We are in the middle of an Energy Crisis and many are wondering if Climate Change is just a false alarm. Should we really be concerned about it and why are many so afraid of energy usage?
I interview Bjorn Lomborg, one of TIME Magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world and
repeatedly been named one of Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers to get the the details. We discuss:
🔥 The current state of the climate and If carbon is really the problem
🔥 If EV vehicles are a solution and what greenwashing is
🔥 The truth about renewables and biofuels
🔥 Natural Disasters in the world and if climate is to blame
🔥 Political intervention and how it affects innovation
🔥 What the True Cost of Climate Change is
And so much more!
So let’s go!
Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:14 Climate change, A False Alarm?
3:56 What are we doing to make world worse off?
6:04 Renewables
8:21 Natural Disasters and climate change
17:36 Carbon Tax
20:39 We solve it with innovation
27:59 Renewables Don’t Work
40:10 Paris Accord is failing
43:11 Will the leaders become smarter?
47:34 What is the cost of climate change
49:15 The Narrative
50:39 Self-Imposed Disaster
53:43 Converting the world
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Just say no.
I like Bjorn and his logic. That said, there is probably little that we can do to affect the earth’s temperature. The temp is cyclic and has had dramatic swings during earths history. With Technology and money, we can put people at the South Pole and under the surface of the oceans for extended times.
>> here is probably little that we can do to affect the earth’s temperature.
This sounds like you do not believe in spectroscopy.
The direct CO2-effect is measured and known!
About 1°C per CO2-doubling, from there IMHO you can only argue if a “normal atmosphere” is very different than the real atmosphere (it is not!)
If you meant that those climate models give a complete unrealistic feedback sensistivity, which has not been measured in the real world, you would have a point.
I’m distracted from following what someone is saying when they talk about weather being “not normal“.
I find myself trying to interrupt them with –
“But these conditions are on record as having been experienced several times in the past. Therefore, they must be within the parameters of “normal” weather. No matter how frequently they occur.
So can you please define for me what is, and is not within the scope of “normal” weather?”.
“Normal” is a subjective opinion
“Average” is the scientific objective fact
Average of what, over what time frame –
hours of sunshine?
diurnal temps?
cloud cover?
rainfall?
wind speeds & directions?
snowfall?
dew points?
etc
etc
etc
And to determine “normal”, are all these elements taken singly, or all together ?
And what increments of departure from “average” values are allowed before determining “ABnormal” weather conditions?
(eg if a day’s hours of sunshine is 3 minutes more or less than the established “average”, does that make that day a day of ABnormal weather?
No. Nothing is “abnormal” about “above average” or “below average,” the notion of “normal” weather is a falsehood.
Hence my comment above. It is a misuse of the English language.
Normal is a broad range. When media weather broadcasters say above normal or below normal, somebody should slap them. Figuratively.
5-95% probability defines variations around “normal” or “average”, and then you have the 1 in 100 year excursions.
sorry .. error of translation.. still revealing as to how little some readers seem to know about the basis of climate science..
with “normal atmosphere” I meant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Atmosphere
Animals have a normal temperature. Places do not. They have average temperatures.
When they say “normal” weather, it is a misuse of the English language. What they MEAN when they SAY “normal” is “a long-term average of a specified 30-year period.”
There IS NO “NORMAL” weather. The AVERAGE they CALL “normal” is just a midpoint of extremes.
Spectroscopy shows that the tiny increase in absorption in the very weak, thin CO2 band is countered by an increase in radiation in the atmospheric window.
No energy is being “trapped” period. !
“The direct CO2-effect is measured and known!”
Please show us where warming by atmospheric CO2 has ever been measured.
Just looking at theoretical radiative effects, in an atmosphere governed by pressure and temperature difference effects, is not proof of anything.
Just look it up yourself it is not rocket science!
I believe the most modern and complete datasets would be the HITRANS and MODTRAN databases.
>> Please show us where warming by atmospheric CO2 has ever been measured.
There are DIY youtube videos to measure this effect (I grant you however that most of them are not very accurate and often mix other factors into the observation, yet the conclusion of these simple experments cannot be “anthropoegenic CO2 has NO effect”)
Just because others might be wrong should not allow you to close your eyes to the facts, learn and set them straight!
