James Dyke, University of Exeter; Robert Watson, University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr, Lund University
Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash. Blurred outlines snap into shape and suddenly it all makes sense. Underneath such revelations is typically a much slower-dawning process. Doubts at the back of the mind grow. The sense of confusion that things cannot be made to fit together increases until something clicks. Or perhaps snaps.
Collectively we three authors of this article must have spent more than 80 years thinking about climate change. Why has it taken us so long to speak out about the obvious dangers of the concept of net zero? In our defence, the premise of net zero is deceptively simple – and we admit that it deceived us.
The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So it follows that we must stop emitting more and even remove some of it. This idea is central to the world’s current plan to avoid catastrophe. In fact, there are many suggestions as to how to actually do this, from mass tree planting, to high tech direct air capture devices that suck out carbon dioxide from the air.
The current consensus is that if we deploy these and other so-called “carbon dioxide removal” techniques at the same time as reducing our burning of fossil fuels, we can more rapidly halt global warming. Hopefully around the middle of this century we will achieve “net zero”. This is the point at which any residual emissions of greenhouse gases are balanced by technologies removing them from the atmosphere.
This is a great idea, in principle. Unfortunately, in practice it helps perpetuate a belief in technological salvation and diminishes the sense of urgency surrounding the need to curb emissions now.
We have arrived at the painful realisation that the idea of net zero has licensed a recklessly cavalier “burn now, pay later” approach which has seen carbon emissions continue to soar. It has also hastened the destruction of the natural world by increasing deforestation today, and greatly increases the risk of further devastation in the future.
To understand how this has happened, how humanity has gambled its civilisation on no more than promises of future solutions, we must return to the late 1980s, when climate change broke out onto the international stage.
Steps towards net zero
On June 22 1988, James Hansen was the administrator of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a prestigious appointment but someone largely unknown outside of academia.
By the afternoon of the 23rd he was well on the way to becoming the world’s most famous climate scientist. This was as a direct result of his testimony to the US congress, when he forensically presented the evidence that the Earth’s climate was warming and that humans were the primary cause: “The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.”
If we had acted on Hanson’s testimony at the time, we would have been able to decarbonise our societies at a rate of around 2% a year in order to give us about a two-in-three chance of limiting warming to no more than 1.5°C. It would have been a huge challenge, but the main task at that time would have been to simply stop the accelerating use of fossil fuels while fairly sharing out future emissions.
Four years later, there were glimmers of hope that this would be possible. During the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, all nations agreed to stabilise concentrations of greenhouse gases to ensure that they did not produce dangerous interference with the climate. The 1997 Kyoto Summit attempted to start to put that goal into practice. But as the years passed, the initial task of keeping us safe became increasingly harder given the continual increase in fossil fuel use.
It was around that time that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.
They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.
Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.
This story is a collaboration between Conversation Insights and Apple News editors
The Insights team generates long-form journalism and is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects to tackle societal and scientific challenges.
Around the time they were first developed, efforts were being made to secure US action on the climate by allowing it to count carbon sinks of the country’s forests. The US argued that if it managed its forests well, it would be able to store a large amount of carbon in trees and soil which should be subtracted from its obligations to limit the burning of coal, oil and gas. In the end, the US largely got its way. Ironically, the concessions were all in vain, since the US senate never ratified the agreement.
Postulating a future with more trees could in effect offset the burning of coal, oil and gas now. As models could easily churn out numbers that saw atmospheric carbon dioxide go as low as one wanted, ever more sophisticated scenarios could be explored which reduced the perceived urgency to reduce fossil fuel use. By including carbon sinks in climate-economic models, a Pandora’s box had been opened.
It’s here we find the genesis of today’s net zero policies.
That said, most attention in the mid-1990s was focused on increasing energy efficiency and energy switching (such as the UK’s move from coal to gas) and the potential of nuclear energy to deliver large amounts of carbon-free electricity. The hope was that such innovations would quickly reverse increases in fossil fuel emissions.
