climate change

Climate experts are not being listened to despite the coronavirus pandemic highlighting the importance of following science, the environmental activist Greta Thunberg has said.

The Swedish teenager argued that the Covid-19 crisis had “shone a light” on how “we cannot make it without science”, but people were “only listening to one type of scientist”.

Like, for example, RCP 8.5 isn’t going to happen, isn’t happening. And the solution is a carbon tax anyway.

But that’s not what she means, is it?

The world’s first detailed route map to ending a nation’s use of fossil fuels is both “ambitious and affordable”, according to the UK government’s official advisers,

Entirely the wrong decision tree. The correct one is:

1) Should this be done?

2) Is this the best available way of doing this?

That we can afford to do it this way isn’t relevant at all, not until those first two have been answered.

BTW, the answer to 2 is no, whatever your opinion of 1.

Sledging, building snowmen and having snowball fights could become a thing of the past by 2100 as global warming will eradicate lying snow, according to new analysis by the Met Office.

The detailed climate change projections suggest that if no action is taken to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, the UK’s winters will become warmer and wetter, and our summers will heat up and become drier.

And hasn’t the date of the prediction already passed?

The other question we might want to ask being what’s wrong with warmer winters and drier summers?

Scientists who specialise in climate change fly more than other researchers, according to a study by Cardiff University that has prompted calls for them “to look in the mirror” before demanding that others cut emissions.

Climate scientists take about five flights a year on average for work while other researchers take four. Climate professors catch nine flights a year compared with eight for all professors.

Even when trips for fieldwork were removed from the comparison, climate scientists still flew more than scientists from other disciplines.

The difference could be that climate scientists attend more international conferences, according to Lorraine Whitmarsh, an environmental psychologist and lead author of the study.

Such conferences never, ever, taking place in Nome in December, or Dhaka during the monsoon or – nope, always in places convenient for whores and good restaurants jet travel

Climate change wiped out early humans, a study has found, as scientists warn that global warming could have a greater impact than previously thought.
Cousins of Homo sapiens failed to adapt to the cold tens of thousands of years ago, a new paper argues, leaving them vulnerable to extinction when temperatures dropped below the levels they were used to.

The land disappears under a mile of ice and humans will find it difficult to survive, yes. Thought this was well known?

The lesson, of course, being pump out that CO2 so the land doesn’t disappear under a mile of ice……

Prince William says we must act in this decade to save the planet

The thing that needs to be said – we’ve just spent two decades doin’ stuff. We’ve made other forms of energy generation cheaper than coal. That’s all that was ever needed to beat the worst predictions. We’ve done it.

Prince William and Sir David Attenborough have joined forces to launch what they hope will become the “Nobel Prize for environmentalism”.

They say the search is on for 50 solutions to the world’s gravest environmental problems by 2030.

With £50m to be awarded over a decade, the “Earthshot Prize” is the biggest environmental prize ever.

OK, well, we know what the solution is. From the IPCC, Stern Review, Nordhaus et al. We need globalised capitalism with a carbon tax.

So, my £1 million would be spent on proselytising that around the world. However, given the judges, don’t think I’d actually win, would I?

Climate and environmental breakdown are a crisis of inequality, rooted in profound imbalances in wealth and power both within and between countries. A spate of reports and letters from leading scientists have sounded the alarm on this sober reality, and warned that we will likely fail in combating the climate crisis unless we radically reduce inequality and redistribute consumption and resource use.

The IPCC’s models actually say that a more equal world is one which has a worse outcome. So it would be nice to have some evidence of these assertions…..

More muggy evenings as study finds that nights are warming faster than days
Climate change is causing more cloud cover, which means nights are heating up

I thought this is what all the models said would happen? That sure, warming, but largely at night.

You know, that absolute disaster of not much change to day temps and an extra degree maybe on night?

The world can achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of this century for an annual investment of US$1 trillion-US$2 trillion, or up to US$60 trillion over the next 30 years, a coalition of major oil firms, companies in other energy-intensive industries, and banks said.

