of distance, inequality
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/.../ec64bf5d1f90ed38cea ...

https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0bHDnrWSi3e9CkCgmaCXBAxTNgFq254LS4AneM4EeL9o6SFus9tQJrrVvm1dqUpWSl&id=100005903885538

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Critical Facts Ignored in the Climate Change Debate

Many Western countries are enacting policies to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and oil) to less reliable and costly “green” energy sources (mostly wind and solar) while ignoring the critical benefits that hydrocarbons provide.

The outcomes will be nothing short of calamitous for more developed countries as their energy industries are crippled. Witness the energy crisis in Europe. At the same time, less developed countries are being prevented from partaking of the many benefits fossil fuels provide.

It is no exaggeration to say that the wide availability of fossil fuels almost exclusively resulted in the steep rise in the standard of living over the 20th century and into the 21st century. People live longer, are safer from extreme weather events, eat more, travel farther and faster, have more leisure time, drink cleaner water and breathe cleaner air, and produce more goods and services.

Take crude oil, for example. Not only are fuels derived from crude oil ideal for various forms of transportation, but we make thousands of products from it.

And while other energy sources have been developed over the same time period, fossil fuels as a whole still provide about 80% of the energy people use worldwide.

Only some extraordinarily dangerous risk from the continued use of fossil fuels could possibly justify abandoning them. So, should we just trust the ruling class’ war on fossil fuels and accept the suffering that will inevitably come? After all, these are complex issues involving climate and economic models and new and emerging energy technologies. How can the average citizen wade through all the data to decide?

Exposing Climate Alarmism

Any policy decisions about climate change and fossil fuels must be based on comparing risks and benefits. But when it comes to supposedly human-caused climate change (specifically, greenhouse gas warming), official statements from governments and international agencies such as the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change do not consider the incredible benefits of fossil fuels. It’s no wonder so many people believe that our greenhouse gas emissions only present risks.

These risks supposedly include increased hurricanes, tornadoes, heat waves, droughts, forest fires, and rapidly rising sea levels, among others. What’s more, alarmists claim the rising temperature will soon reach a climate tipping point, beyond which it all gets rapidly much worse and Earth becomes uninhabitable.

It’s surprisingly easy to disprove these claims, and you don’t necessarily have to be an expert. This makes me wonder how so many educated people can be so spectacularly wrong, but that is a topic for another day.

In disproving the claims, there’s no need to focus on personalities or dueling authorities. There are certain key findings that cut through the fog. The only tools you need are a basic understanding of trends and knowing how to spot misleading data.

For example, contrary to what most news outlets have claimed recently following Hurricane Ian, hurricanes making landfall in the U.S. have not increased in number or frequency since reliable records began being kept in 1851. Neither have they increased globally. Moreover, strong tornadoes in the U.S. have decreased significantly since 1954.

What was the worst decade for heat waves in the last 120 years? Would you have guessed the 1930s? And would you be surprised to learn that climate change has not worsened forest fires in the U.S.?

The average global temperature has risen by a little over 1 degree Celsius (about 2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 19th century. No one disputes this. Since 1980, it has been rising 0.16 Celsius per decade on average.

How much of this warming is man-made and how much is natural? In short, climatologists compare models that include human effects on the climate with what has happened in the real world.

This is where expertise helps. But you don’t need to be a climatologist to know if the models match reality. In fact, the models have been running much hotter than the actual temperature in recent decades both globally and for the U.S. This implies that the climate models overestimate the human contribution to global warming.

Still, what if we are headed toward a tipping point, albeit more slowly than thought? This concern might be more believable if we were living in unprecedented times. But paleoclimatology research shows that the current temperature, if anything, is on the cool side relative to the whole Holocene period (the period since the end of the last ice age). Since Earth didn’t encounter a tipping point when it was warmer, then it is extremely unlikely it will encounter one any time soon.

Why Green Energy Alternatives Won’t Work

Even if the risks of fossil fuels use outweighed their benefits, we still need to know if it is even possible to replace them. It’s surprising that this question is not asked more often. Certainly, the ruling class believes it is possible. But the facts say otherwise.

First, consider that although fossil fuels are burned to generate heat and are often converted into other forms of energy such as electricity, they are also used to make many products we use every day.

Oil is especially versatile. Only 45% of U.S. oil consumption actually goes toward making gasoline and 9% is used to make jet fuel. About 25% is for products ranging from solar panels, wind generators, and asphalt to tires, plastics, and waxes.

Agriculture also depends heavily on fossil fuels, both for powering farm machinery and making fertilizers and pesticides.

It is also very unlikely that jets, merchant ships, or large trucks will ever run on batteries. There are currently no substitutes for oil-derived products in the quantities required to operate these larger vehicles.

In short, we will still need fossil fuels. Almost all aspects of our daily lives depend on them.

Second, are there even enough raw materials to build all the wind turbines, solar panels, and electric vehicles needed for a fossil fuel-free world? These new technologies require more mineral resources than our current fossil fuel-based energy infrastructure.

