Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A MSM reporter shares his guilt at having to make excuses to the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival for not doing enough to promote climate concern.
The biggest mistake we’ve made on climate change
By ROSS GITTINS
29 May 2018 — 12:14pm
Every time I go to the Byron Bay Writers’ Festival I’m asked the same question: since there’s no policy issue more important than responding to global warming, and we’re doing so little about it, why do I ever write about anything else?
I give the obvious answer. Though I readily agree that climate change is the most pressing economic problem we face, if I banged on about nothing but global warming three times a week, our readers would soon lose interest.
But even as I make my excuses, my Salvo-trained conscience tells me they’re not good enough. Even if I can’t write about it every week, I should raise it more often than I do.
…
Our grandchildren will find it hard to believe we could have been so short-sighted as to delay moving from having to dig our energy out of the ground to merely harnessing the infinite supply of solar and wind power being sent to our planet free of charge.
What were we thinking? Did an earlier generation delay moving from the horse and buggy to the motor car because of the disruption it would cause to the horse industry?
The biggest mistake we’ve made is to allow our politicians to turn concern about global warming into a party-political issue, and do so merely for their own short-term advantage.
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Apparently, only socialists think their grandkids will have anything to worry about. The right-thinkers among us know the only bad thing our offspring will inherit is Labor’s debt.
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I found this apologia interesting on a number of levels.
Greens are well and truly losing the battle for hearts and minds. Most of the right lost interest long ago, but reporters like Ross Gittins realise even their mainly left wing audiences have priorities other than receiving updates about how doomed we are.
Gittins himself in my opinion admits that he is embracing expediency over green purity, he feels guilty about “not doing more”, but this vague sense of guilt does not translate into an imperative for him to change his own behaviour.
If this failure continues, soon even holdout groups like the Byron Bay Writer’s Festival will give up. They may pay a little lip service, the way left wing bourgeoise of today lift a glass of expensive champagne to toast Karl Marx, but in a few years the age of climate concern will be well and truly dead.
Did an earlier generation delay moving from the horse and buggy to the motor car because of the disruption it would cause to the horse industry?
We abandoned the horse and buggy for motor vehicles because the latter are a more efficient mode for moving people and products. Does Mr. Gittins think the modern economy would function based on the Amish model?
At the turn of the 20th century horses produced millions of tons of manure in London alone, not to speak of the urine lake each day.
https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Great-Horse-Manure-Crisis-of-1894/
But hey! Transport was powered by biofuels then. What’s not to like?
No taxpayer funded government subsidies required to convert from horse to car.
Just a free market and basic economics.
Unlike converting to solar and wind
YES! There’s the rub. If solar and wind were such miracles, we wouldn’t need the government to push them, private companies would be doing ACTUAL “investing” in them, the so-called “investments” they are making now are nothing more than “subsidy and mandate farming.”
Who built the roads? Who obtained the right of way? Who built the interstate? The relationship between business and government isn’t as simple as you imply. Government investment in new technology can pay for itself in the long run. Look at the internet — huge ARPA, DARPA and NSF outlays created a thing that every business wanted but no business could create, and then that thing allowed for entirely new businesses whose combined value dwarfs the government costs.
The Left is quickly losing their CAGW propaganda war.
None of the Left’s gloom and doom CAGW predictions are coming close to reflecting reality so more informed and rational people are beginning to seriously doubt the efficacy of the CAGW hypotheis.
In particular, CAGW climate models predicted global temp anomalies should be around 1.1C as of May 2018, while the UAH temp anomaly is now at just 0.18C… OOPS!
Ocean “acidification”, Sea Level Rise, severe weather frequency/intensity are at 50~100+ year average levels, Antarctic Land Ice increasing at 80 billion tons/yr, crop yields increased 200% since 1960, etc.
All the empircal evidence/physics show ECS will be between 0.6C~1.2C, (a net benefit), and nowhere near the 3C~4.5C Leftist rent seekers once predicted.
CAGW is already dead.
