Hot Air, Flannel & Gaseous Eruptions of Vapour – Energy Policy That Might Actually Work – Part II

Modern society depends on reliable power on tap.  This requires plentiful, cost-effective and dependable energy sources, and the means to harness this energy into safe and usable forms for retail and industrial use, i.e. energy utilities and transport fuel.

The word ‘utility’ is a reminder that we are not referring to luxuries that can be dispensed with.  Without fuel to power our mechanised labour-saving devices, said labour does not get saved, nor do fields get ploughed or harvested, nor supermarkets stocked – and good luck transporting your family by wheelbarrow to visit non-local friends and relatives.

In our introductory article for The New Reformer we noted that ‘without cheap and reliable power the basic functions of our society will either break down or become unaffordable’ and we presented the Laleham Declaration, a coherent position paper establishing a sound basis for an energy policy to future-proof the UK.  The Declaration concludes with four key steps that must be undertaken:

• Repeal the Climate Change Act 2008, unwind any allied secondary legislation relating to the decarbonisation agenda and disband the Climate Change Committee;
• Commit to a resilient and reliable fuel mix to supply our energy needs, seeking to encourage the use of locally-sourced fuels (or, in the case of uranium, adequate stockpiles to ensure operational resilience) for electricity generation, heating and transport needs;
• Explicitly cease any kind of government-funded activity that seeks to sequester carbon so as to permanently remove it from use – instead, encourage innovation to optimise the efficiency of existing power generation technologies, as well as innovation to create new ones;
• Encourage public discourse to revert to the Popperian ideal (“there are no statements in science which cannot be interrogated”) and encourage critical thinking throughout society.

science which cannot be interrogated”) and encourage critical thinking throughout society.

More detailed policy follows on naturally from the Laleham Declaration, and later articles in the series will put flesh on these bones, including outlining why ‘Net Zero’ is so impractically and heinously expensive – such that those promoting current policies to the general public are, in effect, committing usury.

CO2 Is Good, Not Bad

First, though, we need to tackle some fundamental misconceptions head on.  There is a mistaken belief – promoted by various supra-national entities – that Net Zero (which we can think of as the ‘cult of decarbonisation’) is somehow essential in order to ‘save the planet’, as witnessed by an escalation of invective with the deployment of terms such as ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate breakdown’.  It is essential to challenge such apocalyptic propaganda, as – per point 4 of the Laleham Declaration – it hinders rational discourse and critical thinking.  Consider the following vignette:

Nigel Farage: “[The King] used to say that CO2 was a pollutant which [I thought] was a very stupid comment“

Nick Robinson: “If it’s going to leave the planet to burn, it’s not a bad word, is it?”

Nigel Farage is spot on here; the King and the BBC’s Nick Robinson both being very much out on a limb. Indeed, not so much out on a limb but, like cartoon roadrunners, comfortably beyond it.

If you have been led to believe that human-released CO2 – or other greenhouse gases such as methane – will ‘burn the planet’, then you are in stark disagreement with the evidence to be found in a broad swathe of the scientific literature, even that which originates from researchers aligned with the otherwise alarmist Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose pronouncements are overtly political.  Look beyond the IPCC’s ‘summary for policymakers’ hyperbola and you will find scientific papers that – despite being carefully curated such that they appear to toe the uniparty line – cannot hide a much more equivocal picture.

Faulty Forecasts

Let’s be specific.  The IPCC’s AR5 report, published in 2013, contained the so-called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), a set of scenarios for their climate predictions.  Much of subsequent alarmist rhetoric in subsequent years is based on their ‘worst case’ pathway, RCP 8.5, which was inexplicably described in AR5 as being a ‘baseline’ forecast, i.e. a reasonable ‘business as usual’ trajectory to plan for.   Wind forward to 2021, and the IPCC’s AR6 flatly contradicts this: “High-end scenarios (like RCP8.5) … are not typical ‘business-as-usual’ projections and should therefore not be presented as such”.  Even so, it took a while for this message to filter through to the high priests of climate alarmism: that same year, the multimillionaire former US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry claimed that “we are regrettably on course to hit somewhere between 3, 4 degrees [or warming] of at the current rate”, before – eventually – calming down and aligning himself with the IPCC, grudgingly conceding that (much like his previous predictions of an ice-free Arctic), he was way off-beam.  It still took a further two years before he admitted that we might be “currently heading towards something like 2.4 degrees, 2.5 degrees of warming on the planet”.

