Friends of Science published US Climate Election Squares Off as Net Zero Falters Despite NATO Climate Activism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Mark P. Mills provides great gambling advice in his City Journal article  A Bet Against the “Energy Transition”. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Modern civilization depends on abundant, affordable, and reliable energy.
Policies that ignore this won’t turn out well.

Starting this month, everyday citizens, not just hedge fund managers and traders, will be able to make direct bets on “big” issues ranging from basic economic indicators to the weather. Based in Greenwich, Connecticut, the global trading firm Interactive Brokers has won U.S. federal approval to run a “prediction market” platform allowing users to make bets on everything from consumer sentiment to the national debt to “atmospheric carbon dioxide.” As the Wall Street Journal reported, “Interactive Brokers said it believes that it ‘can help establish a collective view’ on ‘controversial issues.’”

Let’s hope for an opportunity to bet on whether the energy transition,
the linchpin of the ruling energy orthodoxy, will in fact happen.

The orthodox view, of course, is that it’s already underway, and the world will radically reduce, if not eliminate, the use of oil, natural gas, and coal. This narrative is firmly embedded in plans, policies, and rhetoric on both sides of the partisan divide. Conferences, studies, and consultancies are framed around the transition. Even “Big Oil,” from Exxon to Chevron, genuflects to the narrative. The only substantive debate about the energy transition concerns how fast it’s happening and what should or shouldn’t be subsidized to hasten the inevitable.

Meantime, hydrocarbons still supply over 80 percent of America’s and the world’s primary energy needs, roughly the same proportion as two decades ago. But that fact understates reality. Hydrocarbons are used, in one way or another, in everything we build and use to sustain civilization.

The goal of the energy transition is not only to eliminate the ubiquity of hydrocarbons but also to do it fast. That is the central objective of the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). This is a government enterprise arguably unprecedented in American history, and certainly in the history of industrial programs.

A proper accounting of the IRA reveals that its real costs—$2 trillion to $3 trillion—will be far greater than the costs its advocates claim. For context, in inflation-adjusted terms, the U.S. spent about $4 trillion to prosecute World War II. This level of spending, complemented by similar pursuits in about two dozen states, makes the IRA one of the defining issues of our time. It is no exaggeration to say that the realities of energy systems—the physics, the engineering, and the economics—are now central to the future of the U.S. economy, and thus central to our policy and political debates.

Society as we know it would not exist if not for vast supplies of energy.

Energy is consumed by every invention, product, and service that makes life safe, interesting, convenient, enjoyable, and even beautiful. Energy policies are bets on whether there’s enough energy to meet people’s demands both now and in the future. But underlying that observation is a foundational truth relevant to forecasters and policymakers: throughout history, innovators have invented far more ways to consume energy than to produce it.

One of humanity’s remarkable capabilities is to invent future wants—that is, to invent new energy demands. There was no energy demand for air conditioning before its invention. We used no energy for flying until the airplane. The same is true for the car, pharmaceuticals, and computing. The global computing ecosystem now uses more energy than global aviation, and it is growing far faster. And now comes artificial intelligence: in energy terms, AI is to computers what jet engines are to aircraft.

Energy policies are thus also bets on what it is possible to build to supply those needs. Supply follows demand, but a lack of supply can also kill demand. The past and present offer ample evidence that the latent energy demands of billions of people across the globe remain underserved.

An ironclad hierarchy pertains when it comes to supplying energy. Call it a triumvirate of needs. First, you need enough energy. You can’t consume what you don’t produce. Energy abundance is key. Energy shortfalls stifle economic growth; severe shortfalls are lethal.

Second, abundant energy needs to be cheap. Affordability matters. The visible political touchstone for that reality is the price of a gallon of gasoline. More hidden is the industrial touchstone, which is the combined price of hydrocarbons and electricity. Ignoring this hidden reality has led the U.K. and Germany to sink into economically destructive deindustrialization.

Third, energy needs to be reliable at all scales and timeframes. Reliability is about meeting the energy demands of people, machines, and systems not only minute-by-minute but also over days, weeks, months, and years. The absence of energy when it is needed can crash both machines and economies.

Reliability is the inverse of fragility in energy supply chains. It is the sine qua non that lets low-cost abundance be taken for granted. High reliability allows the energy issue seemingly to disappear from our daily concerns, but behind the scenes it is a Sisyphean struggle. A society must always be designing and building energy supply chains to combat the realities of relentless, often malevolent, interference from nature, accidents, or human choices.

