Climate Politics

This Summer Celebrate Our Warm Climate

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Legacy and social media keep up a constant drumbeat of warnings about a degree or two of planetary warming without any historical context for considering the significance of the alternative.  A poem of Robert Frost comes to mind as some applicable wisdom:

The diagram at the top shows how grateful we should be for living in today’s climate instead of a glacial icehouse. (H/T Raymond Inauen)  For most of its history Earth has been frozen rather than the mostly green place it is today.  And the reference is to the extent of the North American ice sheet during the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM).

For further context consider that geologists refer to our time as a “Severe Icehouse World”, among the various conditions in earth’s history, as diagramed by paleo climatologist Christopher Scotese. Referring to the Global Mean Temperatures, it appears after many decades, we are slowly rising to “Icehouse World”, which would seem to be a good thing.

Instead of fear mongering over a bit of warming, we should celebrate our good fortune, and do our best for humanity and the biosphere.  Matthew Ridley takes it from there in a previous post. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Background from previous post The Goodness of Global Warming

LAI refers to Leaf Area Index.

As noted in other posts here, warming comes and goes and a cooling period may now be ensuing. See No Global Warming, Chilly January Land and Sea.  Matt Ridley provides a concise and clear argument to celebrate any warming that comes to our world in his Spiked article Why global warming is good for us.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Climate change is creating a greener, safer planet.

Global warming is real. It is also – so far – mostly beneficial. This startling fact is kept from the public by a determined effort on the part of alarmists and their media allies who are determined to use the language of crisis and emergency. The goal of Net Zero emissions in the UK by 2050 is controversial enough as a policy because of the pain it is causing. But what if that pain is all to prevent something that is not doing net harm?

The biggest benefit of emissions is global greening, the increase year after year of green vegetation on the land surface of the planet. Forests grow more thickly, grasslands more richly and scrub more rapidly. This has been measured using satellites and on-the-ground recording of plant-growth rates. It is happening in all habitats, from tundra to rainforest. In the four decades since 1982, as Bjorn Lomborg points out, NASA data show that global greening has added 618,000 square kilometres of extra green leaves each year, equivalent to three Great Britains. You read that right: every year there’s more greenery on the planet to the extent of three Britains. I bet Greta Thunberg did not tell you that.

The cause of this greening? Although tree planting, natural reforestation, slightly longer growing seasons and a bit more rain all contribute, the big cause is something else. All studies agree that by far the largest contributor to global greening – responsible for roughly half the effect – is the extra carbon dioxide in the air. In 40 years, the proportion of the atmosphere that is CO2 has gone from 0.034 per cent to 0.041 per cent. That may seem a small change but, with more ‘food’ in the air, plants don’t need to lose as much water through their pores (‘stomata’) to acquire a given amount of carbon. So dry areas, like the Sahel region of Africa, are seeing some of the biggest improvements in greenery. Since this is one of the poorest places on the planet, it is good news that there is more food for people, goats and wildlife.

But because good news is no news, green pressure groups and environmental correspondents in the media prefer to ignore global greening. Astonishingly, it merited no mentions on the BBC’s recent Green Planet series, despite the name. Or, if it is mentioned, the media point to studies suggesting greening may soon cease. These studies are based on questionable models, not data (because data show the effect continuing at the same pace). On the very few occasions when the BBC has mentioned global greening it is always accompanied by a health warning in case any viewer might glimpse a silver lining to climate change – for example, ‘extra foliage helps slow climate change, but researchers warn this will be offset by rising temperatures’.

Another bit of good news is on deaths. We’re against them, right? A recent study shows that rising temperatures have resulted in half a million fewer deaths in Britain over the past two decades. That is because cold weather kills about ’20 times as many people as hot weather’, according to the study, which analyses ‘over 74million deaths in 384 locations across 13 countries’. This is especially true in a temperate place like Britain, where summer days are rarely hot enough to kill. So global warming and the unrelated phenomenon of urban warming relative to rural areas, caused by the retention of heat by buildings plus energy use, are both preventing premature deaths on a huge scale.

Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models.
Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa.  Source John Christy

 

Summer temperatures in the US are changing at half the rate of winter temperatures and daytimes are warming 20 per cent slower than nighttimes. A similar pattern is seen in most countries. Tropical nations are mostly experiencing very slow, almost undetectable daytime warming (outside cities), while Arctic nations are seeing quite rapid change, especially in winter and at night. Alarmists love to talk about polar amplification of average climate change, but they usually omit its inevitable flip side: that tropical temperatures (where most poor people live) are changing more slowly than the average.

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

But are we not told to expect more volatile weather as a result of climate change? It is certainly assumed that we should. Yet there’s no evidence to suggest weather volatility is increasing and no good theory to suggest it will. The decreasing temperature differential between the tropics and the Arctic may actually diminish the volatility of weather a little.

 

Indeed, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) repeatedly confirms, there is no clear pattern of storms growing in either frequency or ferocity, droughts are decreasing slightly and floods are getting worse only where land-use changes (like deforestation or building houses on flood plains) create a problem. Globally, deaths from droughts, floods and storms are down by about 98 per cent over the past 100 years – not because weather is less dangerous but because shelter, transport and communication (which are mostly the products of the fossil-fuel economy) have dramatically improved people’s ability to survive such natural disasters.

The effect of today’s warming (and greening) on farming is, on average, positive: crops can be grown farther north and for longer seasons and rainfall is slightly heavier in dry regions. We are feeding over seven billion people today much more easily than we fed three billion in the 1960s, and from a similar acreage of farmland. Global cereal production is on course to break its record this year, for the sixth time in 10 years.

Nature, too, will do generally better in a warming world. There are more species in warmer climates, so more new birds and insects are arriving to breed in southern England than are disappearing from northern Scotland. Warmer means wetter, too: 9,000 years ago, when the climate was warmer than today, the Sahara was green. Alarmists like to imply that concern about climate change goes hand in hand with concern about nature generally. But this is belied by the evidence. Climate policies often harm wildlife: biofuels compete for land with agriculture, eroding the benefits of improved agricultural productivity and increasing pressure on wild land; wind farms kill birds and bats; and the reckless planting of alien sitka spruce trees turns diverse moorland into dark monoculture.

Meanwhile, real environmental issues are ignored or neglected because of the obsession with climate. With the help of local volunteers I have been fighting to protect the red squirrel in Northumberland for years. The government does literally nothing to help us, while it pours money into grants for studying the most far-fetched and minuscule possible climate-change impacts. Invasive alien species are the main cause of species extinction worldwide (like grey squirrels driving the red to the margins), whereas climate change has yet to be shown to have caused a single species to die out altogether anywhere.

