Essay by Eric Worrall
“… What people mean when they say they don’t believe human-induced climate change … they fear what dealing with it might mean for them personally …”
Climate change scepticism isn’t real
To deny the existence of global warming, or its human causes, is an untenable position to take and hard to believe, argues Alex Stevensson
…
What people mean when they say they don’t believe human-induced climate change is real is actually that they fear what dealing with it might mean for them personally, and that they would rather do nothing.
If you own a few classic cars, work for a petrochemicals company, enjoy travelling to Asia twice a year, gorge on steaks twice a week, or any number of other scenarios, this is not an unreasonable reaction: “If I can convince myself, and at least some people around me, that this problem doesn’t exist, I might just be able to live out the rest of my life in blissful ignorance.”
This logic could probably work for most of us – and certainly for someone as elderly as Mr Trump. But sometimes ignorance isn’t bliss. Sometimes it’s nothing short of deliberate sabotage of the future.
…
Read more: https://www.luxtimes.lu/world/climate-change-scepticism-isnt-real/104965758.html
What a profoundly ignorant article.
Do we affect the climate? Of course we do. Cutting down trees impacts water cycles. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions also likely affect the climate, though since the CO2 band in the atmosphere is already saturated, adding more CO2 likely has limited impact.
But this isn’t the only viewpoint in the climate skeptic community. If Alex Stevensson had bothered to do some research, he might have discovered there is a range of views, from people like myself who think CO2 has almost no effect, to people who fully accept IPCC predictions of global warming, but question the economic calculations of estimated impacts.
Had Alex made an effort, he would have learned that far from being dangerously warm, the world is currently locked in one of the coldest periods of the Late Cenozoic Ice Age, that permanent polar ice is not the normal state of Earth’s historical climate, and that life thrived in past warm periods.
Alex might have even learned even if the world warms, there is no evidence that warmer conditions hurt nature. He might have learned that our monkey ancestors first emerged in the fossil record during one of the warmest periods of the last hundred million years, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, when global temperatures were 5-8C hotter than today. Far from being harmed by such warmth, our monkey ancestors colonised much of the planet, feasting on the abundance the extreme warmth of the PETM provided, spreading across Eurasia and Northern Europe, only retreating when the return of colder conditions drover them from their their new homes. If a monkey ancestor with a brain the size of a matchbox could thrive in much warmer conditions than today, we humans could certainly cope.
Most of all, if Alex had bothered to do his job as a reporter and get out and talk to people, rather than wasting his reader’s time by airing his nonsensical personal prejudices, he would have learned the real fakes are those who push unfounded fear, uncertainty and doubt, that the climate fear mongers are no different to the Covid fear mongers, who damaged our national economies and our children’s mental health with months or in some cases years of completely unnecessary enforced social isolation at home.
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At least the paper classified this tosh as “OPINION”.
The IPCC on the other hand . . .
Alex…
To spend Trillions, as the world already has over the last 30 years, tilting at Windmills and Solar Panels (weather dependent unreliable energy sources), and having ZERO effect on Temperature, Storminess, Hurricane intensity, Droughts, Floods or even the ever constant increase in CO2 levels is naught but a fools errand. To profess the madness continue makes one sound even more Foolish or downright insane.
not to mention that the vast majority of CO2 in the atmosphere is naturally occurring (I’ve read as high as 95%) which can’t be removed and what could be is so tiny as a % of the atmosphere that it defies common sense to believe that it could affect the weather in any way
Calling out the liars is untenable for the liars.
that is why the UN wants to up censorship
Is Luxembourg real?
Well, I have never seen Luxembourg and Lichtenstein in the same room. You decide…
What about the Duchy of Grand Fenwick?
Luxembourg is smaller than sea level rise – so you decide .
Her most famous citizen is former EU Reichsführer Juncker ,
who set the standards for climate science:
” When things get serious you have to lie “
“Do we affect the climate? Of course we do. Cutting
down trees impacts water cycles. Anthropogenic CO2
emissions also likely affect the climate, though since
the CO2 band in the atmosphere is already saturated,
adding more CO2 likely has limited impact.”
____________________________________________________
Yes indeed, but is that impact positive or negative?
Here’s my list of the negative impacts of increasing CO2:
There isn’t any.
Beware the plants. Plants outweigh animals by 1000 to 1. Humans are dramatically improving the conditions for abundant plant life. If we are not watchful they will retake the land we occupy.
Just 20 years ago, I could look out of our house and see to the distant horizon all full of tiled roofs with occasional sealed roads. Now all I see is tree tops.
