Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Former Deputy and Interim Director of the Tyndall Centre Professor Kevin Anderson has accused his fellow academics of compromising their scientific integrity to present climate mitigation proposals they think will be politically palatable, instead of saying what they really believe.
Government climate advisers running scared of change, says leading scientist
Rapid transformation needed, Kevin Anderson says, particularly in lifestyles of rich
Matthew Taylor
Fri 26 Jun 2020 22.16 AESTKevin Anderson, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, had a familiar reaction to the latest report from the government’s climate advisers, which was published this week.
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He said: “Many senior academics, senior policymakers, basically the great and good of the climate world have decided that it is unhelpful to rock the status quo boat and therefore choose to work within that political paradigm – they’ll push it as hard as they think it can go, but they repeatedly step back from questioning the paradigm itself.”
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“On mitigation, the academic community and the CCC have collectively failed the political realm and civil society by tailoring our conclusions to fit with what we judge to be politically palatable – all at the expense of scientific integrity.”
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He said the models also ignored the fact that it was the lifestyles of a relatively wealthy few that gave rise to the lion’s share of emissions.
“Globally the wealthiest 10% are responsible for half of all emissions, the wealthiest 20% for 70% of emissions. If regulations forced the top 10% to cut their emissions to the level of the average EU citizen, and the other 90% made no change in their lifestyles, that would still cut total emissions by a third.
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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/26/leading-scientist-criticises-uk-over-its-climate-record
The abstract of Anderson’s study;
A factor of two: how the mitigation plans of ‘climate progressive’ nations fall far short of Paris-compliant pathways
Kevin Anderson , John F. Broderick & Isak Stoddard Received 19 Jul 2019, Accepted 05 Feb 2020, Published online: 28 May 2020
The Paris Agreement establishes an international covenant to reduce emissions in line with holding the increase in temperature to ‘well below 2°C … and to pursue … 1.5°C.’ Global modelling studies have repeatedly concluded that such commitments can be delivered through technocratic adjustments to contemporary society, principally price mechanisms driving technical change. However, as emissions have continued to rise, so these models have come to increasingly rely on the extensive deployment of highly speculative negative emissions technologies (NETs). Moreover, in determining the mitigation challenges for industrialized nations, scant regard is paid to the language and spirit of equity enshrined in the Paris Agreement. If, instead, the mitigation agenda of ‘developed country Parties’ is determined without reliance on planetary scale NETs and with genuine regard for equity and ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’, the necessary rates of mitigation increase markedly. This is evident even when considering the UK and Sweden, two nations at the forefront of developing ‘progressive’ climate change legislation and with clear emissions pathways and/or quantitative carbon budgets. In both cases, the carbon budgets underpinning mitigation policy are halved, the immediate mitigation rate is increased to over 10% per annum, and the time to deliver a fully decarbonized energy system is brought forward to 2035-40. Such a challenging mitigation agenda implies profound changes to many facets of industrialized economies. This conclusion is not drawn from political ideology, but rather is a direct consequence of the international community’s obligations under the Paris Agreement and the small and rapidly dwindling global carbon budget.
Read more: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14693062.2020.1728209
I love this guy. I think he sees things a little differently to the rest of us, but he certainly doesn’t pull his punches.
For example, from the main body of his study, Kevin’s study appears to suggest developing nations cannot be allowed to industrialise .
As it stands today, the difference in the cement intensity (i.e. kg-cement/person-year) between developed countries with mature infrastructure and those developing nations rapidly constructing such infrastructure, ranges between a factor of two and five (see Appendix B for more detail). Put simply, whilst there are, at scale, substitutes for fossil fuel energy, as yet there are no such substitutes, at scale, for cement. Consequently, and given the key role of cement in facilitating development, penalizing poorer and industrializing nations for rapid infrastructure expansion runs counter to the concept of CBDR&RC.
Nevertheless, whilst ethical considerations are important, the global cement industry cannot be exempt from deep and rapid decarbonization. The inclusion here of the cement sector as a ‘global overhead’ does not exempt nations with high cement use from seeking to reduce process emissions, rather it puts pressure on the global industry to rapidly curtail its emissions. Failure to do so only puts further downwards pressure on global, and hence national, energy-only carbon budgets that are already at the threshold of what is achievable.
Read more: same link as above
The conclusion of Kevin’s study prescribes carbon reduction rate of 10-12% per annum. To put this into context, the Covid lockdowns are estimated to have resulted in a 17% emissions drop – so Kevin is effectively calling for two thirds of a Covid lockdown worth of permanent CO2 reduction every year, for the forseeable future.
Sadly Kevin does not offer any solution to how this colossal societal shift might be engineered, other than a vague reference to the US funded post WW2 Marshall Plan in the conclusion of his study, and a suggestion in his Guardian interview that we could achieve an immediate 30% CO2 emission reduction by heavily restricting the life choices of rich people.
Below is Josh’s take on Keven Anderson’s climate theories, from 2010.
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Anderson is not a leading climate scientist. He is a former marine engineer turned mathematical modeller. He takes the IPCC conclusions as fact and weaves fantastic doom scenarios around them.
https://tyndall.ac.uk/people/kevin-anderson
In 2005, he was promoting personal carbon credit cards. Everyone would be given a “carbon” allowance and every time they purchased anything they would swipe their card at the checkout and be debited with the “carbon” cost of the product.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/237228029_Domestic_Tradable_Quotas_A_policy_instrument_for_reducing_greenhouse_gas_emissions_from_energy_use
Almost without fail, when I read the pronouncements of one of these self-annointed “world savers,” it strikes me that they really aren’t scientists. They’re actually latent, frustrated dictators.