Source: Phanerozoic_Biodiversity.png Author: SVG version by Albert Mestre

Of course, climate change does and will bring problems as well as benefits. Rapid sea-level rise could be catastrophic. But whereas the sea level shot up between 10,000 and 8,000 years ago, rising by about 60 metres in two millennia, or roughly three metres per century, today the change is nine times slower: three millimetres a year, or a foot per century, and with not much sign of acceleration. Countries like the Netherlands and Vietnam show that it is possible to gain land from the sea even in a world where sea levels are rising. The land area of the planet is actually increasing, not shrinking, thanks to siltation and reclamation.

Environmentalists don’t get donations or invitations to appear on the telly if they say moderate things. To stand up and pronounce that ‘climate change is real and needs to be tackled, but it’s not happening very fast and other environmental issues are more urgent’ would be about as popular as an MP in Oliver Cromwell’s parliament declaring, ‘The evidence for God is looking a bit weak, and I’m not so very sure that fornication really is a sin’. And I speak as someone who has made several speeches on climate in parliament.

No wonder we don’t hear about the good news on climate change.

 

 

Put Climate Insanity Behind Us

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Conrad Black writes at National Post Time for the climate insanity to stop.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

We have been racing to destroy our standard of living
to avert a crisis that never materialized

We must by now be getting reasonably close the point where there is a consensus for re-examining the issue of climate change and related subjects. For decades, those of us who had our doubts were effectively shut down by the endless deafening repetition, as if from the massed choir of an operatic catechism school, of the alleged truism: “98 per cent of scientists agree …” (that the world is coming to an end in a few years if we don’t abolish the combustion engine). Decades have gone by in which the polar bears were supposed to become extinct because of the vanishing polar ice cap, the glaciers were supposed to have melted in the rising heat and the impact of melting ice would raise ocean levels to the point that Pacific islands, such as former U.S. vice-president Al Gore’s oratorical dreamworld, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu, would only be accessible to snorkelers. There has been no progress toward any of this. Ocean levels have not risen appreciably, nothing has been submerged and the polar bear population has risen substantially.

A large part of the problem has been the fanaticism of the alarmist forces. This has not been one of those issues where people may equably disagree. There was a spontaneous campaign to denigrate those of us who were opposed to taking drastic and extremely expensive economic steps to reduce carbon emissions on the basis of existing evidence: we could not be tolerated as potentially sensible doubters; we were labelled “deniers,” a reference to Holocaust-deniers who would sweep evidence of horrible atrocities under the rug. For our own corrupt or perverse motives, we were promoting the destruction of the world and unimaginable human misery. There has been climate hysteria like other panics in history, such as those recounted in Charles MacKay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” particularly the 1630’s tulip mania, in which a single tulip bulb briefly sold for the current equivalent of $25,000.

In western Europe, and particularly in the United States, where the full panic of climate change prevailed, the agrarian and working echelons of society have rebelled against the onerous financial penalties of the war on carbon emissions. There have been movements in some countries to suppress the population of cows because of the impact of their flatulence on the composition of the atmosphere. This has created an alliance of convenience between the environmental extremists and the dietary authoritarians as they take dead aim at the joint targets of carbon emissions and obesity. Germany, which should be the most powerful and exemplary of Europe’s nations, has blundered headlong into the climate crisis by conceding political power to militant Greens. It has shut down its advanced and completely safe nuclear power program, the ultimate efficient fuel, and has flirted with abolishing leisure automobile drives on the weekends.

Claims that tropical storms have become more frequent are rebutted by meticulously recorded statistics. Claims that forest fires are more frequent and extensive have also been shown not to be true. My own analysis, which is based on observations and makes no pretense to scientific research, as I have had occasion to express here before, is that the honourable, if often tiresome, conservation movement, the zealots of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, were suddenly displaced as organizers and leaders of the environmental movement by the international left, which was routed in the Cold War. Their western sympathizers demonstrated a genius for improvisation that none of us who knew them in the Cold War would have imagined that they possessed, and they took over the environmental bandwagon and converted it into a battering ram against capitalism in the name of saving the planet.

Everyone dislikes pollution and wants the cleanest air and water possible. All conscientious people want the cleanest environment that’s economically feasible. We should also aspire to the highest attainable level of accurate information before we embark on, or go any further with, drastic and hideously expensive methods of replacing fossil fuels. Large-scale disruptions to our ways of life at immense cost to consumers and taxpayers, mainly borne by those who can least easily afford it, are a mistake. We can all excuse zeal in a sincerely embraced cause, but it is time to de-escalate this discussion from its long intemperate nature of hurling thunderbolts back and forth, and instead focus on serious research that will furnish a genuine consensus. I think this was essentially what former prime minister Stephen Harper and former environment minister John Baird were advocating in what they called a ”Canadian solution” to the climate question. Since then, our policy has been fabricated by fanatics, including the prime minister, who do not wish to be confused by the facts. The inconvenient truth is now the truth that inconveniences them.

Western Europe has effectively abandoned its net-zero carbon emission goals; the world is not deteriorating remotely as quickly as Al Gore, King Charles, Tony Blair and the Liberal Party of Canada predicted. Some of the largest polluters — China, India and Russia — do not seem to care about any of this. Canada should lead the world toward a rational consensus with intensified research aiming at finding an appropriate response to the challenge. What we have had is faddishness and public frenzy. Historians will wonder why the West made war on its own standard of living in pursuit of a wild fantasy, and no immediate chance of accomplishing anything useful. We have been cheered on by the under-developed world because they seek reparations from the advanced countries, although some of them are among the worst climate offenders. It is insane. Canada should help lead the patient back to sanity.

Postscript:

So to be more constructive, let’s consider what should be proposed by political leaders regarding climate, energy and the environment.  IMO these should be the pillars:

♦  Climate change is real, but not an emergency.

♦  We must use our time to adapt to future climate extremes.

♦  We must transition to a diversified energy platform.

♦  We must safeguard our air and water from industrial pollutants.

A Rational Climate Policy

This is your brain on climate alarm. Just say N0!

Biden Climate Policies the Greatest Financial Risk

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Will Hild writes at Real Clear Policy The Biden Administration Proves Itself Wrong on ‘Climate Risk’.  The report shows how the feds’ own numbers prove their net zero policies pose a far greater financial risk than the climate itself. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Environmental activists and left-leaning political bodies have long argued that climate risk is a form of financial risk, constantly pressuring blue states and the Biden Administration to make the issue a central part of their agendas. Recently, a group of those states has started suing oil and gas companies directly in their state courts. California, for example, claims that oil companies have colluded for decades to keep clean energy unavailable. Such lawsuits are ludicrous, and my organization, Consumers’ Research, filed an amicus brief at the Supreme Court supporting an effort to stop this litigation abuse that drives up consumer costs.

These harmful suits are driven in part by the idea that climate risks are inherently financial risks. However, evidence from the Biden Administration’s own study on climate risk shows that these risks are grossly exaggerated and immaterial. In an attempt to justify its radical and onerous climate policies, the Administration inadvertently exposed the fraud behind the environmental movement.