It has got so bad for Australia that the continent is losing its claim to be the dry continent. Every year now it looks more like the Amazon. So much moisture that lows persist over central Australia causing rain depressions to develop over land rather than cyclones forming offshore and dumping over north Australia in mid to late summer.
Yes, we’ve had a few relatively dry summers these last 5 years. When I say dry, I mean the 20cm per day for a week rains haven’t been around. The winters weren’t as dry as usual (normally zero rain for months).
This year seems to be a dry spring, so I expect a good deluge. I think it’s because of the development of La Niña this season, but I’m not a meteorologist or anything. I’m definitely looking forward to next door’s lovely scuplted garden (was bush before he bought it and ripped it all out) getting washed away 😀
Southern Queensland is taking a pretty heavy battering already, though….
Beware the ferns
https://youtu.be/zc7qJE9Nzo8?si=-WGhkhgGLJMeeBVO
Triffids. Don’t forget the Triffids
BTW, we are having an odd wet late summer/fall here in the California Mojave Desert and Southern Sierra. My desert plot is usually bare as a slate in November but there are … grass and weeds out there. The whole place is green, well, our kind of green. We just got another 3 inches! If this keeps up it’s going to start getting lush, with cactus and scraggly trees like the Sonora Desert. At least the bunnies have plenty to eat and aren’t going at the wiring of my cars.
The Abbo’s used to set fires to clear the scrub. Your government made it illegal. Now you get runaway tree-growth and intermittent wildfires that cost lives. Nothing to do with rising CO2 levels, blame the stupidity of politicians.
“ Humans are dramatically improving the conditions for abundant plant life. If we are not watchful they will retake the land we occupy.”
The blackberries are already taking over my back yard.
As Steve asks, is the impact positive or negative? One man’s life saving rain is another’s flood. And so on.
There are no minimum changes to a chaotic system which may result in completely unforeseen results.
If you don’t accept chaos theory, Richard Feynman derives the same conclusion from quantum mechanics.
In the meantime, adding CO2 to air does not make thermometers hotter. Anybody who says so is assuming that their audience is at least as ignorant and gullible as themselves.
Alex has a bachelor’s degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Gloucestershire and speaks English, Icelandic and French but apparently has never heard of the straw man fallacy, or maybe he has and uses it intentionally to deceive his naive readership.
Or he could be a sincere, but very thinly, devoted to his faith in Climate Change, and sees no need to learn anything about his faith, despite a bigoted view of anyone who does not agree.
I agree. Priests are invariably sincere about their cults regardless of how irrational they may be.
Dear Alex, it is important to first understand your own argument before thinking you understand the other side. Try harder..
People who don’t believe in climate change have 0 fear dealing with it,
but they fear the ever increasing tyranny that is being introduced by using climate change as justification.
“An untenable position to take?!”
What an arrogant ass. There is nothing untenable about not embracing hypothetical bullshit with religious fervor.
The only “sabotaging of the future” is the energy (and therefore general) poverty that the Climate Fascists want to inflict on humanity to “save it.”
From AN IMPROVING CLIMATE.
Once upon a time there was a lot of uncertainty but we had to pretend there wasn’t for your own good folks-
Shock admission from top health expert over state’s response to Covid pandemic
So let that be a lesson to you.
This fella doesn’t know what he is talking about.
When in doubt ask the experts-
‘Thick-headed’ bureaucrats dodge questions on legalities around Palestinian recognition
It’s what you pay them for handsomely to get certainty.
I think the article is right. And as to confirm it, it is countered by a nonsensical argument..
The “skeptical side” is acting like a defense lawyer on behalf of someone they consider guilty. I mean you still have to put up a defense, but it will all be about distraction, bad arguments and a plea for reasonable doubt. There is no attempt to prove the innocence of the defendant.
What I am doing is very different. I am not a defender, but a CSI. I did not start out with a defensive strategy and if the defendant is guilty, so be it. I only collected the evidence and based on that evidence, I know the accusation is unjustified.
But there is one interesting twist. The “critical side” is so convinced the evidence would go against their interest, they just don’t want to know.
Watch the Dr. Will Happer video I linked to understand what I meant by “The CO2 band in the atmosphere is already saturated”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2nhssPW77I
Will Happer is a Physics professor whose understanding of atmospheric physics is so profound he predicted and invented an entirely new artificial atmospheric phenomenon, the laser guide star. So someone who is worth listening to when he says the CO2 band is saturated.
https://dof.princeton.edu/people/william-happer
Happer’s understanding is a long shot from what it takes..
Nonsense words from someone who has no understanding of who Happer is.
You should never argue with idiots.