Well…”yet the conclusion of these simple experments cannot be “anthropoegenic CO2 has NO effect” According to the IPCC as shown in this article; https://humansbefree.com/2018/10/can-you-guess-how-much-co2-is-mankind-responsible-for.html?m=0&utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=email_this&utm_source=email the human contribution of CO2 is 3% of 3% of 0.1% (rounded off) of the atmosphere. Which is saying, basically, that just 3% of any measurable warming is only 3% caused by human emissions of CO2.
While that article was old and the carbon dioxide mean of the atmosphere has been increasing yearly, the figures used to reach the point of 3% of 3% of 0.1% has increased, yet even if it was doubled to 6% being humans contributions of CO2 it still means that only 6% of any measurable warming is caused by human emissions. While over 99.8%of the carbon dioxide is created by nature by natural occurrences, of flora and fauna and the earth itself as rocks break down to soils releasing CO2, volcanic activities, etc.. As you live and breathe you’re pumping out more CO2 than you inhaled and your waste products decay to emit CO2 including hair and skin shedding. The saying “We are what we eat.” is simply that everything we eat is a carbon based life form that during digestion we gain the carbon to build our own bodies and what we don’t use is expelled as Carbon Dioxide, urine and other gases and fecal matter. We are reaching 8 Billion humans in November on earth that’s a lot of Carbon sequestered in bodies that give off tremendous amounts of CO2 a day. This realization was known decades ago that spurred the idea of population control, but those people calling for it didn’t like admitting if they really believed that that why didn’t they take the logical step…
“This sounds like you do not believe in spectroscopy.
The direct CO2-effect is measured and known!”
Spectroscopy is the branch of science concerned with the investigation and measurement of spectra produced when matter interacts with or emits electromagnetic radiation.
It tells us that CO2, in isolation under laboratory conditions, has a very high greenhouse effect at a level of 20 ppmv (parts per million by volume), of the order of 1.70C of global warming, and the effect declines at an exponential rate as the concentration of CO2 increases.
By the time it reaches 400 ppmv the heating effect from a doubling of CO2 is so small as to be inconsequential.
This is a function of the saturation phenomena that applies to all the spectra.
In reality the atmosphere contains a variety of other greenhouse gasses, the most important of which is water vapour, and they all contribute to the combined saturation of the spectra.
Carbon dioxide is active at two of the infra-red spectra where emissions of thermal radiation from earth can occur, a small very minor spike at 4.3um and a significant spike at ~14.9um.
Water vapour however is also partially active at 14.9um, limiting the potential warming effect of CO2 due to the partial saturation of this spectrum by the vastly more dominant volume of water vapour present, depending on location.
The combination of these saturation effects means in reality that a doubling or quadrupling of atmospheric CO2 can make no significant contribution to a warming or cooling global climate.
Historically we have seen carbon dioxide levels five, ten, possibly up to twenty times higher than todays levels.
A complex of many thousands of other factors dominate to determine global climate.
More to the point, the NEGATIVE FEEDBACKS to any hypothetical CO2 “effect” on temperature render the actual, as opposed to hypothetical, “effect” of CO2 on the Earth’s temperature unable to be differentiated from ZERO.
Which is what observations support.
“we have seen”
LoN: “do not believe in spectroscopy.”
You apparently believe in nonsense. Radiation physics is not a theory of climate.
No, it is hypothetical, and that hypothetical effect on temperature is based on a foundational assumption called “All other things held EQUAL.” Which they have never been, are not, and will never be.
The fact is, there is no empirical evidence that indicates that CO2 has any ACTUAL, as opposed to hypothetical, effect on the Earth’s temperature.
OBSERVATIONS TRUMP THEORY.
I suggest you give the work of Wijngaarden and Happer a careful read. You might then be better informed about how those IR photons get absorbed and emitted and what that implies for atmospheric temperatures at various altitudes and for different column compositions consistent with different latitudes and conditions (e.g. desert, ocean, polar, etc.)
My father use to ask, “do you understand all that you know about it!” You do really need to ask to yourself when that question about CO2 and climate. From my point of you, know a lot and understand little.
