Another comment by Doug Brodie

Arguments against alleged man-made global warming and its impossible so-called solution

It is hard to understand why any rational person would be in thrall to the politically-contrived theory of alleged dangerous man-made global warming when the alleged problem remains unproven and unconvincing, when its proposed globalist “solution” would be so damaging to our global civilisation as to be utterly unachievable short of an implacable totalitarian world government being installed and when the climate change movement has been mired in dishonesty (or noble cause corruption to be charitable) since its very beginning. What sort of a movement is it that needs to constantly insult the intelligence of the general public with such high levels of spin, dissembling and blatant lies? Establishment politicians have created a climate change monster but will they end up being destroyed by it themselves?

It all started when American lead author Ben Santer was prevailed upon politically (probably by climate fanatic Vice President Al Gore) to flagrantly change the conclusion of the 1995 UN IPCC climate report, contrary to the latest scientific data and against the opinions of his fellow scientists, to say that there was “a discernible human influence on global climate”. The politicians used this false “evidence”, given under duress, to launch the man-made global warming scare they had been itching to start for years. The scientists have been in the pockets of the politicians ever since. Almost a quarter of a century later that supposedly discernible “human influence” in the form of a signature tropospheric “hot spot” has never been seen: if it had been found we would have heard all about it.

We’ve had our school children brainwashed in the establishment’s climate change orthodoxy, for example by being force fed Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” climate change documentary which a high court judge ruled was riddled with scientific errors. The infamous “hockey stick graph” which featured prominently was only proved to be a fraud years later due to the lack of cooperation by its climate scientist authors who refused to make public their flawed data and algorithms. It is not uncommon nowadays to hear children (and MPs) saying they wish they could “reverse climate change”, as if a simple cut-back in the use of fossil fuels could bring about such a change in the global climate. What sort of unscientific nonsense are susceptible children being taught? It sounds like the absurd notion that the level of CO2 in the atmospheric acts like a control knob for the global climate which if “turned down” could take us back to the cooler conditions of the early 1970s or even to the freezing conditions of the Little Ice Age, the coldest period of our precarious inter-glacial.

We’ve had the 2009 Climategate revelations of climate science skulduggery, complicity to deceive, blocking of FOI requests and other professional malfeasance, including the ostracising of honest dissidents who refused to toe the party line on the establishment’s man-made climate change dogma, the whole affair disgracefully whitewashed by an establishment apparatchik.

We’ve had the head of the UN blatantly insisting that the “science is settled” which is patently untrue given the large number of independent dissenting voices, for example Emeritus Professor of Physics Hal Lewis who declared “The global warming scan … is the greatest and most successful pseudo-scientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist”. We’ve had top UN IPCC officials openly revealing their ulterior political motives which have very little to do with climate, such as “to transform the world’s economic development model” and to negotiate “the distribution of the world’s resources”, themes of anti-capitalist global social engineering and wealth redistribution.

We’ve seen how the Summary for Policymakers reports of the UN IPCC are written by politicians and issued months before their Science reports which get retrospectively revised as necessary to support the predetermined political conclusions. The UN IPCC dishonestly presents itself to the public as a scientific organisation when it is first and foremost a political organisation, always careful not to disclose its deliberately restricted mandate to assess only human-induced risks to climate, not climate in the round. This restriction allows them to surreptitiously downplay natural causes of climate change such as oceanic effects, cosmic rays and solar activity including UV and magnetic field effects, omissions which render their “one-trick pony” (man-made CO2) climate reports practically worthless to anyone other than agenda-driven politicians. The UN IPCC itself has admitted that “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”.

We’ve had made-up propaganda like the fake “97% Consensus” which went viral after being published by an overtly propagandist organisation, endlessly repeated by climate alarmists, politicians and the mainstream media despite having been comprehensively debunked. One of the main authors of that fraud writes regularly in the Guardian under the masthead “Climate Consensus – the 97%” which tells us all we need to know about the shameless propaganda of the climate-obsessed Guardian and, by association, of the wider climate alarmist establishment. The ironic result is that politicians have scared themselves witless about climate change through their own politically-sponsored propaganda.

