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
I think this is the forgotten aspect of the climate change arguments.
I thought Willis showed a couple days ago that according to climate scientologist Berkley earth we have already blown through 2C increase since pre-industrial, and no crisis to be seen?
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I saw temperature figures from NASA on the climate the other day and those figures show that the year 2016, the warmest year in the 21st century was 1.02C above the average from 1850 to the present.
Our current temperature is 0.7C cooler than 2016.
It is indeed rare to have three erudite members of academia explain in such detail their delusions and ensueing idiocy.
A three-man Echo chamber.
Wow, I’m sure glad the ozone hole has been repaired. Remember when it was going to kill us all? All we had to do was stop freon from being manufactured and used. I’m also glad that the acid rain has stopped. Remember when it was going to kill us all?. All we had to do was install catalytic converters on every tailpipe.
Now, we need to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere before it kills us all. The best way to do that is to return to horse and buggy days I think. How many horses does 3 Trillion buy? I need to buy a manure shovel though. I’ve heard it piles up quick.
Remember, Watson was the chairman of the IPCC before Pachauri.
Charles,
You should have put a “trigger warning” on this essay.
I think this will ruin my day and possibly the entire weekend.
I am now going to step outside and confront the climate crisis —
From the National Weather Service – Pendleton:
Today – – Mostly sunny, with a high near 63. Light and variable wind becoming south 5 to 7 mph in the afternoon.
I think that CO2 mapping based upon data from the new CO2 measuring satellite contains the information that could expose anthropogenic warming of the atmosphere as a false argument. I also think that the mapping already shown reveals the possibility that vegetation may have a significant, and perhaps dominant, role in the increase in atmospheric CO2 levels. I realize that this flies in the face of current science but new information sometimes is the cause of changes in the accepted science.
The author of this article asks “What happens when reality bites?”
The reality is that “net zero” is unfeasible and prohibitively expensive, but is also unnecessary. Yes, CO2 levels in the air are increasing, but where is the warming predicted in 1988? Half of it never happened.
What about all the food shortages predicted in 1988? They never happened either–in fact we have a larger, better-fed population now than then.
What about the prediction of Florida being flooded? Sea levels are still rising at the same rate as before, so that coastal cities can be protected by building a 1-foot high sea wall every century, which would be much cheaper than trying to replace fossil-fuel power plants with windmills and solar panels.
If all the CO2 emitted by human activity remained in the atmosphere, CO2 concentrations would be rising about 1.8 times faster than they actually are (at Mauna Loa), meaning that natural processes currently remove about 45% of human CO2 emissions from the atmosphere. Most chemical reactions have rates that are proportional to the concentration of reactants (Le Chatelier’s Principle), so that CO2 removal rates increase with concentration. If man-made CO2 emissions remain stable in the future, the CO2 removal rate will catch up to the emission rate, and concentrations will stabilize at a higher level than now, while the Earth will be greener and provide even more food than it does now.
Reality HAS bitten, Mr. Rotter. The predictions of gloom and doom were wrong, and the future is bright if we just leave things alone, and let Mother Nature do what she does best. We don’t need any exorbitantly expensive global “silver bullet” projects to “solve” a non-problem–we’ll just need a few sea walls here and there over the next few centuries.
“In principle there is nothing wrong or dangerous about carbon dioxide removal proposals.”
This has got to be one of the most terrifying statements I have ever read. You want an “existential threat”? The entire concept of removing CO2 from the atmosphere is far more of an existential threat than ANY warming we might be facing. We want to reduce CO2 from 400-450ppm to, what? 300? 250? What’s the target? What if we overshoot and end up below 180ppm?
Talk about a threat to all life on earth…
Yes, i have stated that geoengineering types need to put their own lives on the line and their schemes may end all life on the planet.
At least we get the satisfaction of maybe seeing them drawn and quartered before the rest of us die
All this human CO₂ comes from C. C in the form of petroleum, coal and ‘natural’ gas. There is a tiny bit from burning foliage and wood, but environmentalists consider that net-zero already, since more plants grow.
OK. Want to stop CO₂ then from further building up?
