Essay by Eric Worrall
“… they worry that if the true nightmare was revealed, … everybody … would … just give up …”
Trump’s America is abandoning climate action and the fight just got harder
By Alan Kohler
…
Bulldozing the Amazon rainforest is a fitting way to mark 30 years of failure, of annual gabfests that have released colossal amounts of carbon dioxide from the mouths of the well-meaning, and burned tonnes of aviation fuel to get them there, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions not one bit.
…
Energy scientist, Vaclav Smil puts the total cost of achieving net zero by 2050 at $US444 trillion, or $US17 trillion a year for 25 years, “requiring affluent economies to spend 20 to 25 per cent of their annual GDP on the transition”.
…
So net zero by 2050 won’t happen and the increase in global temperature will not be limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels that was agreed as preferred at Paris in 2015 – nowhere near it.
…There has been systemic reticence on the part of scientists to spell out what’s actually going on, first because science is inherently uncertain, so they are always reluctant to be definitive, and second because they worry that if the true nightmare was revealed, politicians and everybody else would either refuse to believe it or just give up.
Read more: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-17/climate-change-religion-trump-zeldin-epa-wind-back-rules/105057538
…
The average temperature difference between the Aussie state capitals Melbourne and Brisbane is around 4ºC, so why isn’t everyone in Brisbane dying from climate change? How could global warming of 4ºC make Melbourne uninhabitable?
Cairns is about as much warmer than Brisbane as Brisbane is warmer than Melbourne. 4ºC warming wouldn’t even make Brisbane uninhabitable.
And of course you have prosperous and high population tropical cities like Jakarta and Singapore even closer to the equator than Cairns.
If all this isn’t enough, we have evidence from the distant past that warming is not a problem.
Our monkey ancestors also did well in a much hotter world. The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 5-8C hotter than today, was the age of monkeys. Our monkey ancestors thrived on the abundance of the hothouse PETM, and colonised much of the world, only retreating when the encroaching cold drove them from their new homes.
Fish also did pretty well during the PETM.
As for climate scientists failing to tell the truth to prevent Net Zero being abandoned, surely the time has come to stop hiding the truth and let it all out, and tell it how it is?
Net Zero is being abandoned anyway, so what do you have to lose? Please entertain us, don’t hold back – let’s hear your nightmare, let’s hear and read the predictions of your dying climate doomsday cult in all their glorious detail. Go out with a bang rather than a whimper.
It appears that the proponents of NetZero have regained their Brains.
Lets not be too hasty…
It is about which story to tell the public. Long term gigantic policy failure is not a runner and insisting on doubling down on efforts on Net Zero is not a resilient story. For those who think the world is edging to a climate cliff/tipping pount and it’s too late their story is unsellable. Propaganda can and obviously does work but needs focus. The focus is now on ‘security’ and war. The warmunistas are getting anxious seeing their funds (possibly) shifted. We who know better are watching 2 insane groups battling for supremacy. Woke is gone. Climate change might have to take a back seat f a while.
Although, European leaders seem to want to borrow piles of funds and keep their insane projects running..
Clearly, governments must bond – to individual limits – all those who still want to keep people thinking that climate is seriously (not trivially) being affected by humans.
NEED MORE BRAINS
— Return of the Living Dead
As I recall, James Hansen was claiming runaway feedback loops, and, voila!—instant Venus.
Yup. All those feedbacks that would be triggered by any warming, for any reason, at any time. And never have, proving beyond any possible doubt, that they don’t exist.
What amazes me is that intelligent, educated people can actually accept these obviously impossible theories, and never question them nor apply even the slightest amount of logic to examination of them.
Problem is that via the Media and the Public, private and Academic education systems “these obviously impossible theories, and never question them nor apply even the slightest amount of logic to examination of them. This indoctrination starts at two to three years of age.
