The New Pause Feels the Influence Of The Coming El Niño

By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The gentle but prolonged la Niña over the past four or five years has given us a good run, but now it is giving way to what some predict will be another humdinger of an el Niño. The uptick in the UAH global lower-troposphere anomalies from the previous 0.18 K to the current 0.37 K is enough to shorten the New Pause by 1 month from 8 years 11 months to 8 years 10 months:

For context, here is the entire dataset from December 1978 to May 2023:

IPCC (1990), in the business-as-usual Scenario A in its First Assessment Report, confidently predicted 0.3 [0.2, 0.5] K decade^–1 global warming from 1990-2090. Scenarios B, C and D all predicted less warming, but they also all predicted fewer sins of emission than Scenario A. Scenario B, for instance, predicted that annual emissions would not increase from 1990-2025, when in fact they have increased by more than 50% since 1990. Scenario A, then, is the scenario on which we must judge IPCC’s predictions and find them grossly excessive. For the warming rate since 1990 has been only 0.137 K decade^–1, showing IPCC’s original range of predictions to be 220% [150%, 370%] of mere observed reality.

Here is the UAH temperature record since 1990:

The Realitometer continues to show the scale of the excess of prediction over sober reality:

Next, the revealing graph below, sent to me by a correspondent, shows that it is chiefly the Western nations that are shutting down industry after industry as the climate Communists dream up ever more implausible pseudo-environmental excuses for destroying yet more sectors of the once-free world’s economies.

The roast beef of old England is now under sustained and malevolent attack by the Communist-led environmental front groups to which the present nominally “Conservative” government is in thrall, on the ground that cow-farts are an existential threat to The Planet. It would in fact be a disaster if meat were banned, since a diet rich in saturated fat is beneficial to everyone. Eating meat with the fat on it does not make you fat. It is eating the high-carb diet relentlessly promoted by the vegans that makes them fat and gives them type 2 diabetes.

Here, then, is the graph of various countries’ pledges to destroy their economies:

It is largely the East that continues to expand its combustion of coal, oil and gas, not least so that it can accommodate growing number of industrial sectors either banned outright in the West in name of Nut Zero or priced out by savage electricity costs.

The United Kingdom now has just about the highest unit electricity prices in the world – approximately eight times those in India and China. No surprise, then, that foreign direct investment in Britain, which in Margaret Thatcher’s time exceeded all foreign investment into the entire European tyranny-by-clerk, has collapsed.

The United States has largely achieved its “climate goals” by replacing coal-fired power with fracked gas, which emits half as much CO₂ as coal but costs about twice as much.

Bloomberg, the sponsor of the graph, is sullenly dedicated to the official climate-change narrative. Its graph reveals that its staff no longer possess either the scientific competence or the political independence to approach questions such as the climate issue dispassionately.

The graph misleadingly suggests that if everyone toes the Communist Party Line and commits economic hara-kiri as the United Kingdom and at least two of its dominions are doing, the world will only warm by 1.5 degrees or less, but that if everyone follows Communist-led India and China there will be at least 2.5 degrees’ anthropogenic warming.

But one can show on the back of an envelope that even if the whole world attained nut zero and the dark, satanic mills fell silent forever the global warming prevented by 2050 would be less than one-tenth of a degree. It’s not rocket science, but it’s beyond the clueless fanatics at the once trustworthy but now laughable Bloomberg.

If even global nut zero would reduce global temperature by less than 0.1 C by 2050, then it is implausible to suggest, as the Bloombourgeois do, that the difference between some nations complying and others not complying with nut zero will be as large as 1 C. It won’t.

The Bloomburglars have also failed to make allowance for the fact that most of the Western nations that have cut their emissions have done so by switching from coal to gas, a transition that is all but complete. Now that that low-hanging fruit has been picked and eaten, not much more progress will be made, not least because adding wind and solar power to a grid once their installed nameplate capacity – the output of these unreliables in ideal weather – has surpassed total mean hourly demand on that grid will greatly increase the cost of electricity but will not reduce CO₂ emissions one iota:

Finally, an eminent professor whom I dare not name, for academic freedom in the Komsomol indoctrination centres that were once our ancient universities is no more and he would be savagely punished if I were to name him, has kindly sent me the following evaluation of the scope for wind power in the United Kingdom.

He describes it as “an interesting calculation that an intelligent child could make”:

Bottom line: If we carpeted the entire land and sea area of the United Kingdom with windmills – 14^th-century tech to fail to solve a 21^st-century non-problem expensively – they would in theory meet our entire electricity demand. Except that they wouldn’t. Three-quarters of the time they would be producing little or no electricity. The other one-quarter of the time they would be producing four times as much electricity as Britain needs. The waste would be prodigious. Of course, one could carpet the land area in between the windmills with static batteries, but then the cost of UK electricity, already among the highest in the world, would be ten times what it already is.

Ludicrously, down here in Somerset, the Government is about to bribe Tata Steel with half a billion sterling of our money so that they can build a giant battery factory for electric buggies. Reason for the bribe: Tata Steel says it can’t afford to come to the UK without subsidies to pay the difference between the nut-zero-driven electricity cost here and just about everywhere else. And that is before taking account of the fact that even global nut zero by 2050 (which won’t happen anyway because China, Russia, India and Pakistan are building ever more coal-fired power stations) would reduce global temperature by just 0.1 degree, at a cost of at least $1 quadrillion.

The Professor concludes that even 10% coverage by bird-blending, bee-bashing, bat-blatting windmills would be intolerable. He writes:

“The only solution is 100% nuclear. It is so blatantly obvious that I cannot believe that a halfway intelligent person cannot understand it. I also cannot understand why anyone would think that nuclear energy is dangerous when the evidence says the opposite.

“The problem is that we are in a post-truth society when the scientific method is dying and government and science are melding into a fluid rolling wave of corrupt stupidity. There is so much money being made by the renewable industries from grotesque subsidies, and from carbon trading credits by some members of the World Economic Forum, that we are fighting an uphill battle.

“There are signs that the Government are beginning to recognise the absurdity of net zero, but nobody from the pseudo-science climate alarmists to the politicians want to lose face by publicly admitting that the whole climate scam is a house of cards.”

Amen to all that.