Ten Big Lies That Fuel Climate Alarmism

This much of the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) crusade is true: The level of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere increased from an estimated 280 parts per million (ppm) before the Industrial Revolution, to a recorded 316 ppm in 1958, to 415 ppm in 2020.  The average temperature of the earth (as best as it can be measured) has increased since the end of the Little Ice Age by more than a degree Celsius (^oC).  According to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), more than half the warming since the Industrial Revolution has been caused by the greenhouse effect of man-made (anthropogenic) CO2.  A doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere increases the world’s average temperatures by 1 to 1.2^oC.  Computer models that calculate hypothetical consequences of this greenhouse effect project additional warming due to feedbacks, but to date these have overestimated the warming, so they have not been validated by empirical data.[1]  An energy budget, based on the greenhouse effect plus feedbacks, as recorded by empirical data, projects a rise of 1.5 ^oC per doubling of CO2.[2]  This means that the higher the CO2 in the atmosphere, the less will be the warming effect of additional CO2.

These scientific premises are acknowledged by most scientists involved in climate, although the last two are rarely mentioned by alarmist scientists. There remain anomalies and unanswered questions in the theory – for example: if increased temperatures are caused by increased CO2, temperature rises should follow closely behind CO2 rises, but they don’t, not on any time scale.  During the northern hemisphere spring and summer, temperatures rise while CO2 levels fall, as plant growth sucks CO2 out of the air – then in the autumn and winter, temperatures fall while CO2 rises as fallen leaves release CO2.  During the 20th century the CO2 rose steadily, whereas most of the warming occurred in the 1930s and 1990s, with a cooler period in the 1960s and 1970s.  As for Al Gore’s infamous 650,000-year graph, it hid the fact that the CO2 rises followed 800 years or so behind the temperature rises.  But scientific anomalies aside, even if the greenhouse theory and the IPCC’s premises are all correct, neither these nor any other scientific facts or theories justify climate change alarms, let alone Green New Deals, Extinction Rebellions, Great Resets, Code Red Emergencies, or zero emission targets.  All such anti-CO2 obsessions rest on a conga line of big lies.

 

Big Lie 1: Carbon dioxide (CO2) is dangerous “carbon pollution”.[3] 

Far from being a pollutant, CO2 is one of the three most basic requirements for life on earth, the others being oxygen (O) and water (H2O).  CO2 is of no danger to animals like us until it reaches 12,000 ppm (30 times its present level) – and the more CO2 in the atmosphere the better for plant growth.  The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution has increased plant growth across the planet by 15 per cent, but it is still too low for optimal plant growth, which is why CO2 is pumped into glass houses to raise it to 2,000ppm (which is about the level we breathe when we are in a crowded or poorly ventilated room).

 

Big Lie 2: The decision to use fossil fuels was a fatal mistake.[4]

 Before we learnt how to harness the energy in coal, oil and natural gas, we relied on the burning of wood and the muscles of animals and slaves and peasants to power the world.[5]  Wood and muscle power produced barely enough energy to keep one billion of us alive for less than half the average life expectancy that 7.9 billion of us now enjoy.  More than 80 per cent of the power that sustains 7.9 billion longer, less painful, freer, richer, more productive, knowledgeable, and fulfilling lives, is supplied by fossil fuels.  There are only two types of power that could replace any significant fraction of our fossil fuel power at anywhere near the same reliability and price: hydroelectric and nuclear power.  But there are not many places that facilitate hydro, and most climate alarmists want to ban hydro and nuclear power along with fossil fuel power!!

 

Big Lie 3: Solar and wind power will be a cheaper alternative to fossil fuel power.[6]

If this were true, why would it be necessary for Australian taxpayers to support and subsidise solar and wind power to the tune of $13 billion a year then penalise fossil fuel power to the tune of $75 per emitted tonne of CO2 in 2025 rising to $390 per tonne by 2050?  What is true is that the direct cost of solar and wind power is cheap on a sunny day or when the wind is optimum strength – if you don’t factor in the down time and the costs of manufacture, installation, distribution, and disposal when the solar panels and windmills have to be replaced.  But that’s a cheat’s way of calculating the price.  It is also cheating to claim that solar and wind power don’t emit any CO2, by not factoring in the manufacture, installation and disposal of the solar panels and windmills, and the need of fossil fuel power when there is no wind or sun.  Which highlights the biggest problem with solar and wind power: their intermittency and unreliability. At night and when dark clouds block sunlight solar panels stop transmitting electricity, as do windmills when the wind is too weak or too strong. All of which explains why, even after three decades of governments around the world promoting them with trillions of dollars of grants and subsidies, wind and solar generators provide less than 2 per cent of the world’s power. And in the next three decades they are going to replace more than 80 per cent of the world’s power? 