From the article: “We are in the middle of an Energy Crisis and many are wondering if Climate Change is just a false alarm.”
Human-caused Climate Change *is* a false alarm.
Look around. Nothing is going on now that hasn’t gone on in the past.
There is no evidence CO2 is changing the Earth’s weather. None.
People who sound an alarm about CO2 are sounding a false alarm.
Shout this from the mountains!
Well that won’t do much good; you need to shout it from the cities, most of all the capital cities!
i don’t think “climate alarmist” is the best term to ridicule members of that religion. I personally call them Climate Howlers, but other choices might be even better. Here are some suggestions:
Climate scaremongers
Climate doomsayers
Climate extremists
Climate radicals
Climate insurrectionists
Climate troublemakers
Climate agitators
Climate pessimists
Climate instigators
Climate fascists
How about Climate Deniers? After all they are definitely denying Reality.
The really sinister bit is that the CAGW MEME which is a SCAM is a leftwing/Marxist political creation with a Communist agenda. Heaven help us.
I think they already call us climate deniers.
Natural history deniers.
Absolutely. Mann’s hockey stick is pure climate change denial. It denies the reality of climate change (the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age) over the last thousand years. It pretends that climate change started only after CO2 was invented.
As for the list of suggested labels above, I would say they are all pretty fair.
Chris
all of the above
Climate grifters
Climate hoaxers
Those are very good.
I had two another suggestions that I didn’t use because they would probably offend too many people
Warmunists
Climunists
Climate quacks
Climate Nazis.
In all honesty?
Climate boredom.
“[UK] Drought until spring 2023″..
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/14/england-could-be-in-drought-beyond-spring-2023
The ground outside is waterlogged. Squelch, squelch etc
The experts will tell you… “after record low rainfall has left the country short on water.” in the hope you really are more emotional than objective.
The wettest drought evah!
Last year’s Grauniad permanent drought prediction for Australia
may give it a run for its money as they’ve had 3 straight yrs of flooding!
https://realclimatescience.com/2022/09/guardian-permanent-drought-update/
This is the Australian prediction and follow-up that I find most amusing:
End of Australian snow’ by 2020.
September 5, 2012
From GriffthNews, quote: “Griffith’s Associate Professor Catherine Pickering has researched the effects of declining snow cover and hotter summers on the Australian Alps. […] ‘We’ve predicted by 2020 to lose something like 60% of the snow cover of the Australian Alps,’ she said. […] ‘In a few years the amount of water that ski resorts will need to make snow is going to exceed the amount of water that’s used by Canberra. And it looks like we are heading back towards dry conditions, so where will they get the water?'”.
Australia Sees Huge Snowfalls To Start 2022 Season
Excitement levels are particularly high in Australia where most ski areas opened a week earlier than planned last weekend after a big pre-season snowfall last week. The snow has now started falling again and several areas have now had more than a metre of snowfall in the past week, making it now one of the snowiest weeks of all time in the country.
Among claimed stats are “the snowiest start to an Australian ski season for 22 years” and “one of the two snowiest starts to the season ever”. The snow has been falling at a rate of up to half-a-metre in 24 hours.
How embarrassment. 🙁
The climate alarmists are convincing the young generation that Man is destroying the planet and it will be unliveable in a matter of decades. I feel so sorry for the kids and so angry at the alarmists.
Train the children in fear and they will be compliant to the government for the rest of their lives.
Climate deception isn’t aimed at todays grown up’s, its the long road to future societal control.
But man is damaging the planet! Just not by high CO2 feedback values, which mean evironmentalism is really alive and necessary (and will take damage from those false prophets too!)
True ! All this net zero nonsense, wind turbines and basically every facet of the green agenda… does a lot of damage to the planet, as well as destroying economies and energy and food supplies around the world.
The environmental cost is huge and will continue to climb.
While 24k German’s protested high inflation & energy prices, they still don’t
get it as the unifying slogan of these protests is: “together through the crisis- ensure social security and end fossil fuel dependence”. Also, they’ll
probably toe the line & not grumble too much despite all that the Green’s have done to destroy Germany! (Yahoo! headline below)
https://dailycaller.com/2022/10/22/thousands-march-against-rising-energy-costs-inflation-germany/
Whining? The best the feckless German government can hope for is to avoid lynchings. No matter what or who they believe is the cause of their misery, German people will blame the government when, not if, blackouts and food shortages begin.