Soon after taking office, President Biden issued an executive order asking executive agencies to assess “the climate-related financial risk, including both physical and transition risks, to … the stability of the U.S. financial system.” Agency officials quickly responded to the order. Treasury Secretary Yellen announced that “climate change is an emerging and increasing threat to U.S. financial stability.” The FDIC declared that climate risk endangered the banking system. The SEC issued controversial climate risk disclosure rules, which impose massive regulatory burdens on Americans.

The problem with these new rules is that the Administration lacked
sufficient evidence to show that “climate-related financial risk” existed.

The SEC and Secretary Yellen relied on a Biden Administration report issued in 2021 by the Financial Stability Oversight Council. However, the report itself admitted that there were “gaps” in the evidence needed to support its speculative assertion that climate change would “likely” present shocks to the financial system. 

John H. Cochrane, a respected Stanford professor, slammed the Biden Administration’s “climate-related financial risk” assertions and highlighted that the Administration has not shown any serious threat to the financial system. “Financial regulators may only act if they think financial stability is at risk,” but “there is absolutely nothing in even the most extreme scientific speculations” to support the type of risk that would allow financial regulators to intervene. [See my synopsis Financial Systems Have Little Risk from Climate]

In response to criticism, the Biden Administration came up with an idea to manufacture its own evidence.  If the Federal Reserve created scenarios in which banks must simulate extreme “physical” and “transition” climate risks, these custom-designed scenarios could show a large impact to the financial system just like federal “stress tests” for banks.

To ensure that the “stresses” were sufficiently severe,
the Biden Administration manipulated the scenarios
to ensure as much stress as possible. 

For example, for “physical risk,” major banks had to simulate the effect of a storm-of-two-centuries-sized hurricane smashing into the heavily populated Northeast United States with no insurance coverage available to pay for the damage.  For “transition risk,” the government demanded a simulation in which “stringent climate policies are introduced immediately,” without any chance for banks to prepare for such policies, along with rapidly rising carbon prices. 

Despite these attempts to make the climate risk as extreme as possible, the tests utterly failed to demonstrate any significant effect.  The Administration’s study demonstrated that even under some of the most extreme climate scenarios imaginable, the probability of default on loans only increased by half a percentage point or less.   In contrast, federal bank stress tests involving true financial stresses, such as a severe recession, have resulted in probabilities of default jumping by 20 to 40 times that amount or more, leading to hundreds of billions in losses. 

The climate analyses also revealed the expected costs
of the Biden Administration’s quixotic net zero quest. 

The Biden Administration employed scenarios from the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). Those climate scenarios envision the cost of carbon emissions steadily rising and reaching over $400 per ton by 2050.  Given that the average American emits about 16 tons of carbon a year, the Biden Administration’s hand-picked climate scenarios would cost the average American around $125k between now and 2050 in government mandated carbon fees.

Thus, the Biden Administration’s own bank stress test proved that climate risk is not a material financial risk, and that the biggest financial risk at issue is that the Administration’s net-zero policies would result in massive financial losses for everyday Americans. The Biden Administration should stop using lies to support their burdensome policies, and blue states should drop their punitive lawsuits against oil and gas companies.  Otherwise, the result of both efforts will be to inflict high costs on everyday Americans without any benefit.

 

 

Roots of Climate Change Distortions

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Roger Pielke Jr. explains at his blog Why Climate Misinformation Persists.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T John Ray

Noble Lies, Conventional Wisdom, and Luxury Beliefs

In 2001, I participated in a roundtable discussion hosted at the headquarters of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) with a group of U.S. Senators, the Secretary of Treasury, and about a half-dozen other researchers. The event was organized by Idaho Senator Larry Craig (R-ID) following the release of a short NAS report on climate to help the then-new administration of George W. Bush get up to speed on climate change.

At the time I was a 32 year-old fresh-faced researcher about to leave the National Center for Atmospheric Research for a faculty position across town at the University of Colorado. I had never testified before Congress or really had any high-level policy engagement.

When the roundtable was announced, I experienced something completely new in my professional career — several of my much more senior colleagues contacted me to lobby me to downplay or even to misrepresent my research on the roles of climate and society in the economic impacts of extreme weather. I had become fairly well known in the atmospheric sciences research community back then for our work showing that increasing U.S. hurricane damage could be explained entirely by more people and more wealth.

One colleague explained to me that my research, even though scientifically accurate, might distract from efforts to advocate for emissions reductions:

“I think we have a professional (or moral?) obligation to be very careful what we say and how we say it when the stakes are so high.”

At the time, I wrote that the message I heard was that the “ ends justify means or, in other words, doing the “right thing” for the wrong reasons is OK” — even if that meant downplaying or even misrepresenting my own research.

I have thought about that experience over the past few weeks as I have received many comments on the first four installments of the THB series Climate Fueled Extreme Weather (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4). One of the most common questions I’ve received asks why it is that the scientific assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are so different than what is reported in the media, proclaimed in policy, and promoted by the most public-facing climate experts. And, why can’t that gap be closed?

Over the past 23 years, I have wondered a lot myself about this question — not just how misinformation arises in policy discourse (we know a lot about that), but why it is that the expert climate community has been unable or unwilling to correct rampant misinformation about extreme weather, with some even promoting that misinformation.

Obviously, I don’t have good answers, but I will propose three inter-related explanations that help me to make sense of these dynamics — the noble lie, conventional wisdom, and luxury beliefs.

The Noble Lie

The most important explanation is that many in the climate community — like my senior colleague back in 2001 — appear to believe that achieving emissions reductions is so very important that its attainment trumps scientific integrity. The ends justify the means. They also believe that by hyping extreme weather, they will make emissions reductions more likely (I disagree, but that is a subject for another post).

I explained this as a “fear factor” in The Climate Fix:

Typically, the battle over climate-change science focused on convincing (or, rather, defeating) those skeptical has meant advocacy focused on increasing alarm. As one Australian academic put it at a conference at Oxford University in the fall of 2009: “The situation is so serious that, although people are afraid, they are not fearful enough given the science. Personally I cannot see any alternative to ramping up the fear factor.” Similarly, when asked how to motivate action on climate change, economist Thomas Schelling replied, “It’s a tough sell. And probably you have to find ways to exaggerate the threat. . . [P]art of me sympathizes with the case for disingenuousness. . . I sometimes wish that we could have, over the next five or ten years, a lot of horrid things happening—you know, like tornadoes in the Midwest and so forth—that would get people very concerned about climate change. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.” From the opening ceremony of the Copenhagen climate negotiations to Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, to public comments from leading climate scientists, to the echo-chambers of the blogosphere, fear and alarm have been central to advocacy for action on climate change.

It’s just a short path from climate fueled extreme weather
to the noble lie at the heart of fear-based campaigns.