But by around the turn of the new millennium it was clear that such hopes were unfounded. Given their core assumption of incremental change, it was becoming more and more difficult for economic-climate models to find viable pathways to avoid dangerous climate change. In response, the models began to include more and more examples of carbon capture and storage, a technology that could remove the carbon dioxide from coal-fired power stations and then store the captured carbon deep underground indefinitely.
This had been shown to be possible in principle: compressed carbon dioxide had been separated from fossil gas and then injected underground in a number of projects since the 1970s. These Enhanced Oil Recovery schemes were designed to force gases into oil wells in order to push oil towards drilling rigs and so allow more to be recovered – oil that would later be burnt, releasing even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Carbon capture and storage offered the twist that instead of using the carbon dioxide to extract more oil, the gas would instead be left underground and removed from the atmosphere. This promised breakthrough technology would allow climate friendly coal and so the continued use of this fossil fuel. But long before the world would witness any such schemes, the hypothetical process had been included in climate-economic models. In the end, the mere prospect of carbon capture and storage gave policy makers a way out of making the much needed cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
The rise of net zero
When the international climate change community convened in Copenhagen in 2009 it was clear that carbon capture and storage was not going to be sufficient for two reasons.
First, it still did not exist. There were no carbon capture and storage facilities in operation on any coal fired power station and no prospect the technology was going to have any impact on rising emissions from increased coal use in the foreseeable future.
The biggest barrier to implementation was essentially cost. The motivation to burn vast amounts of coal is to generate relatively cheap electricity. Retrofitting carbon scrubbers on existing power stations, building the infrastructure to pipe captured carbon, and developing suitable geological storage sites required huge sums of money. Consequently the only application of carbon capture in actual operation then – and now – is to use the trapped gas in enhanced oil recovery schemes. Beyond a single demonstrator, there has never been any capture of carbon dioxide from a coal fired power station chimney with that captured carbon then being stored underground.
Just as important, by 2009 it was becoming increasingly clear that it would not be possible to make even the gradual reductions that policy makers demanded. That was the case even if carbon capture and storage was up and running. The amount of carbon dioxide that was being pumped into the air each year meant humanity was rapidly running out of time.
With hopes for a solution to the climate crisis fading again, another magic bullet was required. A technology was needed not only to slow down the increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but actually reverse it. In response, the climate-economic modelling community – already able to include plant-based carbon sinks and geological carbon storage in their models – increasingly adopted the “solution” of combining the two.
So it was that Bioenergy Carbon Capture and Storage, or BECCS, rapidly emerged as the new saviour technology. By burning “replaceable” biomass such as wood, crops, and agricultural waste instead of coal in power stations, and then capturing the carbon dioxide from the power station chimney and storing it underground, BECCS could produce electricity at the same time as removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. That’s because as biomass such as trees grow, they suck in carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. By planting trees and other bioenergy crops and storing carbon dioxide released when they are burnt, more carbon could be removed from the atmosphere.
With this new solution in hand the international community regrouped from repeated failures to mount another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. The scene was set for the crucial 2015 climate conference in Paris.
A Parisian false dawn
As its general secretary brought the 21st United Nations conference on climate change to an end, a great roar issued from the crowd. People leaped to their feet, strangers embraced, tears welled up in eyes bloodshot from lack of sleep.
The emotions on display on December 13, 2015 were not just for the cameras. After weeks of gruelling high-level negotiations in Paris a breakthrough had finally been achieved. Against all expectations, after decades of false starts and failures, the international community had finally agreed to do what it took to limit global warming to well below 2°C, preferably to 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels.
The Paris Agreement was a stunning victory for those most at risk from climate change. Rich industrialised nations will be increasingly impacted as global temperatures rise. But it’s the low lying island states such as the Maldives and the Marshall Islands that are at imminent existential risk. As a later UN special report made clear, if the Paris Agreement was unable to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the number of lives lost to more intense storms, fires, heatwaves, famines and floods would significantly increase.
But dig a little deeper and you could find another emotion lurking within delegates on December 13. Doubt. We struggle to name any climate scientist who at that time thought the Paris Agreement was feasible. We have since been told by some scientists that the Paris Agreement was “of course important for climate justice but unworkable” and “a complete shock, no one thought limiting to 1.5°C was possible”. Rather than being able to limit warming to 1.5°C, a senior academic involved in the IPCC concluded we were heading beyond 3°C by the end of this century.