It takes a complex and delicate dance to build systems that can simultaneously balance the triumvirate of needs: abundance, affordability, and reliability. The rules to that dance are dictated by the physics of energy and how it is manifested in the machinery we can build and afford. You could call it the physics of money.

You may have noticed that I’ve made no mention of the environment in the ironclad energy hierarchy. Abundant, affordable, and reliable energy creates the conditions for wealth that in turn make possible the time and capital required for everything beyond mere survival— from health care to entertainment to the modern luxury of environmental protection. Break the triumvirate of needs, and we know what happens. Throughout history and across the world, we see the correlation between environmental degradation and poverty.

When it comes to energy forecasts, the elephant in the room is the climate debate—the ultimate motivation for energy transition goals. But it doesn’t matter what one thinks about climate science when it comes to analyzing the physics and economics of the energy systems that we know how to build. They are entirely separate magisteria.

Thus, it was predictable that energy pundits would rediscover
the ironclad hierarchy with the rapid expansion of
the most recently invented energy-using infrastructure.

I’m referring of course to artificial intelligence. It’s a pure example of the invention of energy demands. Electric utilities around the country are now reporting epic jumps in forecasts for near-term power demand. The end of the interregnum of flat growth in electric usage comes not because of enthusiasm for electric vehicles (EVs), or because of the repatriation of semiconductor factories, though both are significant new demand vectors. It comes because the so-called virtual world of software can exist only within the physical world of energy-hungry hardware.

The cloud, whether measured in terms of the size of the network,
the capital deployed, or the energy used, is on track
to become the biggest infrastructure ever built by humanity.

Global capital spending on energy-using hardware to build the cloud and its networks now exceeds global capital spending by all electric utilities on energy-producing power plants and those networks. For context, today’s global cloud already consumes ten times more electricity than all the world’s EVs combined. Even if EV adoption expands at the rate that enthusiasts assume, the cloud will still significantly outpace that new demand for electricity, especially with the rush to buy AI hardware.

And we are still in the early days of AI adoption. To continue the AI and jet-engine analogy, the aviation industry had been booming for three decades before the 1958 introduction of the first viable commercial passenger jet, the Boeing 707. After that transformative event, flying, measured in passenger air-miles, grew more than tenfold in under a decade and kept soaring. Of course, energy use followed.

Marc Andreessen, Silicon Valley pioneer and venture capital potentate, said more than a decade ago that he expected “software would eat the world.” He meant that software would disrupt “large swathes of the economy.” He was right, but he may not have imagined that the hardware that makes the software possible would eat the grid.

And do you think AI is the last energy-using innovation that will ever emerge? The question answers itself—and that says nothing about the energy implications of billions of people who seek basic economic growth, to rise out of poverty and come to enjoy the benefits of yesterday’s inventions, from air conditioning to cars to airplanes. In timeframes that matter, new demands for energy are practically unlimited. And if we employ common sense, so, too, are new supplies.

To return to Andreessen: he has more recently issued a long, impassioned Techno-Optimist Manifesto which includes a specific exploration of energy. “We believe energy should be in an upward spiral,” he observes. “Energy is the foundational engine of our civilization. The more energy we have, the more people we can have, and the better everyone’s lives can be.” Amen.

Back to betting markets. I’d take the bets—and I hope Interactive Brokers will offer them—that in the near future we’ll see:

♦  global energy use rise, not shrink;
♦  global production and use of hydrocarbons expand, not contract;
♦  in parallel with rising alternative energy production;
♦  the abandonment of the idea of an “energy transition.”

These bets all derive from the iron law of the energy hierarchy.
Policymakers who bet against reality will face unpleasant consequences.

Footnote: The Problem Created By CO2 Hysteria

Our World in Data on The World’s Energy Problem

 

Jason Isaac writes at Real Clear Energy Fossil Fuels: The Best-Kept Secret in Our World Today.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Apparently, you can litigate anything these days, and it’s gotten far more insidious than suing McDonald’s over hot coffee being, you know, hot. A new climate activist group called Our Children’s Trust is suing state and federal government agencies on behalf of individual children, claiming that fossil fuel regulators are negligently ruining their future.

That children should feel entitled to come of age under a specific set of favorable environmental and political circumstances — and to demand punishment for individuals they disagree with — isn’t just a testament to the egocentrism dominating the 21st Century. It also exposes our culture’s deeply warped understanding of climate science, which, surprisingly to many of us, actually shows global warming has no meaningful negative effects on our lives or our environment.

In fact, we have fossil fuels to thank for the twenty-first century being
the best time in human history to be alive.
Unfortunately, it’s the best-kept secret in our world today.

If we really want to earn “our children’s trust,” we should teach them the truth instead of foisting crippling and needless anxiety on an entire generation.