Not in Canada it isnt. Trudeau is going to force new taxes of $35 billion over next 5 years to lower our share of the global temperature increase at the end of the year 2100 by 0.005C. But it isnt clear that we will even save that amount of temperature. If the firms simply pay the carbon taxes and dont cut back production then pass the extra costs onto the consumer the government will end up with $35 billion more and nothing accomplished. If you run a blast furnace it wont run on solar or wind power. Even if somehow the CO2 target figures are met how sure is the IPCC of climate sensitivity especially 82 years from now? Even if the IPCC can measure climate sensitivity to 3 digits correctly at the end of 82 years from now, is 0.005 C going to mean that any less ice will melt in 82 years?
As you can see the whole thing is one STUPID exercise The stupidest and most economically destructive exercise ever invented. I shudder to think what all the governments around the world are spending just count up the CO2 emitted by their industries. The formula is Emissions =activity data * emission factor.
Activity data is the amount of each fuel burned
Emission factor is average emission rate of a given pollutant for a given source
The emissions are then reported in greenhouse gas equivalents.
Now I understand. Since we report greenhouse gas emissions in CO2 equivalents; that is not the same as actual CO2 in the air. So the IPCC has screwed it up again because everybody is only looking at the CO2 numbers. However wikipedia say that total forcing of methane is 20% So you really cant compare each country’s emissions with the increase in CO2 announced from Mauna Loa anyway. We already knew that because even though mankind has increased emissions by 80% in last 30 years CO2 levels only went up by 22%. However since methane is being tracked as an emission in CO2 equivalent then we are taxing methane as well. However cows put out more methane than humans do in industry. So far the farmers have been given a pass. Will Trudeau put a tax on cow farting? The methane figures from Mauna Loa seem to be tracking on the same upward curve that the CO2 is tracking. However natural sources of emissions of methane are larger than man’ contribution and the accuracy of tracking the whole methane cycle is so fraught with errors that it dwarfs the errors in CO2 tracking. However it turns out that methane is completely irrelevant as a greenhouse gas. Thus IPCC has screwed up yet again.
To quote from a previous WUWT article by Dr. Tom Sheahen 4 years ago
“Looking across the wavelength scale at the bottom, H2O absorbs strongly in the 3-micron region, and again between 5 and 7 microns; then it absorbs to some degree beyond about 12 microns. CO2 has absorption bands centered around 2.5 microns, 4.3 microns, and has a broad band out beyond 13 microns. Consequently, CO2 adds a small contribution to the greenhouse effect. Notice that sometimes CO2 bands overlap with H2O bands, and with vastly more H2O present, CO2 doesn’t matter in those bands.
Looking at the second graph in the figure, methane (CH4) has narrow absorption bands at 3.3 microns and 7.5 microns (the red lines). CH4 is 20 times more effective an absorber than CO2 – in those bands. However, CH4 is only 0.00017% (1.7 parts per million) of the atmosphere. Moreover, both of its bands occur at wavelengths where H2O is already absorbing substantially. Hence, any radiation that CH4 might absorb has already been absorbed by H2O. The ratio of the percentages of water to methane is such that the effects of CH4 are completely masked by H2O. The amount of CH4 must increase 100-fold to make it comparable to H2O.
Because of that, methane is irrelevant as a greenhouse gas. The high per-molecule absorption cross section of CH4 makes no difference at all in our real atmosphere.
Unfortunately, this numerical reality is overlooked by most people. There is a lot of misinformation floating around, causing needless worry. The tiny increases in methane associated with cows may elicit a few giggles, but it absolutely cannot be the basis for sane regulations or national policy.”
well the alarmists give the cows a pass the same way that humans get a pass on breathing out CO2 . The pass is that both eat food which was grown and that used CO2 or methane .
alsosice the methane gowth curve is evem less than the CO2 growth curve the alarmists dont bring it up much. BUT THE GOVERNMENTS DO . And that is why I am complaining because the alarmists have it wrong on both greenhouse gases and both are costing us big money in taxes. We must remember that so called carbon trading and carbon taxes are in reality GHG taxes.