Instead of confront our doubts, we scientists decided to construct ever more elaborate fantasy worlds in which we would be safe. The price to pay for our cowardice: having to keep our mouths shut about the ever growing absurdity of the required planetary-scale carbon dioxide removal.
Taking centre stage was BECCS because at the time this was the only way climate-economic models could find scenarios that would be consistent with the Paris Agreement. Rather than stabilise, global emissions of carbon dioxide had increased some 60% since 1992.
Alas, BECCS, just like all the previous solutions, was too good to be true.
Across the scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with a 66% or better chance of limiting temperature increase to 1.5°C, BECCS would need to remove 12 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide each year. BECCS at this scale would require massive planting schemes for trees and bioenergy crops.
The Earth certainly needs more trees. Humanity has cut down some three trillion since we first started farming some 13,000 years ago. But rather than allow ecosystems to recover from human impacts and forests to regrow, BECCS generally refers to dedicated industrial-scale plantations regularly harvested for bioenergy rather than carbon stored away in forest trunks, roots and soils.
Currently, the two most efficient biofuels are sugarcane for bioethanol and palm oil for biodiesel – both grown in the tropics. Endless rows of such fast growing monoculture trees or other bioenergy crops harvested at frequent intervals devastate biodiversity.
It has been estimated that BECCS would demand between 0.4 and 1.2 billion hectares of land. That’s 25% to 80% of all the land currently under cultivation. How will that be achieved at the same time as feeding 8-10 billion people around the middle of the century or without destroying native vegetation and biodiversity?
Read more: Carbon capture on power stations burning woodchips is not the green gamechanger many think it is
Growing billions of trees would consume vast amounts of water – in some places where people are already thirsty. Increasing forest cover in higher latitudes can have an overall warming effect because replacing grassland or fields with forests means the land surface becomes darker. This darker land absorbs more energy from the Sun and so temperatures rise. Focusing on developing vast plantations in poorer tropical nations comes with real risks of people being driven off their lands.
And it is often forgotten that trees and the land in general already soak up and store away vast amounts of carbon through what is called the natural terrestrial carbon sink. Interfering with it could both disrupt the sink and lead to double accounting.
As these impacts are becoming better understood, the sense of optimism around BECCS has diminished.
Pipe dreams
Given the dawning realisation of how difficult Paris would be in the light of ever rising emissions and limited potential of BECCS, a new buzzword emerged in policy circles: the “overshoot scenario”. Temperatures would be allowed to go beyond 1.5°C in the near term, but then be brought down with a range of carbon dioxide removal by the end of the century. This means that net zero actually means carbon negative. Within a few decades, we will need to transform our civilisation from one that currently pumps out 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, to one that produces a net removal of tens of billions.
Mass tree planting, for bioenergy or as an attempt at offsetting, had been the latest attempt to stall cuts in fossil fuel use. But the ever-increasing need for carbon removal was calling for more. This is why the idea of direct air capture, now being touted by some as the most promising technology out there, has taken hold. It is generally more benign to ecosystems because it requires significantly less land to operate than BECCS, including the land needed to power them using wind or solar panels.
Unfortunately, it is widely believed that direct air capture, because of its exorbitant costs and energy demand, if it ever becomes feasible to be deployed at scale, will not be able to compete with BECCS with its voracious appetite for prime agricultural land.
It should now be getting clear where the journey is heading. As the mirage of each magical technical solution disappears, another equally unworkable alternative pops up to take its place. The next is already on the horizon – and it’s even more ghastly. Once we realise net zero will not happen in time or even at all, geoengineering – the deliberate and large scale intervention in the Earth’s climate system – will probably be invoked as the solution to limit temperature increases.
One of the most researched geoengineering ideas is solar radiation management – the injection of millions of tons of sulphuric acid into the stratosphere that will reflect some of the Sun’s energy away from the Earth. It is a wild idea, but some academics and politicians are deadly serious, despite significant risks. The US National Academies of Sciences, for example, has recommended allocating up to US$200 million over the next five years to explore how geoengineering could be deployed and regulated. Funding and research in this area is sure to significantly increase.