MUST stop removing it from its natural sequestration reservoirs … coal mines, gas and oil fields. That anyone of any reasonable intellect can countenance the idea that massive continent-wide arrays of CO₂ scrubbers will take out the CO₂ that is being generated, or that all those tens-of-thousands of natural gas fired power stations will efficiently collect all the CO₂ before it leaves their smokestacks … is ludicrous. Any system that costs far more than the cost of generating electricity itself, is going to be a føøl’s game.
No. I fully expect to see that all the post-Paris Biden-era agreements that are studiously debated, begrudgingly signed, and gleefully politicked ‘around the planet’ as proof the something is being done will … like the very same 30+ years of ‘agreements’ having been seriously considered, begrudgingly signed and gleefully marketed … will do NOTHING AT ALL to change the upward reaching Mt. Moana Loa CO₂ realtime measurements.
Nothing.
All banapple gas.
Pölïtical fodder, election material, with NO TEETH.
Nope. To do it right, one has to fill in coal mines with overburden. To cap gas wells, and to fill their pipes with cement. And the same for petroleum. We have to not just as, but demand that the producers of this supposedly terrible resource go completely bankrupt. Bankrupt, and without a hope of recovery as the winds-of-politics change the landscape shortly after the Oil Ticks and Coal Mongers wail in their decline.
Nothing short will ‘solve’ this problem in the way demanded.
Nothing less will ‘turn the curve’ up there on Mt. Moana Loa.
It’d be a terrible burden on society, larger society. A few lucky oil wells and gas wells, and even coal mines would need to remain open, just to provide the petrochemicals that drive our whole industrially useful chemical industry, as well as our lubrications, emergency energy reserves and so on. Can’t shut down all sources instantly, unless a great big kilometer-scale meteor swarm strikes earth and sends into a –25° C asteroid Winter. For decades, or even likely centuries.
So… shut down production.
Demand will fall in line accordingly.
And very likely technology to overcome the loss. Genetic engineering of super-plants that make gasoline and diesel, or oil and vinegar (snicker) directly. And major parts of deserts covered end-to-end with solar cells, with continent-crossing pipelines of sea water, to be desalinated, and turned into hydrogen gas. And piped likewise everywhere else, with very little energy loss (compared to long-distance electricity at the civilization scale delivery).
Can do this?
Yep.
But not with mealy mouthed politicians and international pontificators.
Not a chance.
Because NO ONE will tell the ‘oil ticks’ to shut down their gas wells and oil fields.
And realistically, neither will anyone shut down coal mines, especially in China.
⋅-⋅-⋅ Just saying, ⋅-⋅-⋅
⋅-=≡ GoatGuy ✓ ≡=-⋅
He the asteroid, that could be used. We just need to push a big one a little to land right on China.
I have no doubt there are planet worshippers that pray for him to hit. Their idiocy is unfathomable and without bounds.
For skeptics there is now a reason to develop methods of removing CO2 from the air. Elon Musk is offering a $100 million prize for doing it. https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-ceo-musk-puts-100-mln-jolt-into-quest-carbon-removal-2021-04-22/
As a skeptic I don’t believe CO2 is harmful. But I do believe in 100 million bucks. 🙂
Elon risks his $100,000,000.00 because he understands thermodynamics. LOL.
Correct me if I’m wrong but, didn’t he take more corporate welfare then any business owner in human history? I don’t think he has any idea what the value of currency is.
“Sometimes realisation comes in a blinding flash.”
Yep, it did. We wasted our lives and our 10th-rate phony scientist careers, but we can pretend we didn’t by lying harder … to ourselves.
Does this psychiatric phenomenon have a name? Is there any kind of treatment?
Acute cognitive dissonance disorder ?? It’s only going to get worse.
Microcephaly.
“Microcephaly generally is due to the diminished size of the largest part of the human brain, the cerebral cortex…”
To be 100% fair about it, some of them may simply be cretins.
“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.”
I thought we were about to see defections from the earth scorching meme in the face of the the coldest spring in Germany since 1881 and the widespread wine and other crop destruction througout France and elsewhere including N America.