Conventional Wisdom

The phrase was popularized by John Kenneth Galbraith in his 1958 book, The Affluent Society, where he explained:

It will be convenient to have a name for the ideas which are esteemed at any time for their acceptability, and it should be a term that emphasizes this predictability. I shall refer to these ideas henceforth as the conventional wisdom.

The key point here is “acceptability” regardless of an idea’s conformance with truth. Conventional wisdom is that which everyone knows to be true whether actually true or not. Examples of beliefs that at one time or another were/are conventional wisdom include — Covid-19 did not come from a lab, Sudafed helps with hay fever, spinach is high in iron, and climate change is fueling extreme weather.

As the noble lie of climate fueled extreme weather has taken hold as conventional wisdom, few have been willing to offer correctives — Though there are important exceptions out in plain sight, like the IPCC Working Group 1 and the NOAA GFDL Hurricanes and Global Warming page.

Actively challenging conventional wisdom has professional and social costs. For instance, those who suggested that Covid-19 may have had a research-related origin were labeled conspiracy theorists and racists, those who suggested that President Biden was too old to serve another term were called Trump enablers, and those who accurately represent the science of climate and extreme weather are tarred as climate deniers and worse.

A few years ago I wrote an op-ed for a U.S. national newspaper and included a line about how hurricane landfalls had not increased in the U.S. in frequency or in their intensity since at least 1900. The editor removed the sentence and told me that while the statement was correct, most readers wouldn’t believe it and that would compromise the whole piece.

When noble lies become conventional wisdom,
they become harder to correct.

Luxury Beliefs

Yascha Mounk offers a useful definition:

Luxury beliefs are ideas professed by people who would be much less likely to hold them if they were not insulated from, and had therefore failed seriously to consider, their negative effects.

After all, what is the real harm if people believe in climate fueled extreme weather? If people believe that the extreme weather outside their window or on their feeds make aggressive climate policies more compelling, then that’s a good thing, right?

Surely there can only be positive outcomes that result from promoting misunderstandings of climate and extreme weather at odds with evidence and scientific assessments?

Well, no.

Last year I attended a forum at Lloyd’s of London — the event was held under the Chatham House rule, and in the event, later reported by the Financial Times, the company made a surprising admission contrary to the conventional wisdom (emphasis added):

Lloyd’s of London has warned insurers that the full impact of climate change has yet to translate into claims data despite annual natural catastrophe losses borne by the sector topping $100bn.

Insurance prices are surging as companies look to repair their margins after years of significant losses from severe weather to insured properties, exacerbated by inflation in rebuild costs. A warming planet has been identified by insurance experts and campaigners alike as a key factor.

But at a private event last month, one executive at the corporation that oversees the market told underwriters that it has not yet seen clear evidence that a warming climate is a major driver in claims costs.

It turns out that misunderstandings of the science of climate and extreme weather actually lead to unnecessary costs for people whose jobs involve making decisions about climate and extreme weather. Those unnecessary costs often trickle down to ordinary people. Kudos to Lloyd’s for calling things straight, even if only in a private forum — That is of course their professional responsibility.

Conclusion

In a classic paper in 2012, the late Steve Rayner explained that some forms of social ignorance are created and maintained on purpose:

To make sense of the complexity of the world so that they can act, individuals and institutions need to develop simplified, self-consistent versions of that world. The process of doing so means that much of what is known about the world needs to be excluded from those versions, and in particular that knowledge which is in tension or outright contradiction with those versions must be expunged. This is ‘uncomfortable knowledge’.

Climate fueled extreme weather is perhaps the canonical example
of dysfunctional socially constructed ignorance.  It may be
uncorrectable — a falsehood that persists permanently.

Here at THB, I am an optimist that science and policy are self-correcting, even if that takes a while. That means that the series on climate fueled extreme weather will keep going — Have a great weekend!

 

 

Fantasies of Clever Climate Policies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Chris Kenny writes at The Australian Facts at a premium in blustery climate debate. Excerpts in italics from text provided by John Ray at his blog, Greenie Watch.  My bolds and added images.

Collective Idiocy From Intellectual Vanity

We think we are so clever. The conceit of contemporary humankind is often unbearable.  Yet this modern self-regard has generated a collective idiocy, an inane confusion between feelings and facts, and an inability to distinguish between noble aims and hard reality.

This preference for virtue signalling over practical action can be explained only by intellectual vanity, a smugness that over-estimates humankind’s ability to shape the world it inhabits.

As a result we have a tendency to believe we are masters of the universe, that we can control the climate and regulate natural disasters. Too lazy or spoiled to weigh facts and think things through, we are more susceptible than ever to mass delusion.

We have seen this tendency play out in deeply worrying ways, such as the irrational belief in the communal benefits of Covid vaccination despite the distinct lack of scientific evidence. Too many people just wanted to believe the vaccine had this thing beaten.

Still, there is no area of public debate where rational thought is more readily cast aside than in the climate and energy debate. This is where alarmists demand that people “follow the science” while they deploy rhetoric, scare campaigns and policies that turn reality and science on their heads.

This nonsense is so widespread and amplified by so many authoritative figures that we have become inured to it. Teachers and children break from school to draw attention to what the UN calls a “climate emergency” as the world lives through its most populous and prosperous period in history, when people are shielded from the ill-effects of weather events better than they ever have been previously.

Politicians tell us in the same breath that producing clean energy is the most urgent and important task for the planet and reject nuclear energy, the only reliable form of emissions-free energy. The activists argue that reducing emissions is so imperative it is worth lowering living standards, alienating farmland, scarring forests and destroying industries, but it is not worth the challenge of boiling water to create energy-generating steam by using the tried and tested technology of nuclear fission.

Our acceptance of idiocy, unchecked and unchallenged, struck me in one interview this week given by teal MP Zali Steggall. In many ways it was an unexceptional interview; there are politicians and activists saying this sort of thing every day somewhere, usually unchallenged.

Steggall was preoccupied with Australia’s emissions reduction targets. “If we are going to be aligned to a science-based target and keep temperatures as close to 1.5 degrees as we can, we must have a minimum reduction of 75 per cent by 2035 as an interim target,” she said.

Steggall then patronised her audience by comparing meeting emissions targets to paying down a mortgage. The claim about controlling global temperatures is hard to take seriously, but to be fair it is merely aping the lines of the UN, which argues the increase in global average temperatures can be held to 1.5 degrees with emissions reductions of that size – globally.

We could talk all day about the imprecise nature of these calculations, the contested scientific debate about the role of other natural variabilities in climate, and the presumption that humankind, through policy imposed by a supranational authority, can control global climate as if with a thermostat. The simplistic relaying of this agenda as central to Australian policy decisions was not the worst aspect of Steggall’s presentation.

“The Coalition has no policy, so let’s be really clear, they are taking Australia out of the Paris Agreement if they fail to nominate an improvement with a 2035 target,” Steggall lectured, disingenuously.

