Essay by Eric Worrall
As Britain endures extreme cold and near miss blackouts, apparently now is the right time for an English scientist to tell everyone how hot it is.
My new dark red climate stripe for 2024 shows it’s the hottest year yet
Published: January 10, 2025 10.00pm AEDT
Ed Hawkins
Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading…
These “warming stripes”, adopted around the world as a symbol of climate awareness, action and ambition, have just been updated to include a new dark red stripe for 2024. It was a colour that I had to add for the first time last year when 2023 shattered the previous records.
No one experiences the global average temperature directly. But we can use the same approach to represent how we have lived through our own climate experience, locally. The UK had it’s fourth-warmest year on record. Other countries, such as Germany, had their warmest year on record.
…
Well done humanity. For it is us who have caused this rapid warming of the planet, and the devastating consequences for people and ecosystems that are so visible today and every day. Many extreme weather events have been made even worse by our reliance on burning fossil fuels, causing misery around the world.
Read more: https://theconversation.com/my-new-dark-red-climate-stripe-for-2024-shows-its-the-hottest-year-yet-246914
…
The article goes into all the bad things Ed Hawkins thinks global warming has caused, such as the Los Angeles fire. Strangely Ed forgot to include Britain’s current extreme cold snap in his list of climate disasters.
Given a choice between affordable home heating or climate action, I’m guessing most Brits right now would choose the affordable home heating option.
If an extreme cold snap with near zero wind and solar can occur at 1.5C global warming, it can obviously occur at 2C global warming or even 3C global warming. In fact, if Ed’s prediction of more extreme weather is correct, that could make cold snaps such as Britain is currently enduring more likely or more extreme.
Of course, given the failure of climate models to predict the current bump in global temperature, there are clearly substantial climate forcings which have not been captured by the models. So it is anyone’s guess where global temperature will go next.
Let us hope Britain doesn’t vote their way out of a survivable future, by embracing so much global warming action they all freeze to death. Because Britain’s ongoing effort to sabotage their own industrial competitiveness and energy affordability is having no impact on India and China’s determination to lift their people out of grinding poverty, by providing low cost fossil fuel electricity as quickly as they can build the coal plants.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg52543v6rmo the irony of this story is that Norway has a not insignificant presence in the North Sea gas/oilfields. Their electricity is primarily sourced from hydroelectric power sources, but they still have natural gas and coal fired power stations, the latter uses native coal..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Norway
This is the wrong thing to be debating. There are two pieces of the climatist agenda. The first is to argue that there is a climate crisis caused by human CO2 emissions. The second is to argue that moving the West to heat pumps, EVs, wind and solar electricity generation – the whole Net Zero agenda, the closing down of oil, gas and coal in the West – is a sensible and effective remedy for it.
The activist stance, deliberately or not, is to focus on the most opaque aspect of the agenda. It seems very doubtful that there is any trend in global temperatures which is cause for alarm, but the arguments on both sides are quite technical and detailed.
However, it doesn’t really matter to policy. Whether there is a crisis or not, whether human CO2 emissions will cause one or not, its not important. If you are an activist its something you will want to concentrate debate on, because the second part of the agenda is full of holes.
Intermittency means that its impossible to move to net zero in power generation. Or, its possible, perhaps, but not while keeping anything like current standards of living and electricity consumption. Think reducing electricity demand by 50 – 75%, and making supply intermittent.
And the state of global opinion and policy outside the West means that doing it, for those countries that have shown any willingness to try, will have zero effect on global temperatures.
Don’t argue about whether climate sensitivity is 1, 2 or 3C. Instead ask, if the activist agenda is successfully implemented in the West, how much difference, on the theory, and taking into account the actual policies of China, India, Indonesia and the ROW, will this make to global temperatures?
The West probably does 25% of global emissions and falling. China, India etc do the rest and are rising, and have no intention of pausing or stopping.
The thing to focus on is that the activists are trying to get us all to do something which is impossible, which costs huge amounts to attempt, and which even if done is totally futile on their own theories.
Its part of a pattern of Left demands to do things of purely symbolic value about what are claimed to be real problems. But its very prevalent in climate. As for instance the mad aim of eliminating greenhouse gases from of all things, anesthetics in UK hospitals. By how many degrees will that lower global temperatures? Don’t ask. How much effect will the UK move to EVs have? Don’t ask.
This more than anything else is what should persuade us that climatism is a religious cult. The demands are that we adopt energy policies which are impossible sucessfully to implement, and which if implemented would have no effect on the supposed problem.
By analogy to religions, don’t spend time arguing over the evidence for their founders being or not being real historical persons. Instead ask, do you want to live in societies which accept their teachings? In the end, whether they were real people or not makes no difference. What counts is the validity of the teachings in their own right.
Perhaps a more accurate description of him would be “pseudo-scientist”
this rapid warming of the planet
Just how much warmer is the earth now, compared to the eleventh warmest year on record? Does anybody notice?
Ah, University of Reading….one of the low grade institutes that pump out global warming propaganda.