We see how politicians point-blank refuse to discuss concerns from worried constituents (or anyone else, not that the mainstream media ever questions the establishment’s climate change narrative) about their unworkable and damaging climate change plans, fobbing-off all arguments with boilerplate platitudes and assertions such as “an existential threat to the planet”, the “overwhelming consensus” and how it is essential to “set a good example” to the rest of the world.

We see how establishment climate scientists always act to exaggerate the alleged threat, suppress debate and crush dissenters. We’ve seen how they retrospectively adjust their temperature data to make modern global warming look worse than it is, exposed by Climategate emails and confirmed by independent researchers. Climate alarmists run wild in this unenlightened age of unreason, making claims with little or no basis in science. We are subjected to a steady stream of untrue scare stories such as starving polar bears and walruses falling off sea-cliffs to their death, all allegedly due to man-made global warming when in reality polar bears are thriving, as are walruses to the extent that their unfortunate but long-established out-hauling behaviour is due to their current population being at the upper level of sustainability.

Barely any bad weather event occurs anywhere in the world without hysterical, knee-jerk “climate emergency” claims from politicians and environmental activists that it is all the fault of “climate change”, the all-purpose weasel phrase adopted by the global establishment after alleged man-made global warming stalled around the turn of the century – the well-documented so-called “pause” which establishment climate scientists were oh so reluctant to acknowledge, finally conceding it in 2014. Since then we have had a spike of natural El Nino warming which has now largely dissipated, with no sign of any slow but steady alleged man-made global warming. These alarmists make their “climate emergency” claims without a shred of scientific evidence, not understanding or simply ignoring the fact that it is not valid to argue “man-made climate change” in the absence of any contingent “man-made global warming” or indeed that the climate was much worse in terms of well-documented storms and floods during the cold conditions of the Little Ice Age than it is now. It is a disgrace that establishment climate scientists seldom if ever call out such false claims.

We’ve had cheating by European car manufacturers to fake the emissions ratings of their diesel vehicles. We are subjected to the technically illiterate, untrue slogan that electric cars are “emissions-free” (of CO2), with politicians setting up the car industry for an even bigger fall over EVs than they did with diesel cars.

We have politicians constantly trying to bamboozle us (and themselves) with their false accounting on emissions. They boast about their supposed progress to date but they never acknowledge that the big reduction in UK emissions since 1990 came mainly from the one-off “dash for gas” switch from coal to gas in electricity generation and the past 30 years of deindustrialisation due in large part to self-imposed green energy price hikes. They overstate their progress by not counting the foreign emissions of the imported substitutes (which will usually burn more net global emissions than the home-produced originals with the perverse result that offshoring actually makes alleged man-made global warming worse) nor indeed the foreign emissions of all our other imports including electricity which are set to increase steadily as their ruinous climate policies force more and more of our manufacturing industry and power stations out of business.

Politicians pretend that burning wood in power stations is emissions-free when it is actually worse than burning coal. They pretend that wind power is emissions-free by ignoring the emissions of the supporting/duplicating fossil fuel power stations without which wind power cannot operate on the grid. They also pretend that wind power is cheaper than fossil fuels when the basis of their comparison is totally invalid, like comparing crab apples to luscious oranges. They pretend that electric vehicles will be a climate panacea when depending on decarbonisation progress their global net emissions savings (taking account of all the mining and processing of battery raw materials) could turn out to be minimal or even negative if unexpected circumstances (e.g. loss of gas imports) force continued use of coal.

Such blatant deception (or sheer ignorance) is unacceptable, especially in the absence of any due diligence study to weigh the costs of the societal upheavals and privations they want to impose on everyone against the supposed benefits. Politicians should learn from Germany which has so far spent over $900 billion on its “Energiewende” but is on course to flop on its emission targets. They should learn from France where President Macron was recently shown the limits of public tolerance to green policies which impose pain on ordinary people. It is surprising that the 27% of Scottish households reported as being already in fuel poverty has not provoked more of a public outcry.

We’ve noted the total failure over the past 25 years of all the establishment’s flawed climate model predictions of dangerous man-made global warming and their irresponsible lack of acknowledgement of this failing for so many years, possibly soon stretching into decades. Politicians are so wedded to their self-righteous, virtue signalling crusade to “save the planet” that they can’t bear to face the possibility that they might have to backtrack.