Agreed, EXCEPT that “ECS” with regard to CO2 levels would ONLY be that high if you make the very GENEROUS assumption that ALL of the temperature rise is caused by CO2 – which it is not. In fact, there is little scientific basis for saying ANY of it is – it’s all just hypothetical BS.
Well if we are waiting for Titanic earth to perish, why would Ross write about anything else? It shows a strange illogical wifty-poofty dichotomy in the minds of these troubled folk. Their gross нiросяisy too is puzzling.
Most remarkable of all aspects of the вig Liе thats hidden in plain site is that climate science is composed of and is a tool of a шнутемаи’s иеосоlоиiаl моvемеит. The real 97%+ feature is this composition of the players and the supporters, big шнутые foundations & вilliоиаугеs, After
its underpinnings began to crumble young (mainly of the same гасе) women did begin to come out of graduate schools too late to have a full career in it (I tried ti warn one of them but to no avail).
Perhaps all this “dуvегsiту” stuff is a smoke screen for the Euroethnic makeup of it all. How have they gotten away with this evеn bigger нуросяisу given who the main group to bear the biggest burden of this is. Perhaps they haven’t. Delaying the payola to the least developed countries may bring anabrupt stop to it.
Gary, some of your words resemble Russian, as in “шнутемаи’s иеосоlоиiаl моvемеит.”
Why is the only thing they can think to do about the issue is wail and moan ? Dude should sell his car and make his own clothes or something, These people are in a mental Gordian knot and I feel sorry for them to a degree. Anguish of the mind is pitiful and I don’t wish it on anyone.
My uncle had a long and very expensive battle with greenies while trying to protect his Byron Bay beachfront property from erosion.
https://www.northernstar.com.au/news/rock-wall-was-promised/2684485/
OT …breaking news Fuego volcano in Guatemala has erupted 7 dead, many imjured. in a massive eruption.
Fuego eruption blasted 10 kilometers into the atmosphere.
Thanks for that news.
Here is the eruption from GOES-16/east in Geocolor (~2pm–6pm UTC):
http://col.st/KWFF6
You have to peer through the clouds, but you can still see it.
viewed through the EUMETSAT ash product (~2PM–8PM UTC)
http://col.st/vspK2
(change start and end frames on settings under archive imagery checkbox)
Earth warning alerts …this is starting to look pretty crazy, imo. Here are two interesting YouTubes. One discusses new cracks in Hawaii volcano which now pose the probability of a major event, and the second video discusses a prior quake of 8.0 which coincided with a large eruptio at Mauna Loa. …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bqGi24EpGU
So from my daily observations. Quakes at Mauna Loa dropped off the other day to a minimal count, and then shot up to 140/24hrs today. Along with that global quakes have also increased today, which is out of sync with the typical pattern over the last 5 years. The signs are not looking good, imo. …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmIvwxjCDxc
If the volcanoes continue to erupt, they’ll find some pseudo-science explanation of how THAT is caused by human CO2 emissions too!
The wonder is whether Gittins really believes it or is toeing the party line for his lefty editors. A bit like those who work for the BBC or ABC. Dont believe in CAGW? There’s the door son, don’t come Monday. BTW, I’ve been to Byron Bay many times. It’s OK but the beach is no better than hundreds of others up the Australian east coast.
Ross Gittins is writing pure drivel. He has no apparent scientific training, but ASSUMES that catastrophic man-made global warming is a crisis that will doom humanity and the environment. That very-scary global warming hypothesis has already been disproved, based on many lines of evidence.
Nevertheless, there always seems to be an audience for this sort of doomsday nonsense.
Ever notice how some people just love a novel idea, no matter how crazy it is? They tend to be young, teenagers and young adults, self-styled “Progressives”, but some people retain this extreme form of naivety all their lives.