He also believes that adding CO2 to air makes thermometers hotter! He’s wrong. Newton believed that he had calculated the size of the temple of New Jerusalem, and that the world would end in 2060 (it might, I suppose).
Will Happer and Sir Isaac Newton are obviously quite intelligent. Their intelligence doesn’t prevent them from being ignorant and gullible in some areas.
And you base your “insights” on what???
Sure, true of all humans- but it’s worth taking seriously those skills they are recognized to be expert at- and less so for their other opinions.
So what did Happer/Wijngaarden “discover”?
a) CO2 forcing is about 3W/m2
b) WVF is only 0.7 to 0.9W/m2, depending on altitude
They simply read the data from hitran. Anyone can do that, also with free modtran and you’ll get the same results. Go to modtran, link below, pick the “U.S. Standard” scenario, double CO2 and check the difference it makes in “Upward IR Heat Flux”. It is about 3W/m2.
What were their shortcommings?
a) They did not account for overlaps with clouds. Then “consensus” CO2 forcing is not the delta OLR, but the sum of “fluxes” at the tropopause, both up and down. To attain that, you will also need to model the stratospheric temperature change. Eventually you would even have to consider the lapse rate effects within the troposphere, reducing CO2 forcing, something even “consensus science” fails to do. Of course you would also want to critically discuss said flux approach.
b) WVF as claimed by “consensus science” is unrelated to radiative transfer models. That would be a thing to discuss. Then WVF actually consists of components, WVF as such plus LRF (lapse rate feedback). Radiative transfer models can be helpful in analyzing that, but you will need to project lapse rate effects onto the data. On the other side, the actual source for consensus WVF is the observed dOLR/dTs relation, which is then used as a proxy. This approach is nonsense and gives the false(!) impression of a positive WVF – great if you want to falsify “the science”.
Happer/Wijngaarden did nothing the like because they did not know. What they published was at best entry level, without any impact
https://climatemodels.uchicago.edu/modtran/
Radiative “theory” only. There is FAR more than radiation within the Earth’s atmosphere.
The effect of enhanced atmospheric CO2 on temperature or climate, if any at all…
… is like a flea on an elephants rear end.
Immeasurably small… which is why it has never been measured.
Word salad.
I mean really, what gives you the confidence to claim anything if you know nothing? Don’t you understand I can smell incompetence 10 miles against the wind? Who are you trying to fool?
When you go against the wind.. you know what blows back to you, don’t you !!
“Saturation” is often misunderstood. People commonly mean any of three different things when they refer to saturation — and most of those people seem to assume everyone else means whatever they mean.
Prof. Happer cleared up my own confusion about this by explaining what astrophysicists and scientists doing radiative transfer calculations mean by “saturated.” He directed me to this short paper:
https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967Obs….87..233G (Gussmann, 1967)
Excerpt:
(Greenhouse gases in Earth’s atmosphere create “Fraunhoffer lines,” which are the dark lines in an emitting body’s observed emission spectrum caused by absorption by radiatively active gases between source and observer.)
By that definition, the CO2 level is already far past the point of saturation.
A second definition is that CO2’s absorption of LW IR is “saturated” if you cannot “see” emissions from the surface of the Earth from outer space at 15 µm (where CO2 absorbs and emits most strongly). Even by that definition CO2 is already saturated.
But some people think that saying CO2’s effect is “saturated” means that adding more CO2 does not affect temperatures, at all. By that definition CO2 is not saturated. Not quite, anyhow.
Regarding Prof. Happer’s invention of the Sodium Laser Guide Star…
Astronomer Ethan Siegel called it, “perhaps the most spectacular, revolutionary advance in ground-based astronomy since the invention of photography.”
CO2 forcing is logarithmic, which should not be that hard to understand. Putting a different name on it and calling it “saturated” is pointless. But then doing as if this was opposing the “consensus position” is simply deceiving.
Actually, path length calculations based on measurements have shown that absorption in that band levels out around 280-300ppm.
There is actually no such thing as “CO2 forcing”, that is made up “climate” term… what they really mean is “absorption”
Atmospheric CO2 doesn’t “force” anything.
I know, there is endless incompetent stuff out there done by people with Kruger-Dunning syndromes.
I just wrote a glossary entry for “saturation,” do I need to write one for “forcing,” too?