In addition to the common metals, electric vehicles require lithium, nickel, cobalt, copper, rare earths, manganese, and zinc. Studies are already showing that the projected supply of some of these minerals for the transition to a fossil fuel-free world would fall far short of what’s needed.

The prices of these key minerals will continue to rise steeply, having the consequence of increasing the costs of not only electric vehicles, but of all the other products that employ them, including laptops, phones, copper pipes, and more.

Third, if we want to preserve the environment, isn’t it better to obtain energy resources from the deep dead zones of the Earth rather than from the delicate veneer of life at its surface? Or is it better to mow down the wild forests to grow crops to make biofuels and strip mine the minerals needed for the green transition? Lithium mining is hazardous to the environment, as is cobalt mining.

Should we go back to the bad old days before whale oil, fuel wood, and rubber trees were replaced by kerosene, coal, and petroleum products, respectively?

The Real Green Revolution

The so-called green revolution is not some hoped-for net-zero emissions Utopia. It is here now, and it is actually fueled by carbon dioxide. The very carbon dioxide we put into the air from burning fossil fuels is plant food, as all the carbon in a plant or tree comes from the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The benefits are already evident as we see significantly increased “greening of the Earth” over the past several decades as a result of increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/11/02/critical-facts-ignored-in-the-climate-change-debate/

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Hudson Bay Sea Ice Freeze-Up In 2022 For 5th Time Since 2015

This is the fifth year out of the last seven that enough sea ice has formed along the west coast of Hudson Bay by mid-November for bears to be able to head out to the ice, just as it did in the 1980s.

One of the independent polar bear guides on the ground near Churchill had this to say about the bears and freeze-up conditions this year:

“Bears started leaving on November 10; conservation emptied the jail on the 10th as well.”

‘The jail’ is the Churchill Polar Bear Alert Program’s ‘holding facility’.

While the Alert program folks have not released a report for this week (gee, I wonder why?), nearby tourist outfit Great White Bear Tours not only confirmed the bears were released from jail but posted a picture of a ‘green dot bear’: the mark put on problem bears released from the holding facility to keep track of them.

Bears are not released before there is ample ice along shore for them to move out.

Great White Bear Tours have been tracking bears moving offshore.

This information suggests the average date for bears leaving shore will likely turn out to be 12-14 November, again earlier than the average for the 1980s (16 Nov +/- 5 days) (Castro de la Guardia et al. 2017).

That makes five out of the last seven years (2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022) since 2015 that bears have left about the same time as they did in the 1980s.

While there are still be a few bears on the shore of Wapusk National Park that seem to be in no hurry to leave, a few stragglers doesn’t mean there isn’t ice available for hunting.

Sea Ice Conditions On Hudson Bay

This amount of ice is more than the long term average for this time of year (week of 14 November), according to the following CIS comparison chart, where blue is more than average and dark blue is much more than average:

Bears In No Hurry To Leave Shore

Some bears in good condition appear to be in no hurry to get out onto the ice, as the images below from 12-17 November on the shore of Wapusk National Park, courtesy Explore.org.

This phenomenon seems to mirror the reluctance of some bears in early summer to leave the retreating ice even when there is very little left.

Only a couple of WH bears tagged by Andrew Derocher’s team had left shore by 11 November and he hasn’t yet updated this information.

As he’s done in the past, chances are he won’t post another tracking map until the bears are all offshore, so we won’t be able to tell when most of them left.

But perhaps he’ll surprise us this year.

https://principia-scientific.com/hudson-bay-sea-ice-freeze-up-in-2022-for-5th-time-since-2015/

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UK: The austerity we don’t talk about

A new age of austerity is upon us. And it is going to hurt. Even proponents of ‘austerity 2.0’ seem to agree as much. UK chancellor Jeremy Hunt, who today unveiled a £55 billion package of tax rises and spending cuts, has previously described his own economic plans as ‘eye-watering’ and ‘horrible’.

Unsurprisingly, there is no shortage of opposition to the chancellor’s grim proposals. The Labour Party, the broader left, economists, think-tankers and the media are bemoaning the bitter medicine. What is striking, however, is that prior to Hunt’s statement, the UK government had already committed itself to a parallel austerity programme – a far more painful set of measures that will squeeze living standards and smother economic dynamism. It is one of the most significant government projects of the postwar period, and yet it barely receives any scrutiny or pushback. In fact, many of those who are implacably opposed to Hunt’s austerity measures are among the loudest cheerleaders for this other impoverishing project. I’m talking, of course, about Net Zero – a polite term for green austerity.

Opponents to Hunt’s austerity are right when they say the measures are punitive and counterproductive. Britain’s public sector is already crumbling. Planned cuts to infrastructure spending will hurt growth and productivity. And if public spending as a whole is reined in too quickly, or if taxes are hiked too steeply, this could easily prolong and deepen this winter’s recession.

