Repost from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
FEBRUARY 14, 2021
By Paul Homewood
Across the world, politicians are going out of their way to promise fantastically expensive climate policies. President Biden has promised to spend $500 billion each year on climate — about 13 percent of the entire federal revenue. The European Union will spend 25 percent of its budget on climate.
Most rich countries now promise to go carbon-neutral by mid-century. Shockingly, only one country has made a serious, independent estimate of the cost: New Zealand found it would optimistically cost 16 percent of its GDP by then, equivalent to the entire current New Zealand budget.
The equivalent cost for the US and the EU would be more than $5 trillion. Each and every year. That is more than the entire US federal budget, or more than the EU governments spend across all budgets for education, recreation, housing, environment, economic affairs, police, courts, defense and health.
Tellingly, the European Commission Vice President Frans Timmermans recently admitted that climate policies would be so costly, it would be a “matter of survival for our industry” without huge, protective border taxes.
Climate change is a real, manmade problem. But its impacts are much lower than breathless climate reporting would suggest. The UN Climate Panel finds that if we do nothing, the total impact of climate in the 2070s will be equivalent to reducing incomes by 0.2-2 percent. Given that by then, each person is expected to be 363 percent as rich as today, climate change means we will “only” be 356 percent as rich. Not the end of the world.
Climate policies could end up hurting much more by dramatically cutting growth. For rich countries, lower growth means higher risks of protests and political breakdown. This isn’t surprising. If you live in a burgeoning economy, you know that you and your children will be much better off in the coming years. Hence, you are more forgiving of the present.
If growth is almost absent, the world turns to a zero-sum experience. Better conditions for others likely mean worse conditions for you, resulting in a loss of social cohesion and trust in a worthwhile future. The yellow-vest protests against eco-taxes that have rankled France since 2018 could become a permanent feature of many or most rich societies.
Yet politicians obsessively focus on climate. Growth-killing “fixes” would delight a few job-secure academics, but they would lead to tragic outcomes of stagnation, strife and discord for ordinary people.
Most voters aren’t willing to pay for these extravagant climate policies. While Biden proposes spending the equivalent of $1,500 per American per year, a recent Washington Post survey showed that more than half the population was unwilling to pay even $24.
And for what? If all the rich countries in the world were to cut their carbon emissions to zero tomorrow and for the rest of the century, the effort would make an almost unnoticeable reduction in temperatures by 2100.
This is because more than three-quarters of the global emissions in the rest of this century will come from Asia, Africa and Latin America. These nations are determined to lift their populations out of poverty and ensure broad development using plentiful energy, mostly from cheap fossil fuels.
The last 30 years of climate policy have delivered high costs and rising emissions. The only reliable ways to cut emissions have been recessions and the COVID-19 lockdowns, both of which are unpalatable. Expecting nations to stop using cheap energy won’t succeed. We need innovation.
Take the terrible air pollution in Los Angeles in the 1950s. It wasn’t fixed by naïvely asking people to stop driving cars. Instead, it was fixed through innovation — the catalytic converter allowed people to drive further yet pollute little. We need to invest in research to make green energy much cheaper: from better solar, wind and batteries to cheaper fission, fusion and carbon capture.
We should spend tens of billions to innovate the price of green energy below fossil fuels. Spending trillions on enormous and premature emissions cuts is an unsustainable and ineffective First World approach.
https://nypost.com/2021/02/09/bidens-climate-fix-is-fantastically-expensive-and-perfectly-useless/
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Post says: “Climate change is a real, manmade problem.“
First of all the above is totally wrong. It is not a problem and it is not man made. Playing in somebody else’s sand box means they win.
Second, there is NO climate problem! Any warming is not man made!
People like like Lomborg who try to play the middle only help the far left. If you agree with them how can you really argue against their solutions.
I get angry when I see quisling stuff like this. People will die from warmist solution to a nonexistent problem.
Griff and Loydo you both bear responsibility for wanting higher energy costs for the millions of minority folks that live in property.
The opposition tolerate in their ranks no dissent from their creed. Most in this forum I consider to be scientifically more literate and ethically more honest. We don’t need witch hunts to sniff out the impure in our ranks and anyone who considers “the science is settled ” is in either camp fool, a rogue a Villain or all three in many cases.
A billion here, and a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking about some large sums of
OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY.
Todays politician doesn’t really care about the long term results of anything they do, same as the dumbed down activist ”expertise” they take their advices from.