Oh, wait. I already did:
https://sealevel.info/glossary.html#radfor
“Saturation” and “radiative forcing” are both terms of art. You don’t have to like the definitions, but it’s way too late to change them. That paper† about “saturation” which I cited is 58 years old. This paper about “radiative forcing” is 46 years old:
Stephens GL and Webster PJ (1979). “Sensitivity of Radiative Forcing to Variable Cloud and Moisture.” J Atmos Sci, 36(8), pp.1542-1556. https://doi.org/10.1175/1520-0469(1979)036<1542:SORFTV>2.0.CO;2
The fact that CO2’s radiative forcing is logarithmically diminishing is not an intrinsic property of CO2. It is because it is saturated, because there’s so much of it in the atmosphere. If there were only a few ppbv of CO2 in the air it would not be saturated, and its radiative forcing would be linear (proportional to the CO2 concentration).
†Uh oh, I see that the (Gussman, 1967) link in my original comment got scrambled. Sorry about that! Here’s a working link:
Gussman, 1967
“I think the article is right”
I think the article is a load of self-opinionated scientifically empty gibberish.
With a grain of truth..
No, absolutely ZERO truth about anything.
Baseless speculation backed by abject ignorance.
Some 99.94% or more of the 15μm CO2 band is attenuated within 10 or so metres of the surface.
Yes, it is as saturated as it gets !!
https://youtu.be/JtvRVNIEOMM?t=1270
You dont understand..
YAWN. !!
Do you understand what is even being measured that shows an increase? It’s not actual temperatures, but ‘anomalies’. Peter Taylor, environmentalist, ecologist, advisor to the UK government on renewables. Was all in on the AGW theory, until he decided to review the science himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdybHS0XhZg
See what he has to say about anomalies from around 13 min 50 sec, and pay attention to the GISS graph of actual temperatures.
Your referenced article is excellent. I have saved it in my climate change folder.
That is not the issue..
“Had Alex made an effort …”
There’s the problem in one. Making an effort to think is the last thing statists want any individuals to do.
Yep – they seem to expect the peasants to make the effort and sacrifice, while the elites fly to climate conferences and dictate to the peasants what is in their own best interests.
My employer arranged “river and trees” team building exercises for the employees, but not the officers, the very ones who most needed to understand that teams work together, more or less voluntarily — not as a team of horses with them cracking the whip. This nutter needs to learn that too.
As usual.. Science credentials.. NIL !!!
“Sometimes it’s nothing short of deliberate sabotage of the future.”
Yes, that is EXACTLY what the climate change agenda is. !!
“What people mean when they say they don’t believe human-induced climate change is real is actually that they fear what dealing with it might mean for them personally…”
What Bovex statement!
There is no measured scientific evidence that human released CO2 has any effect on the climate whatsoever. Period
Warming by enhanced atmospheric CO2 has never been observed or measured anywhere on the planet.
Yes, there are small localised Urban and land change effects, but that is NOT what this clueless scientifically uneducated twit means by “human-induced climate change”
POTUS Trump is beginning to understand that the blood sucking press feeding off taxpayers around the world are radical left organs of the UN globalist movement. They are killing their hosts.
To that end he has called their BBC to account over his character assassination they call news. So deeply seated is the sick view of Trump that they actually believe that he is being petty when he seeks damages for the harm they do to his character. In their view, what right has a lying, womanising demagogue got to claim his character has been damaged by some slight editing. Their own jaundiced reporting has given them the false view that his character is already in the toilet.
I only know one person who has met Trump. I have great respect for that individual and I know he has great respect for Trump as a person and business man. It is an indictment on these radical left media groups that they have zero integrity and think that is the way of the world.
It sickens me that some smarmy, all-knowing Alex Stevensson has any idea what I think about Climate Change™:
I’d bet that even the staunchest opponents of climate action – including Trump – are probably just as convinced by the science as the rest of us are.
I will take that bet on for Alex’s entire wealth because I know what I know and this dimwit has no idea what I know about climate.
The article has a link for “Feedback” down the bottom. It jumps to an email. I have told Alex what I think of his foolish article and the bet he would certainly lose.. :
Good for you. That’s the only way this twit will be exposed to views contrary to his own.
But meanwhile we enjoy the schadenfreude. By all appearances COP 30 has been and will be a disaster for the participants as well as an expensive and dirty disaster for them personally. They can rest easy knowing that their useless conference resulted in bulldozing down thousands of hectares of rain forest.
But what about COP 31 in 2026? Google AI has this to say about it:
The location for COP31 (the 2026 UN Climate Change Conference) has not been finalized, but Australia and Turkey are in a competitive bid to host it. If Australia’s bid is successful, the primary venue will likely be the Adelaide Convention Centre in Adelaide, Australia, which would be a joint effort with the Pacific.
Assuming Ozonia’s a.k.a. Australia’s bid is declared the winner, can we expect Rick Will to attend the conference as an observer?