One Saturday morning in 1974 upon wakening at 8:00 I saw my three sons watching the morning cartoons. Instead of an AD NBC showed how a Nuclear Reactor worked. This was a film where the took the video of the bombing of Easter Island, reduced it to a postage same size, and placed thes 500 – 100 videos into the mock reactor vessel. The oldest son, 7 YO, asked me “Dad, how do they get all of those bomb explosions in the reactor?” Will the Nuclear plant you are working at explode? etc., etc.,
“What amazes me is that intelligent, educated people can actually accept these obviously impossible theories”
Would an intelligent, educated person not see the contradiction in a sentence that states the “science” is uncertain, yet the “truth” is known?
“There has been systemic reticence on the part of scientists to spell out what’s actually going on, first because science is inherently uncertain, so they are always reluctant to be definitive, and second because they worry that if the true nightmare was revealed, politicians and everybody else would either refuse to believe it or just give up”.
“Definitive” would mean spelling out the range of uncertainty and the lack of long term data thereby completely defeating their own statements….
One of life’s paradoxes is the ONLY intelligent, educated people can actually accept these obviously impossible theories.
It’s similar to the saying that something is so simple only a child can do it.
I refer you to Tom Lehrer’s “New Math” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIKGV2cTgqA
Your ‘intelligent, educated people’ are like the ‘academics’. They assume that the specialists in each area of climate studies know well their own area of expertise and only expound the current, proven theories. Thus, they accept what ever the ‘climate scientists’ say, even if illogical and/or nonsensical.
Exactly my thoughts.
Exactly right. I have been saying for years now…If you want something f**ked up – get an academic to do it.
Here’s everything anyone needs to know about the Greenland Ice sheet. In the last 30 years it has lost 0.28% of its volume, <0.01% year, in 100 years at that rate it will have lost <1% of its volume. Greenland Ice Sheet thickness is cyclical. Sometime in the next 1000 years, regardless of ATM CO2 concentration, it will cycle back to getting thicker.
We have to ask ourselves who are all these “inteligent, educated people” and where did they come from? Understanding the process that created these minds is the key to dealing with this hoax. The greatest in history.
When it comes up in social media, my response to the wacky runaway “Venus” claims is now simply, “What happens on Venus stays on Venus.”
Tell ’em, “Mars has an atmosphere that’s 95%
CO2 and it’s so cold on Mars, it snows dry ice.”
Either way, don’t panic.
Venus and Mars are alright tonight. !
The temperature record of the last 1 million years suggests a much harder limit on maximum temperatures than on minimum temperatures. This is most likely due a mechanism such as Willis Eschenbach’s tropical thunderstorm “governor”.
Maximum temperature is highly likely controlled by the oceans which won’t exceed 30 degrees C. Also, the system works to cool the atmosphere with excess heat transported out. In an iceage maximum that system obviously cannot function in the same way. Because of the albedo effect the Earth has issues getting energy in and retaining it..
Over the past hundred years, annual climate-related deaths have declined by more than 97%. It would appear that the “Climate Emergency hypothesis” has been falsified.
The biggest scare of CAGW cult is catastrophic rise in sea levels due to Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melting. In reality, not much is happening to the ice and the rise is catastrophic only in their models.
“requiring affluent economies to spend 20 to 25 per cent of their annual GDP on the transition”
They are too greedy. Church tithes were 10%.
. . . and were as effective in improving the lot of those tithing as will be net-zero taxation (directly or indirectly) on the public.
From Alan’s article:”…first because science is inherently uncertain,…”
F=ma is science and the equal sign says it is not uncertain. We know how many molecules are in a mole to an exact number.
I don’t think inherently is a correct word to use. Climate science has uncertainty because we don’t know all parameters, we don’t have enough accurate historic information, or we can’t measure what we need to know with enough precision.
Sorry to break it to you
f=ma is an approximation at non relativistic speeds (aka slow speeds)
The number of molecules in a mole was changed in 2019 as were many of the old physics constants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_revision_of_the_SI)
Classical physics is wrong and has been for 100 years so be careful trusting it to much. It’s a useful approximation which is the only reason it’s still taught.