Contrary to the attention-grabbing clips of forests burning and shock-inducing statistics about record-high temperatures, modern climate science suggests that warming is likely to remain mild and manageable while our resilience continues to improve. In fact, despite average global temperatures increasing about 1° Fahrenheit and our population quadrupling in the last century, climate-related disasters claim 99% fewer lives. Our resistance to severe weather events (which actually have remained consistent or even declined in recent decades) is actually growing at a faster rate than non-weather-related natural disasters like volcanoes and earthquakes. The alarmists want you to believe a changing climate is jeopardizing human lives; however, the opposite is true.

Our environment is also better than ever. The U.S. has cut air pollution by nearly 80% in the last 50 years and ranks number one in the world for access to clean drinking water. In fact, those infamous greenhouse gases may actually help the planet. Mild increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide create a “global greening” effect that stimulates plant growth, which both helps natural ecosystems and makes agricultural production more efficient.

Meanwhile, this is the best time in human history to be alive,
thanks largely to widespread access to affordable, reliable energy.

Children today have a far greater chance of living a long, healthy, fruitful life than ever before. Around the world, in both developing and developed nations, poverty has plummeted and people are enjoying the tangible, life-improving benefits of lower infant and child mortality, better nutrition, improved education, lower infectious disease rates, more economic opportunity, gender equality, and longer lives. It’s no coincidence that global quality of life spiked and has continued to improve consistently since the Industrial Revolution — or that communities without access to electricity are still plagued by poverty, danger, and disease.

For a group claiming to seek “Our Children’s Trust,” this activist group seems to be deliberately abusing children’s trust.

With nearly any factoid we could wonder about immediately accessible on our smartphones, how could we have possibly gotten it so wrong about climate change? The jury is out on whether the cultural cancer of climate alarmism is the result of a deliberate plot for political power by global elites or simple negligence by a society that accepts the claims of those in authority (or simply those who pop up in our Tik Tok algorithm) at face value.

I suspect it’s a combination of both. “Indoctrination” has become a political buzzword, and while there’s no denying there are bad actors out there in schools and governments with agendas to push at all costs, the real problem with the public’s view of climate change is far subtler — which means it’s also harder to root out.

The problem is that no political issue, including this one, is black and white, but few feel they have the time to educate themselves on the nuances and confounding variables of hundred- or even thousand-page research reports. It’s easier to accept grossly oversimplified top-line takeaways as gospel and reduce them to even less accurate headlines and soundbites. I’ve seen the consequences firsthand working with state education leaders on science curriculum standards. Few are truly setting out to put misleading or incomplete information in our classrooms, but the misinformation is pervasive and there’s simply so much information to sift through to get to the real nuggets of truth.

But we need to do better — for our children’s sake.

Catherine Salgado provides unreported news from Climate Experts: ‘Global Warming’ Makes Ecosystems Thrive at PJ Media.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Three climate experts have called out the “global warming apocalypse” narrative and the totally failed record of climate alarmists’ predictions. A warming climate helps ecosystems thrive, and climate models predicting global crisis have consistently over-predicted.

CO2 Coalition Executive Director Greg Wrightstone, Heartland Institute President James Taylor, and Junk Science’s Steve Milloy all spoke during a media call last week about climate alarmist lies and the truths woke media and government don’t want you to hear. These include the fact that moderate warming has actually been found beneficial for ecosystems, including for plants (and food crops) and animals.

Both the last eight+ years of a cooling trend and
the last century and a half of moderate warming portend
no imminent catastrophe, but should be celebrated.

That’s just one hard truth the experts highlighted during the call, providing data that illustrates climate alarmists aren’t concerned with science or reality; rather, they are manipulating data or making unverifiable claims for political or financial reasons. Taylor stated emphatically, “There is no climate crisis.”

Wrightstone particularly highlighted the decrease in natural disasters, including fires, and especially the “significant decline” in global droughts. According to Wrightstone, ecosystems are showing the beneficial effects of a lengthy trend of warming. Taylor provided further context on why “global warming” should be no big concern. “We are currently experiencing the second and the third strongest El Niño ever recorded,” he said, noting that this can increase temperatures; but El Niño and La Niña always and normally create a cycle of warming or cooling effects.

“Earth is still recovering from the Little Ice Age, which was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years, that ended about 150 years ago,” Taylor said. “Temperatures should continue to set ‘records’ so long as climate activists define the ‘record’ as the past 150 years or so, recovering from the Little Ice Age.” In other words, the globe should be warming— and the current “records” only hold if one ignores the temperatures from the previous cooling period!

