by Judith Curry
There is a growing realisation that emissions and temperature targets are now detached from the issues of human well-being and the development of our 21st century world.
JC note: this is the text of my op-ed for SkyNews that was published several weeks ago
For the past two centuries, fossil fuels have fueled humanity’s progress, improving standards of living and increasing the life span for billions of people. In the 21st century, a rapid transition away from fossil fuels has become an international imperative for climate change mitigation, under the auspices of the UN Paris Agreement. As a result, the 21st century energy transition is dominated by stringent targets to rapidly eliminate carbon dioxide emissions. However, the recent COP27 meeting in Egypt highlighted that very few of the world’s countries are on track to meet their emissions reductions commitment.
The desire for cleaner, more abundant, more reliable and less expensive sources of energy is universal. However, the goal of rapidly eliminating fossil fuels is at odds with the urgency of providing grid electricity to developing countries. Rapid deployment of wind and solar power has invariably increased electricity costs and reduced reliability, particularly with increasing penetration into the grid. Allegations of human rights abuses in China’s Xinjiang region, where global solar voltaic supplies are concentrated, are generating political conflicts that threaten the solar power industry. Global supply chains of materials needed to produce solar and wind energy plus battery storage are spawning new regional conflicts, logistical problems, supply shortages and rising costs. The large amount of land use required for wind and solar farms plus transmission lines is causing local land use conflicts in many regions.
Given the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding climate change, does the alleged urgency of reducing carbon dioxide emissions somehow trump these other considerations? Well, the climate ‘crisis’ isn’t what it used to be. The COP27 has dropped the most extreme emissions scenario from consideration, which was the source of the most alarming predictions. Only a few years ago, an emissions trajectory that produced 2 to 3 oC warming was regarded as climate policy success. As limiting warming to 2 oC seems to be in reach, the goal posts were moved to limit the warming target to 1.5 oC. These warming targets are referenced to a baseline at the end of the 19th century; the Earth’s climate has already warmed by 1.1 oC. In context of this relatively modest warming, climate ‘crisis’ rhetoric is now linked to extreme weather events.
Attributing extreme weather and climate events to global warming can motivate a country to attempt to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that eliminating emissions would have a noticeable impact on weather and climate extremes in the 21st century. It is very difficult to untangle the roles of natural weather and climate variability and land use from the slow creep of global warming. Looking back into the past, including paleoclimatic data, there has been more extreme weather everywhere on the planet. Thinking that we can minimize severe weather through using atmospheric carbon dioxide as a control knob is a fairy tale. In particular, Australia is responsible for slightly more than 1% of global carbon emissions. Hence, Australia’s emissions have a minimal impact on global warming as well as on Australia’s own climate.
There is growing realization that these emissions and temperature targets have become detached from the issues of human well-being and development. Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century. However once we relax the faux urgency for eliminating CO2 emissions and the stringent time tables, we have time and space to envision new energy systems that can meet the diverse, growing needs of the 21st century. This includes sufficient energy to help reduce our vulnerability to surprises from extreme weather and climate events.
I your headline did you mean the “not” to be “no”? As written the headline looks strange.
thx, fixed
“ Looking back into the past, including paleoclimatic data, there has been more extreme weather everywhere on the planet. ”
This sentence can be misinterpreted. Adding “..in the past” at the end makes it clear.
Sorry to be predictable
and boring…but as my grandpa always said: ‘Moderation in all things”. Seems fair. The sky is not falling.
njf
The sky is fine.
Those who fall into the orbit of Sky News, not so much.
We can only hope that reports from Judith in Murdochland will not rival those of his coal-fired content providers down under.
People who criticise coal are beyond redemption. Coal is poetic; trees covered Gondwana during the Carboniferous period. Those trees died and after millions of years became coal. Humans dig up coal and use it to build every amenity which has taken humanity from the tyranny of nature: energy. steel, cement; and when humanity burns coal CO2 is released to feed the plants alive today.
Only a moron would find fault with that.
Judith, what you say sounds so reasonable. Why doesn’t everyone get it?
Judith doesn’t get it either.
She claims there is a need to reduce CO2 emissions
That claim is false.
” Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century. ”
No we do not, and the author should not be taken seriously after making that data-free claim unsupported in the article (or anywhere else). She apparently has no skepticism of always wrong long term climate predictions, and the absurd belief that the future climate can only get worse (after it has been getting better for the past 325 years.)
I do appreciate the work of Dr. Curry. She is a leader and I am very thankful for her courage in this space. However, I found it unfortunate to see that comment ” Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”
No we do not need to reduce CO2. Those words are what the Malthusians and misanthropic forces grab out of context. These folks are doing serious harm to our children and these false fears of climate change. They are dark forces, with legions of followers, anchored in hopelessness for our future and our families.
Yes, we need to be reduce particulate matter, nitrogen, sulfur, mercury, benzene content, smog, and other hazardous air pollutants. We should continuously push the envelope to innovate and improve the technology that removes those pollutants from the air and water. And focusing on actual pollutants will keep our air and water clean while allowing fossil fuels to remain part of the mix for our future energy needs. And if we reduce CO2 while focusing on those pollutants, fine, but that is a different perspective.
However, CO2 does not belong in the same category as these pollutants. Its efficacy in the atmosphere is NOT significant as a climate force. Relative to the sun’s effects on the planet’s energy flows, CO2 is a virtually negligible weather driver. Our sun, NOT CO2, is our source of climate change. The uncertainty alone, relative to sun driven global energy processes, far outweigh the climate force generated by CO2. And the sun’s creation of the most prolific natural greenhouse gas, namely water vapor, dwarfs CO2’s contribution as a warming agent to our atmosphere.
Climate change scientists have made the fundamental and gross error of believing they can examine the role of human-made greenhouse gases, like CO2, independently from natural global energy processes. By extracting and analyzing only the human-generated greenhouse gases, they build these dire fictional scenarios (i.e., models) that the world is heading toward catastrophic calamity.
The hierarchy of the climate change science community has created and allowed this gross error to propagate. It then enables the precision of the science that follows to make logical sense to the legions of scientists that accept the original premise.
Climate change scientists do not examine human-made greenhouse gases in the genesis and within the aggregate of natural global climate. If they did, the result would show that the force on the climate from human sources, like CO2, is negligible or impossible to discern from the natural uncertainty of global energy budgets, which our sun determines.
Thanks as always, Dr. Judith. You make an excellent case that rapid decarbonization is inadvisable.
However, there’s a much larger issue, which is that rapid decarbonization a la “Net Zero by 2050” is politically, economically, and physically impossible. I go through the details in the post below.
Thanks for all your good work,
w.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/01/27/bright-green-impossibilities/
Nut Zero is not necessary
More CO2 in the atmosphere is a blessing for humans, animals and especially C3 plants that humans and animals eat
Current electric grids are not broken (yet — Biden is trying) so do not need to be fixed
Nut Zero is not feasible
Nut Zero is not affordable
Nut Zero timing is an arbitrary target that won’t be met
There is no Nut Zero plan that could be analyzed for feasibility, cost and timing, Nut Zero is just a long-winded green dreamer vision statement and arbitrary completion date.
About 7 billion people of the 8 billion in the world, live in nations that could not care less about Nut Zero, so it CAN NORT SUCCEED in stopping the growth of CO2 emissions, and that is great news, because more CO2 emissions improves life on this this planet.
I’m sure the Willis article covered many of the same issues almost two years ago, but I will add another issue, that people will struggle to believe, with a “It can’t happen here” belief. But it IS happening here in the USA:
Nut Zero is designed to fail. That’s obvious, and here’s why:
— In a few years, the failure of Nut Zero will be spun as a NEW climate emergency. That can “only” be “solved” with more government mandates and more government control of the private sector, which has been the goal of leftists for over a century.
