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
To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter.
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
“Net zero”
Equals rationing.
This might be the single most stupid article I have ever read. I want my 10 minutes back.
One reason I read this blog is to get a reminder of the profound idiocy of supposedly educated individuals. Quite a juxtaposition between this article and History Confirms Democrat’s 1988 Senate Global Warming Hearing Got Everything Wrong from Start to Finish – Watts Up With That? Why is it that those writing these articles don’t look at actual data?
so, net zero ain’t radical enough?
“The only way to keep humanity safe is the immediate and sustained radical cuts to greenhouse gas emissions…”
Will the authors set the example?
What’s unsafe about cold parts of the planet warming a bit?
As for human safety, I’m far more worried about religious extremists and the CCP.
Three blind men: “A-ha! Now we see”!
No, you don’t.
What a massive load of crap. Long past time to make a list of these idiots and block them from using or benefiting from any source of electricity and any product made from, with or transported using petroleum. Force them to live the lives they want to force all of us to live.
These people need sectioning, surgically.
The Guardian: “First Thing: green up your act, Biden warns world leaders”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/first-thing-green-up-your-act-biden-warns-world-leaders/ar-BB1fXZUn?ocid=Peregrine
“….the climate crisis has shifted the planet’s axis”
Wow, I guess that’s the ultimate tipping point. If we don’t instantly stop all “carbon pollution” as called for by the 3 authors of the current article, the planet will surely flip right over.
Calm down. It’s just Guam that will flip over.
The planet will burst into flames.
Right- on YouTube there is a video of Bill Nye the science guy- he poured lighter fluid on a globe, then set it on fire, then used some 4 letter words about how pissed off he is about it. He looked insane.
🤣🤣 Oh, I’d love to see that video, Joseph.
Thanks!
Bill Nye… WAFI!!
He is! The only good thing about the AGW rigmarole is Bill left the Adirondacks!
Oh Crap, that’s Bill McKibben.
McKibben is now in VT. I’ve read all his books- they suck. Very, very, very boring. Alex Epstein debated him several years ago and mopped the floor with him- it’s a video anyone who dislikes McKibben must watch. McKibben was introduced as Dr. McKibben and he failed to correct this error until well into the debate after someone from the audience made the point. McKibben has a B.A. in English from Hah-vid. Just like Ale Gore.
Of course the VERY BEST WAY of stopping that fire..
….. would have been to douse it with CO2 from a fire-extinguisher.
This article should come with a warning label “Caution, may cause dizziness or mental confusion. Do not drive or operate machinery after consumption.”
The mental confusion is on the part of the three authors.
Oh dear.
What can I say that has not been said by those who have already commented, on this rambling fact free piece of rubbish?
When you think, they can not get any more disingenuous, along comes an article such as this to demonstrate, there is no limit to their lunacy or desire, to destroy normal healthy social behaviour.
This is nothing short of a demand, for authority to shut down consumer society.
A clearly articulate piece, pushing a false premise, without any attempt to provide scientific proof of the need to do anything?
At least they admit, they are just acting like flies jumping from one dung pile to the next, looking for the juicy bit.
The other remarkable feature was no mention of China’s role in the ongoing failure to limit CO2 globally? Maybe that was because inside they know, it does not matter one jot to the actual Climate what China, or anyone else does, regarding CO2.
Meanwhile, here in the Climate Emergency Theocracy of Massachusetts:
“Proposed new bill embraces environmental justice, solar equity and expansion, utility accountability and nature-based solutions ”
https://www.sentinelandenterprise.com/2021/04/23/proposed-new-bill-embraces-environmental-justice-solar-equity-and-expansion-utility-accountability-and-nature-based-solutions/
“It is important to note that the provisions in the Next Generation Roadmap law would not have happened without the zealous clean energy and climate change groups that have multiplied across Massachusetts who are fighting to tackle racial and economic injustices embedded in our energy sector.”
In this theocracy, virtually everyone worships the Green God..
Will this guy be the Democrat’s choice for an installed president when Kamala Harris leaves office in January, 2033?
What in theeee Sam Hill is solar equity?!?
Are we going to cut larger and larger holes in everyone’s roofs, as you get closer and closer to the poles so everyone gets the same amount of sunlight?
I don’t know what solar equity is, but I suspect if you don’t support it, Democrats will call you a racist.
At least, that’s what the Democrats do when you disagree with them on any other subject.
“…environmental justice, solar equity and expansion, utility accountability and nature-based solutions…”
Anyone else notice it has become extremely easy to spot the words of people who have no idea what they are talking about?
The charlatans have become so comfortable with their scams they are now talking openly about them, unaware that it is only their acolytes that are too hypnotized to hear what is being said.