The Energy Transitions Commission (ETC) is a coalition of 45 leaders from energy producers, energy-intensive industries, financial institutions, and environmental advocates, including BP, Shell, Sinopec Capital, Rio Tinto, ArcelorMittal, Bank of America, HSBC, Iberdrola, Ørsted, and Vattenfall.

Worth checking out at least.

The ETC is co-chaired by Lord Adair Turner

Ah, no, it’s bollocks.

Further, over and above it being bollocks because it’s Adair Turner the co-chairman manages to allow them to misspell his own name/title in the report itself. He ain’t the second or subsequent son of a Duke. He’s Adair Turner, Lord Turner, even, if he really wants, Adair, Baron Turner of Ecchinswell. But something he ain’t is Lord Adair Turner.

It’a also bollocks in the technical sense because it just doesn’t address the main question. Do we do all this now, or as soon as possible – or do we do the sensible thing as Bill Nordhaus says and replace worn out stuff with emissions free rather than tearing down perfectly good functional stuff to replace it? Without addressing that question you’re not being serious.

Bank Holiday Monday set to be coldest on record, as police brace for weekend of illegal raves

July was hot which shows we must destroy capitalism. Late August is cold but that’s just weather.

Praising Joe Biden’s climate plan our more local addlepate declares:

In the process, he intends to create millions of well-paying, unionised jobs making wind turbines, building sustainable homes and manufacturing electric vehicles;

Pennycook is stupid enough to think that this is a benefit of the plan rather than a cost.

We’re never going to have a well run country when those who would do the job are this ignorant, are we?

Bjorn Lomborg is generally correct but:

For reference, Stiglitz got his Nobel prize in economics for analyses of markets with asymmetric information like the selling and buying of used cars.

Used cars is asymmetric information, yes, but the market for lemons is George Akerlof not Joe Stiglitz.

On the high seas of the Norwegian continental shelf, cargo ships are a familiar sight. If scientists have their way, however, a new type of ship could soon appear over the horizon, powered not by a dirty pollutant but ammonia….

Of course, all knowledge is local etc etc. But this looks like something of a waste to me.

They’ve got to get the ammonia first – steam reforming of methane, or perhaps hydrogen from electrolysis driven by windmills – which has emissions. Sure carbon capture, mebbe.

But if you’re going to do that why stop with ammonia, which is highly corrosive, has to be cooled and compressed etc. Why not carry on the chemistry to a hydrocarbon? Which we know how to carry around, we’ve already a century of experience in making the engines using it efficient and so on.

Of course, again, all knowledge is local etc. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find that for certain applications – maybe ships, more likely jet engines – the replacement for oil is oil. Just, we make the oil rather than drilling for it. The economic point here being that if you make hydrogen cheap enough then it works. And if you make electrolysis from solar and or wind cheap enough then it works again.

“Cheap enough” being an interesting definition in itself but still true. In fact, we already know how to make avgas and the like this way, it’s just not cheap enough yet.

The greatest benefit of this process being, obviously, that it will piss off so many greenies.

The world has only six months in which to change the course of the climate crisis and prevent a post-lockdown rebound in greenhouse gas emissions that would overwhelm efforts to stave off climate catastrophe, one of the world’s foremost energy experts has warned.

“This year is the last time we have, if we are not to see a carbon rebound,” said Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency.

The argument that we’ve got to do it all now does keep getting repeated. My own view – prejudice perhaps, based upon experience of how the political world works – is that the catastrophists realise they’re rumbled. Which is why the cries become ever more shrill. It all started out as let’s avoid 3 oC – OK, we can do that by a tweak or two to the system. But, but, we want to kill industrial capitalism, so, we’ll argue for 2 oC as the target. There, Hah! Hmm, well, yes, we can manage that with another tweak or two. We’ve already started fracking so that entirely rules out RCP 8.5 anyway. Solar and wind have got vastly cheaper, so we’re on RCP 4.0 maybe.