We conservatives look at leftist decisions and plans and see them as incompetent. In fact, their decisions have the goal of fundamentally transforming the US economy.
That is done by breaking down the current system (called capitalism, but is really socialism, with 34.5% of GDP being government spending in 2022).
When the current economic system is failing, their desired Marxism will seem to be worth trying. And that is the goal of fundamental transformation. Every leftist decision and plan makes sense if you know their ultimate goal, from Nut Zero, to climate scaremongering, media censorship, prosecution of political opponents, open borders, and even teaching pornographic sex in schools (which is actually old Marxist strategy from 1919).
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms, Michigan
http://www.ElectionCircus.Blogspot.com
“Nut Zero is not necessary”
Not sure if that is a typo or an intentional description of the current policies.
Total Federal, State and Local Government spending % of GDP. Yes, socialism and btw less than “communist” China’s (fascist really)
https://d3fy651gv2fhd3.cloudfront.net/charts/united-states-government-spending-to-gdp.png?s=unitedstagstg&projection=te&v=202211181518V20220312
It is not CO2, but other anthropogenic causes that drive NH warming. As with CO2 climate sensitivity is extremely low, and it is strange how this was not understood any earlier.
I have already explained how the inclusion of clouds and a proper accounting for surface emissivity drops CO2 forcing to only 2W/m2.
https://greenhousedefect.com/the-holy-grail-of-ecs/the-2xco2-forcing-disaster
Happer, Wijngaarden in the meanwhile are slowly moving forward trying to answer on what CO2 forcing will be, once clouds are considered. Apparently they have not quite figured it out yet (although it is pretty simple), but here Wijngaarden seems to quote my results..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfwnKWIWPzk&t=3770s
Anyway, the problem does not stop there. The same issue with overlaps applies to WV feedback. Excluding overlaps and assuming a perfectly emitting surface, it might be about 1.8W/m2 in theory. With overlaps, which are specifically strong between WV and clouds, it is far less.
On top of that WV is generally overstated as a GHG. Assuming surface emissions of 390W/m2 or higher, despite it only being 355W/m2 (emissivity of water is 0.91!), the GHE is badly overestimated. In the process of attribution WV receives the rest of the pie so to say. As the pie is smaller than the consensus thinks, this rest is subject to a huge error margin.
Allowing for all that, WV feedback is only about 0.65W/m2 and thus effectively smaller than lapse rate feedback. Over both components, WV turns out to be rather a negative feedback. Eventually correcting “lambda” from 0.3 to 0.27, ECS is merely in the 0.5K region. Even considering likely erroneous albedo- and cloud feedbacks will hardly change that.
So whatever causes NH warming (note: it is NOT global) will be something different than GHGs. We have primary energy consumption with forcings >1W/m2 in industrious regions, pollution which is certainly rather warming than cooling, and most of all there are aviation induced cirrus.
Your assertion of NH limited anthropogenic effects is supported by the lower troposphere chart of the south pole posted by CO2islife here.
Antarctica does not get global warming from CO2
CO2islife does not have a strong grasp of climate science
Although the phrase “CO2 is Life is certainly correct.
“In a world where most regions are warming because of increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), central Antarctica has been cooling slightly in recent years. Greenhouse gases such as CO2 typically trap heat radiated back toward space from the planet’s surface, but large swaths of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (the broad pink mass on the right side of the image) are, on average, actually colder than the upper layers of the atmosphere for much of the year—the only place on Earth where that’s true. When the team looked at the overall balance between the radiation upward from the surface of the ice sheet and the radiation both upward and downward from the upper levels of the atmosphere across all infrared wavelengths over the course of a year, they found that in central Antarctica the surface and lower atmosphere, against expectation, actually lose more energy to space if the air contains greenhouse gases, the researchers report online and in a forthcoming Geophysical Research Letters. And adding more CO2 to the atmosphere in the short-term triggered even more energy loss from the surface and lower atmosphere there, the team’s climate simulations suggest. The topsy-turvy temperature trend stems, in part, from the region’s high elevation; much of the surface of the ice sheet smothering East Antarctica lies above an elevation of 3000 meters, so it is much colder than it would be at lower altitudes. Moreover, that region often experiences what meteorologists call a temperature inversion, where temperatures in the lowest levels of the atmosphere are cooler than those higher up. For the lower-altitude fringes of the icy continent, and for the rest of the world (even Siberia and Greenland), the greenhouse effect still works as expected.”
SOURCE OF QUOTE:
https://www.science.org/content/article/rising-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-actually-cools-part-antarctica
No it is not
CO2 emissions growth does not affect the Antarctic in the same way as it affects other areas of the planet — the South Pole chart is a red herring argument;
“In a world where most regions are warming because of increasing concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), central Antarctica has been cooling slightly in recent years. Greenhouse gases such as CO2 typically trap heat radiated back toward space from the planet’s surface, but large swaths of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (the broad pink mass on the right side of the image) are, on average, actually colder than the upper layers of the atmosphere for much of the year—the only place on Earth where that’s true. When the team looked at the overall balance between the radiation upward from the surface of the ice sheet and the radiation both upward and downward from the upper levels of the atmosphere across all infrared wavelengths over the course of a year, they found that in central Antarctica the surface and lower atmosphere, against expectation, actually lose more energy to space if the air contains greenhouse gases, the researchers report online and in a forthcoming Geophysical Research Letters. And adding more CO2 to the atmosphere in the short-term triggered even more energy loss from the surface and lower atmosphere there, the team’s climate simulations suggest. The topsy-turvy temperature trend stems, in part, from the region’s high elevation; much of the surface of the ice sheet smothering East Antarctica lies above an elevation of 3000 meters, so it is much colder than it would be at lower altitudes. Moreover, that region often experiences what meteorologists call a temperature inversion, where temperatures in the lowest levels of the atmosphere are cooler than those higher up. For the lower-altitude fringes of the icy continent, and for the rest of the world (even Siberia and Greenland), the greenhouse effect still works as expected.”
SOURCE OF QUOTE:
https://www.science.org/content/article/rising-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-actually-cools-part-antarctica
A CO2 cooling south pole is really good news for humanity if true. We get all of the benefits of a warmer, expanded habitat in the NH, and higher agricultural yields, all while Antarctica grows from all the precipitation of the extra water vapor as it gets cooler. This can offset the forecast doom of Greenland melting here:
“A study published Aug. 29, 2022, demonstrates – for the first time – that Greenland’s ice sheet is now so out of balance with prevailing Arctic climate that it no longer can sustain its current size. It is irreversibly committed to retreat by at least 59,000 square kilometers (22,780 square miles), an area considerably larger than Denmark, Greenland’s protectorate state.
Even if all the greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming ceased today, we find that Greenland’s ice loss under current temperatures will raise global sea level by at least 10.8 inches (27.4 centimeters) [he doesn’t say in how long]. That’s more than current models forecast, and it’s a highly conservative estimate [He says numerical models are not fit for the purpose. One needs to observe and use his model].”
The paper constrains the timescale to between 200 and 2500 years for the committed ice loss.
Yes, that is the point! They are trying to crash everything and have the globe broke, hungry, freezing and destitute. All part of their agenda.
Who is/are this/these “they”?
Do you have any names?
“They” are leftists with the goal of powerful governments micromanaging our lives. Rule by government “experts” who are not really experts on any subject. Minimal personal freedom. Censorship. Persecution of political rivals. Just like in the US now. This has been the Marxist plan for over 100 years.