Taylor continued that, for much of human civilization, “temperatures have been significantly warmer than today, and humans and nature fared just fine.” And therefore, in fact, comparatively speaking, the globe is currently “unusually cool.” Milloy added his support to the arguments of the other two experts by noting that “global warming” isn’t man-made, either. Indeed, despite the oft-repeated assertion that every emission causes the planet to heat up, April 2024 was a third of a degree Farenheit cooler than April 1981 despite decades of emissions, Milloy added. In fact, in reality, carbon is not only beneficial but absolutely necessary for all life on earth, including humans.

No major climate prediction for 50+ years has come true; often, the predictions are wildly wrong. As Milloy noted, it’s a hallmark of science to be able to make reasonably accurate predictions, and yet climate alarmists never do — more typically, they make temporarily unverifiable predictions or claims about the past and far into the future. Greg Wrightstone agreed, “One of the things driving these failed predictions [is] they’re … basing a lot of these forward-looking projections on climate models, climate models that we know for a fact over-predict warming significantly.”

He continued, “And if you look at the 100+ models that are used, there’s only one that has accurately predicted the temperature into the future compared to actual temperatures, and that’s the Russian model. The others, we see, [on] average, over-predict warming by 2.5 to 3 times too much.” If climate alarmists really followed the scientific method, they’d have to admit that their hypothesis is not supported by evidence and needs to be reformulated. Unfortunately, climate alarmists find their narrative too convenient a political tool to surrender to reality.

 

Martin Durkin produced “Climate: The Movie” and writes at Daily Sceptic Climate Change is Class Warfare.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  The movie can be viewed below.

The climate is up the spout and we’re to blame. The planet is boiling like a pan of porridge. We face the possible extinction of all life on earth. ‘Science’ says so. Anyone who questions it is a demonic scoundrel. The climate catastrophe is a 100% solid-gold, slam-dunk irrefutable fact.

Hmm. And yet, it is clear to anyone who has paid the slightest attention, that the tired, hysterical predictions of the climate alarmists (made repeatedly over four decades and based on their hypothetical computer-models) have proved to be spectacularly wrong, again and again and again. It does not take much digging (we have the internet these days) to discover that the outlandish claims of climate alarmists are flatly contradicted by lots and lots of perfectly good scientific evidence and data. We’re not talking here about fringe science put about by whackos. We’re talking about official data – mainstream science, published in respected journals. (Some of it is featured in my ‘climate-denier’ film, Climate: The Movie, available for free online).

The world is not boiling. We are, as any geologist will tell you, in an ice age – one of the coldest periods in the last 500 million years. The level of CO2 in the atmosphere is not unnaturally or frighteningly high. Compared to the last half billion years of earth’s history it is extremely low. And there is no evidence that changing levels of atmospheric CO2 (it has changed radically many times in the past) has ever ‘driven climate change’. If there had been, Al Gore would have said so in his silly film, but he didn’t. Hurricane activity is not increasing, nor are the number of wildfires, nor are the number of droughts, and so on and so on. This is what the official data say. You can look it up.

Of course this is all a bit embarrassing for the science establishment. The climate alarm is worth billions to them in climate-related funding. A lot of jobs depend on it. A lot of reputations are at stake. And it’s deeply awkward for the renewables industry, which turns over around a trillion dollars a year.

The climate alarm is not supported by scientific evidence. It is supported by bullying, intimidation and the censorship of anyone who dares to question it. Climate catastrophism is politics, shamelessly dressed up as science.

The climate scare was the invention of the environmentalist movement, which stands opposed to vulgar, dirty, free-market capitalism. They say there are too many people, consuming too much. We must be restrained and contained, for the sake of Gaia. The solution to the global, existential climate problem is higher taxes and more regulation.

At any social gathering, you can pretty confidently predict who will think what about climate, by asking them about taxes and regulation. People who love the Big State can’t get enough of climate chaos. People who want lower taxes and less regulation will roll their eyes and say rude things about little Greta.

Across the Western world, the state has grown enormously over the last century, vastly increasing the number of people whose livelihoods depend on state-spending, and whose jobs are related, directly or indirectly, to government control. In the U.K. and U.S. both, more than twice as many people now work in government as work in manufacturing. And this does not include all those (in the third sector etc.) who rely indirectly on government largesse.

These people depend on government. They are paid for out of taxation. In such circles to proclaim the joys of a small state, lower taxes and less government is a breach of social etiquette. You have crossed a moral line. You will be suspected of liking Donald Trump, of voting Brexit, of hating lockdown and compulsory vaccination, of defending the Second Amendment, of being a climate denier.

