As The Elite Posture And Gibber, The New Pause Shortens By A Month

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The New Pause has shortened by a month to 6 years 8 months on the UAH data, but has lengthened by a month to 7 years 7 months on the HadCRUT4 dataset.

I visited Glasgow during the latest bout of UN-sponsored hand-wringing, where such inconvenient truths as the absence of global warming for six or seven years were not on the menu. Mere facts were, as usual, generally absent from the discussions.

I gave two hour-long talks at the Heartland side-event – one on climate science and the other on economics and policy. They are available at heartland.org. As always, if anyone would like a copy of the slide-decks just write to monckton{at}mail.com.

A single slide on the economics of net-zero emissions by 2050 summarizes just how pointless the climate panic is: for even if there were to be large warming (rather than none for the best part of a decade), and even if that warming were potentially harmful (rather than actually net-beneficial), the trillions spent on attempting to abate it would make practically no difference to global temperature.

No government that has committed itself to the trashing of its economy in the name of Saving The Planet has done the very simple calculations that are necessary to establish the abject futility of attempting to tell the weather how to behave. Let us repeat them:

The British hosts of the conference – particularly Boris Johnson, described as a “Prime Minister”, have proven themselves to be even more scientifically and economically illiterate than most. If Britain were to go in a straight line from today to net-zero emissions by 2050, the cost, according to the grid authority, would be a staggering $4.2 trillion.

Yet, even on IPCC’s own current midrange estimate that getting on for 4 W m^–2 warming in response to doubled CO₂ would eventually warm the world by 3 K, the British taxpayers’ $4.2 trillion (the grid authority’s deeply conservative estimate) would buy an abatement of just 1/220 K of global warming by 2050. So negligible an effect cannot be measured by modern instruments. Even if it could be, one would first have to determine that a climate warmer than today’s would be net-harmful, which one could only do if one had thought to calculate the ideal global mean surface temperature for life on Earth. But that calculation does not appear to have been done.

If, however, the feedback regime that obtained in 1850 were to obtain today – and there is no strong reason to suppose that it would not obtain today, in an essentially thermostatic system dominated by the Sun, which caused 97% of the reference temperature that year – Britain’s $4.2 trillion would buy not 1/220 K but just 1/550 K abatement. The calculations are not difficult.

Even if the whole West were to gallop to net-zero by 2050 (and it won’t), the warming abated would be 1/8 K if IPCC’s equilibrium-sensitivity estimates are correct and 1/18 K if the 1850 feedback regime is still in effect.

The late Bob Carter once gave a fascinating talk to a Heartland conference, saying that in 2006 the Institute for Public Policy Research – a far-Left front group – had circulated other totalitarian extremist groups with innocuous-sounding names to recommend that, if the Western economies were to be destroyed, “the science” should no longer be discussed.

Instead, the climate Communists should simply adopt the position that The Debate Is Over and Now We Must Act.

However, in the traditional theology of evil it is just at the moment when the bad appears to triumph over the good, the false over the true, that evil collapses. And it often collapses in upon itself because it becomes visibly laughable.

Though coal, oil and gas corporations were not permitted to exhibit at the Glasgow conference (for free speech might bring the house of cards down before the Western economies had been frog-boiled into committing economic hara-kiri), there were many silly manifestations. Top prize for daftness goes to the island of Tuvalu, which, like just about all the coral islands, is failing to disappear beneath the rising waves. As the late and much-missed Niklas Mörner used to say, coral grows to meet the light and, if sea level rises, the corals will simply grow to keep their heads above water.

At the Tuvalu exhibition stand, half a dozen mocked-up polar bears were dressed in bright orange life-vests. Well, Tuvalu is a long way from the North Pole. It appears no more aware than was Al Gore that polar bears are excellent swimmers. They are capable of traveling hundreds of miles without stopping. That is one reason why their population is about seven times what it was in the 1940s.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, who, like just about everyone at the UN conference, knows absolutely nothing about the science or economics of global warming abatement but absolutely everything about the politically-correct stance to take, was wafting about in his black full-length cassock, looking like Darth Vader without his tin hat.

Boaty McBoatface (a.k.a. David Attenborough) bleated that the conference Must Act Now. He has been bleating to that effect ever since his rival environmental specialist, the late David Bellamy, a proper scientist, was dropped by the BBC because he had dared to suggest that global warming might not, after all, prove to be a problem.

However, at last some of the UK’s news media – not, of course, the unspeakable BBC or the avowedly Communist Guardian or Independent – are beginning to mutter at the egregious cost of Government policies piously intended to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.

The current British Government, though nominally Conservative, is proving to be the most relentlessly totalitarian of recent times. It proposes to ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars in just eight or nine years’ time, and to require all householders to scrap perfectly good oil and gas central heating systems and install noisy, inefficient ground-source or air-source heat pumps – not a viable proposition in a country as cold as Britain.

It will also become illegal to sell houses not insulated to modern standards. In the Tory shires, policies such as these are going down like a lead balloon.

In the end, it will become impossible for governments to conceal from their increasingly concerned citizens the fact that there has not been and will not be all that much global warming; that for just about all life on Earth, including polar bears, warmer weather would be better than colder; and that the cost of forgetting the lesson of King Canute is unbearably high.

But one happy memory will remain with me. At Glasgow Queen Street station, while waiting for my train to Edinburgh, I sat at the public piano and quietly played the sweetly melodious last piece ever written by Schubert. As the final, plangent note died away, the hundreds of people on the station forecourt burst into applause. I had not expected that Schubert’s music would thus spontaneously inspire today’s generation, just as those who imagine that the evil they espouse has at last triumphed will discover – and sooner than one might think – that it has failed again, as it always must and it always will.