So why, then, is there silence about the other assault on our living standards? At its core, the Net Zero agenda is about limiting human activity to keep carbon emissions in check. Most of all, it is about limiting our production and use of energy – the lifeblood of a modern industrialised society. The current energy crisis is just a tiny taste of how painful it can be to be short of energy.

For the past few decades, politicians across the spectrum have put decarbonisation at the heart of our energy policy. In doing so, they have not only failed to secure cheap and abundant supplies of energy – they have also boasted about their efforts to make supplies more precarious. They have bet the house on unreliable renewables, which stop producing power when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. And they have delighted in the abandonment of reliable fossil fuels.

Britain now produces less electricity than it did 15 years ago – a process set in motion by New Labour’s Climate Change Act, which imposed legally binding CO2-reduction targets. The Net Zero policy doubles down on those targets. It was signed off in 2019 with barely any pretence of a debate. The process has barely even got started and yet we are already facing catastrophic energy shortages – shortages that were apparent even before the war in Ukraine. The National Grid is now warning there could be blackouts this winter. Soaring energy prices are eating into household budgets, imposing huge costs on businesses and pushing up inflation across the board. Hardest hit are the poorest, especially in those regions already grappling with the consequences of deindustrialisation.

As well as reining in energy production, and switching to less reliable methods, Net Zero will mean limiting and managing energy ‘demand’. The Climate Change Committee (CCC), which advises the UK government on decarbonisation, says that an astonishing 62 per cent of emissions reductions should come not from new carbon-free energy infrastructure or production processes, but from ‘behaviour change and individual choices’. That is because the technologies we would need to have Net Zero carbon emissions while maintaining current levels of energy use either do not exist or are not yet viable.

These ‘choices’ and new ‘behaviours’ will not be freely made or adopted, of course. Under the current Net Zero plans, cheap methods of producing energy, heating our homes and transporting people and goods will be phased out, banned or taxed very heavily at the very least. And costlier methods will be encouraged or mandated. Few people will volunteer to make these ‘choices’ because they all mean accepting a reduced quality of life – less consumption, less travel, a colder home. The CCC even wants people to eat less of their favourite foods, like meat, dairy and fish. This is rationing in all but name.

These measures are far bleaker than anything being served up by Hunt in his statement today. Yet rather than decry this assault on our living standards or the sabotage of our energy supplies, those who think of themselves as ‘progressive’ are all on board with green austerity. In fact, they want the government to go further and faster in cutting carbon emissions, regardless of the consequences. The Labour Party, for instance, has pledged to decarbonise the UK’s energy system in the space of just six years. The eco-cultists of Just Stop Oil want us to halt domestic fossil-fuel production. All are in agreement that the people must make sacrifices and should live a diminished, substandard ‘green’ lifestyle.

This is the austerity we need to talk about. The austerity we need to get angry about. It poses a serious threat to our living standards that no nation should be expected to tolerate. And yet the supposed critics of austerity are nowhere to be seen.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/11/17/the-austerity-we-dont-talk-about

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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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Flooded Earth: How the global map and countries' coastlines will change by 2100 as higher temperatures cause sea levels to rise, flooding cities such as London and New York

This is an old, old prediction -- going back to the '80s. But nothing has ever come of it

Vast swathes of London, New York, Bangkok and other major cities will be underwater by 2100, according to terrifying sea level predictions based on the current trajectory of rising global temperatures.

As a result of rising water levels, the global map is set to change as we know it before the end of this century. Coastlines will be altered, and many cities will be rendered uninhabitable - displacing hundreds of millions.

With a recent United Nations report finding 'no credible pathway' to stopping global temperatures from rising above the 1.5 decrees Celsius (the 'preferable' target set by the Paris agreement), rising sea levels as a result of increasing global temperatures are considered inevitable by 2100.

As they meet in Egypt for Cop27, some world leaders are working to limit global temperatures from rising any further. Thanks to the rapid growth in clean energy technologies, the world has already started to curtail emissions. However, the current emissions pathway is still predicted to cause a global temperature rise of 2.7C to 3.1C by the end of the century.

A global temperature rise of 3C by 2100 would have a disastrous impact on millions around the globe, and nowhere would be immune to the effects.

Heatwaves will last longer and become more common, causing droughts and global food shortages. Global migration will rise, as will the spread of disease. And, as polar ice melts, sea levels will rise.

Scientists at Climate Central, a non-profit organisation, estimate as many as 275 million people currently live in areas that will be flooded in this scenario.

Low-lying London is predicted to be one of the worst affected major cities in the western world. A rise of even 2C could see central parts of the British capital along the River Thames flooded by 2100.

According to maps modelled by Climate Central, other parts of England will not be spared, either. A large portion of the Midlands will be submerged, while cities and towns along the Humber - including Hull - will also be flooded. Much of the coast on the South-East will also be at risk.

Across the English Channel, Northern France, Belgium, Germany and then around half of the Netherlands will also be underwater by 2100. The situation is particularly bleak for the low-lying Holland region of The Netherlands, known for its flat landscape of canals, tulip fields and windmills.

Should the sea level rise in-line with current predictions, only the centre of Amsterdam, and The Hague further south, could become islands in an otherwise flooded landscape.