But, but, we want to kill industrial capitalism! So, 1.5 oC. Hah! And so on ad infinitum as it becomes obvious that killing industrial capitalism is never the answer yet is the desired goal.

Now of course I’m a cynic for saying so but it is how I read it. And thus we get this latest 6 months to save the world – it’ll be 24 hours to save the NHS next.

Hip and knee operations ‘should be done under local anesthetic to help cut carbon emissions’
Switching 1 million hip and knee operations to local anaesthetic would save the equivalent of 7.3 million miles driven in a car

Sure, OK, we can see the benefit, reduced emissions. But what’s the cost?

For example, 7.3 million miles, average car does 11,600, average annual emissions from average car 4.6 tonnes, each tonne CO2 cost of $80 as per Stern, that’s a net emissions benefit of $232,000 a year.

Cool, what’s the cost? Each life is statistically worth $2 million – say, there’s a range of values – so does our use of local not general increase the chance of a death by one tenth of a death over all those treated? Actually, gien that general is itself dangerous it probably reduces but still, this is the sort of calculation we should be doing.

Sure, there’s a benefit to this as with anything else. But we also need to know the cost.

The Australian Press Council ruled that the language in Bolt’s August 2019 article breached standards because it attempted to “diminish the credibility of Ms Thunberg’s opinions on the basis of her disabilities and by pillorying her supporters on the basis of her disabilities”.

No, not the specific here, just feel the general there.

We are not to use disability as a manner of diminishing the credibility of opinions. Say, Caroline Lucas’ entire inability to understand economics is not to be used in determining the validity of her opinions upon economics? Retardation to the point of not being able to count means that views on mathematics are just as valid? The claim of being able to see carbon dioxide does not lead to a certain discounting of views upon climate change – or, actually, anything at all?

The global coal industry will “never recover” from the Covid-19 pandemic, industry observers predict, because the crisis has proved renewable energy is cheaper for consumers and a safer bet for investors.

A long-term shift away from dirty fossil fuels has accelerated during the lockdown, bringing forward power plant closures in several countries and providing new evidence that humanity’s coal use may finally have peaked after more than 200 years.

That makes the worst-case climate scenarios less likely, because they are based on a continued expansion of coal for the rest of the century.

It never was true that just carrying on would lead to that RCP 8.5. It was necessary that we used ever more coal – not just more, but as a greater portion of our energy supply – for that to ever come to pass.

Now, I wonder. Will the next time someone presents a prediction based upon “business as usual” – which is almost always that RCP 8.5 that isn’t going to happen – The Guardian tell them to bugger off?

Fundamentally, fighting the climate crisis is about fighting the injustice that it magnifies. Preventing the poor, who played no part in fuelling the climate fire, from getting burned. Enabling those with little wealth to build dignified lives without the use of coal, oil and gas. Creating a better world, where we stop exploiting the planet as if its resources were infinite and, through cooperation, learn to live within our means.

There’s actually nothing in that first set of desires – hey, let’s not have global warming – which leads to that second – hey, let’s all be poorer. But guess which of the two makes Damian Carrington lick his lips?

As Prof Myles Allen of the University of Oxford has pointed out, slavery was once a highly profitable provider of energy and we brought it to an end because it was an affront to the values that make us human.

Well, actually, no, we didn’t. We brought it to an end because it was no longer economic. As Carlyle was so dismalled to find out. And the same will be true of our use of oil and gas etc.

So here’s one: 19 November 2020. That is when the UN climate change conference, hosted by Boris Johnson and the UK government, is due to end. Unless nations dramatically increase their pledges to cut emissions, we will remain on track for a terrifying 3-4C of heating.

No, we won’t. Because that is to assume that it’s only governments making pledges which cut emissions. Archetypal tosspottery from Damian there. No government pledged to cut emissions by fracking for oil and gas, thereby making coal largely uneconomic in the US. But it still happened, still reduced emissions.