To much fanfare and glitz we had final confirmation that the climate is happening.
The media went nuts - the hottest first week of July since the Big Bang - or something like that.
It didn’t last too long and for the last week or so I’ve had to put my sweatshirt on a few times because I was getting a tad chilly - in the middle of the worst climate cataclysm since the climate first learned to cataclysm. I think Mr Climate needs to go back to cataclysm school. It’s not doing it right.
As John Dee reported1 the data record for central England was a little more understated. Us Brits traditionally get excited by the weather, but the British weather itself remains typically reserved. That deadly and cataclysmic week of July came in at number 595 in the “hottest week league table” counting all weeks from around 1870 (about 7,500 of them).
So much for me being able to grow mangoes, then. Hmmp.
If you’re anything like me you will be thoroughly sick of hearing the word “climate”. Six billion Gretas could be spontaneously combusting all over the planet because of the “climate”. Roads could be melting. Planes, trains and automobiles could be oozing into molten slag, and King Charles’ fingers could be swelling even more - and I simply wouldn’t give a flying fornication2.
I’ve had enough of the nonsense
The “climate” is changing? Is it? What’s THE climate then?
The climate where I live in East Anglia in the UK is a bit different to the climate in Manchester where my mum is.
But, apparently, the world has something called “the climate” and, trust us, it’s changing - and not for the better. If we don’t catapult ourselves back into the Dark Ages we’re all going to die, horribly. And won’t anyone think of the polar bears?
Jebus Horatio Christ on a jet-powered skateboard, the media messaging on “the climate” seems to be aimed at an educationally sub-normal 3 year old. At least with covid they treated us as if we might have been 5 years old.
I’ve lost count of the number of psychotic articles I’ve seen which are geared towards making me fearful for “the climate”. In Australia a while back, for example, some idiot politician claimed that “climate change” was leading to a rise in domestic violence - and that’s just one from a loooooooong list of climate crazy.
I am, apparently, supposed to treat this kind of “reporting” as if it were serious - and not just an example of someone taking the piss.
I’m beginning to wonder if they’re ramping it up this much in order to make us reject it all. It’s so over the top, so surreal, that a lot of people must surely now be more sceptical than before?
I suppose in a strict technical sense I am a climate denier. The world does not have a climate. There are lots of regions that have different climates. But the problem is a bit more involved than that because “climate change”, or crisis, or emergency, or whatever codewords get used, is a shorthand for a very specific set of interconnected beliefs.
The core tenets of this faith system are the following :
(a) the world is getting warmer
(b) this is a bad thing
(c) this has been caused by human activity (specifically carbon dioxide production)
(d) it constitutes a climate “crisis” or “emergency”
(e) it can only be halted or reversed by achieving something called net-zero
(f) so-called ‘renewable’ energy sources (solar and wind primarily) are going to meet all of our future energy requirements
(g) this is “settled” science with 97% consensus amongst ‘climate’ scientists
You could probably add in another one to do with faith in the various climate models that are used, but I’ll comment on that later.
Of these core elements of faith I think only (a) has any validity. I think the world is currently in a period of warming.
But even this statement cannot be allowed to stand without some examination. What does it mean to use a single number (a temperature ‘anomaly’) to characterize the temperature of the entire globe?
In case you haven’t noticed, the planet is quite sizeable with a large variety of, erm, climates. What is a single number, this temperature anomaly, supposed to be telling me about this vast and complex system? That’s before we even get into the niceties of the specifics of how that single number might be arrived at.
When you have any significantly fluctuating quantity - that varies in both location and time - it’s going to be quite a task to properly ‘represent’ the totality of that dynamical behaviour with a single number. This previous sentence is known in the technical literature as “an understatement”.
Here’s a great example of the kind of thing “scientists” sometimes do. This is a graph claiming to show a relationship between cognitive function and BMI. Us fatties, according to the authors, are cognitively impaired.
The authors draw in the helpful straight line here - to demonstrate that blobby folk are dim. It’s analogous to using a single number to describe the ‘temperature’ of the world.
We’re going to throw caution to the wind and accept the ‘straight line’ on the scatterplot of the world’s temperature and say, yes, the world is warming up a bit.
This, according to article of faith (b), is supposed to be a bad thing. How so? What is the ‘right’ temperature for the planet? Or more accurately, what value of this single temperature anomaly number for the entire globe is the “correct” one for the planet?