The best way to deprogram people from such nonsense is having them read every article on this blog site!
“solar equity”.
The Democrats just keep adding to the language. Unfortunately, noone knows what they mean by this stuff. I think that is intentional on the part of the Democrats. One reason to confuse the language is to obscure what you are really doing.
It’s all part of the effort to confuse and control the masses.
They succeeded in Massachusetts. The state legislature is 90% Democrat. We have a Republican in name only governor. Here, you’ll NEVER hear any skepticism about the “climate emergency”. It is the state religion- here in the state that once burned witches. While pretending to be the most progressive state- it’s still run by Puritans. Everything here is intensely regulated. As a forester, if I intend to manage a timber harvest, several government agencies have to review the cutting plans. One day I had a meeting with 5 reps of 5 agencies- in a forest. I was the only one not earning any money that day. All were young people less than half my age who knew next to nothing about forests- yet they were reviewing my work. Yet, when a solar company plans to build a solar “farm” they can clear cut 100 acres with little review- because it’s state policy. I think the state wants to be the first state to be net free- though I believe that’s impossible. One way to get there is to export all the industrial jobs and they’re successful at that- few are left- and to import all the products we want- so the “carbon pollution” in producing those products doesn’t have to be counted.
“I was the only one not earning any money that day.”
Well put! 🙂
I’m glad I don’t live in Europe. It doesn’t seem like there is much intelligent life left there.
I thought Mike Mann lived in Pennsylvania. Last time I looked on the map it was not located in Europe.
And he seems very much at home with the Australian BOM enthusiasts….
From the article: “The threats of climate change are the direct result of there being too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” Get a grip. There is a highly variable emitter/reflector above us. Here is how it performs, at a gridpoint near me, as hourly CERES data for 2018 shows. The atmosphere is not a passive trap, as these results could never be produced that way. It has to be powered. Sure, if nothing moves, the static absorption and emission of longwave energy is real and measurable. But the final output is not suppressed, as the heat engine operation of the atmosphere feeds the emitter/reflector.
Click on the image for a clearer view. And in case anyone wants to see these plots in more detail, here is a link.
?dl=0
“… 1980s, when climate change broke out
onto the international stageinto bad rash…” on June 22, 1988 more exactly…Hansen will soon be publishing his latest book.
This has the sound of a tract written by a semi-literate monk, writing between bouts of self-flagellation, deep within a Dark Ages monastery!
The strident religious fervor roiling just below the surface of this screed is hard to stomach; in much the same way it is difficult to listen to most politicians! They know that we know that they are lying; but they want to keep their zombie supporters placated and plodding in the politically correct direction!
That must be a big reason I feel so restless in most urban areas now. Watching the actions of a beehive or termite colony is interesting from a distance; being right in the middle of one is a bit disconcerting!
The mind numbing qualities of the media and Big Tech are leading us closer to the Matrix with every breath we take!
From what I’ve read, we need more CO2, not less; that we’re already at dangerously low levels. If true, that renders all this moot.
No longer dangerously low at 180ppm during last glaciation period; it still would be nice to have a little more of a safety factor in the 800-1,000ppm range! And all the plants would just love it!
My standard reply when any alarmist comments on this subject is “there is NO climate emergency, and we need MORE CO2 not less”. I have yet to have any of these technically illiterate fools contest my statement!
Email sent to all three authors under the subject heading:
net nonsense: an even more dangerous trap
Dear Drs. Dyke, Watson, and Knorr,
I write hoping to relieve your fears. Please regard, “Propagation of Error and the Reliability of Global Air Temperature Projections.”
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00223/full
Your entire collective fear about CO2 emissions and the climate rests upon the reliability of climate models.
However, climate models have no predictive value. Their air temperature projections are physically meaningless.
Be reassured. Collectively you three authors of that article must have spent more than 80 years being misguided about climate change.
There is no known evidence of a climate crisis; now or pending.
Glad to have helped.
Regards,
Pat
Patrick Frank, Ph.D.
…
email: xxxx@xxxx.xxx
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
These things are, we conjecture, like the truth;
But as for certain truth, no one has known it.
Xenophanes, 570-500 BCE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Good to see this. The more I think about it, the more I appreciate how your emulator helped to expose the illusion of it all. Best to you.
Thanks, David. I expect to submit a thorough-going CMIP6 update in the relatively near future.
Good move, Pat.
Maybe Dr. Happer will send those three authors his latest research paper, too.
Then they would know from your paper that the computer models making these three people scared of CO2, are not fit for purpose and Dr. Happer’s paper would show them that there appears to be an upper limit to how much warmth CO2 can add to our atmosphere, and the Earth’s atmosphere is just about at that upper limit today, so any additional CO2 added would have little effect.
