Believing and Knowing, There’s a Big Difference

I see Rishi Sunak has backflipped a little on measures which were designed, albeit quixotically, to achieve net zero. Though, to be clear, lest you get excited, he didn’t backflip on net zero itself. What is net zero anyway? I assume it means that we, all of mankind, emit only as much CO2 as we absorb. Better be careful here. Better not start absorbing more CO2 than we emit.

Right now we have 410 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. That compares with 280 ppm in preindustrial times, which made it very cold. Hmm, yes and no. It was cold in the Little Ice Age (LIA) but then some centuries before that there was the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). They had no belching coal power stations at the time, so what caused the MWP is any old climate scientist’s guess.

In any event, there doesn’t seem to be any hard science which associates a particular level of CO2 with temperature. Nevertheless, if consistency matters, those scientists who believe the current warming is anthropogenic must, pari passu, accept that if we somehow managed to push CO2 back down to 280ppm, then it would get uncomfortably cold, as it was in the LIA, and deaths would inevitably rise. Deaths would rise directly because of the cold and also because crops, and plant life generally, would grow less prodigiously and abundantly.

Plants love CO2. I understand that greenhouses have about 1000 ppm to encourage growth. Apparently, if CO2 falls below 150 ppm plants give up the ghost, as would we in turn; nothing to eat. I assume, other things equal, that each 10 ppm less of CO2 in the atmosphere means that average crop yields fall by a particular amount; as, correspondingly, would the prevalence of famines rise in less developed lands. Has this dire consequence been considered? Doubt it. Haven’t noticed.

I once asked a former left-of-centre, same-sex-marriage-supporting, climate-alarmist friend of mine what level of CO2 he would like. “Back to preindustrial levels,” he unsurprisingly replied. Once I started pointing out the implications, he disengaged from the discussion. Inconvenient facts and consequences are the last thing leftist people want to hear about. Realism and leftism simply don’t mix.

Why doesn’t Anthony Albanese explain what the Voice will do, people ask. It’s clear enough. Albanese isn’t being evasive. He simply doesn’t know. He doesn’t want to know. Knowing might undermine the vibe. Leftism thrives and trades on ignorance. How else would Marxism continue to thrive in universities in the face of the horrors it has caused when put into practise. How else would leftist politicians – on both sides of the aisle – manage to gain voter support for their various nefarious schemes.

Think of politicians getting together to prosecute their useless and tyrannical responses to Covid and of populations meekly complying. Think of them getting together to allow the immigration of millions of culturally clashing migrants and of populations shrugging feebly in response. Think of them destroying reliable energy systems and replacing them with unsightly and dysfunctional wind and solar erections – shanties for mansions – and of populations staring numbly as they are told it will cool the planet.

The level of determined ignorance and reluctance to consider consequences is astounding across the political class and this, perforce, flows onto populations. On climate change, there are hundreds of scientists who have put forward views which run counter to the received wisdom. You would never guess. Politicians exhibit the certainty of the dim-witted. And populations are thus starved of digestible information.

Following up on Rishi Sunak’s come-to-Brahma moment, a reporter In UK’s Telegraph newspaper (September 22) titled her article: “Nobody ever asked us if we wanted green energy.” A reader commented: “In 2019 the Tories made it a key manifesto pledge to stick to their net-zero plan and got a massive majority.” I commented on the comment: “The reason. Low information voters. Both sides of politics preaching the same [mindless] climate-change mantra. Thus democracy dies.”

The only reason the Voice isn’t being waved through, shrouded in ignorance, is that political opposition has teased out its irrelevance to the task at hand, i.e., improving the lot of a minority of the Aboriginal population living in isolated communities, and its severing of national unity down racial lines. Suddenly, people become more informed. Whenever that happens, leftwing causes perish.

If we were to ever get strong political opposition to net zero and to the stupid idea (King Canute, where are you?) that we can control the climate then, at that point, information would flow and we would start building new coal power stations, like the Chinese and Indians.