From the incomparable H. L. Mencken:
“Puritanism: The haunting fear, that somewhere, someone is happy.”
The guy’s obviously a control freak, and a typical champagne Socialist.
Just do it, do the thing you want everybody to do.
You can start today, revolutionise YOUR life.
Sell your houses.
Stop travelling.
Eat less. Freezer’s are for Fascists Kev.
You really should have nothing to recycle if you’re serious about this.
Put another jumper on when you’re cold. May as well just keep your coat on actually.
C’mon Kev you can do this, think of the strong message you’ll be sending to your fellow rich b@stards.
….you remember…
“If we were serious about this crisis we could do this in a year – if we were really serious we could do it in a month”
I hate to say this, but Professor Andersen is right on target. Conceptually, the idea of rolling back society to a pre-industrial condition is naive (to put it mildly…); but it has the virtue of actually being able to hit its objective. The readers here are well aware that all the renewable energy schemes will (a) not provide useful electrical services and (b) mostly (if not entirely) shift the carbon output from generating power to making windmills and solar installations. No exaggeration: Trillions down the drain to accomplish bubkis from a CAGW perspective (
liningstuffing pockets of the well-connected aside…). Compared to the Green New Deal and its fellow travelers, his ideas are remarkably coherent.Not that I agree with it for a nanosecond. As others have noted above, this thinking is only (marginally) rational if one wholly buys into the catastrophic consequences of a a degree or two of warming. Condemning all to unending poverty and deprivation only makes sense if one believes the alternative is the lucky few who make it to Hudson Bay licking lichen off of rocks.
So, from a scientific perspective, Professor Anderson’s assumptions (AGW and its consequences) are questionable; but his analysis is refreshingly superior to what we usually see from the global warming community. I urge him to spread his message far and wide. It’ll shift the discussion to the validity of the AGW assumption.
Chaps, I do really recommend looking at gapminder.org’s Dollar Street for an education about the peoples of this planet. There’s depth there- variations in income, place, family habits, aspirations. “We are saving to buy a bicycle”. Photo of a rich South Korean toothbrush holder, a realistic Burundi water closet (actually there isn’t one). Umissable has
“Globally the wealthiest 10% are responsible for half of all emissions, the wealthiest 20% for 70% of emissions. If regulations forced the top 10% to cut their emissions to the level of the average EU citizen, and the other 90% made no change in their lifestyles, that would still cut total emissions by a third”
What do emissions have to do with it? What is the relationship between global warming and emissions?
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/05/18/12479/
When he talks about the top 20%, he’s talking about the population of the entire planet.
That 20% dives well into the middle class of Europe and the America.
Mark,
As 20 of the world population is some 1.4 billion people you have to ask, who does he have in mind as his target exactly?
Remember at least a third of the western world’s population are children/teenagers. With that in mind if you took the whole of the USA and Canada adult population plus the whole of the European adult population it would only come to around 0.5 billion. Where are the other 900,000,000 rich individuals going to be coming from that he wants to target? Further, I would ask, do all adult Americans and Europeans consider themselves, rich?
I suspect not.
Doesn’t matter whether they consider themselves rich or not. Compared to the rest of the world, they are rich.
If the children live in rich households, then they would qualify as rich.
There are a lot of wealthy people in India and China, since both countries abandoned socialism/communism.
“who does he have in mind as his target exactly?”
No one. He’s just blathering meaningless bullsh!t to salve his Chronic Virtue-Signalling Disorder. Give the poor idiot a padded cell.
I first became interested in what subsequently has been named the “climate crisis” a few years ago partly from natural curiosity about the planet’ climate sytems which I had always been too concerned with employment to think about and partly to a concern that things were getting out of control ( fear admittedly first raised in me by the media). At the same time , and contradictorily, I was concerned about the proliferation of eyesore windfarms and the restriction of personal choice about transport and general living styles that were being advocated to counter said climate crisis. That is why I welcomed Bexit and Trump as a brake or a slowing down of these developments and began to haunt websites such as this.
However the Wuhan flu pandemic has destroyed so much so quickly that I realise now that nothing the Greens and the accompanying politicians can do will come anywhere close to what the evil geniuses of Wuhan have achieved .
So in a sense Covid-19 has liberated me . No point in worrying about the failure of Brexit or the defeat of trump by Clinton in Nov because the worst has already taken place. UK is bankrupt with shortly 2m extra unemployed . EU is requiring a massive invention of money from Germany , France and Netherlands and in many countries rioting and murder are out of control. The climate science is still fascinating and continues to hold one’s attention , but the Green initiatives simply consist of blowing up the few remaining buildings in an cityscape already reduced to near rubble , to speak metaphorically.
Pathetic. There is no man made (AGW) climate change. We are staring down the barrel of a Mini Ice Age. It has already begun. Get real Climate Change is natural and cyclical.
We are however stripping the planet of minerals to fuel/supply our lifestyles. This is a completely separate question. Is there an alternative. EG a renewable timber based economy. We still need metals.
I suggest a voluntary uni degree tax from those perpetually concerned weather worriers to help out those struggling to pay for all the free electricity from Gaia-
https://www.msn.com/en-au/money/other/ofgem-proposes-permanent-measures-to-help-vulnerable-energy-customers/ar-BB164ZZf
If it’s not enough it will have to become compulsory based on the individual’s past weather worrying.
Bomb throwing by tenured professors is more an act of personality cult and Teflon status than anything useful to society or science.