If they have enough sense to understand what they are reading then that ought to calm them down a little bit about the future of the world.
One can only hope, Tom.
But given the historical persistence of religion in the face of fact, hope for spontaneous AGW apostasy is pretty thin.
My intent is to just rub their noses in it.
I was just describing an ideal situation (wishful thinking). I support you rubbing their faces in it, absent an epiphany from the alarmists. 🙂
There is the growing realization that, if we still want energy and really must quit emitting CO2, we must switch to nuclear energy. The authors of the screed above have joined the chorus.
There should be a Manhattan project to develop Small Modular Reactors (SMR). The main constraint should be preventing nuclear arms proliferation. The goal should be to start rolling SMRs off the production line in five years.
Constructing and installing SMRs would go on for decades and provide many jobs and boost the economy. Batteries are useless for long distance vehicles so we still need a transportation fuel. Ammonia (which is not without serious problems) can be used to fuel internal combustion engines. It can be produced using excess energy from nuclear power plants.
Then some day, when people finally realize CAGW is a fraud, we can go back to putting beneficial CO2 into the atmosphere.
When the next ice age begins- the greens will be demanding new coal power plants.
“There should be a Manhattan project to develop Small Modular Reactors”
Why? The US Navy already buids small modular reactors. The problem is not technology it is the bizarre politics of our era.
The main constraint should be preventing nuclear arms proliferation.
No one is going to steal reactors to build nuclear weapons. They are way too hot, for many different values of hot.
There you go. But tell that to the California utilities, who are planning on decommissioning their 2 remaining nuclear plants. To be fair, they are not SMRs but big legacy plants with lots of legacy costs…but still, if they were serious about eliminating fossil fuels and carbon emissions nukes are the best way to do that.
Shutting down California’s nuclear powerplants is just insane.
Unless a person spends time on a university campus it isn’t apparent how widely weak thinking extends through otherwise well educated people. Examples:
Faculty person in education believes that “science” operates by having scientists get together and hammer out an argeement — i.e. no mention of experiment, observation, measurement but only consensus forming. This person is teaching this view of science as a process to one class after another of science educators.
Faculty person in engineering thinks we have to abandon the use of metals completely over the expense and environmental issues in mining and refining, including CO2 footprint, and instead rely exclusively on plastics.
Another faculty person in engineering thinks that policy to limit the earnings of business and “businessmen” would best suit fairness.
etc. etc.
Right now there is a lot of hysteria over covid, of course, and focus on how wonderful it is to have installed people in various offices on the basis of skin color — oh, and on wokeness topics…
If only the taxpayer really knew.
George Orwell: “There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.” A perfect adage for this article and its authors.
As was completely predictable right from the start, the developing world was never going to accept any limits on their use of coal in particular, and fossil fuels in general, so the only way to keep carbon emissions down was to scale up nuclear. Not every country needed to do it, the US, Japan, Europe, Russian, India and China would have been enough. This could all have been financed by a massive preferential loan scheme set up by the World Bank (which would have given them something useful to do for a change).
But no, the intelligentsia, the academics, Cultural Marxists and far-left environmentalists all wanted to use the issue to overthrow capitalism and bring in their favourite brand of envy-driven societal destruction – i.e. world communism – via a command/rationed intermittent energy system.
So here we are. Up the proverbial creek missing a vital piece of equipment. Praying for a breakthrough in battery storage that would make Moore’s Law look positively linear.
I have serious doubt that any of these guys are “very intelligent”.
They are dead wrong about the big questions, which means they are not smart, they are very stupid.
Teleb named these types.
nice ho that is a must plan
FTA: “But when it comes to perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces, we often show a dangerous lack of critical analysis.”
Let’s start with “perhaps the greatest challenge humanity faces”, shall we? From there, let’s try analyzing “Zero Now.”
I kept waiting for these “experts” to realize somewhere at the bottom that CO2 doesn’t drive the climate but that never came. I can’t see how any true scientist or expert, after years of proof, models that are falsified, temperatures of the past left out, can actually come out and say that it does. Boggles the mind.
Obviously, the Pentagon will need “Green Nuclear Weapons”
But I can’t even think of a definition for such a weapon.
A daub of green paint will do the trick.
The neutron bomb might fit the green bill. It’s made to kill the maximum of humans with the minimum of physical damage.
He doesn’t seem to realize that “net zero” is scam to sell projects, equipment, raise taxes, and create jobs while accomplishing truly zero….the fact that he is a greenie who doesn’t think “net zero” is a good idea for psychological reasons is ironic.