Difficult truths
In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals. In fact developing ways of reducing concentrations of carbon dioxide can feel tremendously exciting. You are using science and engineering to save humanity from disaster. What you are doing is important. There is also the realisation that carbon removal will be needed to mop up some of the emissions from sectors such as aviation and cement production. So there will be some small role for a number of different carbon dioxide removal approaches.
The problems come when it is assumed that these can be deployed at vast scale. This effectively serves as a blank cheque for the continued burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of habitat destruction.
Carbon reduction technologies and geoengineering should be seen as a sort of ejector seat that could propel humanity away from rapid and catastrophic environmental change. Just like an ejector seat in a jet aircraft, it should only be used as the very last resort. However, policymakers and businesses appear to be entirely serious about deploying highly speculative technologies as a way to land our civilisation at a sustainable destination. In fact, these are no more than fairy tales.
The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions in a socially just way.
Academics typically see themselves as servants to society. Indeed, many are employed as civil servants. Those working at the climate science and policy interface desperately wrestle with an increasingly difficult problem. Similarly, those that champion net zero as a way of breaking through barriers holding back effective action on the climate also work with the very best of intentions.
The tragedy is that their collective efforts were never able to mount an effective challenge to a climate policy process that would only allow a narrow range of scenarios to be explored.
Most academics feel distinctly uncomfortable stepping over the invisible line that separates their day job from wider social and political concerns. There are genuine fears that being seen as advocates for or against particular issues could threaten their perceived independence. Scientists are one of the most trusted professions. Trust is very hard to build and easy to destroy.
But there is another invisible line, the one that separates maintaining academic integrity and self-censorship. As scientists, we are taught to be sceptical, to subject hypotheses to rigorous tests and interrogation. But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.
In private, scientists express significant scepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS, offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.
Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?
The time has come to voice our fears and be honest with wider society. Current net zero policies will not keep warming to within 1.5°C because they were never intended to. They were and still are driven by a need to protect business as usual, not the climate. If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now. That is the very simple acid test that must be applied to all climate policies. The time for wishful thinking is over.
For you: more from our Insights series:
- How we discovered a hidden world of fungi inside the world’s biggest seed bank
- Climate crisis: how museums could inspire radical action
- Prehistoric communities off the coast of Britain embraced rising seas – what this means for today’s island nations
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James Dyke, Senior Lecturer in Global Systems, University of Exeter; Robert Watson, Emeritus Professor in Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, and Wolfgang Knorr, Senior Research Scientist, Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science, Lund University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
HT/TonyN
Drivel to a new level.
It should have been longer. Not enough mindless repetition of baseless claims.
The stupidity of the article is beyond comprehension; however when such minds hit the concrete walls of reality, they crack.
They in essence are gaslighting themselves. I wonder if this is net suicide.
Oh yes, isn’t it just wonderful? In essence the climate enthusiasts in academia are trying to separate from the climate enthusiasts in governments – each will point to the other and scream ‘splitter!’ And with some luck they will cancel each other out, or at least the ensuing chaos might reveal some more unpalatable truths!
We are The Climate Front of Net Zero!
The Net Zero Climate Front is that fellow over there!
…
Splitter!
Good one, Pat. Oh, wait, I thought WE were the People’s Net Zero Climate Front.
Maybe we can make them all a franchise and retire, Mickey. 🙂
I scanned the article for some actual science, ANY actual science. I didn’t see any. Then I saw this was from “The Conversation” – no credibility. I immediately knew that I could stop reading and I wouldn’t miss anything.
It was a GEM, from the beginning when they said they screwed up on their models again, right up till the end where they admitted they’re failing miserably. It’s climate science at it’s most honest and best.
A useful first step would be to actually demonstrate that a 3% manmade increase in CO2 is doing anything other than good for us, the trees and the planet. So far, all we have seen are failed predictions, wonky over-sloped graphs and hysterical children.
I met several of the faculty at Exeter. On a nice “journey through time” hike, the area and grounds of campus are beautiful, the leader asked us to pray for Gaia and he broke down in tears. To him, his nutty theories appeared to have become a religion.