Its all about the here and now, the power and the prestige, and thats it, whatever will keep them in the game for as long as possible.
Why would they care about 40/50 years time they will be dead or very old sitting on their stash of ill gotten gains, nice houses nice pension nice lives why would they possibly give a shit about your grand kids future, they will virtue signal about the future but its only pound shop virtue
In addition to that and worse still, Biden himself and all his other policies will be fantastically expensive and perfectly useless.
Welcome back to the 1970s with a more volatile economy and colder climate. Jimmy Carter included.
“Climate policies could end up hurting much more by dramatically cutting growth.”
That’s the entire goal, to cut growth. Prosperity is the enemy of the Left.
Only two days after the election, Biden promised to deliver a slow recovery. He’s a follower of the national socialist Klaus Schwab, promising a slow recovery make Leftists like him very happy.
Global socialist Klaus Schwab – there will be no place for national or self-identity in his totalitarian dystopia.
They tried something similar in ‘Yugoslavia’ and that ended well…
his narrative that co2 is in any way negative will on the one hand get a few listeners that otherwise would have branded him heretic,
otoh i personally think the entire notion that co2 is harmful must be
unconditionally rejected. even if co2 is indeed going to take us out of this ice age, its still a whole wide world better than staying
You need to be very clear – Earth’s surface energy balance is thermostatically controlled. It simply CANNOT be influenced by CO2. It is just fantasy. The “greenhouse effect” is fantasy.
There are two vital process that control Earth’s energy balance – formation of sea ice at the poles and cloudburst over the tropical ocean warm pools. Both are high precision temperature control mechanism you can see in action every day of every year:
While all three oceans achieve a warm pool of 30C at least annually and the two poles form sea ice at least annually, the average surface temperature is easily calculated:
Average Global Surface Temperature = {30 + (-2)}/2 = 14C
The only climate change currently occurring is not altering the surface temperature. The oceans are still rebounding from the last glacial and most glaciers are still in retreat from the last glacial period.
To help save the planet and help keep him awake, sleepy Joe as initiated a program to develop solar-powered pace makers.
Play money is not expensive, bad outcomes on the other hand are very expensive.
At least the next Jimmy Carter style windfall profits tax on big oil won’t work this time because of their carried losses from before the price spike.
Call it the cash for policy clunkers plan and the stimulus for union potholes like NJ and Illinois.
I believe Joey is going to fix America up….just like Castro fixed Cuba and Maduro fixed Venezuela…..and he likes the CCP model too.
A completely baseless claim. There is no “real” climate change on the surface of Earth. There is real measurement system flaws and fraud.
The fraudsters cannot even agree on the current temperature. Nine climate models offer a choice of global average surface temperature over a 2C range. There is only one correct model based on physics but the Chinese FGOALS model is not far off despite still being based on a fantasy that CO2 affects the global energy ballance – utter hogwash.
NO. There is nothing “green” about green energy. Stop buying into this BS.
Climate change a man made problem! NO. How about a man-conceived problem.
It isn’t even that. “Climate change” is the default setting of our planet’s atmosphere and always has been. The term is nothing but equivocation … a tautology. Furthermore the idea that this planet has A climate is an utter absurdity. Climates are local, not global. You can’t average a complex concept and pretend a single compound (CO2) is its engine.
People need to stop pretending that “The Biden Administration” has something to do with China-Joe Biden. Joe is hors-de-combat, out-to-lunch and present-in-name-only. Anyone who would sign over 50 executive orders in less than 2 weeks isn’t in charge. They have made congress irrelevant. In fact the US government could easily be under China’s control and no one would know.
While Bjorn is correct about the costs and the little effect of the spending on supposed pollution the facts are that all the expenditure on CO2 mitigation is unnecessary. The 2nd law of thermodynamics says basically that heat only flows from hot to cold so if CO2 in the atmosphere gets warmer from convection and radiation (only at a wavelength of 14.8 micron) it will only radiate to cold space and not to the Earth’s surface or the atmosphere close to the surface. Secondly, the Earth surface on average (293K) radiates at around 10 micron wavelength. CO2 only absorbs at 14.8 micron at a temperature level of about 200K ie very high in the atmosphere (note the lapse rate of about 6K/1000m). Thirdly, calculations of heat balances have been put out incorrectly. The radiation window is 66 w/m2 as shown by satellite measurements. Dr Tremberth has admitted that he knows this but has not altered or withdrawn his paper. In the heat balance there is no room for so-called back radiation which is unphysical.