This was Steggall promulgating the central lie of the national climate debate – that Australia’s emissions reduction policies can alter the climate. It is a fallacy embraced and advocated by Labor, the Greens and the teals, and which the Coalition is loath to challenge for fear of being tagged into a “climate denialism” argument.

It is arrant nonsense to suggest our policies can have any discernible effect on the climate or “climate risk”. Any politician suggesting so, directly or by implication, is part of a contemporary, fake-news-driven dumbing down of the public square, and injecting an urgency into our policy considerations that is hurting citizens already with high electricity prices, diminished reliability and a damaged economy.

Steggall went on to claim we were feeling the consequences of global warming already. “And for people wondering ‘How does that affect me?’, just look at your insurance premiums, our insurance premiums around Australia are going through the roof,” she extrapolated, claiming insurance costs were keeping people out of home ownership. “This is not a problem for the future,” Steggall stressed, “it is problem for now.”

It is a problem all right – it is unmitigated garbage masquerading as a policy debate. Taking it to its logical conclusion, Steggall claims if Australia reduced its emissions further we would lower the risk of natural disasters, leading to lower insurance premiums and improved housing affordability – it is surprising that world peace did not get a mention.

Mind you, these activists do like to talk about global warming as a security issue. They will say anything that heightens fears, escalates the problem and supports their push for more radical deindustrialisation.

Our national contribution to global emissions
is now just over 1 per cent and shrinking.

Australia’s annual emissions total less than 400 megatonnes while China’s are rising by more than that total each year and are now at 10,700Mt or about 30 times Australia’s. While our emissions reduce, global emissions are increasing. We could shut down our country, eliminating our emissions completely, and China’s increase would replace ours in less than a year.

So, whatever we are doing, it is not changing and cannot change the global climate. Our national chief scientist, Alan Finkel, clearly admitted this point in 2018, even though he was embarrassed by its implications in the political debate. Yet the pretence continues.

And before critics suggest I am arguing for inaction, I am not. But clearly, the logical and sensible baseline for our policy consideration should be a recognition that our national actions cannot change the weather. Therefore we should carefully consider adaptation to measured and verified climate change, while we involve ourselves as a responsible nation in global negotiations and action.

Obviously, we should not be leading that action but acting cautiously to protect our own interests and prosperity.

It is madness for us to undermine our cheap energy advantage to embark on a renewables-plus-storage experiment that no other country has dared to even try, when we know it cannot shift the global climate one iota. It is all pain for no gain.

Yet that is what this nation has done. So my question today is what has happened to our media, academia, political class and wider population so that it allows this debate and policy response to occur in a manner that is so divorced from reality?

Are we so complacent and overindulged that we accept post-rational debate to address our post-material concerns? Even when it is delivering material hardship to so many Australians and jeopardising our long-term economic security?

Should public debate accept absurd baseline propositions such as the idea that our energy transition sacrifice will improve the weather and reduce natural disasters, simply because they are being argued by major political groupings or the UN? Or should we not try to impose a dose of reality and stick to the facts?

This feebleness of our public debate has telling ramifications – there is no way this country could have embarked on the risky, expensive and doomed renewables-plus-storage experiment if policies and prognostications had been subject to proper scrutiny and debate.

Our media is now so polarised that the climate activists of Labor, the Greens and the teals are able to ensure their nonsensical advocacy is never challenged, and the green-left media, led by the publicly funded ABC, leads the charge in spreading misinformation.

Clearly, we are not as clever as we think. Our children need us to wise up.

Nine July Days Break Wind Power Bubble

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Parker Gallant reports at his blog  Nine July Days Clearly Demonstrate Industrial Wind Turbines Intermittent Uselessness.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added image. H/T John Ray

The chart below uses IESO data for nine (9) July days and clearly demonstrates the vagaries of those IWT (Industrial Wind Turbines) which on their highest generation day operated at 39.7% of their capacity and on their lowest at 2.3%!  As the chart also notes, our natural gas plants were available to ramp up or down to ensure we had a stable supply of energy but rest assured IESO would have been busy either selling or buying power from our neighbours to ensure the system didn’t crash. [Independent Electricity System Operator for Ontario, Canada]

The only good news coming out of the review was that IESO did not curtail any wind generation as demand was atypical of Ontario’s summer days with much higher demand then those winter ones.

Days Gone By:         

Back and shortly after the McGuinty led Ontario Liberal Party had directed IESO to contract IWT as a generation source; their “Annual Planning Outlook” would suggest/guess those IWT would generate an average of 15% of their capacity during our warmer months (summer) and 45% of their capacity during our colder months (winter). For the full year they would be projecting an average generation of 30% of their capacity and presumably that assumption was based on average annual Ontario winds!

The contracts for those IWT offered the owners $135/MWh so over the nine days contained in the chart below those 125,275 MWh generated revenue for the owners of $16,912,125 even though they only generated an average of 11.8% of their capacity.  They are paid despite missing the suggested target IESO used because they rank ahead of most of Ontario’s other generation capacity with the exception of nuclear power due to the “first-to-the-grid” rights contained in their contracts at the expense of us ratepayers/taxpayers!

Should one bother to do the math as to the annual costs based on the 15% summer and 45% winter IESO previously used it would mean annual generation from those IWT in the summer would be about 3.9 TWh and 11.7 TWh in the winter with an annual cost of just over $2.1 billion for serving up frequently unneeded generation which is either sold off at a loss or curtailed!

Replacing Natural Gas Plants with BESS:

Anyone who has followed the perceived solution of ridding the electricity grid of fossil fuels such as natural gas will recognize ENGO [Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations] have convinced politicians that battery energy storage systems are the solution!  Well is it, and how much would Ontario have needed over those nine charted July days? One good example is July 9th and 10th and combining the energy generated by natural gas from the chart over those two days is the place to start. To replace that generation of 221,989 MW with BESS units the math is simple as those BESS units are reputed to store four (4) times their rated capacity. Dividing the MWh generated by Ontario’s natural gas generators by four over those two days therefore would mean we would need approximately 55,500 MW of BESS to replace what those natural gas plants generated.  That 55,500 MW of BESS storage is over 27 times what IESO have already contracted for and add huge costs to electricity generation in the province driving up the costs for all ratepaying classes. The BESS 2034 MW IESO already contracted are estimated to cost ratepayers $341 million annually meaning 55,500 MW of BESS to the grid would add over $9 billion annually to our costs to hopefully avoid blackouts!

The other interesting question is how would those 55,500 MW be able to recharge to be ready for future high demand days perhaps driven by EV recharging or those heating and cooling pumps operating?  The wind would have to be blowing strong and the sun would need to be shining but, as we know, both are frequently missing so bring us blackouts seems to be the theme proposed by those ENGO and our out of touch politicians and bureaucrats!

Just one simple example as to where we seem to be headed
based on the insane push to reach that “net-zero” emissions target!