Err…..Yes. Giants of Toady – err…Today!
Including Bill Gates, Pr. M Mann, Pr. Philip Jones, Don Lemon, Doctorate in Senility J. Biden, B Obama, D. Attenborough (‘Southern England will be a desert in 2020’. Brilliant!), A. Gore, Significant Others at the BBC, SKY News….and…..and… (drones on for hours)……(yawn).
Names which all agree will live for ever!
Hoorah for Hollywood and fantasy.
Michaelrorme – yes, I think those are the sorts of “leftists” thecliff… has in mind, i.e. absolutely everyone apart from Donald Trump, thecliff… and a few others he agrees with.
And what a plan by those nasty Marxists : 100 years of trying and…they’re still trying! Not very good, are they? Or, maybe they don’t exist – scary thought for those who truly believe…
Marxists busy for 100 years with no results (‘they’re still trying’)? Umm yes they are still trying, and no, they’ve already succeeded. Many of the last 100 years have been occupied cleaning up these bastards’ bloodletting wherever they ruled. They’re tough nuts to crack alright! O yes.
Are Mann, Lemon et. al. Marxists? Doubtful. More like ‘useful idiots’. Slaves of history. Something like that.
An often repeated joke listed five major enemies of Socialism: Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, and Capitalism. Here you have it again except now these are enemies of the Planet. (I take the liberty to assemble the first four into Climate Change).
I do not believe there is any imperative to reducing CO2 emissions. It is unlikely to be effective at modifying the weather or climate in any significant way.
What must be considered is that fossil fuels are a finite resource. They are not likely to run out in the near future if ever, but the cost of recovery and scarcity could very soon make them too expensive to burn.
Solar, particularly rooftop solar, probably has a ways to run as yet, but wind and hydro may already be reaching their limit of practicality and affordability.
What is left? At first glance, only nuclear and perhaps a few examples of microsystems. But other options may appear as technology advances.
There is a lot of room for conservation at the consumer level, however, with more efficient manufacturing, housing, and transportation. Electrification of everything is not the answer. In fact it may lead to lower efficiencies which could only be justified by much lower overall cost.
The almost rabid and unjustified obsession with CO2 and government interference in the market is only delaying appropriate responses. It is essential that energy priorities be adjusted to reflect reality
Screwed up my editing, the subsequent post may be more readable if it appears.
Good information, thank you. However, there are two issues inseparable for any discussion on limiting Co2 (economic growth). First, is political control. Anyone with jurisdiction of energy usage controls a people and their society. We already see calls for increased taxation of energy (economic growth) and even demands for Climate caused lockdowns.
Next, the vast amount of money being created from the ether is an opiate that will significantly modify behavior including that of scientists and economists. Who will turn down the trillions of dollars and question the orthodoxy of political power. No one and anyone who dares is canceled, right JC?
We might actually do some good if the 20% of the required resources were invested in protecting from drought, floods, hurricanes, ocean level increases, drinking water, disease mitigation, and food shortages using whatever sources of energy were most effective — not even mentioning that the “green” we get our food from (trying to feed 8 Billion people) loves CO2. This approach would pay dividends even if the temperature wasn’t really increasing that much and the ocean levels really weren’t increasing that much. Instead, we are trying to change the entire climate of the Earth — and don’t even have assurance that our models are correct or buy-in from the other 50-70% of the world population pushing in the other direction.
I think Project Drawdown supports many of your ideas. It has been suggested that CO2 emissions have always been just a proxy for excessive consumption which leads to a multitude of other known problems.
https://www.drawdown.org/
We have over 250,000 man-made molecules being dispersed into the biosphere and CO2 is not the only thing we have to worry about.
This message needs to be put forward to the Canadian government which appears to be determined to destroy our economy in the pursuit or net zero. I am so grateful for the fossil fuels powering my furnace during our recent Siberian High.
Elections have consequences
Fossil fuels save Texas from Climate Doom follies!
The emergency order from the US Energy Department allowed the state’s grid operator to exceed certain air pollution limits to boost generation amid record power demand in the state. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, whose service area includes 90% of electric customers in Texas, requested the emergency order Friday, warning it may need to resort to blackouts. TRANSLATION – fire up more coal and gas plants!
Fortunately a repetition of the blackouts last year was avoided. But as we can see, it was gas power which came to the rescue, as wind power collapsed to virtually nothing at the same time as demand surged:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/12/26/gas-power-saves-texas-from-blackouts-as-wind-power-collapses-again/
This is as good a place as any to point out THE elephant in the room, ridden by the emperor with no clothes on: renewable dependability.
Virtually all renewables are unreliable and intermittent, particularly solar and wind. How about hydro in a drought? How about biofuels when bio supplies run shirt? In practical fact, there is no such thing as a reliable renewable that can guarantee 24/7/365 forever. And people do like the lights to come on every time they flip the switch.
It doesn’t matter how many solar panels or windmills you put up. When the weather doesn’t provide sun or wind, they ALL go down uniformly. The solution to these gaps is some sort of generation that can be activated seamlessly, just as fossil fuel plants do today, supporting partial (and variable) renew production. But as renewables pick up more and more of demand, and electric utilities are mandated to decommission their fossil fuel plants, the frequency of brown & blackouts becomes greater.
The preponderance of renewable supporters greet this with the assumption that batteries will keep things going. This is a gigantic assumption, that has no basis in fact. To provide the hundreds of gigawatt-hours a community needs, even for only a few days, would require tens of billions of dollars of batteries, taking up huge tracts of land, and needing replacement over and over. Advocates still say, “Battery technology is improving.”, which is irrelevant. I’ve studied the future of utility battery farms, and suffice it to say, the devil is in the details. People are also deluded into thinking their residential rooftop solar is going to supply their house and car 24/7/365. Not only “not even close”, but de minimus in the scale of any community.
So the only real solution is 100% dependable renewable generation to fill the gaps in intermittent renewable generation. I’ve posed that question to legislators and activists, who tell me it’s not a problem. “You can burn canola oil in a specialized turbine”, “Biofuels”, “hydrogen”, etc. You can’t argue these leaps, no matter the details of the actual, scalable, cost factors, and ultimate CO2 production. But they insist generation technologies like this will do it. To my knowledge no one has studied reliable backup generation, let alone reliable renewable backup generation.
(The obvious place this leads us is nuclear, but that’s a forbidden subject)
The real conundrum this exposes is, if you believe we can reliably generate renewable power, why bother with the worldwide effort to install trillions of dollars of unreliable renewable generation in the first place? The backup requirement capacity will always be the same for any community: the peak demand. We may not run it very long, but if a disruption occurs at prime time, on a hot day, with all the air conditioners on full blast, that GW capacity is what will need to pick up the load.
Here’s an idea! How about DON’T shut down all the oil and coal plants. How about DON’T outlaw the use of fossil fuels (already done in CA)? How about investing in ways to clean up emissions from these sources, instead of dumping $trillions into technologies that won’t even keep the lights on all the time? How about that?
“(The obvious place this leads us is nuclear, but that’s a forbidden subject)”
Nuclear is too expensive and green dreamers hate it for unknown reasons. The right answer is to leave the electric grids alone. They are not broken and do not need to be “fixed”. Spend the money and labor hours, about to be wasted on Nut Zero, on productive investments that benefit humans. Spending a huge amount of money and labor hours to make electric grids less reliable makes absolutely no sense.