(Pre)historical Context

This is not representative of a planet on fire.  Quite the opposite, in fact: the planet is behaving entirely normally.  We are currently in an inter-glacial period, a brief period of mild temperatures before we can expect it to get chilly again (to such an extent that life will be much tougher than it is now).  Moreover, within this so-called inter-glacial (the current ‘Holocene’, the warmer period since the last ice age which ended just under 12,000 years ago) – i.e. not just on longer geological timescales – there have been quite material temperature variations.  The scientific literature is positively awash with peer-reviewed discussion of various events within this period that result in such abrupt temperature changes.  Did you know for example that, roughly 8,200 years ago, Greenland temperatures dropped by 3.3° (±1.1°) over the space of less than 20 years, before bouncing back about 100 years later, and that the event was ‘clearly hemispheric to global’ (i.e. not just a local effect)?  Some studies show an even bigger dip in temperatures.

Add to this that “globally… significant warm excursions occurred ca. 11.4, 4.8, 2.6 and 1.0” thousand years ago.  To be declared such, these warm excursions were classified as ‘significant’ if their underlying datasets showed a statistically significant signal over the course of a century in studies that had suitable resolutions of < 100 years – meaning that temperatures reverted (i.e. down or up) to the mean within a hundred years.  Looking further back in time, “abrupt warming events—some over less than a decade—occurred some 22 times in the last 100,000 years. They are characteristic and recurring features of our Earth’s climate” and “are global phenomena”.  For these abrupt warming periods to be referred to as ‘excursions’, it is necessary that they were followed – or preceded – by abrupt cooling events.  Indeed there is broad consensus in the scientific literature that “large, abrupt, and widespread climate changes with major impacts have occurred repeatedly in the past”.

It is not facetious to point out – with a degree of certainty – that there were not 22 industrial revolutions over the last 100,000 years.  So the idea that “this time it is different”, such that CO2 or other greenhouse gases emitted due to human activity since the industrial revolution are somehow responsible for causing a modest period of warming in the 20^th century, is – to say the least – somewhat suspect.

This all presents a rather different picture from the much-touted ‘unprecedented global boiling’ narrative that is (still) being spun by various vested interests who wish taxpayers’ money to be spent on intermittent power generation from which they – but not the general populace – stand to benefit.

Misattribution

One can only conclude that the IPCC is – at best – hopelessly muddled or – at worst – somewhat compromised.  Back in the 2013 AR5 report (which introduced the ill-fated RCP 8.5 pathway we learned about above), the IPCC still considered ‘more than half’ of recent observed warming to be man-made, leaving natural forcings (after all, no-one disputes that ‘nature’ is 100% responsible for every single climate fluctuation in all of geological history prior to the industrial revolution) to pick up the tab for at most half of this warming.  But within five years, the IPCC had switched to a much harder line: 100% of the warming was now – according to the IPCC at least – deemed anthropogenic.

This is not credible.  It does not match peer-reviewed literature, nor does it pass a common sense ‘smell test’.  It is inconceivable that our sun – after several billion years as the dominant provider (note the understatement!) of energy to our planet – has been usurped by mankind as being fully responsible for a modest period of stop-start warming since around the early 1800s.  It further stretches credulity when one notes that this modest warming is less than the range of (entirely naturally) occurring temperature oscillations throughout the Holocene, incidentally matching various natural cycles such as the Gleissberg cycle which typically lasts 70-100 years.

The precise question of how much the sun has influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends is an ongoing debate that is summarised very well in volume 21 of the journal Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics. Arguments from all sides are presented and the authors ask some pertinent questions, highlighting inconsistencies in current assumptions and pointing out where more research is needed.  We would challenge anyone to read that freely available review article and accept the IPCC’s cataclysmic “end is nigh” lamentations as gospel.

Biased Modelling

Not only are the high-level ‘summary for policymakers’ claims of the IPCC not credible, neither are the underlying models that they rely on.  The global climate models that are used to predict the now-not-so-devastating modest temperature increases keep coming up short – when fed observational data, these models consistently fail to predict Armageddon.  How could this be? We have our suspicions.  After all, the GCMs assume a priori that CO2 causes warming, so it is axiomatic that they cannot be relied upon if this assumption is false.