There will be a change in the “climate” but not the “climate climate”
I’m hoping the “climate” will get extremely hot for the German government. It might serve as a cautionary tale to our feckless government.
I agree with you Dave.
We have to present facts in a way that most people can understand that CO2 is not going to destroy the world .
We have to counter the false stories that the climate doomsayers constantly push that man is destroying the planet.
We have to keep putting these facts in front of people and show them that the alarmists are part of a movement that has other goals than protesting against a warmer world .
The main one is that they believe that there are to many people on this planet.
The alarmists have used many false stories to push their scam.
In no particular order .
Polar bears .
Coral reefs.
End of snow .
Droughts.
Floods.
Ocean acidification.
Methane from farmed animals .
Cold weather. Hot weather. Changing weather.
Runaway global warming.
“Climate change” is all bullshyte. Man has no more control over the climate on the planet than rearranging the sun to rise in the west and set in the east. Well, short of a total all out nuclear war. Even then the planet would simply go about being whatever is left, including the disaster left behind by man’s foolishness.
Idiots, morons and snake oil salesmen comprise the cult of the climate alarmist religion.
Just sayin’.
Climate Change is not bullshyte, it is one of the propaganda programs meant to create a “social” state.
This is implementation of Lenin’s original scheme for world conquest by communism.
Alinsky simplified the scheme into 8 levels of control:
1) Healthcare– Control healthcare and you control the people
2) Poverty – Increase the Poverty level as high as possible, poor people are easier to control and will not fight back if you are providing everything for them to live.
3) Debt – Increase the debt to an unsustainable level. That way you are able to increase taxes, and this will produce more poverty.
4) Gun Control– Remove the ability to defend themselves from the Government. That way you are able to create a police state.
5) Welfare – Take control of every aspect of their lives (Food, Housing, and Income)
6) Education – Take control of what people read and listen to – take control of what children learn in school.
7) Religion – Remove the belief in the God from the Government and schools
8) Class Warfare – Divide the people into the wealthy and the poor. This will cause more discontent and it will be easier to take (Tax) the wealthy with the support of the poor.
I would add to the list that Alinsky made to bring it to the modern authoritarian program:
9) Energy Control. – All activity is limited by energy. Restrict reliable energy and you accelerate the spread of poverty, debt, welfare, and class warfare.
The green loonies are some of the useful idiots that have bought into the propaganda for the Great Reset.
Does any of this sound familiar?
Depressingly so.
Sounds like NZ
Kiddies in Africa and wherever don’t need medication – they need proper food
In fact everybody does and very few are actually getting any much.
THAT is The Problem and he knows it when he often uses the word ‘panic’
Panic is what paranoid people do and people become paranoid from being chronically chemically depressed. It is well known and a very simple cause and effect. Sugar in all its variations is that depressant.
Along with myriad trace element deficiencies- simply because such things are not found inside carbohydrate food
[In bed of a night-time, do you get horrible cramps in your feet or lower leg? That’s Magnesium deficiency]
He rails about ‘efficiency’ – how has he not heard of Stanley Jevons?
He goes on about ‘innovation’
He’s passing the buck.
(And it quite lovely how 80 to 100 years for new trees to soak up Drax emissions is not OK yet 30 or 40 is perfectly OK to innovate our way out)
This is of trifling concern for Lukewarmers and climate scientists but there is:
Just. One. Minor. Glitch.
It’s called: The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics
If something anything was big enough to replace what fossil fuels do, why have we not seen or found it yet?
Apart from nuclear fission?
Here’s an innovation:
Maybe the problem (and thus solution) is coming up from under our feet and not from down out of the sky?
No transcript available?
Open the video in YouTube (not embedded). There you will be able to see the auto generated transcript and copy/paste into a Word processor.
Should be more concerned that the US is building up a military force in Romania in order to enter the Ukraine war after the election. That will do far more damage to the environment than few ppm of CO2.