Some major cities in the United States also face disaster in the 3C scenario. Rising sea levels and floods resulting from more extreme tidal activity would see parts of New York City, including lower Manhattan, under water. Across the Hudson river, Jersey City and parts of Newark are also in the danger zone.

Looking east, the southern coast of Long Island and its Barrier Islands will also see rising floodwaters.

Further down America's east coast, several coastal communities are also at risk. In the South, New Orleans - like Amsterdam in Europe - is expected to become an island as the surrounding flood plains are submerged.

Some projections say Miami, on the southern coast of Florida, would simply cease to exist in 3C rises.

On the West Coast, southern Los Angeles including Long Beach and Seal Beach are predicted to flood in the 3C scenario. Further north, communities around San Francisco bay - including Oakland - are also predicted to suffer.

Northern France, Belgium, Germany and then around half of the Netherlands will also be underwater by 2100. The situation is particularly bleak for the low lying Holland region of The Netherlands, known for its flat landscape of canals, tulip fields and windmills. Amsterdam and The Hague could become islands in an otherwise flooded landscape

Rising sea levels and floods resulting from more extreme tidal activity would see parts of New York City, including lower Manhattan, under water. Across the Hudson river, Jersey City and parts of Newark are also in the danger zone

On the West Coast, southern Los Angeles including Long Beach and Seal Beach are predicted to flood in the 3C scenario. Further north, communities around San Francisco bay (pictured) - including Oakland - are also predicted to suffer

With all that being said, it is the population of Asia that is expected to be most adversely affected by rising waters.

When it comes to flooding, Shanghai in China is one of the world's most vulnerable cities. Models suggest that 17.5 million people could be displaced by a global temperature rise of 3C, thanks to the former fishing village's location on the Yellow Sea. The Yangtze river runs to the north, while the Huangpu river runs through the centre.

Cities such as Shanghai, which rely heavily on water-based infrastructure, are particularly vulnerable. The vast city is built on several islands, has two long coastlines, several shipping ports and miles of canals.

In recent years, China has been building vast flood prevention walls to protect Shangai. Some have blocked the ocean from view entirely to its residents.

Climate Central's projections of sea level rises also show Thailand's capital of Bangkok being all but wiped out by flood waters in the event the world hits 3C. While the sea level itself would not be enough to submerge the whole city, the whole of Bangkok would be at risk of severe flood waters.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11438473/Flooded-Earth-global-map-countries-coastlines-change-2100.html

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Pols who push electric cars ignore basic math and physics

By John Stossel

Politicians praise electric cars. If everyone buys them, they say, solar and wind power will replace our need for oil.

But that’s absurd. Here is the rest of my list of “inconvenient facts” about electric cars.

“The future of the auto industry is electric,” says President Joe Biden. He assumes a vast improvement in batteries. Better batteries are crucial because both power plants and cars need to store lots of electric power.

But here’s inconvenient Fact 3: Batteries are lousy at storing large amounts of energy. “Batteries leak, and they don’t hold a lot,” says physicist Mark Mills.

Mills thinks electric cars are great but explains that “oil begins with a huge advantage: 5,000% more energy in it per pound. Electric car batteries weigh 1,000 pounds. Those 1,000 pounds replace just 80 pounds of gasoline.”

But future batteries will be better, I point out.

“Engineers are really good at making things better,” Mills responds, “but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”

That’s inconvenient Fact 4. Miracle batteries powerful enough to replace fossil fuels are a fantasy.

“Because nature is not nice to humans,” explains Mills, “we store energy for when it’s cold or really hot. People who imagine an energy transition want to build windmills and solar panels and store all that energy in batteries. But if you do the arithmetic, you find you’d need to build about a hundred trillion dollars’ worth of batteries to store the same amount of energy that Europe has in storage now for this winter. It would take the world’s battery factories 400 years to manufacture that many batteries.”

Politicians don’t mention that when they promise every car will be electric. They also don’t mention that the electric grid is limited.

This summer, California officials were so worried about blackouts they asked electric vehicle owners to stop charging cars!

Yet today, few of California’s cars are electric. Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered that all new cars must be electric by 2035! Where does he think he’ll get the electricity to power them?

“Roughly speaking, you have to double your electric grid to move the energy out of gasoline into the electric sector,” says Mills. “No one is planning to double the electric grid, so they’ll be rationing.”

Rationing. That means some places will simply turn off some of the power. That’s our final inconvenient fact: We just don’t have enough electricity for all electric cars.

Worse, if (as many activists and politicians propose) we try to get that electricity from 100% renewable sources, the rationing would be deadly.

“Even if you cover the entire continent of the United States with solar panels, you wouldn’t supply half of America’s electricity,” Mills points out.

Even if you added “Washington Monument-sized wind turbines spread over an area six times greater than the state of New York, that wouldn’t be enough.”

This is just math and physics. It’s amazing supposedly responsible people promote impossible fantasies.