IESO Ontario Electrical Energy Output by Source in 2023

Extreme Examples of Missing IWT generation:

What the chart doesn’t contain, or highlight is how those 4,900 MW of IWT capacity are undoubtedly consuming more power than they are generating on many occasions and the IESO data for those nine days contained some clear examples but less than a dozen are highlighted here!

To wit:

  • July 5th at Hour 11 they managed to deliver only 47 MWh!
  • July 7th at Hours 8, 9, and 10 they respectively generated 17 MWh, 3 MWh and 18 MWh! 
  • July 9th at Hour 9 they delivered 52 MWh!
  • July 12th at Hours 8, 9, 10 and 11 they respectively generated 33 MWh, 13 MWh, 13 MWh and 35 MWh. 
  • July 13th at Hours 9 and 10 they managed to generate 19 MWh and 39 MWh respectively! 

Conclusion:

Why politicians and bureaucrats around the world have been gobsmacked by those peddling the reputed concept of IWT generating cheap, reliable electricity is mind-blowing as the Chart coupled with the facts, clearly shows for just nine days and only looking at Ontario!

Much like the first electric car invented in 1839, by a Scottish inventor named Robert Davidson, the first electricity generated by a wind turbine came from another Scottish inventor, Sir James Blyth who in 1887 did exactly that. Neither of those old “inventions” garnered much global acceptance until those ENGO like Michael Mann and Greta arrived on the scene pontificating about “global warming” being caused by mankind’s use of fossil fuels!

As recent events have demonstrated both EV and IWT are not the panacea to save the world from either “global warming” or “climate change” even though both have “risen from the dead” due to the “net-zero” push by ENGO.

The time has come for our politicians to wake up and recognize they are supporting more then century old technology focused to try and rid the world of CO 2 emissions.  They fail to see without CO 2 mankind will be setback to a time when we had trouble surviving!

Stop the push and stop using ratepayer and taxpayer dollars for the fiction created by those pushing the “net-zero” initiative. That initiative is actually generating more CO 2 such as the 250 tons of concrete used for just one 2 MW IWT installation!   Reality Bites!

Over the Top Guterres Claims Oil and Gas Ads Cause Global Warming

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A recent post below highlights the many colorful falsehoods perpetrated by UN Chief Guterres.  Now he takes his nonsensical word salads to a new level, referring to traditional energy companies as “Godfathers of Climate Chaos,”  a label better suited to himself.  After all, those companies are only filling the demand by billions of people who depend on affordable reliable energy.  What economic demand is Guterres filling?

His lecture was reported many places, including an article at Al Jazeera ‘Godfathers of climate chaos’: UN chief calls for ban on fossil fuel ads.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Antonio Guterres urges a 30 percent cut in global fossil fuel
production and use by 2030 amid record high temperatures.

“The godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said.

Drawing a comparison with many governments’ restrictions on advertising for harmful substances like tobacco, he said, “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies, and I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.”

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels – the main cause wrongly claimed to cause climate change – hit a record high last year despite global agreements designed to curb their release and a rapid expansion in renewable energy. [My edit: see 2024 Update: Fossil Fuels ≠ Global Warming. ]

Coal, oil and gas still provide more than three-quarters of the world’s energy, with global oil demand remaining strong.

Of course Guterres can urge all he wants, without any accountability for his words, since the UN has no authority to decide who agencies take on as advertising clients. It is all bluff and bluster, threatening as though a mafia boss lacking enforcers. Even so, the evidence does not support hydrocarbon fuel emissions as causing temperature changes.  Moreover, there’s no reason to believe banning advertising of such products will reduce the demand, which comes from real people purchasing with their own money in free markets.

Background Post UN Chief Wins Junk Science Award

At Financial Post’s Junk Science Week, Terence Corcoran highlights the hysterical alarmist statements by the UN chief promoting IPCC agenda, the article being The UN emperor has no science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.H/T John Ray.

Guterres Mangles Metaphors To Pitch Extreme Climate Alarmism

UN secretary General Antonio Guterres addresses the media during a visit to the UN office in Nairobi, Kenya, May 3, 2023. © Provided by Financial Post

History will record that the United Nations has established itself as the greatest organizational perpetrator of junk science in modern times, if not of all time, with current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres destined to be singled out for his personal contribution to the distorted UN climate alarmism.

Since his appointment in 2019, Guterres and the UN have lived up to our standard formal definition of junk science. It occurs when:

    • scientific facts are distorted,
    • risk is exaggerated (or underplayed), and
    • “the science” adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.

That definition encompasses a wide range of activities among scientists, NGOs, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who manipulate science for political, environmental, economic and social purposes. It also nicely captures the entire United Nations’ climate crusade and the work of its institutional creation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But no single official can top Guterres as a purveyor of IPCC hype and doom, a living embodiment of Hans Christian Andersen’s  fabled emperor who believes he is fully, stylishly dressed but in fact has no clothes.

Our Sinking Planet – Antonio Guterres is a photograph by Photograph by Christopher Gregory for TIME which was uploaded on July 21st, 2020.

Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal (1995-2002) and president of the Socialist International (1999-2005), was in typically ridiculous form on June 5th when he  delivered a speech  at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, at an event billed as “A Moment of Truth” and a “special address on climate action.” Guterres talked about a planet on a “highway to climate hell,”  rehashing a line he used in 2022 in Egypt at the COP27 climate conference: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

Guterres also has no qualms about mixing and mangling metaphors. He simultaneously told the Manhattan audience that humans are “like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”

The longer Guterres rambles on, the more confusing, contradictory and senseless the metaphors become:

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet.  We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. And the truth is … we have control of the wheel.”

Other Guterres’ climate spins include: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell” and “become a weapon of mass extinction.” And: “We must go into emergency mode and put out this five-alarm fire.”

Is Guterres describing reality — or the content of a new AI computer game in which some crazed teenaged human monster drives a flaming meteor through the ozone layer, knocking off dinosaurs before crashing onto a highway and plowing into a Russian Museum of Political Roulette just outside the Gates of Hell?

As UN Secretary-General, Guterres sits atop a hierarchy of agencies such as the IPCC climate science megaplex, which was created  in 1988 by two other UN agencies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). UNEP was cobbled together in 1972 as the  brainchild of Maurice Strong , the late Canadian global environmental schemer, who famously mused about a fictional environmental crisis that leads a group of global insiders to decide the only hope for the planet is “that the industrialized civilizations collapse.” The current “de-growth” movement is a version of deindustrialization that reflects Guterres’ off-ramp from the highway to hell. In fact, the word “de-growth”  appears  28 times in the IPCC’s sixth and latest Assessment Report .

With these UN agencies as his guide, Guterres’ verbal jumble of science statements is no better than his mixed metaphors. His abuse of climate and environmental facts has often been commented upon, including in a YouTube video titled “Who is Antonio Guterres?,” posted earlier this year by Ottawa journalist John Robson on his Climate Discussion Nexus site. Robson reviews and highlights  some of the garbled inaccuracies and misrepresentations Guterres routinely cranks out.