Link, please.
He’s referring to the, roughly 5,000 extra NATO troops in Romania and about 10,000 extra NATO troops in Poland right now. Not a huge number, enough to bolster Poland and Romania and hold their hands when they start crying about Ukraine, but nowhere near enough to ‘enter the Ukraine war’. Given that the ratio of support troops to combat troops is somewhere between two thirds to three quarters to support one third or one quarter combat troops, then NATO would have to increase this number tenfold to even put a small taskforce into the field. Despite tgasloli banging the drum, I doubt anyone is particularly concerned about the numbers of troops in Poland or Romania right now.
Why does Bjorn look like he’s smelling a turd?
The interviewer mentioned Mikey Mann?
How do you know he’s not?
I just assumed turd-smelling wasn’t part of the interview.
I’d pay to see a debate between Seth B. and Bjorn L. At least Bjorn wouldn’t come up with this kind of impossible experiment and b.s.:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/climate-questions-does-carbon-dioxide-115912039.html
Lies, damned lies and CliSciFi.
Worrying about climate change is sensible. It’s big. It’s potentially harmful.
Suggesting that we can control the climate by sacrificing anything is controversial.
Increasing poverty to fight climate change is dangerous. The recommended policy is unworkable and very expensive.
Climate change has never been harmful in the planet’s history that mankind is aware of, other than perhaps when it gets cold.
How about the ice ages? Was that climate change harmful?
Again, one of the biggest lies they’re selling is the notion that a warmer climate means “more extreme weather.”
Of course, THEY SAID THE SAME THING ABOUT A COOLING CLIMATE during the 1970s “Ice Age Cometh” scare story.
All past warm climate periods during the Holocene were ACCURATELY called a “Climate OPTIMUM” for a reason.
“It’s potentially harmful.” But no harm has been identified to date. The future harm is entirely speculative, much of it based on inadequate models. One thing, in and of itself, conclusively shows the CliSciFi climate models are fundamentally incorrect: The lack of measured tropospheric hot spots as predicted by all climate models but two.
Worrying about climate change is foolish. People should be worried about how they are going to maintain their standards of living in the face of government’s insane and unnecessarily costly climate policies and wildly inflationary deficit spending. Climate change is the monster in your closet or the alligator under your bed.
If the UK goes renewable, then we will need 18,000 gwh of backup energy, to allow for unreliable renewables (probably pumped storage systems). But at present we only have 10 gwh (the Dinorwig plant). .
But remember that Dinorwig was the most expensive power station in the world – because the Greeneys insisted it was built INSUDE a mountain. We need to cost in that missing 17,990 gwh of backup (which will cost £trillions), before saying renewables are cheap. And these backup storage systems will take decades to build. And where will we put them??
And if we run out of electricity and heating during a cold winter anticyclone, there will be no food, water, sew.erage, petrol, transport etc. So we will probably loose hundreds of thousands of people, just in one winter. And we will have ten or twenty of those devastating winters, before these backup systems are completed.
Ralph
Cutting down trees…
Not just for home fires. The UK’s Drax power station is now burning 14 million tonnes of trees trees a year, and putting out much more CO2 than when it was burning coal. (Drax is the UK’s largest power station, at 4gw.). Those trees are logged in America and trucked (hundreds of trucks) to pulping plants to make pellets. They are then shipped across the Atlantic in four dedicated bulk carriers, and railed in 20 trains a day to Drax.
The fossil-fuel energy expended to achieve all of this – oil and gas – is astronomic. Conversely, the coal for Drax used to come from underneath the power station. And of course therm for therm, coal puts out much less CO2 than wood pellets. The other heresy is that they said they would use wood offcuts, but they ran out of that pretty quickly, and are now using lumber-quality trees.
Ralph
And years behind this blogosphere AT LAST the oh so cutting edge‘investigative ‘ BBC programme PANORAMA did a hatchet job on Drax which was RATHER GOOD but seems to have sunk without trace amongst policymakers.
Yes, they are rather slow. I wrote long article about the impracticability of renewables back in 2004. It was published on WUWT in about 2009.