And indeed all this may well be true. These views tend to hang together. As do the views of those on the other side. To repeat, the climate alarm is in fact politics dressed up as science. We are, as more people are beginning to realise, engaged in a class war. On one side, the tax-consuming regulating class that feeds from taxation and bosses us about. On the other, the rest of us in the private sector, who rather resent paying taxes and being told what to do and how to live our lives.

This is the real basis for the consensus on climate change. The consensus exists among our sprawling, tax-consuming establishment. This is not a small group of people. It is an entire class. It is, if you will, the ruling class. It controls our civil service, our schools and universities, large parts of our arts and science establishments and much of the media. It is an intolerant class, deeply aware of its own interests. The taboo that surrounds climate scepticism is a reflection of its power.

It would be nice to think that politely pointing to the actual scientific data might put an end to all the climate chaos nonsense. Sadly it won’t. Because this ain’t about science.

 

Paul Sutton explains in his Daily Sceptic article There’s Nothing “Scientific” About Climate Models.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

On Sunday’s BBC Politics, Luke Johnson asked for evidence that the recent Dubai flooding was due to climate change. Chris Packham glibly responded: “It comes from something called science.”

This simply highlighted his poor scientific understanding. The issue is his and others’ confusion over what scientific modelling is and what it can do. This applies to any area of science dealing with systems above a single atom – everything, in practice.

My own doctoral research was on the infrared absorption and fragmentation of gaseous molecules using lasers. The aim was to quantify how the processes depended on the laser’s physical properties.

I then modelled my results. This was to see if theory correctly predicted how my measurements changed as one varied the laser pulse. Computed values were compared under different conditions with those observed.

The point is that the underlying theory is being tested
against the variations it predicts.

This applies – on steroids – to climate modelling, where the atmospheric systems are vastly more complex. All the climate models assume agreement at some initial point and then let the model show future projections. Most importantly, for the projected temperature variations, the track record of the models in predicting actual temperature observations is very dubious, as Professor Nicola Scafetta’s chart below shows.

For the climate sensitivity – the amount of global surface warming that will occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentrations over pre-industrial levels – there’s an enormous range of projected temperature increases, from 1.5° to 4.5°C. Put simply, that fits everything – and so tells us almost nothing about the underlying theories.

That’s a worrying problem. If the models can’t be shown to predict the variations, then what can we say about the underlying theory of manmade climate change? But the public are given the erroneous impression that the ‘settled science’ confirms that theory – and is forecasting disastrously higher temperatures.

Such a serious failing has forced the catastrophe modellers to (quietly) switch tack into ‘attribution modelling’. This involves picking some specific emotive disaster – say the recent flooding in Dubai – then finding some model scenario which reproduces it. You then say: “Climate change modelling predicted this event, which shows the underlying theory is correct.”

What’s not explained is how many other scenarios didn’t fit this specific event. It’s as if, in my research, I simply picked one observation and scanned through my modelling to find a fit. Then said: “Job done, the theory works.” It’s scientifically meaningless. What’s happening is the opposite of a prediction.

It’s working backwards from an event and showing
that it can happen under some scenario.

My points on the modelling of variations also apply to the work done by Neil Ferguson at Imperial College on catastrophic Covid fatalities. The public were hoodwinked into thinking ‘the Science’ was predicting it. Not coincidentally, Ferguson isn’t a medical doctor but a mathematician and theoretical physicist with a track record of presenting demented predictions to interested parties.

I’m no fan of credentialism. But when Packham tries it, maybe he needs questioning on his own qualifications – a basic degree in a non-physical ‘soft’ science then an abandoned doctorate.

Footnote: INMCM–One Low Sensitivity Model Does Replicate Past Temperatures

Climate Models: Good, Bad and Ugly

Background Post on Attributing Exteme Weather Events to Climate Change

Climate Loss and Damage Fails Again

 

 

Randall G. Holcombe writes at Independent Institute President Biden’s Climate Aspirations.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T John Ray

Most of what the political class calls policies are
really aspirations with no policy content.

They are feel-good statements that promote goals most people would support, with no associated policies that would move toward those goals. The following is an example.

The White House’s web page for the National Climate Task Force (skip down to the section “President Biden’s Actions to Tackle the Climate Crisis”) lists emissions goals for 2030, 2035, and 2050, well after President Biden will have left office, even if he serves out a second term. These are aspirations and aspirations that would have to be met by his successors, letting the president off the accountability hook.

What prompted me to write about this subject was this article titled “Biden’s scaled-back power rule raises doubts over US climate target,” which reports on an actual policy. The Biden administration has decided to exclude natural gas power plants from upcoming emissions standards.   The key point in this example is that the president’s actual policy works against the president’s stated goals.