Nobody, of course, can actually answer that question. It’s a meaningless question anyway because, as I think I have mentioned, the planet is a bit bigger than a snooker ball and there is a large range of climate conditions in which human life can (and does) thrive. The Western media will warn us of people in the UK having their brains vaporized (or some such nonsense) in the hot Summer weather whilst those same denizens head off on their summer holidays to places that are 10-20 degrees warmer than the average beach in the UK. Presumably all of the locals in these far-flung, and hotter, places are walking around with gas in their skulls.
Like I said - messaging for the educationally sub-normal 3 year old.
The next one, article of faith (c), is the biggie. It’s the statement of belief that it’s us humans wot ‘ave dun it with our reckless over-production of Carbon Dioxide.
Even if we suspend most of our critical faculties and accept the ‘legitimacy’ of using a single number to characterize the ‘temperature’ of an entire planet you can look back at the historical ‘data’3 to see if there has been any notable correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and this single parameter.
If you look at very long time scales there is little correlation evident. If you look at shorter timescales, the correlation between CO2 and this ‘temperature’ seems to be impossibly good - it’s quite uncanny
The shorter time graph here suggests an extraordinary level of correlation between atmospheric CO2 and this single temperature parameter (here scaled down for just the Antarctic - but you see a similar correlation when looking at the ‘world’ temperature anomaly). I’m somewhat sceptical of this because it suggests that this single ‘temperature’ parameter of something massively complex (the ‘climate’), with many known factors influencing it, is almost entirely driven by CO2 levels. Hmmmmm. My suspicion is that the same assumptions and ‘models’ have been used to derive the 2 charts here (these are not direct measurements after all, but inferred from other datasets).
Article of faith (d) proclaims that this human-induced warming (the (a) and (c) articles of faith) is not only bad (article of faith (b)) but it is an emergency. It’s a freakin crisis we tell ya. Even the models, which have never actually produced anything like an accurate prediction (you know, the kind of thing we expect of models - that they, at some point, actually agree with observation), say that the ‘temperature’ of the world - that single number again - is going to rise by a degree over the next century.
Well, that doesn’t sound too bad does it? Ah, you see, that’s where you’re wrong because we’re well on the way to a tipping point. This is some imagined point in time where we have created some horrible positive feedback loop and the world turns into a raging inferno. Bit like all of those runaway tipping points we had during covid where if we didn’t lockdown and wear 17 masks several billion people would die before Christmas in an exponential catastrophe.
Before I overdo the sarcasm, I will say that the ability of our atmosphere to trap heat has been absolutely essential for the flourishing of life on Earth. Without greenhouse gases we’d, basically, be fucked. The question is really whether it is possible that human activity is destroying the balance sufficiently to cause too much heat retention.
Article of faith (e) relies on article of faith (c) and the ‘correlation’ plot above illustrates the issue nicely. The ‘data’ strongly suggests the single parameter of CO2 concentration is acting like a very effective ‘volume control’ knob and that by adjusting it up or down we can affect the single world parameter of the temperature anomaly. I just don’t believe it. It would be extraordinary, if true.
All of the many interacting and significant factors that influence the ‘climate’ can be boiled down to just ONE (CO2 concentration) and represented by a single temperature offset anomaly number for the entire world? Might I suggest a degree or two of scepticism is in order when assessing this claim?
Having prostrated ourselves before the altar of climate panic and mumbled our prayers to Greater Turdberg, the Norse Goddess of Climate Alarmism, we are in a position to accept articles of faith (e) and (f).
No more burning of nasty fossil fuels for us - all of our energy requirements will come from the wind and the sun. And our energy requirements are gargantuan - and that’s before we help those who are relatively energy poor and who aspire to the same luxuries of lifestyle that we enjoy in the ‘developed’ world.
It’s a bit of a fantasy for several reasons. Yes, wind and solar can create useful energy - but it is not reliable energy. It is a useful extra to the energy supply which must rely on fossil fuels (or nuclear) if it is to achieve on-demand reliability. We could build as many wind and solar farms as we like - festoon the entire planet with them - and we still couldn’t guarantee a source of enough energy as and when it is needed.
We’d need an entire ‘back-up’ system, based on fossil fuels (or nuclear) to guarantee supply.
It also ignores the fact that quite a lot of our energy requirement depends on the direct conversion of a high-density energy source (like oil) to generate power or heat. We need to move stuff, quite a lot of stuff, about from place to place for one thing - and that simply isn’t going to happen with batteries.