See: Renewable Energy Our Downfall.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/05/25/renewable-energy-our-downfall
R
The latest bizarre feature a Drax concerns the different subsidy regimes enjoyed by different units at the plant. Much of the biomass capacity benefits from subsidy in the form of Renewables Obligations which provide about £50/MWh on top of market prices, which have mostly been high to very high, although recent periods of strong wind have sometimes pushed prices much lower at times of low demand.
One unit of the plant is on a CFD that supposedly guarantees a price of just over £126/MWh currently. However, payments under the CFD are determined by the Baseload Market Reference Price, which it set for six months at a time based on forward quotations for the winter or summer season during the preceding season. The winter BMRP has been set at just over £405/MWh. That is way over where electricity has been trading. I suspect that woidchip prices are indexed to coal, and that there is little or no profit at £126/MWh.
The consequence is that the unit has remained shut down, and will likely only be put into production at prices comfortably above the £405/MWh base price, with Drax having to pay in effect a tax of £280/MWh on anything it produces. This windfall tax for now far exceeds the windfall. Somehow it seems appropriate though.
US strong tornadoes have been DECREASING for 60 years
?ssl=1
(see NOAA data).
Hurricanes and Typhoons have been STEADY for 45 years
?w=680&h=357&crop=1
(see Dr Ryan Maue data).
Heatwaves over 100 f have been DECREASING since the 1930s
(see NOAA data).
N Hemisphere snow extent has been INCREASING for 50 years
(see Rutgers snow-lab).
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/images/nhland_season1.png
Polar bear numbers have been increasing for 60 years.
?resize=437%2C195&ssl=1
See DR Sue Crockford data:
S Hemisphere sea-ice extent was INCREASING for 40 years,
before a storm in 2017 (see NSIDC)
(and extent is climbing back up again)
Ralph
Here is the Rutgers winter snow extent graph, again.
R
Everyone who reads the Grauniad know you just made up those false graphics
/s
But are we wtnning?
Please define ‘wtnning’. Is it a game we are playing? These are peoples lives that these idiots are risking, thousands of them, probably more. I’m rather certain that, if there are large numbers of excess deaths due to poor policy decisions in the next few years, that none of those people will have won a damned thing.
My impression of Bjorn Lomborg is much better after listening to that interview.
Is there a transcript available?
Good, insightful interview. However, it assumes that CO2 emissions need to be constrained. The latest CERES data indicates we are basically in balance, once we account for the energy sequestered by the increase in biomass. We need more CO2 (for more food), not less. No physicist, after looking at the latest satellite data, would conclude there is much to worry about. And, given that CO2 makes the food cheaper, it’s unlikely that any effect CO2 might have had on the economy would be negative. Overall, CO2 is a good thing. But that isn’t a PC thing to say, is it?
“Overall, CO2 is a good thing.”
Its actually absolutely necessary, and totally beneficial.
There is no scientific downside to increasing atmospheric CO2 to 1000pmm+ (which unfortunately is unlikely to happen)
Ask Europe next Spring.
Ask the survivors.
Actually you can survive quite nicely in an unheated house as long as you own good Helly Hansens….
You have to engage with your liberal neighbors, friends, associates. Start with little bits and pieces of the false narratives out there. Always be ready with primary sources as evidence; be it AGW / renewables or political tyranny through corrupt DOJ(like fake Steel dossier) .Keep it civil try to stay calm. Stick with stuff document-ably provable.
I could not believe how totally uninformed /misinformed one of my liberal neighbors was when I had a “friendly “ pre election conversation this morning with her out in the yard.
VOTE, DONATE, CALL your reps, push back.
The CCP has just announced a 10% increase in coal fired power, whilst our idiotic Western government’s lead us to energy poverty.
And they’re building more. And they’re helping other “developing” nations build more. In 2019 alone China built more coal fired power plants than the USA has left to close.
Emissions don’t matter, because CO2 doesn’t drive the climate. But emissions WILL CONTINUE TO CLIMB no matter what the USA, Europe, or any other “western” nations do.
We have to stop chasing non-solutions to the imaginary ‘problem,” which wouldn’t solve the imaginary ‘problem’ even IF it WAS real. We will only succeed in impoverishing ourselves to achieve absolutely NOTHING.