Don’t take our word for it.  Consider the conclusions of two highly respected establishment scientists at the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, USA, in a recent paper published in Climate & Atmospheric Science, a Nature Journals Publication: “virtually all global climate models (GCMs) have had difficulty simulating sea surface temperature trend patterns over the past four decades”… these “models are not perfect and contain biases when evaluated against observations”.  Overall, the authors conclude that they expect to see “substantially less global mean warming due to stronger negative feedback and lower climate sensitivity” and they point at other results that show “a prominent model bias in all the periods [from 1958 to 2017] with the later ending years showing larger biases”.

So it turns out that even the IPCC’s substantially watered down forecasts are subject to much doubt.

Twisting Data To Frame The Scapegoat

If you were hoping that a detailed look at the underlying observed data points might help, this is as good a time as any to highlight the existence of so-called ‘ghost’ temperature monitoring stations, both in the USA and in the UK, where actual observations have been replaced by – wait for it – modelled ‘expected’ data.  What, one muses, could possibly go wrong when hard observations are replaced with modelled data so as to fit an expectation of temperature increases, yet these modelled data themselves turn out to be consistently over-estimated? Even ‘gold standard’ datasets such as the HadCET temperature data get ‘the treatment’, with incremental adjustments that serve to exacerbate an upward ‘kink’ recent in temperature trends.  Why does the climate alarmist narrative need constant data adjustments?

Cult Thinking

Without a simple scapegoat for climate variations, the climate alarmists’ worldview falls apart. Inconsistency is layered upon error, gaffe upon omission.  With every data contortion, claims of a ‘climate emergency’ become ever more risible, and the inevitable narrative collapse ever closer.

The dogmatic demonisation of CO2 is thus the climate alarmists’ final throw of the dice, a doomed defence of their worldview that they seem willing to defend to the last man, woman and child with scorched earth policies that are only matched by their uncompromising rhetoric.   Yet their logic is riven with contradictions, as their pet theories cannot explain common observations, and neither do their alarmist prophesies get fulfilled.

In a classic text from 1956, When Prophesy Fails, Leon Festinger et al analyse the psychology of doomsday cults.  The authors describe how cult members cope with the cognitive dissonance when immutable facts contradict sacraments that are fundamental to the cult’s belief system, for example when a prophesied ‘end of the world’ does not materialise, i.e. cult members experience an unexpected – and in this case literal – new dawn.  In such situations some cult members return to normal society, but Festinger notes that in certain cases “followers will not only maintain, but strengthen, their beliefs after they are disproven”.  The parallels need not be spelled out any further.

What Science Does Say

Going by the IPCC’s most recent The Physical Science Basis technical report, cement production and burning of fossil fuels contribute c. 4% of the total CO2 increase in the atmosphere at current rates.  The balancing 96% is dominated by entirely natural terrestrial and maritime respiration, i.e. biochemical reactions where organisms turn organic matter (e.g. glucose) into CO2 by consuming oxygen and thereby releasing energy.

The evidence points to CO2 lagging temperature rises, indicating that CO2 levels are effect, not cause. Rising CO2 levels in recent decades are then a predominantly natural (i.e. non-anthropogenic) effect – note the fertilisation effect of CO2 results (the “greening” of the planet) making the biosphere more productive.  Previous versions of the global climate models that are being relied upon to create alarm have shown to underestimate the extent to which the biosphere balances out any additional CO2.  Actual observations show little or no cause for alarm.

This conclusion is supported by detailed fractionation analysis of the ratio of Carbon 12 and 13 isotopes – fractionation is when a process changes prevalent isotope proportions, and both fossil fuel burning and biosphere respiration favour C12.  The change in the C12/C13 ratio (comparing low amplitude variation at the South Pole to higher amplitude variation in the terrestrial biosphere-rich Northern hemisphere) overwhelmingly supports the latter process – i.e. a more productive biosphere – as the principal mechanism.  Further support is provided by the critical observation that the modern period of modest warming – correlated to a lowering of C13 proportions – began in c. 1820, i.e. the end of the Little Ice Age, well before the industrial revolution and prior to any meaningful increase in anthropogenic CO2 emissions.