Big Lie 4: We face a climate change emergency caused by our CO2 emissions.[7]

If there were a climate change emergency, that would be all the more reason why we need the power supplied by fossil fuels to protect ourselves from its effects.  But as it happens, there is no such climate emergency! The perception of an emergency has been propagandised by the unprecedented coverage of the type of climate disasters that have always occurred around the world, coupled with the blatant lies that routinely attribute negative (but never positive) climatic events to CO2 induced climate change.  The fact is, however, there are no deleterious trends in the world’s climate.  Storms have not increased since we started burning fossil fuels, they have steadily decreased in number and in intensity, and damage caused by storms has plummeted due to better buildings and strategies that depend on the power supplied by fossil fuels.[8] Droughts have not increased, they have decreased, and the higher levels of CO2 make plants more drought resistant. [9] Floods have not increased, and when they do occur it’s fossil fuelled vehicles that rescue people.[10] Heatwaves are not killing more people, far more people die due to cold temperatures than due to hot temperatures, and fossil fuels reduce the death toll due to both heat and cold by providing affordable cooling and heating strategies.[11]  Low lying regions and islands are not being flooded by rising seas, more islands are increasing in size than are decreasing.[12]  Forest fires have not increased since we started burning fossil fuels, there are far fewer forest fires now than before the age of colonisation, which has made some environmentalists worry that there aren’t enough fires to rejuvenate forests.[13] The great barrier reef is not threatened by global warming, periodic bleaching and damage to the coral has always occurred, as do recovery periods such as the present period of rapid coral growth.[14] Despite the most rapid increase in the world’s population, it has never been as well fed due to improved farming methods, higher CO2 and temperatures, and crop yields. Despite the massive increase in populations living in seaside and other such precarious locales, the number of deaths caused by natural disasters has plummeted from above 100 per 100,000 people per year during the first two decades of the 20^th century, to below 3 per 100,000 people during the first two decades of the 21^st century.[15] Which is a 97 per cent drop in climate related fatalities thanks to our “most fatal misstep in history,” to arrive at this “climate emergency” that Greta Thunberg abuses the world’s leaders about, to their thunderous applause! [16]

Big Lie 5: If we don’t stop burning fossil fuels etcetera, the ice caps will melt, cities will be flooded, droughts will cause worldwide famines, food wars will erupt, mass extinction of species will occur, the planet will become uninhabitable, and all life on earth may end.[17] 

There is no more evidence for any of these hysterical alarms than there is for an invasion from the Klingon Empire.  If CO2 keeps rising at its fastest recorded rate, the first doubling since 1860 (from 280ppm to 560ppm) might be reached by 2078, the second by 2300 Which, at 1.5^oC per doubling, means 1.5^oC above preindustrial temperatures in 2078, 3^oC above preindustrial temperatures in 2300, which is less than the average temperature difference between Sydney and Canberra. [18]As for the sea level, the IPCC estimated that the world’s seas rose by 17cm during the 20^th century, without any sign of acceleration.  In 2018 it projected that sea rises could be as high as 3.2 mm per year, i.e. 32 cm per century, which is about the width of a sand bag.  Some alarmist scientists double this projection, which would mean that the seaside homes of Al Gore, Tim Flannery, Barak Obama and Julia Gillard will need two-high rows of sandbags in 100 years’ time to make them as safe from king tides as they are today.

Big Lie 6: 97 per cent of scientists agree with the CAGW agenda and the need to stop burning fossil fuels.