They just want to be “special” – they want to think they are more open and thus more intelligent than their peers, but their fatal flaw is they fail to examine the evidentiary basis and the credibility of the hypothesis they have adopted – that would be too much like real intelligence; too much like real work.
[end of rant]
They mistake exclusivity for enlightenment. Sometimes an idea is only entertained by a select few… because it’s a BAD IDEA.
If they wanted to write about climate and environment, he could weite about how well the biosphere is doing.
Greening.
Growing.
Abundant harvests.
Resilient in the face of the worst mankind has thrown it.
“Our grandchildren will find it hard to believe we could have been so short-sighted as to delay moving from ….. harnessing the infinite supply of solar and wind power ” Actually, Mr. Gittins, our grandchildren will be asking how it was that so many liberals blindly accepted information that was truly fake science. By that time enough time will have passed such that it will be completely evident that today’s hype is all for political purposes. By the way Gittins, though you may think it is infinite it is not always reliable at the time you need it. Were does your energy come from on a windless night?
On windless nights energy might come from the batteries that have yet to be invented, which would hopefully be 5 to 10 times as energy dense for their mass as the present status quo.
Of course, we’ll need much more compact solar and wind harvesting equipt along with those batteries, too.
Wake me when it happens.
Good eye mite.
The blast of Fuego erupting was captured on video, pretty impressive. …https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n24A-PLNVg0
“The biggest mistake we’ve made is to allow our politicians to turn concern about global warming into a party-political issue, and do so merely for their own short-term advantage.”
This shows already the mental attitude of these high priests: We allowed our politicians ………!
These idiots, however, have nothing at all to allow, but have to submit to the political direction that sets the people in the regularly recurring elections.
I’m detecting a great disturbance in the Climate farce.
It’s the collective snoring of millions who’ve drifted off while pondering the future and if climate change
might actually affect them.
Liberal media gets paid to bang on about global warming and the best example of that was the splash of money paid to publishers far and wide ahead of the Paris Climate Agreement.
I always find the comment that wind and sun and water are free so they are obviously cheap but coal isn’t. Like everything in this area the inputs are all basically free. Coal and uranium are basically just sitting there waiting to be exploited in the same way is the sun and the wind. The cost is in harnessing these various sources that differentiates renewables from fossil fuels. When one values the cost based on cost per kilowatt hour coal wins hands down because the intermittency of renewables means that cost wise they require base load backup. If you need base load backup , cut out the middle man don’t have any renewables and run the economy on the base load supply.
“The biggest mistake we’ve made is to allow our politicians to turn concern about global warming into a party-political issue, and do so merely for their own short-term advantage.”
While this is most definitely true, it was the warmists who made the science partisan and it’s the warmist who need the illogical justifications of politics to support their physics defying projections of doom. Anyone who doesn’t recognize the IPCC the political organization that has been pushing the science out of climate science for the last 3 decades hasn’t been paying attention.
Gittens is exhibiting classic psychological projection like so many of his cultists.
Tired of this worn out fear mongering about oh the poor “grand children ” . What a complete load of manipulative crap .
Fossil fuels have created the highest quality of life in the planets history .
Check your grand kids reaction to you asking them to shut off play station , and that you are take them to spend the summer in Antarctica .
What a completely asinine proposition that humans are somehow going to set the earths thermostat .
I do feel sorry for any kid that has a relative or teacher stupid enough to be trying to sell that propaganda .
Doesn’t this simp realize that harvesting all the “free” energy relies on “digging stuff out of the ground” to make the grossly inefficient contraptions we call “renewables”?
N. Tesla laughs at us from the grave. We don’t yet understand the concept of harvesting real energy from our sun.
(The kind that powers the aurorae and sprites, plus more!)
“if I banged on about nothing but global warming”
Honest journalists do not “bang” on pet topics.
True journalists report all evidence and viewpoints of any particular topic.
That is precisely why the average Joe sees right thru the MSM and their CC narrative.
People are tired of the one sided story.
And the utter failure of the MSM to address crucial contradicting facts raised by WUWT and Climate Depot.