Did you manage not to burst out laughing?
That would have been difficult to stop.
Once the general public come to realize that it is or has become their religion maybe things get better. Blind faith in Hansen and Mann et al. has generated a mind numbed cult fueled by government money. I say “Get our money out of your “Green” religion!” Other religious groups only get tax breaks, not funding.
…. and hysterical supposed grown-ups.
In this currently cooling world, if there is ANY truth in the CO2 myth, we could really do with ramping up CO2 release. Cold is the real killer!
Anyone who says “In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals” has not read “Fallen Angels”.
Well, John Kerry said yesterday that reducing our CO2 contributions won’t be enough, and we are going to have to implement CO2 removal from the atmosphere, too.
I wonder if John knows that plants don’t do well in low-CO2 environments?
Idiocracy. We are definitely living in a Democrat Idiocracy. Surrounded by idiots in our government. And criminals.
It’s too late for that! Clearly our only hope of salvation is to remove the atmosphere. Now!
“But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.”
Mostly still wrong, since they still irrationally believe there’s a crisis, that there is substantial warming, and that humans can, or need, do anything to “reverse” it. The arguably small amount of arguable increase isn’t the greatest challenge humanity faces, and is easily overcome using neolithic, pre-scientific technology, economics, and self-organizing social systems.
And, by the way, James Hansen (or Hanson, they can’t decide which way to spell their patron saint’s name) is still wrong, as is any self-styled soothsayer, calling himself a scientist, or not.
P.S. That doesn’t mean to say that I won’t cite these [explicative deleted] the next time I can tell a politician that there is no scientific basis for net zero, or the Paris treaty, to work.
Your P.S. is right on point dk. I consider this article a treasure trove of information to use against warmists.
“The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”
That is as much as I needed to read.
One sentence, spoken without reservations, evidence, qualification, or ant trace of skepticism, demonstrates vividly why such people are anything but scientists.
In the final paragraph these authors reveal their objective:
If we want to keep people safe then large and sustained cuts to carbon emissions need to happen now.
John Kerry, like them, has a simple belief CO2 = pollution.
He want the “polluted” air cleaned.
They need to answer three questions:
Indeed, there is also the untested assertion that we have the technology to replace fossil fuels presently. Oh really? Is there a solar or wind powered auto plant or steel mill somewhere that I haven’t heard of?
Furthermore, these greenies’ fetish for electric vehicles is particularly humorous. Do they really imagine that the entire grid will be solar powered any time in the near future? Have they never heard of attenuation? The ignorance is astounding.
“The ignorance is astounding.”
It really is.
It’s not really that difficult to figure out that the alarmists can’t prove what they claim about CO2. All it takes is a little study and a little bit of critical thinking, but apparently that is a little too much for many people, including many smart people. They won’t do their own research, instead depending on charlatans like James Hansen for their information.
Or, you don’t even have to do any study, all you really have to do to convince yourself that the alarmists are full of bull is to ask them for the evidence and when they can’t come up with any, then you can figure they don’t know what they are talking about.
Ask an alarmist for evidence. That’s the easiest way to come to the proper conclusion about Human-caused Climate Change. The alarmists talk a good game, but they have no evidence. Ask them and you will see.
“apparently that is a little too much for many people, including many smart people.”
Most people I know “don’t have time” to look into things for themselves so they “rely on the experts” to tell them what to think about almost everything. Anything that contradicts the “experts” is obviously wrong.
Musing on that, plus the fact that the “experts” are so often flat-out wrong, I finally really understood what Feynman meant by “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts”
For myself, if I were afraid of what CO2 could do to destroy my future, I would look into the matter enough to understand what was going on. I wouldn’t just sit around and wring my hands like the alarmists seem to do. What a scary world they must live in. No thanks, I’ll stick with reality.
Yup, and beyond those points, it is lies, nonsense, and fear porn all the way to the horizon.
A warmer globe is better, not worse.
More CO2 is better, not worse.
Humanity is thriving like never before in history, and there is no crisis at all, anywhere. Just normal bad weather and cyclical variations in climatic patterns.