Where is Musk when you need him? He can offer to host it virtually in Adelaide via SpaceX and the logons get one tweet each and Grok can summarize it. Cost each tweeter one year’s subscription for the week for SpaceX and the profits go to subsidising Adelaide’s power bills. That orta givem a warm fuzzy.
Unless you’re a canary, there are no tweets.
It could not happen to a nicer bunch of blood suckers.
Years ago, as a large industrial facilities manager, I learnt that functioning toilets was as important as loading ships. I was told that if you cannot sh!t, you cannot eat and you die. I have heard that taking a dump in the Amazon has some issues for the assembled masses.
I sense the motivation being constrained.
I suspect the problem in the Amazon is unanticipated overuse of the toilet facilities, thanks to food providers cutting some corners. Or that typhoid fever I mentioned in a previous article, which I sincerely hope nobody has caught. Having once been infected with Typhoid myself, I can authoritatively say that fever can kill you – especially if the fact someone hasn’t left their room in a few days gets overlooked in the confusion.
Agreed. Then there’s this. The more miserable they are the less inclined they will be to do this again.The discomfort of the enemy is your friend.
Reading anything related to “the climate” anymore is a waste of time, but the worst part is that the endless amount of slop out there is being gobbled up by AI as “truth”. Every Wikipedia article that mentions climate when dealing with Earth’s history automatically blames it on CO2. Not a mention can be made without it. Ditto for nearly all weather-related news. The worship of The Great Control Knob is so total that it surpasses obsession.
I am absolutely certain that climate change is real and ongoing. The skepticism is whether humans are significantly affecting the climate and I think the answer is no.
It always was, it always will be. I believe in ice ages.
A variation of the insufferably arrogant line spouted by some overly-religious types I’ve encountered – “You’re just saying you’re an atheist because you hate God.” Sheer forking hubris.
‘Climate Change skepticism’ is a suitably ill-defined term, isn’t it?
Skepticism is simply a default setting of not believing what people trying to game a particular system tell you is gospel truth (another dodgy term, since the Gospels were selected at political conferences in preference to other submissions, so proving they are absolutely accurate truth is way beyond historical archaeologists).
I am skeptical that humans are the primary drivers of ‘dangerous global warming’.
I don’t doubt that climate has changed regularly over geological time, has changed significantly in both warming and cooling directions on multiple occasions since the time some folks tell us that a chap called Jesus called a bunch of Middle Eastern money-men ‘unsuitable people to be in religious temples’ etc etc.
I don’t doubt that, in the UK, winters in the 1940s, the 1960s and 1980s, were significantly cooler than those in the 1950s, the 1970s and the 1990s onwards.
I do challenge the concept that current temperatures in the USA have been ‘the hottest on record’ (those having been in the 1930s).
I do state that I am more interested in deforestation than I am in carbon dioxide levels going up right now. That may change if humans show signs of not adapting to carbon dioxide levels approaching 1000ppm (when many plants grow far more healthily than at current levels).
I am highly skeptical of trying to extrapolate temperature changes into radical changes of all kinds of policies concerning agriculture, transportation, power production.
What I am most skeptical about is self-righteous busybodies on the make and on the take telling everyone else to change their lives radically when they are going to carry on their own lives of giddy pleasure travelling by air transcontinentally etc etc.
There’s nothing like a global gathering of priests actually worshipping the admonitions of their ‘green gods’ and doing serious penance when they fail to adhere to the strictures they demand to impose on their congregations…..
Since the US Navy sets the maximum level of CO2 on its submarines somewhere around 5000ppm, and commercial greenhouses enhance CO2 concentrations to around 1200ppm, it would seem we are already sufficiently adapted to live with much higher levels.
its the Marxist concept of ‘false consciousness’. The working class fails to see their true interests and so do not support socialist revolution, its because they have been hoodwinked by the evil capitalists, so they have to be forced to see and act on their real interests.
Alex still needs to learn a lot. In particular that he can’t read my mind and know what I ‘really’ think.
A perfect practitioner of the Precautionary Principle. If something might possibly happen, then prepare for the eventuality right now.
Repent your sins, the world is ending, the sandwich board carried by the man said. I didn’t and the world didn’t. Ho, hum.
“Do we affect the climate? Of course we do. Cutting down trees impacts water cycles.”
Minimally, when done right.
Steaks twice a week? Poor boy. My Porsche collection has nothing to do with the weather.
It doesn’t matter how many cars you own. You can still only drive one at a time.
It doesn’t matter how many cars you own. You can still only drive one at a time.
Somehow your double post about only driving one car at a time, works
There needs to be – especially in re to unsupported / unsupportable climate change claims – a means to prominently display red tags indicating “BULL SHIT” … and automatic removal from the internet…. etc.