Further down, the website lists the Biden administration’s accomplishments toward fulfilling his climate aspirations. They include a record number of electric vehicles and charging stations, new solar and wind projects, and supporting domestic manufacturing of clean energy technologies.

Those may be good things, but they are
things the private sector is doing.

“Support” isn’t a policy; it’s an attempt to take political credit for private sector action. If these things count as accomplishments, they are private sector accomplishments, not Biden administration accomplishments.

The website also credits the Biden administration for finalizing the strongest vehicle emissions standards in American history and proposing more robust standards for greenhouse gas and air pollution emissions. Those are not policies; they are aspirations. Should those aspirations be realized, it will be because the private sector has figured out how to reduce its emissions.

As the political season ramps up this year, notice that the “policies”
that politicians will propose are not really policies at all; they are aspirations.

They say, “Here are some good things I would like to accomplish if I am elected,” but they don’t say how they intend to accomplish them. They amount to feel-good slogans rather than actual public policies.

Most people will be in favor of mitigating climate change,
reducing crime, securing the border, and reducing the budget deficit.

Those are feel-good aspirations. Fewer people will favor specific policies aimed at realizing those aspirations. That’s why politicians talk about aspirations rather than specific policies. That’s also why those aspirations often fail to be realized.

The aspirations are popular; the policies to accomplish them are less so.
That’s why the Biden administration is enacting a policy
that works against his own stated goals.

Footnote:  Climate and Energy Policies No Relation to Climate Mitigation

When it comes to controlling weather and climate, it’s actually worse than the author says.  What policies there are serve only to destroy society’s energy platform with no discernable impact on the supposed problem.

Climatists Mistake Means for Ends

 

J. Scott Turner explains how the roots of environmental stewardship were poisoned, resulting in the perverted modern decarbonization movement.  His Spectator Australia article is Environmentalism: from concern about clean air to throwing soup at the Mona Lisa.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T John Ray

Garrett Hardin was a professor of biology and environmental studies at UC Santa Barbara. His “commons” was a metaphor drawn from the traditional English practice of shared grazing and agricultural land to which all members of a community had access. Commons were inherently prone to abuse, Hardin argued, because every user of the commons will exploit it to maximize personal benefit without regard to the other users, leading ultimately to the collapse of the commons as a useful resource.

Hardin extended the metaphor of the commons to include all natural resources, including the air, water, other species, even the entire Earth. The tragedy of Hardin’s expansive commons was the inexorable march to environmental doom, driven by the folly of human freedom. “No technical solution” could halt its march, no ingenious tinkering could fix the problem. Rather, Hardin asserted that the juggernaut could only be arrested through “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon.” To save ourselves, we would have to give up many freedoms we take for granted, specifically “relinquishing the freedom to breed.”

Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” is perhaps the most influential paper
ever to come out of the field of ecology.

Within its six pages were sown the seeds that have grown into the vast industry that is modern environmentalism. If you’ve ever wondered how environmentalism got from simple concern for clean air and water and preservation of wilderness and its wonderful creatures, to Greta Thunberg, Extinction Rebellion and throwing soup at the Mona Lisa, it was Garrett Hardin who drew the map.

Hardin’s path to the tragedy of the commons was itself mapped out by the English economist and cleric, Thomas Malthus. When Thomas Carlyle famously cast economics as the “dismal science” — a “dreary, desolate… quite abject and distressing science” — it was Thomas Malthus he had in mind. Malthus’s economic philosophy was one of finitude and futility. Human populations always grew faster than could the food supply, he asserted, leading inexorably to famine, disease, perpetual poverty and war: the “Malthusian catastrophe.” Malthus’s economics stands in marked contrast to that of his near-contemporary Adam Smith’s more hopeful economics of free trade, free markets and the inscrutable “invisible hand” that would guide societies to prosperity and liberty. The history of economics has been a long contention between these two competing ideas.

Malthusian economics considered people to be aimless particles pushed this way and that by powerful and indifferent forces. People are considered to have no agency whatsoever, or whatever agency they might have, encompass no other sentiment but selfishness. The only way out of the Malthusian catastrophe would be restraint of human nature, through “mutual coercion mutually agreed upon,” as Garrett Hardin put it. Tyranny

A big part of Malthus’s appeal at the time was his mathematical argument, which imparted a faux certainty to his claims. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace both were inspired by Malthus’s mathematics, for example, however, Malthus’s mathematics were simplistic and naïve and failed to account for the fact that humans do, in fact, have individual agency — and that the range of moral sentiments was far wider than mere selfishness.