For example. Assume an engineer calculates the total volume of a spherical vessel. The engineer would us the value of “Pi” which is an approximation as Pi has been calculated to a Million places and is still considered approximate.
Worse, How do you take an indeterminate number [e.g. Pi] and determine the Square root or Square value of that number on any calculator knowing that the calculator is only accurate to 6 decimals, 8 decimals, . . . . 100 decimals, a million decimals, as in the calculation declaring that “This is the value of “Pi” to one million decimals.? ? ?
No calculation performed by today methods are absolutely correct. They are only repatable.
Worse than that, “Climate Scientists” don’t even know how many Unknown Unknowns they need to solve the calculations they are making.
Why do “Theoretical Mathematician’s get a different answer than the “Applied Mathematician’s for the same problem?”
F=ma is ‘close enough for government work’…which is to say even sending rockets almost anywhere in the Solar System except closer to the Sun than ~Mercury and even then they can calculate the impact of the Sun’s energy on the difference in the gravitational field by converting the Sun’s energy to its mass equivalent.
As for the change in constants, it was done to place them on a more ‘objective’ framework and hardly made any impact on other constants defined by the fundamental ones. I mean who wants to rely on the definition of a Kg as being the mass of a platinum-iridium rod held at STP in a lab in France! I don’t trust the french to begin with but its kind of hard to do calibrations to allow everyone else to ‘know’ they are measuring a Kg. The new definition allows anyone to calibrate anything measuring weight without having to fly to France to do it.
Classical physics isn’t wrong “in the realm of normal daily activity where it is properly applied”. In fact its used all the time all over the world on a constant basis. Car designers aren’t using QM or GR to design their cars, they use classical physics. Space-X isn’t using GR to design their rockets to send them to earth orbit, to the moon or even to Mars.
From your link:”The Avogadro constant NA is exactly 6.02214076×1023 reciprocal mole (mol−1).“
So as I said we know how many molecules are in a mole to an exact number. I will stick with my post. If you were not able to grasp the point maybe hold back the nitpicking.
The others comments have given better contexts for good science and usurbrain has given a really good one in reproducibility by others. I am not nitpicking I just hate it when people use some classical physics fairytale as “the truth”.
Whenever you see a classic science constant be careful it means it has no real basis other than to complete the fairytale for classical physics. So no Avogadro constant doesn’t really exist and don’t believe it. So what is it well it’s a number that makes classical chemistry where you are weighing normal compounds work. So it’s exact so that chemists can use it but you can’t use it in a real physical sense. Chemistry had to adapt over the last 100 years as well but they still use the old approximation and they updated the number to make there approximation better.
Navier-Stokes equation is not uncertain – but we can’t solve it. That’s where most climate uncertainty comes from.
“In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”
Is that a quote from Sheldo?
“In science, there is only physics; all the rest is stamp collecting.”
Accounts of the origin of this quote are at
Quote Origin: All Science Is Either Physics or Stamp Collecting – Quote Investigator®
As both a scientist and a philatelist, I do not think that one is much different to the other, but I am not Lord Rutherford in modern clothes. I dislike the thought that one can be used to belittle the other. Both physics and philately involve the recognition of goals that could improve with investigation, detective-like investigations of past material to assess credibility, the development of ways to test hypotheses, criteria for acceptance of “truth” an even financial gains and losses.
My stamp expert friends the Juzwin Brothers have recently advertised for sale a minor “holy grail” set of stamps for collectors to buy, but be ready to spend $50,000 Aust. This is the price for lower-quality ones whose gum has been disturbed. The cost of a similar set of Mint, Never Hinged stamps from the 2025 Brusden White catalogue is $201,250. Philately is serious.
Geoff S
KANGAROOS:
A complete set of 53 stamps,
representing all watermarks –
one of each colour and denomination.
PREMIUM QUALITY.
Mint lightly hinged.
This is our FIRST complete offering – EVER.
$49,500
Since actual human beings clearly see there is no climate crisis the “scientists” have to keep lying about it.