Note water vapour and clouds also do not back radiate They act like a permeable barrier which only radiates to space but at a large range of wavelengths.
How then do you explain this experiment?
https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=99608
They measure an increase in back radiation.
That is radiation moving from cold to hot. The GHE is real. Don’t deny it, just understand the effects are mitigated by other factors.
A few things about the experiment 1/ none of the authors had any engineering qualifications in the engineering subjects of Thermodynamics and Heat& Mass Transfer 2/ The atmosphere is not closed at its top or at its sides3/The atmosphere is colder the further one gets from the surface (note lapse rate) 4/ outside the atmosphere of the Earth is space at less than 1K. The experiment could at least have had a thin conductive layer at the top with say solid CO2 ice or liquid oxygen which could absorb radiation. Internally they have not avoided convection. Anyway if one puts Co2 in an enclosure (by itself or some partial pressure in a mixture of gases) the CO2 will absorb radiation at 4.3 micron (with a hot source of 1000C or another source emitting at 14.8 micron). That does not prove back radiation. Put a cold surface on one surface with a near vacuum (say partial pressure say 10Pa) and see the direction of the heat flow.- all the heat will go to the cold surface.
A botched experiment by persons who assumed the answer they wanted.
Where will the cuts be made?
Health, education, equality issues, housing for those in need, backhanders, government salaries?
(I know the answer – it’s the same answer we always get from the left)
It certainly isn’t useless: the US Government can then justify why there’s no more money in the treasury and why social security is bankrupt… The middle class will then be “taxed” accordingly.
“Climate change is a real, manmade problem.”
Of course it actually isn’t. And the base premise is false. None of these “climate strategies” have a damn thing to do with the climate. All of them have to do with wealth redistribution to entities and people who are in bed with our federal government and its corrupt political class. Warren Buffet owns the railroad that the oil from Keystone will travel on instead. I heard, but have not confirmed yet, that Gates has an interest in the trucks. This is always about laundering our tax dollars while we get poorer and certain others who are actually already rich get richer. They invest their money in federal elected officials just the same as they invest in their companies and the markets. Trump, and by extension “we the people”, was and remains an existential threat to that extensive, yet insidious, money laundering scheme.
“Climate change is a real, manmade problem”
So how do you explain all the climate change that has gone on for billions of years before humans evolved?
I respect Lomborg, but, taken in isolation, ”Climate change is a real, manmade problem” would seem to be off the rails, unless reading between the lines he is really saying two things, (1) climate change is real [agreed, nothing arguable there] and (2) climate change is a manmade problem [true, but not because of man’s very minor influence on climate; instead, a problem because of man’s stupid policy responses to this non-problem].
Having read a number of Lomborg’s writings, it appears that he really believes we are having some influence, as do I, but don’t stop reading there. He hastens to add the next sentence, “But its impacts are much lower than breathless climate reporting would suggest.”
I have always categorized this as high, medium and low change believers. I am in the “low” category that basically says, “move on, nothing to see here.” Energy policy should NOT be based on climate fears. Lomborg seems to be close to my position.
Working in higher education administration, I see the academics sucking on the government teat who have to be high change advocates (even if they don’t believe it), or they will have no future in higher education. It is a sad ethical dilemma, forcing honest scientists out ( e.g., Peter Ridd; Judith Curry; Susan Crockford) and keeping the charlatans who are ready to compromise scientific integrity to keep their lush jobs. Even my beloved, formerly conservative alma mater is gradually succumbing to this group think in science, along with assimilating all of the other SJW tripe infecting college campuses. Just this past week, they were crowing about their 2020 research expenditures, most of it federal government funding. There is much good about my institution, and it is a great place to work and make a difference for the good. However, before I retire soon, I am sure to say or publish something that will get me cancelled. Maybe this very comment.
Everything our Leftists touch is Corrupted and everything they say (MSM included) is a lie.
The theory promoted by Climate Science that warming was initiated by CO2 increase is false.
Water vapor change can be calculated from the saturation vapor pressure of the liquid water. The saturation vapor pressure depends only on the temperature of the liquid water. The actual average global water vapor is measured using satellite instrumentation by NASA/RSS. The measured WV increase trend is greater than the WV trend calculated from the temperature of the liquid water. The WV increase is mostly (about 90%) due to irrigation. This demonstrates that CO2 does not contribute to warming. The slight warming attributed to increasing WV is self-limiting.