Nevertheless, Malthusianism continues to find devoted acolytes wherever simplistic and naive mathematical presumptions reign. Presently, it is climate change that fits that bill, and it is climate change where the Malthusian tragedy of the commons is again rearing its head — no, having its head propped up, Weekend at Bernie’s style — by a group of twenty-three scholars (they always seem to come in packs) in the prestigious pages of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. There, they call for a “new paradigm” (that buzzword) to stave off the tragedy of the Anthropocene “planetary commons.”

Their new paradigm goes beyond mere governments managing common resources, like sea-floor mineral prospecting. Rather, they are advocating a more ambitious program to take control of the “biophysical systems” that impart resiliency to the Earth’s function. These systems include the atmosphere, hydrosphere (oceans, lakes, rivers and aquifers), the biosphere (encompassing all of the Earth’s biota), the lithosphere (all terrestrial ecosystems, and the cryosphere — ice and snow). Exerting such control, they say, will require “mobilization of efforts at an unprecedented scale, including future research” (read spending), which can only be done through a “nested Earth system governance approach.” This will mean “[adjusting] notions of state sovereignty and self-determination,” taking on “obligations and reciprocal support and compensation schemes … comprehensive stewardship obligations and mandates,” all with the aim to protect “Earth-regulating systems in a just and inclusive way.” You get the idea: “following the science” means a world government that subordinates those pesky notions of self-government and national sovereignty.

Doomsday scenarios are nothing new in the genre of “climate action.” Usually, such contributions bristle with weasel words such as “may,” “possibly,” “perhaps” and the ilk (e.g. the impending extinction of insects). Not so the planetary commons paper, which bristles with alarmist certitude. We are driving the Earth toward dangerous instability, rapidly pushing us past “tipping points” where the Earth will be plummeted irreversibly into disaster, making the Earth inhospitable to life itself. We are sinners in the hands of an angry goddess.

The whole thing is a house of cards, which a little digging will expose. Let’s begin with that word in the title: “Anthropocene.” What does it mean? It sounds science-y, but in fact “Anthropocene” is a neologism proposed in 2000 that demarcates the past 250 years from the Holocene, the geological epoch that began around 11,000 years ago, and which encompasses the rise of modern humans. It is no accident that the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary is set at 250 years before the present: it coincides with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

The Anthropocene is the stand-in for the eschatological End Times.
Like the End-Times, it is defined by a basket of horrors and portents:

♦  An order-of-magnitude increase in erosion and sediment transport associated with urbanization and agriculture;
♦  marked and abrupt anthropogenic perturbations of the cycles of elements such as carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus and various metals together with new chemical compounds;
♦  environmental changes generated by these perturbations, including global warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification and spreading oceanic “dead zones”;
♦  rapid changes in the biosphere both on land and in the sea, as a result of habitat loss, predation, explosion of domestic animal populations and species invasions; and
♦  the proliferation and global dispersion of many new “minerals” and “rocks” including concrete, fly ash and plastics, and the myriad “technofossils” produced from these and other materials.

No mention is made, of course, of the dramatic reductions of poverty, extensions of life spans, improved agricultural productivity, cleaner air and water, safer environments that also mark the Industrial Revolution. Those are Hardin’s “technical solutions,” to be dismissed as the false consciousness that merely delays the springing of the Malthusian trap. We best be wary.

The Anthropocene is not a scientific term: it is an entirely political construction. Being able to sell it as scientific has long been a coveted tool to advance the climate change agenda. This has meant a long march through the institutions that govern geological nomenclature. That effort came to fruition in 2019, at a meeting of the International Union of Geological Sciences in Cape Town, where a vote was taken to formally recognize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. It passed by a supermajority of 88 percent in favor, which by the rules of the Society, closed off the matter from further debate. What was the actual vote? Thirty-three individuals voted to recognize the Anthropocene, and four dissented. Was this scientific consensus? Technically it was, but we keep in mind the deceptive power of percentages: the 2022 membership of the Geological Society of America totaled 18,096. Remember these figures the next time we hear about a scientific “consensus.”

With the Anthropocene established as a formal geological epoch, the door was opened for climate activists to advance a political agenda masquerading as “science.” The planetary commons paper, for example, asserts that we have already passed six of nine “tipping points,” putting us THIS CLOSE to catastrophe. That sounds dire, to be sure. But just what determines a tipping point, and how do we know we’re past it? One of the references cited in support of this claim is a paper (with many of the same authors as the planetary commons paper) which defines the “safe operating space” for the nine variables.