“It’s been an extraordinary accomplishment of propaganda,” complains Mills, “almost infantile . . . distressing because it’s so silly.”

Even if people invent much better cars, wind turbines, solar panels, power lines and batteries, explains Mills, “you’re still drilling things, digging up stuff. You’re still building machines that wear out . . . It’s not magical transformation.”

Even worse, today politicians make us pay more for energy while forcing us to do things that hurt the environment. Their restrictions on fossil fuels drive people to use fuels that pollute more.

In Europe: “They’re going back to burning coal! What we’ve done is have our energy systems designed by bureaucrats instead of engineers,” complains Mills. “We get worse energy, more expensive energy and higher environmental impacts!”

I like electric cars. But I won’t pretend that driving one makes me some kind of environmental hero.

“There’ll be lots more electric cars in the future,” concludes Mills. “There should be, because that’ll reduce demand for oil, which is a good thing. But when you do the math, to operate a society with 5 or 6 billion people who are living in poverty we can’t imagine, when you want to give them a little of what we have, the energy demands are off the charts big. We’re going to need everything.”

That includes fossil fuels.

https://nypost.com/2022/11/16/pols-who-push-electric-cars-ignore-basic-math-and-physics/

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Earth CAN regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years to stay in a habitable range

Earth can regulate its temperature over hundreds of thousands of years to keep them within a steady range, a new study confirms.

The planet contains a 'stabilizing feedback' mechanism that's able to keep the climate pendulum from swinging too far in either direction across long timescales.

It's believed this is accomplished through 'silicate weathering' - a geological process during which the slow, steady weathering of silicate rocks involves chemical reactions that draw carbon from atmosphere and into ocean sediments, thereby trapping the gas in rocks.

The findings, published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, are based on a study of paleoclimate data that record fluctuations in average global temperatures of the last 66 million years.

Researchers applied a mathematical analysis to determine if the data revealed any patterns that would show a stabilizing phenomena to keep global temperatures in line on a very long timescale.

They found that there seems to be a consistent pattern whereby the planet's temperature swings get dampened over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. That duration is similar to the timescales over which silicate weathering is thought to act.

'You have a planet whose climate was subjected to so many dramatic external changes. Why did life survive all this time? One argument is that we need some sort of stabilizing mechanism to keep temperatures suitable for life,' Constantin Arnscheidt, a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), said.

'But it's never been demonstrated from data that such a mechanism has consistently controlled Earth's climate.'

Through previous research, scientists have observed the movement of carbon in and out of Earth surface environment to stay relatively balanced - despite global temperature swings.

Scientists believe we are currently in a period of warming and have urged policymakers to enact a range of changes to curb carbon emissions or become carbon-neutral.

Arnscheidt and his colleagues analyzed the history of average global temperatures across 66 million years to consider a range of different timescales, including tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, to see if any stabilizing patterns emerged within each timescale.

'To some extent, it’s like your car is speeding down the street, and when you put on the brakes, you slide for a long time before you stop,' Daniel Rothman, a professor of geophysics at MIT, said in a statement.

'There’s a timescale over which frictional resistance, or a stabilizing feedback, kicks in, when the system returns to a steady state.'

Although scientists have suspected for a long time that silicate weathering can help to maintain our planet's carbon cycle, this is the first time they've observed direct evidence of the mechanism.

'On the one hand, it’s good because we know that today’s global warming will eventually be canceled out through this stabilizing feedback,' Arnscheidt explained.

'But on the other hand, it will take hundreds of thousands of years to happen, so not fast enough to solve our present-day issues.'

One noteworthy finding of their work is that on much longer timescales, meaning over a million years, the data did not reveal any stabilizing feedbacks - which led to the question: What kept global temperatures in check?

'There’s an idea that chance may have played a major role in determining why, after more than 3 billion years, life still exists,' Rothman offered.

'There are two camps: Some say random chance is a good enough explanation, and others say there must be a stabilizing feedback,' Arnscheidt said.

'We’re able to show, directly from data, that the answer is probably somewhere in between. In other words, there was some stabilization, but pure luck likely also played a role in keeping Earth continuously habitable.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11439595/Earth-regulate-temperature-thousands-years-planet-habitable-range.html

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The green mob won’t rest until Christmas joy is utterly destroyed

Lock up your fairy lights! Hide that door wreath! Block the chimney right this minute! The planet-saving Puritans are coming for Christmas, armed with righteous zeal and tins of soup to hurl at your father-in-law’s framed watercolours. There will be no DFS vans delivering new sofas in suburbia. Even the Pope’s festive tree is at risk of being cancelled.

Wait – is that Mariah Carey I hear playing, comrade? Cease and desist or we’ll glue ourselves to your porch. Cometh the most wonderful time of the year, cometh the Winterval wokeys who want to bully, harangue and guilt trip us into performative misery and handwringing Weltschmerz.

Yes, there is much to feel bleak about, what with inflation, energy prices and the war in Ukraine. But just because we could be depressed doesn’t mean we should, and it most certainly doesn’t mean we must.