But is it cheaper? No, of course it isn’t. Without the massive subsidies and the playing field hugely tilted against fossil fuels there’s no way these ‘green’ technologies could compete. There is a reason why China is continuing to build coal-fired power stations - because they make better economic sense. If our markets weren’t so rigged in the ‘west’ no one would be investing in ‘green’ energy at all - at least not from an economic perspective.
And our final article of faith (g) is that the “science” is settled. 97% of the world’s ‘climate’ scientists agree! Bollocks. There is a high level of consensus that the world’s climate is changing and ‘warming’ according to the measure of this single temperature offset anomaly number - but there is not such wide agreement on article of faith (c), that human production of CO2 is the direct cause of this, and there is even less agreement that this, according article of faith (d), constitutes a crisis.
The problem here is that most (all?) of the dire predictions are based on models - and these climate models have an appallingly bad record of being able to match observation. They’re very technical, requiring massive computational resource to generate. They’re also almost all completely wrong when it comes to being able to match prediction with observation.
But we’re gearing up to spend trillions and trillions of dollars (all of us taxpayers will foot the bill) for a vastly impoverished and restricted lifestyle because some model says we’re going to wreck the planet.
We need a bit more beef on the bones, not that we’re going to be allowed to eat beef in the future, before we embark on such a ruinous project for humanity. And do you really think the ‘developing’ world is going to play along? Sorry guys, I know you dreamed of being able to watch Netflix all day and charge all of your iPhones and eat steak for breakfast, but tough - you’re going to have to eat the bugs and walk everywhere and just accept your lot - like you always have done.
The only temperature we need to lower is the temperature of the climate ‘debate’.
There are far too many assumptions and articles of faith being used to generate a level of panic that does not appear to be wholly warranted. And even if there were some truth to be found in the panic, we haven’t even thought properly about how fossil fuels might help to offset things - we’ve limited ourselves to the technical ‘solutions’ of wind and solar, but it’s not clear to me that we’ve explored all of our technology options here.
And, of course, there is a bewildering refusal to consider nuclear power as a viable alternative. We’re planning to spend trillions on technology that, basically, doesn’t work properly (it’s more expensive and not reliable enough) when we could be spending that money on a technology that does actually work. Very odd.
I survived the hottest Summer since the Big Bang - as did most people. But are we going to survive the fevered dreams of our politicians and the ‘elite’?
This article is now only available to paid subscribers. It’s a bit of a conundrum, because the message really needs to get out to more people than just the few who are affluent enough to be able to afford a substack subscription to their favourite writers. I can’t - and I only know about it because the article was first available to all via email - so I have the record.
Flying fornications are to be banned under new rules aimed at reducing carbon dioxide. Only pedestrian fornications will henceforth be permissible.
Much of this has to be inferred from other measurements. It’s all a bit dodgy - but it is what it is and it’s the best we can do. It’s not like we had a bunch of satellites up there during the Cretaceous period is it?
Yesterday, here in Iroquois Ontario, which about 4 hours drive east of the centre of the cultural universe (Toronto) and one hour west of the centre of the hockey universe (Montreal) it was close to 90 degrees as I walked 5 miles while playing the world’s best game. The breeze off the St. Lawrence made it a very comfortable, no sweat, 90 degrees. As I am wont to say, any Canadian who complains about the heat has a short memory. If my putter had cooperated this 76 year old would have broken 80.
Today, we have had some wonderful news. God sent a tornado to attack the Pfizer plant in North Carolina.
I study the sun each day. Go to spaceweathernews.com if you study solar cycles you will understand that the only real driver of the climate is the sun. The sun has 11 year cycles and more importantly 200 and 400 year cycles called Grand Solar minimums, and maximums. The maunder minimum is a good one to look into. The medieval warm period is an interesting time. Over the last 10,000 years we have been on an upward trend coming out of the last ice age ( we are now interglacial). We are in fact on course for the next grand solar minimum which will push temps down for around 80 to 100 years. I’ve been studying the subject about 5 years. Co2 levels are mostly driven by warmer and cooler sea temps. The warmer the oceans the less co2 they can can hold and thus the atmosphere receives more. As oceans cool they can hold more and the atmospheric co2 drops. The suns cycles warm up the oceans more or less as they oscillate. It’s not simply solar radiance ( heat output) it’s to do with how electromagnetically active it is, and this stronger or weaker electromagnetic energy feeds in the earths magnetic field and creates a more or less charge in the field. To understand climate on all the planets in our solar system you need to understand the sun.