Everything is just like it has always been, everywhere on Earth.
Nothing they say bears any relationship to reality.
Such is our prosperity, and such is there a lack of any real crisis, that the entire industrialized world can decide to virtually close up shop for an entire year and counting, and beyond some dislocations in employment, nothing of any severe consequence has come of it.
All the food and consumer goods are still packed into store shelves in profuse abundance, and retailers are reporting record sales of every category of consumer goods, from staples to discretionary.
OH, no, Nichols, not store shelves. There are local farms here that grow fresh veggies all year-round and invite you to buy from them. Wouldn’t have to store anything, and I might even be able to take up canning to stock my own pantry, too.
Increase the O2 level too much and we’ll be back in the Carboniferous ear, with giant dragonflies and 6 foot long centipedes. I wonder how sKerry would handle that, don’t you?
This: another attempt at reining in our dangerous interference with the climate. – That is probably the ONLY true statement in that entire wallow in guilt-over-nothing.
Someone please be kind enough to explain to me how, since the pollution that I grew up with is considerably reduced and the daytime blue sky is sometimes so deep blue you can see Venus and Mercury and maybe Jupiter, if the time of day is right – HOW IN THE BLUE-EYED WORLD IS IT POSSIBLE FOR ANYONE TO BE AS BLIND TO REALITY AS THESE PEOPLE ARE?????
Sorry, don’t mean to shout, but the self-flagellation manifested in that article is enough to have me suggesting that the people involved in the Entire Greenbeaner Movement get some professional help, including long periods outdoors in the severely cold weather. No more comfortable air conditioned offices, no computers (period!!!), no store-bought groceries (raise it yerselves!!), and — wait, what I”m saying this is about as medieval as you can get, isn’t it? Okay, fine – put their ridiculous personages into a medieval setting where they have to raise their own food, including grains, and clean out the outhouses on a rotational basis. And no self-flagellation, unless they’re out of sight and no one can hear them squeak.
This is RIDICULOUS!!!!!!
And for the fellow who cried about Gaia – isn’t that Mother Nature from the margarine ads i the 1990s?
“the self-flagellation manifested in that article is enough to have me suggesting that the people involved in the Entire Greenbeaner Movement get some professional help”
What we are seeing here is a mass delusion driven by the hugely influential Leftwing Media propaganda machine. They are indoctrinating unsuspecting people into their Human-caused Climate Change cult by the tens of millions.
The end result will be the demise of Western civilization and the rise of other, less delusional, civilizations.
Well, maybe (just maybe), Tom Abbott, we’ll get lucky and they will lock themselves up in those walled cities (see the Escape From movies, Blade Runner, Logan’s Run, Soylent Green, Brave New World, several Heinlein stories about Coventry, the Divergent novels, etc.) and never leave and we will be able to just get on with our lives.
Think how devastating it would be to be kicked out of a walled city (see Heinlein’s Coventry stuff) and have to figure out how to find food, clothing and shelter and the meat you eat is real pork or beef…. and you’ve eaten soy products your whole life…. and — well, the possibility is very real.
What a concept, I could certainly live with it – if they locked themselves away and left the rest of us alone. I’m just not so sure about the second half of that.
They can’t leave other people alone. It’s not in their nature.
What a hoot, the fear is that the “problem” can be solved, so much better to redefine the problem so that it can never be solved. Don’t worry greenies, just take a look at the Mauna Loa CO2 plots, if you see that as a problem then it is obvious that it will be around for long enough for you to get nice properties and pensions.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Lost the will to live by the third paragraph! They need to take their assumptions and their critical analyses and stick them up their models.
You couldn’t make this stuff up. Except of course, they have!
That’s about the same point I decided it was pointless reading any further.
I made it halfway.
Nothing but nonsense halfway through predicts the other half is equally vapid. In my models, anyway;-)
“The time for wishful thinking is over.”
Start by admitting that CO2 is not the temperature control for this planet. Everything that follows on from this lie is politics, not science.
This bunch of nonsense is so grotesque, it doesn’t even belong to the climate farcical pseudo-science it takes for granted.
Maybe it’s a new kind of clown show which falls under the field of post-modern-pseudo-science.