The BBC in the UK this evening on the flagship 6.00pm news show ran a story on the US Winter Storm. First, they got a professor from somewhere to say that Global Warming has made the storm more intense by providing more moisture. They then went on to say the storm position is linked to the Jet Stream and this may be impacted by Global Warming. Finally, they claimed this is a once in lifetime event, implying that it could be discounted. It is very sad to see the BBC so 100% signed up to Climate Armageddon notions.
You have to hand it to the alarmists for their cunning. It is impossible to win against an opponent who sets the rules and operates on the principle of “Heads I win, tails you lose.”
It is hard to win against someone who controls the media
This tells a lot about BBC’s presumed audience.
Here is the beginning and the CO2 portion of of my Post at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/
We have just passed a Millenial peak in solar acvity and temperature.
“Earth shows net cooling for 19 years and The Rules of the Lebensraum game.
SUMMARY
1.A battle for Lebensraum, i.e. land, energy and food resources, broke out when Russia invaded Crimea.An associated covid pandemic, and global poverty and income disparity increases now threaten the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. During the last major influenza epidemic in 1919 world population was 1.9 billion. It is now 7.8 billion+/ – an approximate four fold increase.
The IPCC and UNFCCC post modern science establishment’s “consensus” is that a modelled future increase in CO2 levels is the main threat to human civilization. This is an egregious error of scientific judgement. A Millennial Solar ” Activity” Peak in 1991 correlates with the Millennial Temperature Peak at 2003/4 with a 12/13 year delay because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. Earth has now entered a general cooling trend which will last for the next 700+/- years.
Because of the areal distribution and variability in the energy density of energy resources and the varying per capita use of energy in different countries, international power relationships have been transformed. The global free trade system and global supply chains have been disrupted.
Additionally, the worlds richest and most easily accessible key mineral deposits were mined first and the lower quality resources which remain in the 21st century are distributed without regard to national boundaries and demand. As population grows,inflation inevitably skyrockets. War between states and violent conflicts between tribes and religious groups within states are multiplying.
2 The Millennial Temperature Cycle Peak.
Latest Data (1) https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
Global Temp Data 2003/12 Anomaly +0.26 : 2022/11 Anomaly +0.17 Net cooling for 19 years
NH Temp Data 2004/01 Anomaly +0.37 : 2022/11Anomaly +0.21 Net cooling for 19 years
Tropics Temp Data 2004/01 Anomaly +0.22 : 2022/11 Anomaly -0.16 Net cooling for 19 years.
USA 48 Temp Data 2004/03 Anomaly +1.32 : 2022/11 Anomaly – 0.51 Net cooling for 19 years.
Australia Temp Data 2004/02 Anomaly +0.80 : 2022/11 Anomaly – 0.56 Net cooling for 19 years …………………………”
5. CO2 -Temperature and Climate.
The whole COP Net Zero meme is founded on the flawed assumptions and algorithms which produced the IPCC- UNFCCC model forecasts of coming dangerous temperature increases.
The “consensus” IPCC models make the fundamental error of ignoring the long- term decline in solar activity and temperature following the Millennial Solar Activity Turning Point and activity peak which was reached in 1990/91 as shown in Figure 1
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is .058% by weight. That is one 1,720th of the whole. It is inconceivable thermodynamically that such a tiny tail could wag so big a dog. (13)
Stallinga 2020 (14) concludes: ” The atmosphere is close to thermodynamic equilibrium and based on that we……… find that the alleged greenhouse effect cannot explain the empirical data—orders of magnitude are missing. ……Henry’s Law—outgassing of oceans—easily can explain all observed phenomena.” CO2 levels follow temperature changes. CO2 is the dependent variable and there is no calculable consistent relationship between the two. The uncertainties and wide range of out-comes of model calculations of climate radiative forcing (RF) arise from the improbable basic assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the major controller of global temperatures.
Miskolczi 2014 (15) in “The greenhouse effect and the Infrared Radiative Structure of the Earth’s Atmosphere “says “The stability and natural fluctuations of the global average surface temperature of the heterogeneous system are ultimately determined by the phase changes of water.”
Also See AleksandrZhitomirskiy2022 Absorption of heat and the greenhouse gas effect. https://independent.academia.edu/AleksandrZhitomirskiy (16) which says:
“The molar heat capacities of the main greenhouse and non-greenhouse gases are of the same order of magnitude. Given the low concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, their contribution to temperature change is below the measurement error. It seems that the role of various gases in the absorption of heat by the atmosphere is determined not by the ability of the gas to absorb infrared radiation, but by its heat capacity and concentration. ”
Zaichun Zhul et al 2016 (17) in Greening of the Earth and its drivers report “a persistent and widespread increase of growing season integrated Leaf Area Index (greening) over 25% to 50% of the global vegetated area from 1982 – 2009. ………. C02 fertilization effects explain 70% of the observed greening trend.”
Policies which limit CO2 emissions or even worse sequester CO2 in quixotic CCS green-washing schemes would decrease agricultural food production and are antithetical to the goals of feeding the increasing population and bringing people out of poverty.
“Henry’s Law—outgassing of oceans—easily can explain all observed phenomena.” CO2 levels follow temperature changes.”
BS
Henry’s law can ONLY explain that nature (oceans, land and plants) absorbed slightly less CO2 since 1850, than it would have absorbed if the oceans had remained the same temperature since 1850.
Oceans are still net CO2 absorbers since 1850.
The approximately +1 degree C. warming of the oceans since 1850 may have caused them to absorb 15 ppm to 25 ppm less CO2 than they would have absorbed if there had been any warming.
How much CO2 has nature absorbed since 1850?
Manmade CO2 emissions would have added +200 ppm to +300 ppm CO2 to the atmosphere. The actual change in CO2 is estimated at +135 ppm (from 280 ppm estimated in 1850 and 415 ppm measured in 2022). That means nature must have absorbed from 65 ppm to 165 ppm of the +200 ppm to +300 ppm of manmade CO2 emissions since 1850.
“A Millennial Solar ” Activity” Peak in 1991 correlates with the Millennial Temperature Peak at 2003/4 with a 12/13 year delay because of the thermal inertia of the oceans. Earth has now entered a general cooling trend which will last for the next 700+/- years.”
Total BS
There is no measured relationship between solar energy (estimated based on sunspot counts before there were satellites) and the global average temperature since the cold 1690s during the coldest temperature decade of the Maunder Minimum period. There is no other solar signal — 11 years solar cycles are invisible in the global average temperature record.
Every long-term climate forecast in history had been wromg. They are rarely for more than 100 years. And you want us to believe your 700-year forecast claptrap? Do you think we are all uneducated rubes, who just fell off the back of a turnip truck?
A new post and a great interview with Robert Bryce. It’s hard to keep up.
Wonder if Dr. Curry has had a chance to review the 2022 temperature data associated with the heat wave that hit the western states earlier this year. A peak load record occurred on the CASIO grid occurred on 6th of Sept during the heat wave.
“Record Peak Load in 2022 On September 6, 2022 CAISO set a record peak load of 52,061 MW Comparing average temperatures across CAISO, this heat event ranked third in the last 30 years Staff analysis characterizes the peak temperature as a 1- year-in-27 event based on a 30-year weather history”
REF-
California Energy Commission: Docket Log
https://efiling.energy.ca.gov/Lists/DocketLog.aspx?docketnumber=22-IEPR-03
248132 12/16/2022 4 Peak Forecast ADA v2
*** This document supersedes TN 248075 ***
26 page(s)
The previous record peak load occurred back in July of 2006- the same day that PG&E approved our solar system to operate.
Rolling blackouts were avoided, unlike what happened a couple of years earlier during another heat wave in CA. Some PG&E distribution lines went off-line in the Bay Area on the 6th, but those events were planned.