In no way should these empirical observations be used to decry the principle of the greenhouse effect – it is a very real effect, dominated (as you will find confirmed by even the most ardent climate alarmist) by atmospheric water vapour.  The Met Office confirms this: “water vapour is a potent greenhouse gas and is responsible for most of the overall greenhouse effect”.  It is possible that warmer temperatures in 2023 are an example of this – some climate alarmists were quick to blame humans, but did nature not contribute at all? The literature states that “the submarine volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai (HTHH) eruption on 15 January 2022 injected extreme amounts of water vapor (H2O) … into the Southern Hemisphere (SH) stratosphere. The H2O and aerosol perturbations persisted throughout 2022 and were accompanied by large changes in stratospheric climate”, and NASA confirms that this ‘extreme’ water vapour anomaly is only now finally tapering off following the eruption.

Furthermore – and contrary to the claims of ‘settled, consensus science’ that wants us be scared of CO2 – there are many dissenting voices in the science community who believe that the warming effect of CO2 is saturated at current levels – i.e. that further increases in atmospheric concentration cannot lead to further warming.

It’s Mostly Natural

With this level of evidence base to the contrary – and observations that falsify the premises of the doomsday forecasts – it is absurd to think catastrophic man-made ‘climate change’ is underway.  A ‘climate emergency’ is most certainly not ‘settled science’, and the hypothesis that “mankind, by emitting CO2, is responsible for society-endangering climate change” is flawed:

• CO2 is unequivocally a “greenhouse gas” – it absorbs outgoing long wave infra-red radiation emitted by the Earth and acts as a blanket to retain some heat that would otherwise be lost to space. Without the greenhouse effect, earth would have a different ambient temperature and would be inhabited by “life, Jim, but not as we know it”.  But here we are.  The impact of CO2, however, is far less than that of water vapour, and it is at or close to saturation at current levels. There is far from ‘scientific consensus’ that further increases in CO2 would – or could – lead to a significantly warmer world.
• The IPPC is not an impartial scientific organisation. It is heavily compromised, through a combination of ideological capture and funding biases. Episodes such as Climategate have exposed serious scientific corruption, and the peer review process is regularly abused to stifle rational discourse.
• It is generally agreed that the planet has experienced a slight warming since the Little Ice Age – self-evidently in fact, since the Little Ice Age is no more. However, the amount of warming is less clear, obfuscated as it is by the lack of direct observational evidence and biased – and downright hyperbolic – reporting.
• Short term fluctuations in global temperature are nothing new, and there is a plethora of natural climate drivers – most obviously the sun, but also earth-based events that impact short-term global temperatures.
• Any beneficial effects of temporary climate variations, such as a potential reduction in deaths from hypothermia, are ruthlessly censored (or should we say ‘denied’?) by those who sow fear and discord via climate alarmism.

It is entirely to be expected that the climate alarmists – and their allied vested interests – defend the great greenhouse gas bogeyman ‘whatever it takes’.  As noted above, cult thinking can persist for a substantial period of time after being proved to be false.  Besides, how else will alarmists sustain the gravy train from which they enrich themselves at others’ expense?

Climate change witch hunts actually happened a few centuries ago.  We should humbly learn from such historical precedents, and desist from deranged, dogmatic scapegoating of CO2 and other trace gases. The technological handbrake turn being foisted on society is – like those medieval climate witch hunts – entirely devoid of rationality, and futile in the context of natural climate variations.

Furthermore, by misdirecting resources, we will cause immense socio-economic trauma to Western civilisation, the brunt of which will be borne by the poor and the already downtrodden.  In future instalments we will spell out the details of these impacts but, for now, it is worth pointing out that BRICS nations are not subjecting their economies to the vagaries of intermittent and unaffordable energy supply.

There is no climate crisis.  But we might shortly find ourselves mired in an energy crisis.  We need an appropriate energy policy that prioritises energy security and resilience, drafted in line with key principles outlined in the Laleham Declaration, which will give our children and children’s children a stable economy – allowing them prosperous, fulfilled futures, and preventing a substantial, unnecessary and tragic curtailment of their quality of life.

This article (Hot Air, Flannel & Gaseous Eruptions of Vapour – Energy Policy That Might Actually Work – Part II) was created and published by The New Reformer and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the authors Dr. Alex Starling and John Sullivan