What 97 per cent of scientists probably do agree with is the observations that most CAGW sceptics agree with too, such as those presented above.  But as for the implication that 97 per cent of scientists agree with the zero emissions by 2050 agenda, that is a myth.  Scientists are unlikely to agree with a zero CO2 policy, but if they do their opinions are of little more relevance than anybody else’s, because it is much more than a scientific question.  Many scientists oppose the CAGW doctrine.  For instance, in 2019 the European Climate Declaration, signed by more than 500 prominent scientists, was sent to the UN protesting climate alarmism – it wasn’t the first such petition. The origin of the oft-quoted 97 per cent consensus was a flawed survey that looked at published papers that were related in any way to climate and found that 97 per cent of them assumed human causation of warming. So rather than attesting to 97 per cent of scientists making a judgement that the CAGW doctrine is correct, it attested to 97 per cent of funding being made for scientific projects that assumed it.  For its 5^th report, the IPCC relied heavily on a survey of the climate change literature by John Cook and associates Its conclusion was that 97 per cent of published paper abstracts supported the consensus that humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions “are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20^thcentury.” But all a paper had to do to “endorse” the “consensus” was to acknowledge that a consensus existed. More to the point, even if a consensus did agree that humans caused such warming, that says nothing about whether it will create a bigger problem than destroying the best 80 per cent of the world’s power!

Big Lie 7: Australia must eliminate net emissions of CO2 in order to save the planet from climate change.

During its highest emission year, 2018, Australia emitted nearly 416 million tonnes from the burning of fossil fuels and production of cement.  China emits over 10,000 million tonnes per year from fossil fuels and cement, and its average increase in emissions since 2000 has been more than 350 million tonnes per year. So, if Australia ceased burning any coal, natural gas, petrol, diesel, aviation fuel or kerosene, and made no more concrete, from the 1^st of January 2022, that suicidal gesture would be nullified by the increase in China’s emissions alone by March of 2024. While countries like Australia are expected to achieve zero emissions by 2050, countries like China are exempt from zero emissions until 2060.  Which gives China at least a decade to take over Australia’s industries with its cheaper labour and cheaper fossil fuelled power that doesn’t close down every time the wind drops or clouds cover the sun. Then a decade on, is China really going to follow Australia into energy poverty?

Big Lie 8. The world must eliminate net emissions of CO2 in order to save the planet from climate change.

Given the world breaking or making claims made about CAGW, it is revealing to note that so little of the interminable discourse on the subject addresses the actual costs of the alleged disasters and alleged solutions.  Especially since there is a thorough cost-benefit-analysis that won a Nobel Prize for renowned economists William Nordhaus of Yale University and Professor Paul Romer of the Stern School of Business at New York University.  Their analysis is rarely referred to by alarmists, because, despite it being based on the IPCC reports of the dire effects of its projected warming, which to date have overestimated the warming and overblown its dire consequences, and despite adding 25 per cent for unknown negative effects (when unknown positive effects are just as likely), their cost-benefit-analysis is to a climate alarm what lightning was to the hydrogen-leaking Hindenburg dirigible.[19] Based on this worst-case assessment, the Nordhaus analysis estimates that the cost of CAGW by 2100 will be 2.7 per cent to 4 per cent of the world’s Gross National Product.  But that’s not to say that by 2100 we will be 2.7 per cent to 4 per cent poorer than we are now because of CAGW.  We will be 300 per cent to 1000 per cent richer than we are now, less the 2.7 per cent to 4 per cent if the projected CAGW damage occurs –  i.e. 288 per cent to 973 per cent richer than we are now! [20] That’s if all the IPCC’s projected warming damage comes to pass for the first time, and 25 per cent more than that, and no unknown positive effects occur!  The real danger for humanity is not CAGW, but the economic vandalism being perpetrated in its name. Will economic progress survive when the best 80 per cent of its power has been prohibited? The biggest elephant amongst the herd of elephants in the CAGW room is the cost of shutting down our cheapest and most reliable energy supply.  When confronted with the question, the usual response is:-

Big Lie 9: “This is our last chance – allowing fossil fuels to be burnt is not an option. 