Where’s the harm in putting up a Norway spruce and bringing an LED twinkle into our chilly homes? Frankly, warming the cockles of our hearts is a lot cheaper than warming the rest of us. And wouldn’t it be nice to set aside real life for a bit and enjoy the sort of celebrations that the Covid lockdowns made impossible? Why shouldn’t we make merry and feast on the last few turkeys that haven’t succumbed to avian flu? We’ll eat veg on Boxing Day.

There is something especially mean-spirited about protesting against the Vatican’s Christmas tree and refusing to allow the traditional 200-year-old fir to be felled, as green activists have managed to do in Italy. The centre of a religion with 1.3 billion believers surely deserves some respect. These foolish eco-warriors conveniently forget that Pope Francis is a vocal exponent of action against climate change. He wrote an encyclical on the ecological crisis back in 2015, for pity’s sake.

But no. Bringing people together (which in the long run is the only way to alter human behaviour) comes a poor second to the adrenalin-rush of bossy boots hectoring and virtue-signalling. And so Oxford Street’s atmospheric lights will go part-time, with a two-thirds cut compared to last year. This will apparently make it a “leading sustainable district”. Now, I may not be a world-leading economist, but I doubt Stygian gloom will do much for retailers desperately needing to boost lacklustre sales and promote family footfall.

Not even the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, which is running its annual light show on biofuel in order to slash emissions by up to 90 per cent, has escaped the censuring gaze of the ultra-green lobby. It has been urged to “turn out your fairy lights” and encourage visitors to “look at the unviolated stars” instead. One particularly aggrieved ecotist asked: “What’s your carbon footprint on this? You should really know better.” What a self-indulgently bleak way to look at the world.

Like most people, I try my best to help the planet. I recycle. I reuse. I take the bus. Hell, I “identify” as flexitarian. But Christmas is for treats. So while John Lewis may once again top the tear-jerking advert league table, my favourite seasonal offering is the fabulously retro Argos ad in which an entire community descends on a young couple for December 25, bearing trifles and crackers. It is silly, joyful and sociable; as the best Christmases should be.

But I fear the militant green mob will not be happy until our high streets are shrouded in darkness and the light has died in our eyes.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/16/green-mob-wont-rest-christmas-joy-utterly-destroyed/

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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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The global warming scare is being used as a front for wealth redistribution

Politicians of all stripes and in all Western countries have been obediently parroting the official IPCC line that Climate Change science knows best and that we must prepare for the worst. But as COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh (I refer to it as Sham in Chief) comes to an end (November 18), it’s worth noting that it was a cloaking device for the real agenda.

As long ago as November 2010, Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, openly admitted what that agenda is. He is quoted by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

‘Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.’

So was the next … and the next … and the next … and the last.

Delegates are told on the COP27 Sameh Shoukry’s Presidential page that: ‘Globally, the increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is impacting the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. Rising global average temperature and rapid global warming are causing alarming consequences on human beings and all other forms of life on earth.’ All this without evidence.

The ‘Targets’ set out for COP27 in the Presidential Vision includes the following:

‘A transformative adaptation agenda is needed now, one based on science and is responsive to the actual needs of countries and communities in climate vulnerable situations.

‘Action to clarify support for loss and damage, with the increasing impacts of more frequent extreme weather events, and speeding slow onset events. It is time to respond to the calls and needs for effective mechanism that delivers on the needs for action and support, in particular for those who are most vulnerable to the climate change impacts.

‘Providing, mobilising and delivering climate finance for developing countries is an urgent priority.’

It’s worth noting the dubious tactic of regurgitating claims about ‘more frequent extreme weather events’ since the IPCC itself debunked that notion – way back in 2011 – noting that man-made warming effects on climate extremes will be swamped by natural climate variability. But who cares? Who will fact check the COP27 President?

It was always the real agenda of climate activists to change the world for the better by redistributing income from wealthy capitalist nations to impoverished nations of the third-world. Some, like sly old China, are actually first-world powers, but hunger for victim status when it comes to ripping off the West.

This raises a consequential question for politics: given that political campaigns and major policy decisions are regularly made – at considerable social and economic pain viz energy etc – based on the (unproven) scientific assumptions about the dangers of ‘climate change’, are politicians incompetent and ignorant of the facts? Or perhaps are they complicit in the sleight of hand with policies that are not about curbing global temperatures (if it were a true premise) but about making western nations poorer and weaker? In other words, are policy decisions made on false pretences? Did the electorate vote on the redistribution of wealth via climate and energy policies? Or on the (laughably) false belief that we are saving the planet from overheating? The big lie or the big stupid?

I believe that politicians are feeble and incompetent rather than so massively corrupt (dishonest) as to hoist this agenda on an innocently ignorant voting public who never signed up for it. But time’s up and political advisors should begin devising new advice based on the known facts, so voters are not misled so egregiously. ‘Save the planet – vote for wealth distribution.’ ‘Vote to be poor so the world’s poor can get richer.’