From the above article:
“Energy scientist, Vaclav Smil puts the total cost of achieving net zero by 2050 at $US444 trillion, or $US17 trillion a year for 25 years . . .”
Well, IMHO, Vaclav Smil’s statement is idiotic for asserting that “net zero” across the US is even remotely possible by 2050. Anyone really think we’ll have battery-powered long-range passenger and cargo aircraft or sea-crossing marine vessels by then?
As to his cost estimate: pffthptphhhtp!
Not sure where that figure came from because in the paper cited Smil says the following
“Nobody can offer a reliable estimate of the eventual cost of a worldwide energy transition by 2050. A survey of 16,000 projects in 16 countries and in 20 categories shows 91.5% of projects over $1bn have overrun and the mean overrun is 62%”
My notes of Smil’s paper do not contain the figures stated in the article
And the amount of CO2 released by attempting to manufacture all those batteries and new technology required for “net zero” will probably be more than the CO2 that would be release on a “steady as she goes” scenario.
ToldYouSo:
Here is a link to a McKinsey Corp.report on NetZero 2050: [Note: their estimate was ~$270T;
I had a link to Bloomberg NEF’s estimate (~$200T IIRC) but can’t find it. grrrrr….]
https://www.scribd.com/document/555773648/McKinsey-The-Net-Zero-Transition-What-It-Would-Cost-What-It-Could-Bring-250122
As to Smil, in 2022 he has likened attaining NetZero to being science fiction.
“It makes no sense to argue with the details of what are essentially the academic equivalents of science fiction. They start with arbitrarily set goals (zero by 2030 or by 2050) and work backward to plug in assumed actions to fit those achievements, with actual socioeconomic needs and technical imperatives being of little, or no, concern.”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/beyond-magical-thinking-time-to-get-real-about-climate-change
Either way, NetZero by 2050 is magical thinking Trump’s EPA needs to drive a wooden stake in its heart by requesting legislation to prevent the EPA from regulating CO2. It is not a pollutant.
“Energy scientist, Vaclav Smil puts the total cost of achieving net zero by 2050 at $US444 trillion, or $US17 trillion a year for 25 years,”
So is he a “scientist” or an economist with a magic ball?
The people who write this sort of tripe are either dumb or paid to do it or both
There are doubtless some true believers out there. They won’t be able to cope with the sudden collapse in trust in their prophets, people like the odious and serially wrong Mann
Others I’m sure are bemoaning the fact that they will soon see their last paycheck
The difficult we can do immediately, the impossible takes a little longer.
Climate scientists have not been systemically reticent about claiming the dangers of CAGW.
There’s going to be between 1-7 degrees of warming by 2000.
The Arctic will be ice free by 2014.
Snow will be a thing of the past.
Bigger and more powerful hurricanes are coming due to global warming.
NY will be under water due to rising sea levels.
The problem is they made numerous scary predictions that have all been wrong!
That Problem- is of course a good thing they were wrong.
The worst thing is that they believed they were right, or justified in trying to scare the world
even though the science didn’t support their cause, so they made it up.
It’s called noble cause corruption, and many are still afflicted by it, and want us
to share their misery.
No thanks, but I would look forward to a warmer future, however I believe the solar minima
story is more relevant to the future, so we are likely in for significant cooling within 5 years
that will finally put paid to AGW garbage. Then, the refrain will be “another mini -Ice Age oh dear!
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087332/quotes/?item=qt0475882
Every time I hear about some plant closure, or some power grid failure because of renewables I think about earlier in the scene:
Dr. Raymond Stantz: Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by d***less here.Walter Peck: They caused an explosion!Mayor: Is this true?Dr. Peter Venkman: Yes it’s true.[pause]Dr. Peter Venkman: This man has no d**k.Walter Peck: Jeez![Charges at Venkman]Mayor: Break it up! Hey, break this up! Break it up!Walter Peck: All right, all right, all right!Dr. Peter Venkman: Well, that’s what I heard!
geez, perfect set up and I flub the formatting…..