Baily, our 8-week-old puppy, must have been requesting attention when I typed this-
“Some PG&E distribution lines went off-line in the Bay Area on the 6th, but those events were planned.”
as I meant to note that the outages were UNPLANNED.
The market conditions and activities taken to keep the CASIO grid up during the heat wave are denoted here-
http://www.caiso.com/Documents/Regional-Issues-Forum-Presentation-Market-Conditions-Issues-Performance-During-Summer-2022-Heat-Wave-2022-11-08.pdf
The Mosquito fire started on the 6th-
https://www.mtdemocrat.com/news/mosquito-fire-forest-service-seizes-pge-equipment/
and it led to an evacuation warning at my father-in-law’s home.
Judith: I’ve said it before, but I think it’s worth saying again. And again. – Your “Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.” is wrong and undoes all the good work in the rest of your article. And there is a lot of good work there. The powers of evil can latch onto that one incorrect statement for support and ignore the rest. Why is it wrong? Well, we all know that CO2 is beneficial for the planet, as witnessed by NASA and others’ observations of increased natural productivity, and the powers of evil all know that too (their real agenda is power and control, climate fear is just a useful weapon). BTW, warmth is good too, though the amount of warmth delivered by CO2 appears to be not that much.
One more thing. When you point out that we have already done 1.1 degrees of the terrible 1.5 degrees, why can’t you just point out that panicking over the last 0.4 degrees is quite simply pathetic.
There are a lot of unknowns. We don’t KNOW the long-term impact of humans changing the atmospheric composition. If humanity can cost effectively change the emissions curve it may be a good idea. Why induce unnecessary risk?
We do know the impact of energy poverty. Up till about the 1940’s, western countries endured it. Many billions in “developing” countries still do. The squalor of living conditions in the Middle Ages is well attested.
Why impose those known conditions on people for unknowns, as you’ve just admitted. If you have solutions for reliable, plentiful, affordable supply of energy, not dependent on uncontrollable weather, just list them instead of shrilling on about the Precautionary Principle.
Rob …
> There are a lot of unknowns.
True. But there are also a lot of knowns. We know that policy favoring renewables has driven up the costs for fossil fuels, which, aside from nuclear, are the only reliable sources of energy, and are the main sources of energy in civilization. We also know that developing countries who have fossil fuel resources are being forced to use more expensive renewables, through financing arms of developed countries.
> Why induce unnecessary risk?
True again. But risk assessment needs to rank the unknown of potential CO2 (warming) vs the reduced ability for technological advancement via an artificially (intentionally?) constrained economy. Not to mention the human costs of lost opportunities to develop.
So far, we have not seen the negative predictions of increasing fossil fuel use. +40 years of projections have failed. Sea levels have not risen precipitously, warming has not risen to predicted levels (Judith points that out in her piece that the goal posts are moved.), animal species supposedly threatened have actually thrived and extreme weather events have not been proven to even have a correlation, let alone cause.
We essentially moved society in a direction on the basis of assumptions where there is no evidence, nothing to point to and say the assumptions are correct. The only justifiable action would have been to watch for evidence while continuing in the direction we were going. If someone says, ‘Well, by then it will be too late!’ … I would say I have a great deal on a bridge for you in Brooklyn.
Judith, you wrote “we have time and space to envision new energy systems that can meet the diverse, growing needs of the 21st century.”
My understanding is that the so-called “renewable” energy sources are not capable of delivering enough power to sustain our high energy flow industrial civilization. Do you have some other “new energy systems” in mind?
For someone who’s Modus Operandi is to criticise climate models because of “uncertainty”, this opinion piece sure has a ring of “certainty” about it.
Oh, and your argument about 1% of all emissions from Australia, has convinced me not to pay my taxes which are only 0.00001% of total.
JC- Your article is right-on but my attention drifts out the window after the first page. Is there some version that would appeal to an audience of mouth-breathers like me. You’re great, carry on!
These actually belong here.
The European Union’s energy crisis is expected to continue into 2023 as gas supplies have been cut by more than 80%, prompting the 27-nation bloc’s energy ministers to agree on Dec. 19 to a gas price cap.
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984131
It is irresponsible to put out a plan to achieve the CLCPA’s goals while at the same time preventing New Yorkers from understanding the impact on their energy bills and the economy.
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/09/jc-navigates-the-new-media/#comment-984160
There is no need to sift through the ashes and look for further evidence that Western Academia stabbed America in the back and sacrificed scientific integrity and honesty on the alter of Leftist ideology than Al Gore’s ’06 faux-science mystery science theatrical piece, ‘An Inconvenient Truth.’ School kids writing term papers (Kristen Barnes, Ponder the Maunder) could tell you why it was all BS
“The faux urgency of the climate crisis is giving us no time or space to build a secure energy future”
Worst yet is the incessant urgency to DESTROY an already existent “Secure Energy Future”.
The USA (and other locales) have enough Coal and Oil reserves to keep everybody warm and fed for several centuries at least.
And there is enough Natural Gas available to keep everybody warm and fed for several centuries after that.
But some folks INSIST we destroy all of that first before we prove the practicality of “green energy”.
Like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and expecting someone to invent AND perfect a functional parachute during the descent to a Hard Stop,,,
FYI they are finding the frozen bodies of poor souls stuck outside in the Christmas Blizzard in Buffalo NY as we post. COLD KILLS…. HOT NOT SO MUCH, Doubt that we will be finding human remains lying around when the temperature goes up by 1.5 degrees C in the future,,,,
The NY Governor is busy figuring out how to “Electrify Everything”, No new Natural Gas, banning ICE cars… Stupidity on steroids.
If CO2 is not a control knob, pray tell why do we “need to reduce CO2 emissions.” CO2 is plant food…the more plants eat the more people eat. I don’t recall Dr. Curry ever making a case that CO2 is in any way bad.
Ms. Curry skipped over the “CO2 is dangerous” step on the assumption ladder.
When neither time nor space is allowed in any decision process, it is indicative of “herding” or an intentional drive towards a desired conclusion. Also, an indicator of coercion and scamming.
Any technology reliant upon Lithium batteries is doomed by resource constraints.
Any technology reliant upon Hydrogen is doomed by thermodynamics, electrochemistry, materials science, and economics. H2 economies require more energy input than they deliver.
The only known energy sources that might possibly be sustainable are fission and fusion. Fusion is immature and always has been. Fission is the most promising option if a cascaded U, Pu, Mox, chain where reprocessing is used or a Th closed cycle with reprocessing.
The maths, physics, chemistry, and economics drive this.
What does Greta think of new generation fission? The UN is waiting to know.
What Greta thinks about anything is irrelevant by any practical measure. That anyone cares what she thinks is prima facia evidence of politics, not reason. Ignorant Children have no place at the table of Grid Scale Power.
Agreed, Lance.
What she does is what matters. And sometimes what she says, e.g.:
https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1608056944501178368
“Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”
I think that the only way that one can make such an assessment legitimately is after a detailed, cost/benefit analysis is done for all anthro’ sources of CO2. That includes the energy and CO2 fluxes for current and proposed new power sources, from extraction of raw materials to eventual disposal or recycling. To the best of my knowledge such a detailed analysis hasn’t been done by anyone.