Most of all we’ve had the establishment political class pretending they are “tackling climate change” (to use their dishonestly unrealistic phrase) when after over a decade of Climate Change Act striving they have barely scratched the surface of decarbonising the economy because, as they were warned, the task is far more difficult than they naively imagined. Following years of vast expenditure and disruption, the UK flagship renewables of wind and solar power contributed just 3.1% of UK final energy consumption in 2018 while fossil fuels contributed 79%, down just 1% from 2017 [ref: BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2019]. Meanwhile, global CO2 emissions have continued to rise year after year driven by steadily increasing global energy consumption, with no possibility of this global trend changing in the foreseeable future no matter what unilateral tinkering we undertake here in the UK. The stark truth is that the world is collectively 84.7% dependent on fossil fuels (plus 6.8% hydro and 4.4% nuclear which many greens abhor) for the energy needed to sustain our current civilisation while the global contribution from intermittent wind and solar is little more than negligible at 1.2%. Anyone who believes that these global engineering realities can be utterly transformed in a few short decades is living in cloud cuckoo land.

As the politically correct 2019 BP World Energy Review glumly admits “There is a growing mismatch between societal demands for action on climate change and the actual pace of progress, with [global] energy demand and carbon emissions growing at their fastest rate for years … and with renewables accounting for only around a third of the increase in total power generation”.

The UK government claims that its Clean Growth strategy has boosted the economy but most common sense economists would argue that our modest economic growth since 2008 has been achieved despite our debilitating climate change policies. These policies are achieving next to nothing other than to make us all worse off thanks to self-imposed sky-high energy prices, causing businesses to contract or close down (e.g. British Steel) and setting us up for future power cuts and electricity rationing as a result of over-investment in inappropriate technologies, especially in Scotland where a massive energy deficit is looming from the imminent shut down of its two remaining nuclear plants. The unbending laws of engineering and the hard rules of financial discipline dictate that a so‑called “low‑carbon economy” powered largely by energy-sparse, expensive, unusable at scale weather-dependent renewables is technically and financially infeasible.

Unbelievably in the face of this engineering reality and in these times of so-called austerity, our self-deluded, self-indulgent politicians led by political failure Theresa May are planning without any mandate to pour over £1 trillion down the drain (and UN modelling suggests that it would run to considerably more) over the next three decades in a futile attempt to eliminate UK fossil fuel CO2 emissions completely. Why do none of them ever do the basic arithmetic on what they are hoping to achieve – it’s not rocket science?! It is sheer wishful thinking to imagine that the current 3.1% of UK primary energy consumption supplied by intermittent wind and solar energy could ever be expanded enough to displace 79% of fossil fuel energy, never mind that such an expansion would be technically unworkable.

Establishment politicians are clearly out of their tiny minds (and technical depth) as explained in my Arguments against a net-zero emissions policy which also dissects the climate scare in more detail. They are taking the electorate (and themselves) for fools, steadily digging a deeper and deeper hole for themselves. Any serious attempt to implement such a policy would wreck the economy, reduce the populace to penury and leave the country lumbered with a grossly inefficient and fragile energy infrastructure. Given that the UK is responsible for just 1% of global emissions, our pointless sacrifice would have negligible impact globally. The “Precautionary Principle” is not an acceptable option for such a herculean undertaking which is certain to fail (especially given that the less ambitious Climate Change Act 80% target is already struggling) when the alleged problem of man-made global warming remains indiscernible and unproven in terms of empirical evidence.

The idea (from Ed Miliband who lumbered us with the 2008 Climate Change Act and who has never held down a real job in his life) that we can boost the economy through unproductive green jobs like insulating houses, installing charge points and planting trees coupled with the deployment of yet more expensive intermittent renewables and expensive energy-squandering (not to mention dangerous) technologies like hydrogen domestic heating and carbon capture and storage is beyond ludicrous. Hopefully the common sense rationalists of the Brexit Party will finally force reality to be confronted regarding the absurd UK establishment political consensus on “climate change”.

Douglas Brodie, BSc

Nairn, June 2019

PS: For a much longer exposition from November 2017 with extensive hyperlinks see The Infeasibility of our 80% Decarbonisation Plans.