Of course, it is not only Australian politicians (of all parties) but the politicians of the whole Western world who have been sucked into this sham. The special irony for Australia, though, is that if it is fossil fuel emissions that are the danger, ours is the least relevant, at around 1 per cent. So even if you were convinced that carbon dioxide (emitted when making energy) is a pollutant and warms the planet, with a just a few years left of life on earth … you can’t seriously believe that our drastic economy-destroying policies can be justified.

Total carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 0.04 per cent. Man-made carbon dioxide in our atmosphere is about 0.0012 per cent; Australia’s contribution to that is 0.000012 per cent. You don’t have to be a mathematician or a scientist to realise that our coal has nothing to do with the climate changing.

While 30,000 ‘Climate Change’ activist industry delegates swarmed to Sharm el Sheikh, blinded by faith and hope for change, elsewhere, the real world was hunkering down to cope with energy shortages and inflation, and the coming northern winter.

The false assumption about fossil fuel emissions as the driver of warming has been sold with spectacular if fateful success. And a large dose of dishonesty.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/who-voted-for-wealth-redistribution-to-save-the-planet

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China tell COP27: We need more coal and won't make Europe's mistakes

China’s plans to add to its world-leading fleet of coal power plants are a short-term Band-Aid to address energy security concerns and don’t represent a shift in emissions policies, according to members of the team representing the nation at the COP27 summit.

New plants are being planned to address a spate of high-profile electricity shortages in recent years while providing a buffer to global energy markets that have become more volatile following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, according to interviews with three of China’s delegates at the climate meeting in Egypt.

In the long run, electricity market reforms and massive investments in renewable power and energy storage will eventually curb and curtail coal use, allowing the country to hit its targets of peaking emissions by 2030 and zeroing them out by 2060, they said.

The strategy underscores China’s desire to avoid the kind of energy crisis facing Europe, but it has set off alarm bells for climate scientists who say the fuel needs to be phased out by 2040 to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“We need an energy transition that’s high-quality and secure so it can be sustained,” said Li Zheng, a climate change and energy professor at Tsinghua University. “We don’t want to be like Europe and transform at the cost of energy security. They are now declaring that they are taking a step back in order to take two steps forward later.”

The climate researchers downplayed the size of the expansion, saying the country’s total coal capacity wouldn’t change much because of simultaneous retirements of older plants. Earlier this year, an executive from China’s top energy engineering firm said he expects the nation to approve 270 gigawatts worth of new plants through 2025, more than the entire fleet in the US.

Coal has long been China’s mainstay fuel and still accounts for about 60% of the country’s power generation. But its role is shifting, with planners increasingly seeing it as backup for the country’s rapidly growing army of wind turbines and solar panels, said Wang Zhongying, a senior energy researcher with the National Development and Reform Commission, the country’s economic planner.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-15/china-climate-advisers-say-more-coal-needed-for-energy-security?mc_cid=72c8bf23a3&mc_eid=cc88839e92

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Journalists blind to facts as climate pantomime rolls on

Journalists who have followed the United Nations torturous path towards a global climate change deal have known for years its real bottom line is wealth transfer from the First World to poorer nations.

Political manipulation of the science by the UN was discussed in this column on October 23. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s AR6 report, released before last year’s Glasgow COP26, actually presented less scary scenarios than AR5 but was sold by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, a former Socialist Party Prime Minister of Portugal from 1995 to 2002, as “code red for the planet”.

This column has long argued forecasts of imminent climate emergency are not supported by the IPCC’s assessment reports and are about using fear to create political and media consensus. It all looks ever more silly as countries are urged at COP each year to make ever earlier commitments to net zero emissions of CO2 and each year the world burns ever more fossil fuels.

It should be obvious to all but the most naive catastrophist journalists that national leaders, presiding over a 6 per cent rise in global emissions this past year, don’t actually believe in an imminent emergency. Nor will many national leaders fall for the reparations line that is being repackaged as “loss and damage” payments at this year’s COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Even former Tory PM Boris Johnson, who risked his prime ministership and his country’s economic security in the name of climate action, has said the UK does not have the financial resources to pay reparations to low-income countries affected by climate change, according to a report in the London Financial Times on November 7.

But there’s a better reason for scepticism about “loss and damage”. The Daily Telegraph in London the same day reported: “China has emitted more carbon dioxide over the past eight years than the UK has since the start of the industrial revolution. Between 1750 and 2020 the UK emitted 78 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide … compared with China’s emissions of 80 billion tonnes since 2013.”

This newspaper’s environment editor Graham Lloyd described the real UN climate agenda in 2011 when reporting that year’s COP17 in Durban, South Africa, ignominiously dubbed “Flop 17”. Lloyd wrote that much of the Durban conference looked like “an exercise in extravagant foreplay with a very messy ending”, until the situation was rescued by a commitment from developed countries for a $US100bn a year fund “to finance mitigation and adaptation in the developing world”.