The rationalization of niggling “doubts”, which one knows the the clisci clique has, by the half hearted Maxwell Smart explanations of how global warming causes new record cold for the hundredth
time, is causing growing angst and temper tantrums among the them and their supporters.
Neo-left icon Michael Moore came within a whisker of deep understanding of what was really going on in the clisci world with his trashing of ineffective renewables and the lies behind them in his Planet of the Humans. I believe he is smart enough to wonder why ‘respected’ scientists are okay with this renewable sham. I hope the ‘niggling’ in his mind raises the deeper, behind the curtain question. It would be his greatest documentary film, but the instant cancel-culture backlash he has already had may have pushed him into retirement. Com’on Michael, be a real bad boy.
Utter bosh
Couldn’t believe what I was reading! At first, I thought it was going to the biggest retraction in the history of climate science. What twaddle! I feel for those taught or supervised by this bunch!
Net Zero nonsense is Dangerous TRIPE!
There….I fixed it for you
It is good thing that the temperature of the planet is not much affected by the concentration of CO2 once it gets above 300 ppm. All this wailing and gnashing of teeth about carbon capture is an inefficient use of human energy.
It may surprise these pundits that the ocean is a huge sink for CO2 in the form of plants that grow in it. In the coming freeze everyone will get a chance to experiment with tree cutting and planting. As yield will depend on CO2 concentration we can all conduct a life sciences experiment.
In the meantime we should push Gen 4 and 5 nuclear generation technologies for that was lies perpetual energy independence. Gas and oil will be reserved for making plastics and carbon-based materials.
Just thinking what would be involved in NSW Australia becoming “Net Zero”
Or even South Australia
.
The whole idea is totally laughable.
Oh , and we heard a few threads ago that “hydrogen hubs” will be created.
First step will obviously be to build COAL fired power stations to power these hubs.
Then the private sector can build the hydrogen industry, (and eventual carbon sequestration fakeries), around those new COAL fired powered stations.
One could say it’s all about Puritan thought. Not that I am anti-Puritan or something.
But something which isn’t Puritan thought, as example, is we should want to grow human population to 20 billion people by 2100 AD. Though if this was desired, Puritan thought
would have factories making babies, and the State raising children.
Or Puritan thought includes the fear of the power of women. Having women look like men and be like men, is related the fear of the power of women.
Of course women or humans in general should have freedom to do as want, but idea that they there is not enormous value of raising children- that women should avoid it, is lessen the power of women.
Abortion is similar the fifth amendment- the freedom not speaking. And being able to have children is like the first amendment the freedom to speak- form groups, have religion.
Is there any greater religion than of family?
But my point is humans are under populated, rather than over populated. And also
talking about women.
So if we thought human should have global population of 20 billion by 2100 AD- we don’t have to get such higher population {that not the idea]- but it would better, if we could get to such a population. Or we willing to allow there to be 20 billion people by 2100 AD.
If that was the case, we would want higher CO2 levels- as higher CO2 allow more food to be
produced with less land area used.
But there is lots of things we would want to do, rather than having fixation on controlling what women do.
One of the authors is from the “University of East Anglia”! Need I say more?
IIRC, Exeter Uni once boasted more people on the IPCC than any other university in the world
It swills from the very dregs of the climate funding trough.
Its very existence relies on it.
Net Zero is a fantasy. PERIOD. End of conversation.
Good Lord! What can one say? It’s all been in vain.
Unless people stop worshipping at the gaia altar there’s no way to get away from this level of widespread rampant idiocy.
Well they better lead by example stop their personal carbon emissions completely 100%
FOTFLMAO Yeah, I’ll bet they’re buying millions in carbon credits if they’re doing anything. Oh, and good luck vetting the carbon credit industry.
Another trap. Less natural gas means less synthetic N fertiliser means less food means more starvation.
These people have taken on sub-human thoughts when they push for actions to mass kill other people. Truly demented. Geoff So
We’re doomed.
Yep, this is their best and brightest minds. It’s sad.
So, this is how you save face. If only we had listened to them.