On Climate

Press "coverage" is 99.99% alarmist and activist. Phrases like "Climate Crisis" don't raise eyebrows any more. Senior politicians routinely talk about impending doom. The net effect is to make skeptics appear as "denialist" - denying what "everyone" knows. There seems to be no air left for anyone expressing the mildest skepticism over the core claims:

• 1.5 degrees is some kind of "tipping point", beyond which is catastrophe
• 2030 is a critical deadline
• Economic collapse now is totally justified since the alternative is economic disaster in the near future

These days, a Climate "skeptic" is someone who doubts that the world will avoid catastrophe - skeptical about the promises. Everybody is a "skeptic" these days and that refers to universal skepticism over COP26 achieving anything PLUS a sense of despair, since the goals of COP26 are "universally" accepted. We are fucked.

To my mind, the panic itself is now a bigger current danger than any hypothetical ill effects of climate change.

But there are many thousands of serious scientists who are skeptical about the whole issue. Anyone wondering about the "facts" risks being banned from polite society. Generally speaking, these people are known as "geologists", whose business it is to know the history of the Earth, including its chaotic climate.

Whatever the truth may be, I see a self-reinforcing panic going on. Our politicians compete with each other to be the first lemming over the cliff. 

Let's take a deep breath. Is the world as we know it about to meet a fiery doom?

Everyone agrees that global temperature is rising. Some call it "Global Warming". Others call it "Climate Change", so any nasty weather effect can be reported as due to "Climate Change". 

I find it helpful to distinguish the social aspect of the issue from the physical reality in nature. Let's call "Earth 1" the real world and "Earth 2" as society in general reacts to what they believe to be going on in Earth 1, along with what will supposedly happen, what has happened, what are the most relevant facts, who are the experts and so on.

It is extremely hard to rest "facts" from Earth 1. It is even more difficult to find new facts, since such facts will be, by definition, controversial. Even so, it seems there are a few things we definitely know about Earth 1. These days it is even more difficult, since speaking against the "lemming consensus" can be career suicide.

• Global average temperatures have been up and down for all of history. There have been wild variations, from an ice ball Earth to the sauna where dinosaurs roamed the North Pole.
• Since the end of the last Ice Age, the Earth has steadily warmed (this is what "since" means).
•  Until recently, all of this warming has happened without the help of humans. Whatever is making the Earth warm is presumably still going on, with or without human influence.
• The "Greenhouse" effect plays a key role in climate change.
• Water vapor is the main greenhouse gas. This has been know long before we started slipping down the hill to Climate Panic.

• The climate is inherently chaotic - not just difficult to model but impossible to model. Making a computer model act remotely like the real world is impossible even for the fastest supercomputer. The IPCC model (MAGICC) ignores water vapour resulting in models that assume that man-made gasses are the major factor in climate change. More on models here.  Another fundamental assumption in the model is that C02 drives temperature. Historical evidence is the other way around: temperature drives C02. They have the cart before the horse.
• On Earth 2, the focus on "man made greenhouse gasses" has lead to two fanciful reactions on Earth 2:
• Warming is "our fault"
• We can do something about it 
• Warming is "bad" not just something that exists in Nature.
• Volumes have been written in Earth 2 about whether "Climate Change" is good or bad or big or small or illustrated by this or that "cherry picked" graph. Motives are questioned. Some are in league with the fossil fuel industry. Others are shilling for grants for the climate science community. You can follow these debates and tease out the facts, which are reported here. All else is distraction, mud slinging and panic.
• On Earth 2, politics are all about the (totally unfounded) assumption that we can and should "do something" (the premise of COP26)
• Even if all proposals are. accepted, it is admitted that no measurable effect on climate will be observed in this century
• In fact, we can see that promises are not kept. Fossil fuel emissions are not noticeably affected by all the hot air. In fact, none of the major "emitters" have turned their promises into law.
• "Lemming logic" dictates that all measures, including economic suicide are justified to avoid "existential" threat of Climate Change.
• Because of the prevailing mood that Climate Change is "bad" - even an existential threat (without a shred of evidence), the "good" effects of climate change are ignored. These include increased plant growth and, by implication, increased agricultural yield, more food and increased global GDP. This doesn't make for good news coverage against the latest weather catastrophe.
• Because of the IPCC-created illusion that we control climate through our emissions, staggering sums are committed to "net zero", meaning a major commitment to less efficient energy production, lower global GDP and policies that trap developing economies in poverty.
• While our ability to control climate is debatable and the question of whether we should is even more debatable, the costs are not in dispute. "Fighting" climate change is set to become the biggest single "line item" expense for governments around the world even though everyone admits that such efforts have no chance to make an observable effect on climate in this century . The costs are real. The benefits are to be seen in IPCC models that admittedly don't model the world we live in.

I'm happy to discuss all this with (both of) my readers and add references where needed. It's actually fascinating to read what Earth 2 has to say about all this. You learn more about people than climate, but a lot of interesting things pop out.