This assumes that CO2 has any bearing upon anything. Let’s see that proven firstly. Grid scale power is quite taken for granted and incompetent alternatives are entertained when they are farcical. Unless one likes 1850 living standards, results matter more than ideology. Everyone has an opinion until the lights go out and their food spoils and they are freezing to death. That’s when Reality has the final vote. No One has ever provided a “detailed analysis” of how any power source other than oil/gas/coal/nuclear will actually work at grid scale. If they had, none of this intermittent generation folly would exist. At grid scale, one has seconds to minutes to solve the issue, at voltage, at frequency, at current, at power factor, at economic dispatch. Or the grid collapses. Imaginary solutions don’t work in a voltage or frequency collapse scenario. Ask an environmentalist to perform a grid scale load flow or to project a day ahead guaranteed generation dispatch. I’m quite sure they’d not understand the question.
You could assume the worst case for CO2 = CO2 caused all the warming since 1850. Even the worst case assumption does not lead to the conclusion that CO2 level growth is bad news. In fact, CO2 level growth is good news.
As you read this, you are experiencing the accumulated global warming from 4.5 billion years of Earth existence due to the ever-present atmospheric CO2 which is absorbing and re-radiating part of the infrared spectrum released by the Sun and ‘Greenhouse Gas’ heated surface.
The Earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old. The earliest geological era is named the Hadean era after Hades due to the extensive volcanic activity creating sheets of molten lava across the surface. Volcanic activity produces copious amounts of atmospheric CO2 so how could the temperature of the hot surface have fallen to the present-day comfortable level if the ever-present atmospheric CO2 was continuously warming the Earth?
Like every inert, material entity, the atmospheric CO2 is merely a conduit for the passage of heat energy from hot bodies to colder bodies via conduction, convection or radiation, the normal process of achieving thermal equilibrium. It does not produce any heat so it cannot warm anything.
In every minute of every hour of every day, the atmospheric CO2 absorbs and re-radiates heat from the Sun and the Earth’s surface and has been doing so for more than 4 billion years. If this caused warming of the Earth’s surface then surely at least all of the oceans would have evaporated by now.
Given estimates of the Sun’s temperature, its distance from the Earth, the thermodynamic surface properties of the Earth and a given location on that surface, we can estimate a realistic maximum for the temperature at that location without including any contribution from 4.5 billion years of accumulated CO2 global warming.
Under these circumstances, surely it is irrational to propose that CO2 is warming the Earth. The fictitious warming claim promoted by the UN IPCC and the World Economic Forum is simply untenable. It is an attempt to instill fear into the population at large, cause an economic collapse and then claim that a ‘One World Government’ is necessary, run by them, of course.
Edward N. Lorenz ( the “Father” of Global Circulation Models), in 1963, showed that long term weather predictions (climate) were not possible (chaos theory). This is a very good read:
https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/20/2/1520-0469_1963_020_0130_dnf_2_0_co_2.xml
“It (CO2) does not produce any heat so it cannot warm anything.”
Straw man argument.
No one claims CO2 produces heat.
Like other greenhouse gases, CO2 impedes Earth’s ability to cool itself by an unknown amount. That amount is not dangerous.
In fact, above 400 ppm (now at 415 ppm), CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas.
Not so, thecliffclavenoffinance,
Surely “Global Warming” means making the Globe hotter and that can only happen by heat from a hotter source impinging on the Earth’s surface. If not CO2 then what? The atmosphere, including the CO2, provides the pathway for the heat from the Earth’s surface to travel out into space thereby cooling the Earth’s surface via conduction, convection and radiation.
The amplitude/frequency absorption spectrum of CO2 mainly involves a small part of the low frequency, cold end of the spectrum emitted by the Earth’s surface. In order to raise the temperature of the surface it must receive radiation containing higher amplitudes and a greater frequency range than that of the surface. In particular the spectrum from a hotter source contains a greater proportion at the high frequency end which is what is necessary to move the peak emission of the surface to a higher frequency, that is, a higher temperature.
There is no such thing as a greenhouse gas. The supposed “Greenhouse Effect” is a figment of an irrelevant mathematical model, go look it up.
“Attributing extreme weather and climate events to global warming can motivate a country to attempt to rapidly transition away from fossil fuels. However, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that eliminating emissions would have a noticeable impact on weather and climate extremes in the 21st century. It is very difficult to untangle the roles of natural weather and climate variability and land use from the slow creep of global warming.”
Extreme weather attribution IS the new global warming, aka the ‘climate crisis’, happening here and now, every day, all around us. it was the ‘climate crisis’ killed that poor woman in her car in Buffalo, plus numerous others who died in the recent US winter storm. It kills millions of people each year (often in poor countries) by generating extreme weather which is now invariably linked to global warming via attribution pseudoscience. Hence it powerfully motivates the virtue-signalling Green fanatics who have infiltrated our governments and institutions. The logic is, if individual countries reduce their emissions, lives will start to be saved immediately, because the weather will change that little bit less. It’s a hoax of course, but they’re managing to pull it off, via constant repetition of the false meme that extreme weather is ’caused’ by global warming (affecting the Arctic, thereby affecting the jet stream etc. etc.) and that ALL global warming is caused by anthropogenic GHG emissions.
Prosperity shaming!
It doesn’t say what you think it does. Chaos theory tells you that, all else being equal, you have decreasing chance of accurately predicting the weather at any specific time in the future the further into the future you production is for.
Climate change science is based on the known effects of “greenhouse” gases emitted by industry and their appearance in increasing concentrations over time. It is NOT chaos theory.
Chaos theory says nothing like that. It says that weather is extremely sensitive to differences in initial conditions that are too small to be detected, making weather intrinsically unpredictable. Changing the tiny CO2 forcing does not make average future weather more predictable. If anything it makes it less so because it adds another variable to the system.
Note too that chaos theory says climate will always change because the averages will always oscillate. For example warm versus dry weeks, months, years decades and centuries. Same for wet vs dry, windy vs not so much, and so on for all weather parameters. This is called strange statistics.
I prefer my three-part BS Theory
(1) There are many climate change variables.
(2) Humans do not know the exact effect of all of them (or even of the Top Ten), so can not predict the future climate.
(3) Even if humans DID know exactly what the Top Ten climate change variables did, that does NOT mean the future climate is any more predictable than predicting whether or not it will rain in London one year from today.
Therefore, all long-term climate predictions ae tall, steaming piles of farm animal digestive waste products. And that is my BS Theory (I didn’t get a BS degree for nothing!)
Jay, Dr. Lorenz makes no mention of CO2 or Greenhouse Gases.
His point, which you missed, is that the differential equations describing a circulation model of the atmosphere can be Periodic, Non Periodic, Deterministic, Non Deterministic, or in a later paper, Quasi Deterministic or Quasi Periodic. He is speaking to the stability of the differential equations, their solution space, and constraints upon mathematical stability of solutions. His point is that a dynamic, coupled, non linear, set of differential equations describing a cellular flow model ( which is the basis of all Global Circulation Climate Models) cannot ever predict long term weather/climate. Until you can answer the mathematical contradictions of GCM modeling over long time spans, it is meaningless to claim that “Climate Science” has any meaning. The mathematics that found the very “models” of Climate Science have been proven that “Climate Science” is nothing but propaganda. It is the mathematics that govern, Jay, not the politics. From a System Dynamics pov, devolving a system of unknown quantities of variables and their initial conditions, into a single variable, lumped parameter model, is impossibly simplistic and indefensible as a credible solution to a complex system model. In a system of thousands of variables, to claim that one single variable is the sole determinant of the overall model is either hubris, ignorance, propaganda, or faith.
This was in limbo for a good while. Re-posting.
https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/27/the-faux-urgency-of-the-climate-crisis-is-giving-us-not-time-or-space-to-build-a-secure-energy-future/#comment-984182
My children and their significant others are a lost cause after 30 years of indoctrination and brainwashing. No amount of actual evidence will convince them there is not an imminent crisis.