Nothing much has come of that; hence the focus in Egypt. Most journalists, especially those at the ABC and Guardian Australia, refuse to call all this out for the diplomatic pantomime it is. Yet the general public is starting to understand fossil fuels are not being abandoned in most countries and the UN’s preferred power sources – wind and solar power – are not proving cheap or reliable.

RN Breakfast host Patricia Karvelas seemed surprised by the point former Energy Security Board chair Kerry Schott made during an on-air interview last Monday morning. Karvelas wanted to discuss Schott’s proposed appointment by Grok Ventures’ Mike Cannon-Brookes to the board of AGL, which Cannon-Brookes hopes to wean off fossil fuels earlier than present management plans.

Asked by Karvelas to comment on a warning the previous week by AGL chair Patricia McKenzie that closing all the company’s generators early would destroy the reliability of the electricity grid because replacement capacity cannot be built in time, Schott said: “Well I think it may not be possible but I think we’ve got to try.”

This column, looking at Cannon-Brookes’s bid for AGL at the time, interviewed Schott last February. She said intermittent wind and solar could only be firmed by building thousands of kilometres of new poles and wires across the continent so power could be fed to major population centres from wherever the sun was shining and the wind blowing. That network infrastructure would need to be backed up by billions of dollars of new pumped hydro projects because batteries only harmonise the network and cannot yet store power for long periods.

It’s time journalists reported what is really happening. Copenhagen Consensus president Bjorn Lomborg in this newspaper on October 1 wrote: “Even the Biden administration expects the world in 2050 to be dependent on fossil fuels for 70 per cent of energy.

“Rich countries are showcasing the policies to avoid. Germany is on track to spend more than $US500bn ($A770bn) on climate policies (per year) by 2025, yet has managed to reduce fossil fuel dependency from 84 per cent in 2000 to only 77 per cent today.”

Wind and solar account for about 10 per cent of global power supply despite global investment of about $US1 trillion in such renewables every year.

So what does the future hold for the climate and for the business of climate reporting? In the digital age it is a business strategy aimed at securing clicks from vulnerable young media consumers who have not seen and read all the doomsday scenarios for 30 years and understood they never arrive.

For the real climate, warming oceans will increase evaporation and rainfall, but the IPCC is clear no single weather event can be attributed directly to climate change. Tropical storm data shows cyclones and hurricanes are becoming less frequent in the Pacific and Atlantic. Some evidence suggests such storms may be becoming more powerful.

Weather patterns such as this country’s east coast La Nina since 2020 will come occasionally but always have done. The La Nina events from 1954-56 and 2010-12 killed more in floods than this La Nina.

Global temperature sits about 1.2C above the pre-industrial era, which also coincided with a little ice age.

Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the Medieval Warming and the Roman Warming. Latest research suggests climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought. Media consumers seldom see these facts.

The world will need to build for resilience, but no serious scientist expects a climate emergency by 2030: the IPCC has essentially abandoned the scam RCP8.5 warming scenario upon which that scare campaign was based.

Coal and gas will continue to be burned in advanced countries, we will continue to export both because our fuels are cleaner than those extracted elsewhere but Australia will lose almost all of its domestic manufacturing industry, which will move to countries with lower emissions standards as we drive towards more renewable, less reliable power.

The political right here will be disappointed because Australia will never go down the nuclear path, even though it should.

But Australia will continue to export uranium to countries that see the obvious benefits of clean, emissions-free, baseload power.

Finally, while Australia will most likely pay climate bribes to Pacific Islands, the public will eventually find out what the ABC Fact Check unit confirmed in December 2018: most island nations in the Pacific are growing rather than shrinking. Don’t expect ABC reporters to admit that or to challenge Pacific Island leaders complaining about CO2 but taking Chinese money when China is the biggest contributor to global emissions.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/journalists-blind-to-facts-as-climate-pantomime-rolls-on/news-story/914b4dbf2e27720848fa9ac824991a14

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Solar Firm Collapses, Owing UK Taxpayers £655 Million

A solar energy company has fallen into administration after racking up more than half a billion pounds in debt to a local authority in Essex, southern England.

Toucan Energy Holdings 1 Ltd., which owns 53 solar farms across the country and was owned by the financier Liam Kavanagh, had borrowed £655 million ($773 million) over four years from Thurrock Council to fuel its expansion.

In September, Rob Gledhill, the former leader of the council, resigned after the government appointed a commissioner to take over the Conservative-led authority. At the time of his resignation, Gledhill said in a statement: “As Leader of the Council the political buck stops with me and as such it would only be right, and expected, that I resign as Leader of the Council.”

In July, John Kent, the council’s opposition leader, described the investments as “a scandal of huge proportions.”

Last week, Thurrock Council appointed administrators from Interpath Advisory, which has been tasked with selling off the farms to return cash to the council. While Toucan Energy Holdings 1 is in administration, Interpath said in a statement that the underlying parks were not, and would continue to operate as normal.

Mark Coxshall, leader of Thurrock Council, said in a statement that the move would “maximize recovery” for taxpayers.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-11-11/solar-energy-firm-collapses-owing-british-taxpayers-655-million

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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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