What determines the limits of the “safe operating space”?
Why, it’s the presumed conditions prior to the Anthropocene!

The circle is thereby closed: the politically-defined Anthropocene is used to set the politically defined “safe operating space” for the Earth, which sets the course for “navigating” through the perilous Anthropocene. Follow the science! The agenda is clear: reverse the Industrial Revolution and return civilization to the illusory halcyon of the Holocene. This is the climate change echo chamber at work: a collection of mutually-reinforcing arbitrary presumptions dressed up in a science-y costume.

It would be amusing were it not for the costume being flashy enough to take in the mid-wit rubes that constitute our present-day ruling class. Danger lurks there, which was expressed eloquently 264 years ago by Adam Smith in his 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments:

“The man of system, on the contrary, is apt to be very wise in his own conceit; and is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it… He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might choose to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

Garrett Hardin was, in his time, also a “man of system,” and it’s worth remembering that our last flirtation with the tragedy of the commons did not end well, especially not for Garrett Hardin himself, who now seems to be somewhat of an embarrassment to our present-day presumptive “persons of system.” We seem to have learned nothing since 1968, or for that matter, since 1759.

Will history repeat, this time as farce? Or will it be tragedy?

See Also 

Don’t Buy “Planetary Boundaries” Hype

Warning: Earth Day Became Polluted

Clearly climatists are worried about current cold weather, ironically triggered by the beginning of COP28 coinciding with heavv snow closing airports in Munich, for example. Add to that Buffalo Bills NFL playoff game postponed due to extreme cold. So Climate Central coordinated a PR campaign lest the believers lose faith in Global Warming.  Later below are noted the three themes that appear.

Why we still have brutal cold snaps even as the planet warms to record levels, CNN

Why extreme cold weather events still happen in a warming world, PBS

Extreme cold in a warming world: Climate instability may be disrupting polar vortex, UPI

Extreme cold and climate change: What’s the deal?  CBC explains.

What is climate? And how is it different from weather? Deutsche Welle (DW)

Why is it so cold in the UK right now – and how long will Arctic chill last? The Guardian

Extreme cold still happens in a warming world – in fact climate instability may be disrupting the polar vortex, Yahoo News

1.  Cold is Weather, Not Climate

Some of the reassurances are the familiar refrain that cold is weather, while warming is forever.

2.  CO2 Causes Extreme Weather of All Kinds

Others claim that rising CO2 causes all kinds of extreme weather, including big chills.  Actually, those stories are way out on a limb, contrary to what IPCC itself says.  Roger Pielke Jr. explains at his substack page What the IPCC Actually Says About Extreme Weather.  I promise, you’ll be utterly shocked. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Back to extreme weather — let’s take a look what IPCC AR6 says about the time of emergence for various extreme events. Here are some direct quotes related to specific phenomena:

• • An increase in heat extremes has emerged or will emerge in the coming three decades in most land regions (high confidence)
  • There is low confidence in the emergence of heavy precipitation and pluvial and river flood frequency in observations, despite trends that have been found in a few regions
  • There is low confidence in the emergence of drought frequency in observations, for any type of drought, in all regions.
  • Observed mean surface wind speed trends are present in many areas, but the emergence of these trends from the interannual natural variability and their attribution to human-induced climate change remains of low confidence due to various factors such as changes in the type and exposure of recording instruments, and their relation to climate change is not established. . . The same limitation also holds for wind extremes (severe storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms).

The IPCC helpfully provides a summary table for a range of extremes, indicating for various phenomena whether emergence has been achieved with medium or high confidence at three points in time:

to date (today), i.e., specifically when IPCC AR6 was completed in 2021,
by 2050 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5, and
by 2100 under RCP8.5/SSP5-8.5.

Those three dates are displayed as the 3 right-most column in the table below.

A white entry in the table means that emergence has not yet been or is not in the future expected to be achieved. The blue and orange entries represent the emergence of respectively increasing and decreasing signals at various levels of confidence.

Take a moment and look at the table carefully. Look especially at all those white cells.

Clearly, with the exception perhaps of only extreme heat,
the IPCC is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist.

Maybe that is why no one mentions what the IPCC actually says on extreme events. It may also help to explain why a recent paper that arrives at conclusions perfectly consistent with the IPCC is now being retracted with no claims of error or misconduct.

3.  CO2 Makes the Polar Vortex Unstable

The wavy polar vortex is a real phenomenon, but blaming it on us driving our SUVs is a stretch too far.  A previous post deconstructs this warmist claim.

No, CO2 Doesn’t Drive the Polar Vortex (Updated)