However, I am optimistic about the next generation. They are bright, inquisitive kids and I plan to will them my 1,000+ bookmarked studies, graphs and other evidentiary material that should alleviate their concerns. If nothing else, after 30 years of nothingburger climate, with sea level rise rates mirroring those of the last 150 years, they should see through the manufactured cataclysmic outcomes just like their grandpa did.
In 2100 the contemporary scientists will say to themselves, “what, were they nuts?”
I have the same issue. It really bothers me that they don’t trust my experience, background and judgement.
My solution is Federal constraint on the penetration of renewables. We are inching toward that. Here is my latest on this:
https://www.cfact.org/2022/12/27/ferc-considers-constraining-renewables/
The widespread Christmas blackouts and warnings may help things along.
Climate Doomers implement Green Handcuffs in Germany …
The cryptically-named Federal Network Agency has announced plans to empower German power grid operators to remotely limit home heat pumps and EV chargers. And this can be done without the customer’s permission. And lest German citizens think that they have the spring, summer, and fall to make adjustments, this policy is set to take effect next month. It should be running at full speed, so to speak, by the time winter rolls around next year.
Breitbart News cited the German publication Die Welt in explaining that the increasing number of electric cars in the country and the uptick in people using heat pumps for homes are environmentally friendly but are gobbling up power and are taking a toll on power grids.
So the German government has to penalize the people, in this case the ones who are all-in on the International Green New Deal, in order to save them. Or in this case, the grid. The power cannot be completely turned off, but it can be turned down if someone in the government deems it necessary. That means it will take longer to charge those nifty electric cars or to heat a home.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/lincolnbrown/2022/12/27/bundle-up-germany-2024-could-be-a-long-winter-n1656741
“Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.” J. Curry
Ms. Curry, trying to show you some respect, so you will not ban me from the website. But I will respond to this article the sme way I would respond if it was written by a layman.
THAT STATEMENT IS COMPLETELY FALSE.
More CO2 is a benefit for humans, animals, and ESPECIALLY C3 plants that humans and animals eat.
NO harm has been done by the almost +50% increase of CO2 estimated since 1850
No harm was done by the global warming from 1975 to 2015. In fact, people in colder climates have warmer winter nights, which is great news for them..Antarctica is not melting because CO2 does not have a warming effect on the temperature inversion over Antarctica.
If there was any harm done by the global warming since 1975 and CO2 enrichment since about 1850, then such harm MUST be described before you make the FALSE claim: “Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”
Humans have no ability to make long term climate predictions. Even merely extrapolating the next 30 to 50 years of climate based on the past 30 to 50 years of climate, does not work.
Sorry, but you should not be taken seriously as a scientist, if you really believe the long term climate can be predicted, the future climate it can only get worse, which must be your house of cards foundation for the false statement:”Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.”.
I hope this comment shows up and lasts for at least a few hours, I have had too many comments in the past that never showed up, or they showed up, and then disappeared after a delay.
Real scientists should be very skeptical. I am. But you are not skeptical enough about the need to fight the energy transition that IS NOT NEEDED. The US electric grids are NOT broken, and do not need to be fixed, at great expense, with the result of less reliable electricity — that is an insane waste of money.
Richard Greene
Bingham Farms, Michigan
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
Dear Judith,
great article!
However, I think “detached” is the wrong word as I believe these measures really “counteract” human well being.
And can you explain this sentence:
>> Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century.
Why? It makes sense in a world with a high CO2 sensitivity, but that is not the only possible scenario.
If the CO2 sensitivity is low like you and Nick Lewis measured, there is no urgent need to reduce those emissions (beside the prudence of conserving a resource). Is this just one of those meaningless disclaimers you see in almost any climate related article these days?
The purpose of the alarmism is to deliver change. Speed is of the essence, because delay may permit rational thinking and the development of counter arguments. Climate change as a vehicle permits the UN to redistribute wealth via alleged damage reparations and undermine the wealth of the capitalist West by destroying the fossil fuel energy that has powered the Western world for over a century.
The financial elite, through GFANZ and ESG, are using many trillions of invested dollars to bulldoze through change that was previously considered unthinkable for good reason. We do not yet have an affordable, secure energy source to replace fossil fuels. But the elite do not care about such things. They expect to survive very comfortably within their insulated bubble. When the world is plunged into crisis, ruthless leadership must impose a new order. The elite are ready to shape their new world.
I realise that this comic book adventure stuff sounds just as alarmist as Antonio Guterres at COP27. Do these people not realise that the oil and gas industry is essentially a large processing plant with a myriad of by-products? These include chemical feedstocks, plastics, solvents, lubricants, pharmaceutical, and all manner of materials essential to modern lifestyles. Without continual investment, such products would become scarce and expensive. Visualise the electronics or electricity industry without access to plastics.
Such extreme scenarios will not happen. But there are numerous opportunities for unintended consequences. Consider the reaction of governments to climate alarmism. Are the decisions measured and rational? We are descending rapidly into chaos. They are destroying everything of value for no good reason.
as a geography student at Durham University in 1964, we were told by our professors and lecturers the next ice age was around the corner after the 1963, freeze up
The year 2022 brings an end to an era of illusions: a year that saw the end of the post–Cold War era and the return of geopolitics; the first energy crisis of the enforced energy transition to net zero; and the year that brought environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing down to earth with a thump—for the year to date, BlackRock’s ESG Screened S&P 500 ETF lost 22.2% of its value, and the S&P 500 Energy Sector Index rose 54.0%. The three are linked. By restricting investment in production of oil and gas by Western producers, ESG increases the market power of non-Western producers, thereby enabling Putin’s weaponization of energy supplies. Net zero—the holy grail of ESG—has turned out to be Russia’s most potent ally.
https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2022/12/27/2022_the_year_esg_fell_to_earth_872040.html
As usual, excellent points, Judith. The net zero targets are simply not attainable given the scale of the global energy and societal transition needed. Fossil fuels will continue to supply the large majority of global energy needs for decades to come. The energy debate needs a lot more honesty, appreciation of the scale of energy, economic, developmental and societal challenges and a lot less wishful thinking.As Judith has often argued, a lot more emphasis needs to put on “ no regrets” adaptation policies. Humanity should be able to cope with any further global warming as it has very successfully done with the 1.2C warming over the past century.
Please see this recent review article – link:
https://lnkd.in/ew5aGJ-5
Immediately before the COP26 meeting in 2021 I complained to the BBC because it claimed that extreme weather was becoming more frequent. I argued that there was no evidence to support this and lots of data showing that their claim was untrue. The corporation backed down and accepted my complaint very grudgingly.
Two weeks later, Antonio Guterres stood up at COP26 in Glasgow and claimed that extreme weather was much worse. He claimed all sorts of looming disasters. The BBC immediately abandoned all caution, it could claim anything it liked after that. The UN had set the example.
I was reminded of this recently when reading an article on global disasters by Roger Pielke. He mentioned extraordinary claims by the WMO about the worsening of extreme weather events.
It is very sad, though not surprising, that these once respected and trusted organizations should lead the alarmist assault on the public. It seems that all climate scientists on the taxpayer funded payroll agree with the UN. Governments have signed up to the UNFCC after all. Are we to conclude that scientific integrity is a quaint concept of historic interest only?
It cannot even be claimed that lying through one’s teeth is justified by saving the planet when that particular alarmism clearly has a financial motive imbedded in socialist policy.
The point here is that truth and trust are badly broken, yet most of the public and decision makers are not even aware of it yet. We have a very long way to go before these issues can be solved by honest solutions. In the meantime, those driving the alarmism, are desperate to push through all the changes that they want, before everyone else wakes up to the multiplicity of scams.