For instance: “Climate-related natural disasters are becoming more frequent, more deadly, more destructive with growing human and financial cost.”  Not true . And: “The number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years.”  Also not true .

When it comes to policies to deal with his fantastic vision of planetary destruction, Guterres aligns with Maurice Strong’s de-growth agenda. In his Manhattan speech, he repeated the UN call for a “fossil-fuel phase-out” since “economic logic makes the end of the fossil fuel age inevitable.” He urged financial institutions to “stop bankrolling” fossil fuel industries. “Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet,” he told bankers, “they’re toxic for your brand.”

The planet would be much better off if national governments stopped bankrolling Guterres and the United Nations and their constant poisoning of our science, economics and politics.

Declare Freedom from Climate Alarms

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Illustration on climate hysteria by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times

The Washington Times Editorial Board published ‘Declaring independence from hoaxes’ – ‘Let’s put the climate change fantasy to rest’ – ‘What’s being sold as science isn’t science at all’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Two hundred forty-eight years ago, America declared independence from the idea we needed to be governed by a king. Our Founding Fathers realized a freethinking people are perfectly capable of governing themselves. It was a revolutionary concept in every sense of the word.

Today, tyranny no longer emanates from the decrees of a faraway monarch suffering from a dash of mental illness. It has become a mental tyranny emanating from academics and politicians who employ doomsday tales to replace freethinking with blind acceptance of yarns that advance their agenda.

Mankind’s use of modern conveniences has, they insist, warmed the planet to an uncomfortable degree. Unless we do something to reverse this deadly trend, we will be subjected to extreme storms, rising seas and plagues on an apocalyptic scale. Scary stuff indeed.

We are told this is the conclusion of science, and one cannot
disagree with “the science.” But perhaps we should.

Earlier this year, The Heritage Foundation released a report comparing the predictions of 36 climate models against the actual temperature patterns recorded in the U.S. Corn Belt between the 1970s and the present.

The plot shows the 50-year area-averaged temperature trend during 1973-2022 for the 12-state corn belt as observed with the official NOAA homogenized surface temperature product (blue bar) versus the same metric from 36 CMIP6 climate models (red bars, SSP245 emissions scenario, output here).

Accurate models would be able to match real-life measurements. As the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explained in 1964: “If [a theory] disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”

All 36 climate predictions disagreed with reality — that is, each forecast temperatures much higher than what Midwesterners actually experienced. The “warming” never lived up to expectations, which means the climate models are something other than science.

Yet President Biden on Tuesday said you’re “really dumb” if you deny the climate crisis the models predict. He demands you return him to the White House so he can heap more climate regulations on the businesses he disfavors.

It’s not likely that another layer of red tape will do anything to alter global weather patterns, because the sun, not mankind, is the primary driver of climate. Whenever humans try to overcome the sun’s influence, the results inevitably fail to live up to expectations.

For instance, a study published in Nature in May found changes in the formulation of fuel used in cargo vessels four years ago “abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact.”

That’s a fancy way of saying cleaner skies allowed more sunshine to reach the ocean, warming the seas dramatically. It’s a puzzler for devotees of the climate change narrative to explain how pollution can combat global warming, so they just ignore it as they do all inconvenient truths.

If climate change were rooted in honest belief, liberals would rally around nuclear energy as the cleanest and most efficient means of supplying any nation’s electricity needs. According to the Energy Department, when counting manufacturing emissions, rooftop solar panels create 40 grams of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. Nuclear power plants generate one-third that much.

Freethinkers ought to question the animosity toward carbon dioxide, the substance that nourishes plants and makes for bountiful harvests. We ought to liberate our minds from the influence of mountebanks who enrich themselves through the telling of climate fairy tales.

What’s being sold as science isn’t science at all.

 

UN Chief Wins Junk Science Award

Posted on by Ron Clutz

At Financial Post’s Junk Science Week, Terence Corcoran highlights the hysterical alarmist statements by the UN chief promoting IPCC agenda, the article being The UN emperor has no science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.H/T John Ray.

Guterres Mangles Metaphors To Pitch Extreme Climate Alarmism

UN secretary General Antonio Guterres addresses the media during a visit to the UN office in Nairobi, Kenya, May 3, 2023. © Khalil Senosi, AP

History will record that the United Nations has established itself as the greatest organizational perpetrator of junk science in modern times, if not of all time, with current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres destined to be singled out for his personal contribution to the distorted UN climate alarmism.

Since his appointment in 2019, Guterres and the UN have lived up to our standard formal definition of junk science. It occurs when:

    • scientific facts are distorted,
    • risk is exaggerated (or underplayed), and
    • “the science” adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.

That definition encompasses a wide range of activities among scientists, NGOs, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who manipulate science for political, environmental, economic and social purposes. It also nicely captures the entire United Nations’ climate crusade and the work of its institutional creation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But no single official can top Guterres as a purveyor of IPCC hype and doom, a living embodiment of Hans Christian Andersen’s  fabled emperor who believes he is fully, stylishly dressed but in fact has no clothes.

Our Sinking Planet – Antonio Guterres is a photograph by Photograph by Christopher Gregory for TIME which was uploaded on July 21st, 2020.

Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal (1995-2002) and president of the Socialist International (1999-2005), was in typically ridiculous form on June 5th when he  delivered a speech  at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, at an event billed as “A Moment of Truth” and a “special address on climate action.” Guterres talked about a planet on a “highway to climate hell,”  rehashing a line he used in 2022 in Egypt at the COP27 climate conference: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

Guterres also has no qualms about mixing and mangling metaphors. He simultaneously told the Manhattan audience that humans are “like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”

The longer Guterres rambles on, the more confusing, contradictory and senseless the metaphors become:

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet.  We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. And the truth is … we have control of the wheel.”

Other Guterres’ climate spins include: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell” and “become a weapon of mass extinction.” And: “We must go into emergency mode and put out this five-alarm fire.”

Is Guterres describing reality — or the content of a new AI computer game in which some crazed teenaged human monster drives a flaming meteor through the ozone layer, knocking off dinosaurs before crashing onto a highway and plowing into a Russian Museum of Political Roulette just outside the Gates of Hell?

As UN Secretary-General, Guterres sits atop a hierarchy of agencies such as the IPCC climate science megaplex, which was created  in 1988 by two other UN agencies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). UNEP was cobbled together in 1972 as the  brainchild of Maurice Strong , the late Canadian global environmental schemer, who famously mused about a fictional environmental crisis that leads a group of global insiders to decide the only hope for the planet is “that the industrialized civilizations collapse.” The current “de-growth” movement is a version of deindustrialization that reflects Guterres’ off-ramp from the highway to hell. In fact, the word “de-growth”  appears  28 times in the IPCC’s sixth and latest Assessment Report .