The scientists have refused to reveal the truth because doing so, would result in their next research grants not being funded.
The elites pushing this nonsense have almost universal control over the funding mechanisms for science. Scientists & schools that publish studies substantiating their narratives, receive funding for future research. Those that don’t, are cut off from funding.
It’s the same way for the left’s whole agenda- impact of diversity, root cause(s) of mass migration, safety/efficacy of mRNA based vaccines.
Virtually all of the science being conducted today starts with findings confirming the left’s prevailing positions and works backwards, tweaking/adjusting whatever it takes to produce the desired results.
Ah, well… but… the true face of ManBearPig is too spoooooky!
Pure, undiluted Hollywood.
What we have here is a failure to communicate climate change.
Cool Hand Luke 🙂
So net zero by 2050 won’t happen and the increase in global temperature will not be limited to the 1.5 degrees Celsius
The two things mentioned in this sentence, “net zero” and “global temperature” are totally unrelated.
The sentence is total gibberish.
Perhaps it is the huge lies they tell about CO2, that anyone can confirm are lies, and many remember from grade school that CO2 is the basis for ALL life on earth as we know it.
Look it up! CO2 is REQUIRED for ALL life on earth because it is required for photosynthesis which makes ALL of the food for for plants or animals. It also provides the oxygen in our atmosphere. Without CO2 in our atmosphere, we will all die! Did you all sleep through grade school science where they showed this? We breathe out CO2 and plants breathe it IN to release CO2 and make food for us? Look this up so you will KNOW who is lying to you.
Photosynthesis: 6CO2 + 6H2O + solar energy → C6H12O6 + 6O2
https://microbenotes.com/photosynthesis/
It is and always was a means of making money, the green scam. Gore and his carbon credits business is a prime example. His unhinged rantings affected enough idiots to part with money.
Yes, fascist NetZero is a failure! No, fascism never disappears. Expect a well promoted resurrection soon……..
I installed a ducted evaporative cooler in our house when it was built almost 30 years ago. I have found it has become less effective and had the feeling the air was not as dry in summer as it used to be.
The BoM provides some interesting data on evaporation rates over the dry continenet. per attached. My location is showing a decline in summer evaporation rate over the past 50 years. That is either, higher humidity, lower temperature, lower wind or any combination of the three. Looking at the data for the interior, reduced summer evaporation across most of the country has to be a very good thing.
Rick,
How certain are the numbers behind that map? I vaguely recall an overhaul of pan evaporimeter design maybe late 1990s, with tales of pan water loss from birds talking baths, not just evaporation. Such maps as you show are more useful when they show plausible mechanisms causing the patterns. Geoff S
It’s the same old story: if a Big Lie is promoted long enough, some people and maybe the majority will start believing it and its promoters can profit from it. Except this time people see that falling for the argument has been costing them money and they don’t see any appreciable change in the climate beyond the usual fluctuations. And when governments start withdrawing their support for unattainable goals like Net Zero because public opposition is growing, the whole mirage fades from existence.
It’s always “worse than we thought.”
It does seem fairly obvious that a lot of climate scientists do indeed fail to tell the truth – mostly those engaged in the ongoing propaganda effort to convince voters in western democracies that anything that improves their lives must be inherently bad and should be abandoned ASAP.
Should any of the usual propagandists suddenly discover they wish to be redeemed from this everlasting mission and restore some semblance of honesty here are a few starting points.
I wouldnt trust Alan Kholer as far as I could throw him.
I sent Alan Kholer a graph of the satellite temperature record revealing that El Niños cause the warming, and for many years there is no warming at all caused by CO2. Had no reply or thanks.
I see we have the usual claims about the Great Barrier Reef dying. Um, no the GBR is as far south as you can get coral to grow, the vast majority of the world’s reefs are nearer the equator, where I believe the water is hotter (based on n=5 experiences, using my toes).
here’s the distribution of coral reefs
and sea temps are here https://manoa.hawaii.edu/exploringourfluidearth/physical/density-effects/ocean-temperature-profiles