I am old enough to remember Bakelite, arguably the first plastic to be used commercially. It was phenol formaldehyde, a brown, brittle, moulded material used for making light switches, sockets and other electrical insulators. As a young chemistry graduate, I knew all about this polymer and many of the more sophisticated and exciting polymers about to enter the new industrial world.
As plastics became more commonplace and North Sea oil became a commodity, I had strong feelings about this new technology. I recognised it as a gift of nature, almost a miracle. It enabled electronics, mouldings, insulation, the applications were almost endless. But then we started burning the stuff as a fuel. That seemed like a crime. Worse than that, shops became full of the cheap, plastic rubbish that we see today all around the world. Our hugely valuable asset was being squandered in producing cheap garbage to end up as land fill.
I still feel that oil and gas is far too valuable to waste in trivial applications but that must make me very old fashioned. Yet, in a strange way, I foresee that we are turning full circle. As a consequence of demonising this miracle product we shall eventually rediscover its true worth. We shall realise that we cannot live without its unique properties. Those who own the assets will again be king.
I have a gas lease and I strongly agree with you that my million-year-old hydrocarbons are very valuable. But all credit really goes to Chesapeake Energy (R.I.P.) who spent the millions of dollars to frack and re-frack my lease all these years and sell it for $3/thousand cf.
It has been estimated that by the year 2050 there will be over 500,000 patented man-made molecules being produced and I bet a lot of them will use fossil fuels as feed stock. This is amazing, but we should not carelessly put stuff into the environment without knowing their long-term effects like PFAS ect..
(Business) Climate Change …
Exxon Mobil Corp. is suing the European Union in a push to eliminate a new windfall tax against oil groups, arguing the bloc does not have legal authority to impose the levy.
The lawsuit is a major response to the tax from the oil industry that has reaped record profits this year as western governments have sought to bring down skyrocketing consumer energy bills following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The action could jeopardize the tax, which would raise billions to bring down consumer energy costs.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-28/exxon-sues-eu-in-bid-to-block-windfall-tax-against-oil-companies
Why is it always the businesses that get punished? All the people who burn fossil fuels should be the ones to get punished! Without those millions of fossil fuel consumers, there wouldn’t be oil companies in the first place. If the demand weren’t there, the prices would be lower. Sue the consumers!
Interesting item on page 14 of the current print issue (Dec 2022) of Mining Engineering magazine (monthly journal of the Society of Mining Engineers).
The German energy company RWE is dismantling a wind farm in order to expand a lignite mine! The mine supplies lignite for a nearby RWE power plant that is being returned active status due to the ongoing energy crunch in Germany.
The wind farm has eight turbines, one of which has already been removed. All the turbines will be dismantled by the end of CY2023 in order to facilitate expansion of the lignite mine.
The Keyenberg wind farm is located in North Rhine-Westphalia.
Old news. The permit and subsidies for the wind farm have ended and it is due to be removed by 2024.
You can read more about it and future plans here:
https://www.rechargenews.com/energy-transition/well-more-than-compensate-rwe-defends-green-credentials-in-scrap-wind-for-coal-mine-row/2-1-1343916
I did not mention it in my many prior posts (I’m not a concise person) but I also strongly object to the word “we”. Who is this “we”? A world government?
We in the US are responsible for electing our politicians who do our political decisions. They are responsible for CO2 policy. If we don’t like their views we must elect different people with different views. There is no global “we”, and I hope their never will be any one-world government.
The one-world government already exists! Haven’t you heard? They’re the leftists/Marxists trying to destroy society for their evil plan of world domination (or something). Wake up!
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I just read an article on SciTechDaily titled: “Discover the Fascinating 22,000-year Cycle that Dramatically Shapes Seasons in the Equatorial Pacific” — that mentions ENSO. “While ENSO remains a challenge for climate models, we can look beyond climate model simulations to the paleoclimate record to investigate the connection between changes in the annual cycle of the cold tongue and ENSO in the past,” [Alyssa] Atwood said. “To date, paleoclimate records from the tropical Pacific have largely been interpreted in terms of past changes in ENSO, but our study underscored the need to separate changes in the cold tongue annual cycle from changes in ENSO. Comments anyone?
Thank you for an excellent writeup.
My specific concern is energy vs. guns/butter: specifically natural gas vs. food and ammo. I found this 1972 EPA report on the US explosives industry of 1971 – the height of the Vietnam war: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyPDF.cgi/2000I4WR.PDF?Dockey=2000I4WR.PDF
Note that this industry used 198 km3 = 198 bcm of natural gas; this is something like 80% of the natural gas that Russia was supplying to Europe annually.
“Re-arming” thus means a lot of energy in general and natural gas in particular…
I also have been looking at historical data on food vs. energy. Interestingly, the food spikes we see now are not extreme outliers; there was a spike in 2008 as well when energy spiked then. The difference going forward, though, is that 2008 was a few years before the shale revolution. Shale dropped natural gas prices below 2000-2006 ranges and arguably this price drop accelerated the fall in food prices after 2012. However, I would note that even after 2012, all the major crops (corn, wheat, soy) remained significantly above 2000-2006 levels.
So here’s the concern: going forward, it is 100% certain we’re not going to have another shale revolution a la 2013-2019. Natural gas prices are not going to go down and provide downward pressure on food prices going forward. If anything, the likely natural gas price trend is up as the US is now exporting unprecedented amounts to Europe. Couple this with fossil fuel industry investment in the 25% of previous price spike eras, even a complete policy turnaround, right now, means we won’t see new supply for at least 18 months.
So it seems certain that we’re going to see yet another “new normal” in food prices, meaning inflation and accompanying effective income declines will continue (real income has been falling for something like a year already).
Dr.
Quick question. You mentioned in your last paragraph reducing CO2. I thought it’s all good and we may need more?
The rush to green energy, pushed along by the Climate Doomers, is already causing problems in the US. The grid in some areas will not stand more sparky cars and heat pumps.
The states hit hardest by blackouts in last week’s winter storm have significantly increased reliance on heating homes with electricity over the last decade, putting more strain on the power grid when temperatures plummet.
The number of households using electric heat in Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina increased by about 20% from 2009 to 2020, according to government data that survey a sample of households. The generating capacity of power plants in the region, meanwhile, has remained relativity flat and increasingly dependent on natural gas.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-29/big-growth-in-electric-heat-set-stage-for-blackouts-in-us-south
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Here is an excellent article that is slightly skeptical about the always imminent doom being pushed back, from the last
prophecyprojection leaving just enough time to spend those trillions.https://americanmind.org/salvo/settled-science-and-the-politics-of-knowledge/
People who visit Arizona often remark how few solar panels they see on rooftops in residential neighborhoods. Why isn’t everyone here in the booming metropolis of Phoenix installing solar? There are certainly enough solar sales guys/gals knocking on my door every couple of weeks! If solar were the answer to the “climate crisis” you’d think everyone would have solar.
The fact is, solar is expensive to install even if the energy provider offers a deal. My neighbor across the street had 28 solar panels installed on his south-facing roof, and his is the only house for blocks with solar. Another fact is that our electricity isn’t that expensive — I can cool my 2,100-sf home during the summer at a cost of about $230/month; winter it runs less than $100 due to the fact that it’s just not that cold. Why do I need solar?
The FEAR factor is alive and well!
The goal of the power elites pushing this and other scare tactics we’ve experienced over the past three years is “depopulation” — they don’t want anyone teaching them science! This is a war against humans and it has many prongs.