With these UN agencies as his guide, Guterres’ verbal jumble of science statements is no better than his mixed metaphors. His abuse of climate and environmental facts has often been commented upon, including in a YouTube video titled “Who is Antonio Guterres?,” posted earlier this year by Ottawa journalist John Robson on his Climate Discussion Nexus site. Robson reviews and highlights  some of the garbled inaccuracies and misrepresentations Guterres routinely cranks out.

For instance: “Climate-related natural disasters are becoming more frequent, more deadly, more destructive with growing human and financial cost.”  Not true . And: “The number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years.”  Also not true .

When it comes to policies to deal with his fantastic vision of planetary destruction, Guterres aligns with Maurice Strong’s de-growth agenda. In his Manhattan speech, he repeated the UN call for a “fossil-fuel phase-out” since “economic logic makes the end of the fossil fuel age inevitable.” He urged financial institutions to “stop bankrolling” fossil fuel industries. “Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet,” he told bankers, “they’re toxic for your brand.”

The planet would be much better off if national governments stopped bankrolling Guterres and the United Nations and their constant poisoning of our science, economics and politics.

Green Baloney, Hype and Fairy Tales in Australia

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Viv Forbes writes at Spectator Australia Battery baloney, hydrogen hype, and green fairy tales in Australia.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T John Ray at his blog Greenie Watch.

How low Australia has fallen… Our once-great BHP now has a ‘Vice President for Sustainability and Climate Change’, the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: ‘No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear!’ while Our ABC, Our CSIRO, and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy (plus a bit of standby gas, heaps of batteries, and new power lines) can power our homes, industries and the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards.

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions: the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

From Duck to Canyon Curve

Magical things are also expected from more rooftop solar. But panel-power has four huge problems:

♦  Zero solar energy is generated to meet peak demand at breakfast and dinner times.

♦  Piddling solar power is produced from many poorly oriented roof panels or from the weak sunshine anywhere south of Sydney.

♦  If too much solar energy pours into the network (say at noon on a quiet sunny Sunday), the grid becomes unstable. Our green engineers have the solution – be ready to charge people for unwanted power they export to the grid, or just use ‘smart meters’ to turn them off.

♦  More rooftop solar means less income and more instability for power utilities so they have to raise electricity charges. This cost falls heaviest on those with no solar panels, or no homes.

Magical things are also expected from batteries.

When I was a kid on a dairy farm in Queensland, I saw our kerosene lamps and beeswax candles replaced by electric lights. We had 16 X 2 volt batteries on the verandah and a big thumping diesel generator in the dairy.

It was a huge relief, years later, when power poles bringing reliable electricity marched up the lane to our house. All those batteries disappeared with the introduction of 24/7 coal power.

Batteries are never a net generator of power – they store energy generated elsewhere, incurring losses on charging and discharging.

There has to be sufficient generating capacity to meet current demand while also recharging those batteries. What provides electricity to power homes, lifts, hospitals, and trains and to recharge all those vehicle batteries after sundown on a still winter night? (Hint: Call the reliable coal/gas/nuclear crews.)

The same remorseless equations apply to all the pumped hydro schemes being dreamed up – everyone is a net consumer of power once losses are covered and the water is pumped back up the hill.

Yet AEMO hopes we will install 16 times our current capacity of batteries and pumped hydro by 2050 – sounds like the backyard steel plans of Chairman Mao or the Soviet Gosplan that constipated initiative in USSR for 70 years. Who needs several Snowy 2 fiascos running simultaneously?

Mother Nature has created the perfect solar battery which holds the energy of sunlight for millions of years. When it releases that energy for enterprising humans, it returns CO2 for plants to the atmosphere from whence it came. It is called ‘Coal’.

‘Hydrogen’ gets a lot of hype, but it is an elusive and dangerous gas that is rarely found naturally. To use solar energy to generate hydrogen and to then use that hydrogen as a power source is just another silly scheme to waste water and solar energy. It always takes more energy to produce hydrogen than it gives back. Let green billionaires, not taxpayers, spend their money on this merry-go-round.

Who is counting the energy and capital consumed, and the emissions generated, to manufacture, transport, and install a continent being covered by ugly solar panels, bird slicers, high voltage power lines, access roads, and hydro schemes? Now they want to invade our shallow seas. Who is going to clean up this mess in a few years’ time?

As Jo Nova says:

‘No one wants industrial plants in their backyard, but when we have to build 10,000 km of high voltage towers, 40 million solar panels, and 2,500 bird-killing turbines – it’s in everyone’s backyard.’

With all of this planned and managed by the same people who gave us Pink Batts, Snowy 2 hydro, and the NBN/NDIS fiascoes, what could possibly go wrong?

Another big problem is emerging – country people don’t want power lines across their paddocks, whining wind turbines on their hills, and glittering solar panels smothering their flats. And seaside dwellers don’t want to hear or see wind turbines off their beaches. Even whales are confused.

The solution is obvious – build all wind and solar facilities in electorates that vote Green, Teal, and Labor. Those good citizens can then listen to the turbines turning in the night breezes and look out their windows to see shiny solar panels on every roof. This will make them feel good that they are preventing man-made global warming. Those electorates who oppose this silly green agenda should get their electricity from local coal, gas or nuclear plants.

What about the Net Zero targets?

At the same time as Australia struggles to generate enough reliable power for today, governments keep welcoming more migrants, more tourists, more foreign students and planning yet more stadiums, games, and circuses. None of this is compatible with their demand for Net Zero emissions.

Unlike Europe, the Americas, and Asia, Australia has no extension cords to neighbours with reliable power from nuclear, hydro, coal, or gas – we are on our own.

Australia has abundant resources of coal and uranium – we mine and export these energy minerals but Mr Bowen, our Minister for Blackouts, says we may not use our own coal and uranium to generate future electricity here. Someone needs to tell him that no country in the world relies solely on wind, solar, and pumped hydro. Germany tried but soon found they needed French nuclear, Scandinavian hydro, imported gas, and at least 20 coal-fired German power plants are being resurrected or extended past their closing dates to ensure Germans have enough energy to get through the winter.

Australia is the only G20 country in which nuclear power is illegal (maybe no one has told green regulators that we have had a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney since 1958). Australia is prepared to lock navy personnel beside nuclear power plants in our new nuclear-powered submarines but our politicians forbid nuclear power stations in our wide open countryside.

More CO2 in the atmosphere brings great benefits to life on Earth. If man adds to it, the oceans dissolve a swag of it, and what stays in the atmosphere is gratefully welcomed by all plant life.

In 2023, Australia added just 0.025 ppm to the 420 ppm in today’s atmosphere. Most of this probably dissolved in the oceans. If we in Australia turned everything off tomorrow, the climate wouldn’t notice, but our plant life would, especially those growing near power stations burning coal or gas and spreading plant food.

Climate has always changed and a warm climate has never been a problem
on Earth.  It is cold that kills. Especially during blackouts.