They probably mean to publish it on April 1.
Why spend trillions on worthless and futile attempts to engineer perfect climates for each climate zone? Perhaps spending only billions or even millions on adapting to and even seeking to benefit from climate changes would reap considerable benefits for the general public? Could it be that this alarmist climate boondoggle is actually a glorified ponzi scheme benefitting very few but impoverishing the masses?
“Adapting” means you might be able to throw away an old sweater in a few decades….if it warms up enough….or you could move somewhere 250 Km closer to the pole.
” Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash” plonkers, when will they realise they are just pushing a political agenda and that if achieved they will be surplus to requirements. Like the rest of us they’ll own nothing and be happy.
Just wow
if I had a muck-heap as big as that in my field, I’d be ££££££ minted.
Rolling in it.
And I Am Not Joking
Trouble is, I don’t actually have a a field anymore.
snot fair, jus not fair
<sobs>
They do demonstrate the awesome power of Magical Thinking though.
And self-muddlement with all them wurdz
“80 years” of ignoring Entropy, wilfully ignoring the fact that Heat Energy always goes down a Thermal Gradient
From University Folks studying Science
simply mind-blowing
I thought I was going to read about how three climate scientists were going to debunk climate science, but I admit that it deceived me.
I had the exact same thought when I opened the article.
All they did was re-imagine the tired refrain that “it is worse than we thought”.
Here we go, yet again! Oh no we’re polluting the atmosphere with awful terrible chemicals & evil substances Humans are evil & wicked, so lets pump lots of chemicals & substances into the atmosphere to stop it happening! The logic defies rational reasoning, at least for this simple engineer!!!! Have any of these geniuses (they’ve got an ology after their names so they must be!) stopped to errr………..oh what’s it called now, oh yes, think?
A combined 80 years of struggling to realise at last,
that basically is all about the new modern global age indulgence markets at large… and a financial mass ripoff in global scale,
of the masses.
cheers
I gave up about 1/3 the way through.
This is worse than drivel. It’s droaning on about idiocy.
CO2 is a non problem and much needed in our atmosphere!
Dude,
I envy your persistence and nerve. 🙂
My self,
almost made it to the end of 3rd paragraph… just about.
Salute you. 🙃
cheers
Thanks for the heads up. I won’t waste my time. Nice graphs but that’s about it. I prefer scary videos … https://newtube.app/user/RAOB/aGqDEVt
I bookmarked that one, John.
It may be quite useful to keep this article handy for discussions with true believers. Here is a trio of true believers who have come to realise that a major component of the narrative is junk. And not just junk, it’s serial junk.
We all here at WUWT know that the major assertions in the article about CO2 and global warming are also junk, but if it’s possible to progress one step at a time then this article may provide the means for one step.
I would of course prefer an instant collapse of the whole scam.
My thoughts exactly – not even net zero is good enough. They want more…
and it will never be enough.
As I have said repeatedly pandering to these lunatics only encourages them.
I am becoming extremely curt with anyone who goes into this subject – its also great fun as they are almost never appraised of any salient facts – this academic included – apparently.
There aren’t enough caves to go around to pull off their un-articulated conclusion.
“As I have said repeatedly pandering to these [alarmist] lunatics only encourages them.”
Listen up, Republican politicians! This is good advice!
Don’t feed the Human-caused Climate Change meme. As Rush Limbaugh liked to say: Don’t accept the premise (any premise) the Left is selling. Challenge it instead, because it is always wrong if it is coming from the Left, as the Left’s trackrecord demonstrates.
As the one who spotted this first on the ‘conversation’ site […. I read it regularly to see what the academically challenged academics are up to …] I am most grateful for everybody in providing some perspective on this utterly huge pile of crap/gold, which actually flabbergasted my braincells.
One wonders what Griff & co. will make of this Heretical Rationalisation. Could we see a ceremonial burning at the stake … complete with CO2 emissions from exploding heads?
Clearly, this foot-shooting effort is the Galileo-moment for the AGW Movement.
One hopes that the Government seizes this opportunity to cancel COP using any pretext to hand. (Unless of course they want Glasgow to be a competitor to the Edinburgh Fringe….)