This is either a miscalculation of World War One proportions, or a cynically calculated lie. It’s a lie that should have worn out its welcome by now.  In 1989 the head of the UN told us we had just three years to “win or lose the climate struggle.“  In 2006 Al Gore told us we had 10 years. In 2019 Prince Charles told us we had 18 months. But this is quixotic salesmanship, not science or rationality. We most certainly have the option of continuing to power our economies with fossil fuels to maintain our progress, we can most certainly afford to do that.  We most certainly cannot afford to ban fossil fuels. If any climatic catastrophes occur, we can certainly adapt to them, mitigate them, seek solutions that are likely to cost much less than the catastrophe that would result from banning fossil fuels.  When cheaper power supplies that work 24/7 are invented, market forces will ensure they replace fossil fuels – no tax funded grants or subsidies required.  This will maximise our chances of coming up with workable solutions to our problems, be they natural or man-made. Conceding sovereignty over the commanding heights of the world’s energy supply to a cabal of demagogues at the UN, will minimise our chances.

Big Lie 10: The world can eliminate anthropogenic emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses like methane by 2050 or 2060 for China or 2070 for India, while continuing to progress.

Denying the world its solid, liquid and gaseous fuels will reverse progress for our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.  It will deny them the economic and technological resources needed to deal with whatever anthropogenic or natural disasters may occur. Greens aren’t concerned about that, they don’t want to live in an industrial powered world, they will change their minds after experiencing the alternative for a couple of nights, but by then it would be too late. Other alarmists talk vaguely about carbon capture or wave, thermal, or hydrogen power, all of which have been tried at taxpayers’ expense, and all of which have failed. Other alarmists talk vaguely about windmills and solar panels, which would have to be multiplied 40 times their present number to replace fossil fuel power – when they are working. To supply power when there’s no wind or sunlight, many multiples more will be needed to charge the batteries.  Batteries such as the world’s largest that was purchased by South Australia for $90,000,000, which can keep the state powered at night when the wind drops – for two-and-a-bit minutes!

The biggest lie of the second half of the 20^th century was that Communism was the progressive way to replace the alleged disasters of capitalism and arrive at a workers’ paradise called Eutopia.  The biggest lie of the 21^st century so far is that windmills and solar panels are the progressive way to replace the alleged disaster of the fossil fuelled Industrial Revolution and arrive at a centrally planned Green paradise called “The Great Reset”.  Both these catastrophic obsessions were proffered by intellectuals nested in Western universities, who considered themselves far too highly educated to bother answering simple minded questions such as:

If communism is so great, how come all the communist countries have to close their borders with barbed wire and machine guns to prevent their comrades escaping?  Or: If the threat of CAGW has been so well established by science, economics and logic, why do CAGW crusaders rely so heavily on such obvious lies and patently absurd threats of looming doomsdays?

All living beings require energy to survive and thrive, and 80 per cent of the energy required for 7.9 human beings to survive and thrive, is provided by fossil fuels, which Australia has in abundance, to power us for many millennia to come. Committing to a zero emissions-impossible target will closedown coal-fired power plants, skyrocket power prices as have started in Europe, and cause blackouts as have started in Britain due to lack of wind. But even more damaging than the economic effects of the CAGW crusade is its cultural effects, which has turned fact driven science into a doctrine driven religion.  Truthful science needs to be rescued. Scientists who speak up against big lies need to be protected from penalties and dismissals from universities and publicly funded institutions.  And above all, academics, journalist and teachers need to be held to account for the unjustified climate alarms that are traumatising our youth, convoluting our public discourse, and distorting our political commitments. [21]

John Dawson is the author of the Kindle book: Climate Alarmism, and its delinquent children: The Green New Deal and The Great Reset.

 

 

 

 

 

[1] Roy Spencer: Global Warming Skepticism for Busy People. Kindle Edition, Section 1.3.

 

https://science.house.gov/imo/media/doc/Christy per cent20Testimony_1.pdf?1

 

 

[2]  Journal of Climate, Lewis and Curry, 2018. 

 

[3] E.g. President Obama:. https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/05/31/weekly-address-reducing-carbon-pollution-our-power-plants

 

[4] The burning of fossil fuels may be “the most fatal misstep in the history of humankind.”  Professor Robert Manne, After Copenhagen, in the March 2010 edition of The Monthly.

 

[5] We also used windmills, sails and waterwheels, but the amount of power they supplied was tiny compared to wood and muscles.