But seriously, for any budding comedian out there, a precis would make a very good stand-up act.
Agree. This essay demonstrates that true believers realize that mitigation measures won’t work, and explains why. It’s not some supposed Exxon-supported conservative organization announcing that the Emperor has no clothes. This is a very useful essay.
Given the authors’ premises and conclusions, the only thing that will save us is to drastically reduce CO2 production, beginning immediately. The thought of what changes that would mean to everyday lives is astounding – no private fossil-fueled transportation, no more non-essential air travel, rationing of electricity and power, closing of most manufacturing – until “carbon free” electric generation lets us resume our standard of living. Willis and others have explained how that just won’t happen in 10 years, or 20 or 30 years.
That will frighten people when they understand that the proponents of the Green New Deal intend exactly that. It’s part of what is needed to awaken the woke.
‘Carbon Free’ electric generation is impossible – it can never happen. There will always have to be some manufacturing of infrastructure and means of generation that will emit the dreaded ‘carbon’ – it’s a complete nonsense.
You misunderstand their position a bit.
In their minds, they will not be among the ones struggling to survive in the caves. The seem to think we’d still need academics in their future world.
Incredible load of carp! On a bright side, i sense we are reaching kind of a critical mass internationally. China and particularly India are not far from telling US and EU climate clowns to go have some good old “solo fun”.
I think it is starting to dawn on some climate alarmists that their science denying drivel will not be tolerated in the developing world. China and India have no intention whatsoever of reducing their carbon dixoide emissions under any circumstances.
At this point they are back to trying to convince world financiers to stop funding for poor countries trying to improve the lives of their people.
They need get honest and admit they do not want to help people, they want to eliminate them.
Because there are only two ways to do what they are saying must be done.
The first would be to just eliminate them, but of course that will never fly.
The second is to cut off the means by which humanity has managed to increase production of food and other necessities to a level sufficient to sustain the current population.
Which will make survival impossible for billions of people, or however many there is not enough food for.
But large numbers of hungry people do not just lay down and die because some other people cut off their resources.
That is not what happens next.
Personally, I hope it ends badly and soon, for anyone who wishes such a fate on others, whilst they themselves are happily living in the lap of luxury and plenty.
“China and India have no intention whatsoever of reducing their carbon dixoide emissions under any circumstances.”
That’s right. Which means the Western world is spinning their wheels when it comes to trying to reduce total CO2 in the atmosphere. The Western world, under its current idiotic Leftwing leadership, will continue to bankrupt their economies for no good purpose in an effort to reduce their CO2 output, meanwhile, the rest of the world moves on and ahead.
It’s just a ridiculous situation. The Climategate Charlatans and their Spawn have turned a benign gas like CO2 into a worldwide crisis, at least for the leaders of the Western world.
The enemies of the Western world have big smiles on their faces. All they have to do is sit back and watch the Western world self-destruct over CO2, and then they can go in and pick up the pieces.
Right….China already uses 10x the coal that the U.S. does (we’re a distant 3rd behind China and India)
Well that’s 30 minutes of my life I’m never getting back. What screed.
In the UN they trust-
‘The UN is a hopelessly corrupt clown operation’ (msn.com)
But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.
You certainly do that, and have been doing it since 1988.
They’ve been doing it since before the JASON report in the 70’s – it’s an endemic problem.
The first line after the bit entitled Difficult Truths:
There is nothing wrong or dangerous about Carbon Dioxide.
There.
Fixed it for you.
You can forget about all the rest of the paper.
Net zero CO2 emissions is about as likely as zero covid.
Step forward creative accountants…
I am always “net-zero”. It is everyone else who isn’t.
Admittedly, I do the accounting for me only.
Wow, a group who don’t want to rely on technology use a poorly written and non converging set of computer models to define the path of civilization over the next century. They claim we’re working the solutions all wrong by backloading them but it never crossed their mind to challenge the original premise.
And they come to this conclusion working with a combined 80 years of experience in science. Mind-boggling that they are not only this slow but that they are freely admitting their slowness to the world!
They haven’t learned anything in 80 combined years.