 

[6] E.g.“ Solar is the cheapest power ever invented” Tanya Plibersek, Sky, 11/10/202

 

[7] E.g:”all over the world we can see flooding, monster storms, droughts and wild-fires that are completely out of control”. Arnold Schwarzenegger, September 2915, at the UN.

 

[8]  E.g: “Hurricane forecast models (the same ones that were used to predict Katrina’s path) indicate a tendency for more intense (but not overall more frequent) hurricanes when they are run for climate change scenarios.” IPCC.

 

Storm records don’t show increased numbers or intensity. The most reliable records, for the Atlantic and Western Pacific, show that over the last century the intensity of storms has decreased as well as their frequency. And proxy records of storms, (e.g. from stalagmites), indicate that we survived more severe storms thousands of years ago. The frequency of storms coming anywhere near Australia peaked in 1974 and 1984, and the peak year for storm intensity was 1985.  Both frequency and intensity of these storms declined from then to the lowest storm year on record in 2016.

 

 

[9]  “This may not be what you expect to hear but as far as the climate scientists know there is no link between climate change and drought.  Now, that may not be what you read in the newspapers and sometimes hear commented but there is no reason a priori why climate change should make the landscape more arid…. if you look at the Bureau of Meteorology data over the whole of the last 100 years there’s no trend in data, there’s no drying trend^”. University of New South Wales’s Professor Pitman, who is a member of the Climate Change Research Centre.

 

His statement sent the CAGW obsessed ABC into a panic, and it extracted from him a “clarification” that he meant “no direct link”.  Presumably, because warming could alter weather patterns that could produce some winners and some losers as far as precipitation is concerned – but there is no reason to believe that the net effect will be more droughts across the continent.

[10] “Tragic floods in Germany and Belgium were blamed on climate change, but. But the data doesn’t support that river floods have increased. Globally, a large study of more than 9000 rivers shows that while some rivers see increasing flood trends, many more rivers see decreasing flood trends. This is also true in Europe, where the new UN IPCC report tallies all rivers and finds most flood less.”. E.g. the high flows in the river Ahr on 14 July 2021 were exceeded 1804 and 1910. Bjorn Lomborg.

[11]  Alarmists quote an article in the medical journal The Lancet, that calculates that temperature rises during the past two decades in the US and Canada mean 7200 additional heat deaths each year. But they omit that the same article calculates that the warming saves 21,000 cold deaths. As the IPCC contends, “the frequency and intensity of cold extremes have decreased”. As Bjorn Lomborg points out, that means that “more than 4.5 million people die from cold compared with fewer than 600,000 from heat.”

[12] In 2018 a study of 709 islands and 30 Pacific and Indian Ocean atolls, found that 88 per cent of the islands were either stable or increased in area, that no atolls had lost any ground, and no island bigger than 10 hectares had lost ground.

 

[13] E.g.: Despite all the hype about the fires in the US, government statistics show that the burn off in the summer of 2021 was the seventh lowest of the past 20 years, and the 2020 burn off was 11 per cent of the annual burn offs of the early 1900s.

 

[14] When James Cook University researcher Peter Ridd blew the whistle on the unreliability of research papers that claimed that the reef was in danger from global warming, he was sacked, so no researcher who wants to keep his job will ever buck claims of global warming effects.

 

[15] Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know; and many others you will find interesting; by Ronald Bailey and Marianne L. Tupy.

[16] Statistics from the International Disaster Database show that global deaths from all climate-related floods, droughts, storms and fire in the 1920s, amounted to nearly 500,000 per year. Since then, despite the rapid increase in the population, climate-related deaths have dropped by 96 per cent to about 18,000 per average year. So on a deaths per chapiter basis the deaths have dropped by well over 99 per cent.

[17] E.g. “There is nothing like this in history …[Donald Trump] has dedicated his efforts to undermining the prospects for survival of organized human life on earth? … has dedicated policy toward maximizing the use of fossil fuels and cutting down on regulations that mitigate the disaster?” Professor Noam Chomsky, 30 October, 2020, in an interview in The New Yorker magazine:

 

[18] If these rises doubled it still wouldn’t cause anything like the effects listed above.

 

[19] Not to suggest that Nordhaus used such words. 

 

[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QyXduteiWE&t=18s

 

 

[21] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2233864