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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.
It’s amazing that in this age of the internet with facts a fingertip away, so many people choose to be ignorant, usually lefties as this article points out. Low information voters, low curiosity groupthink people who are comfortably numb and just do not want to see through the lies or consequences until it affects them personally.
The inevitable and predictable outcome of the intellectual poverty of Australia’s media, and its group-think journos.
“Back to pre-industrial levels”? How far back, because way back the concentration was much much higher than just before the bad old 1700s started…which must have been nearing plant starvation levels. Like all things natural, things fluctuate.
Presumably, going really far back, the climate used to be a lot warmer, wetter, and the CO2 levels were a lot higher; hence the masses of organic matter that mounded up and which became transformed into coal. All that CO2 in the air was converted into plant tissue by the process of photosynthesis. Maybe if we burn it all up, the world may return to the days of the dinosaurs?
The crux of leftist ideology is the belief in its own, unique moral superiority and ultimate innocence.
The Left’s dependence on catastrophism can’t be overstated. Without some looming or present catastrophe to use as a pretext for their interventionist schemes, leftists would have nothing.
The Left’s dependence on catastrophism cannot be overstated. Without some looming or present catastrophe to use as a pretext for their interventionist schemes, leftists would have nothing.
All is saved! 780 households (out of about 20,000) in the city of Mitcham in SA have signed up for a community solar scheme.
The Mayor proclaims “we have replaced the equivalent of three fossil fuelled power stations”.
I think she means three small diesel generators.
The left and the truth are a poor fit.
I think this one is failing the sheeple test because the sheeple are well aware that it’s all about money, and this has been obvious for a long time. This is an issue that goes back decades and is ingrained into the Australian psyche. On the other hand nobody had given much thought to pandemics, or the importance of marriage, or where electricity came from. Those things caught people with their pants down.
This could have been a very good article until the author mentioned Covid and immigration. With Covid, there’s no doubt that lives were saved by lockdowns, especially when the virus was new and its impact uncertain. And Australia’s recent history shows that migrants integrate really well and within two generations. Such a pity these two non-issues damaged the article’s overall message and credibility.
PS: “On climate change, there are hundreds of scientists who have put forward views which run counter to the received wisdom [ignorance].”
William Briggs is one of the most insightful – and less well-known – critics of CC pseudoscience and its followers. Check out his wmbriggs.com blog.
His latest post: All—As In All—Of The “Climate Change Made This Event More Likely” Claims Are False.
He begins: “Here’s a typical recent propaganda headline: “Climate change made Libya flooding 50 times more likely: Report.” This is not so. Here’s another recent one from PBS: “Climate change made global summer droughts.” And so on and so forth.
What used to be described as “acts of God” has become “acts of CC”. It has morphed into a secular religion. Somewhere in the future there exists a Goldilocks climate and that faith in NetZero – and reparations from the West and, according to Gordon Brown yesterday, a tax on evil “fossil-fuel” companies, will deliver it and save Africa and the “global South”.
The national aeronautical information processing system issues charts on a daily basis and one set of their charts covers the weather, upper air winds, turbulence, stuff like that, but also the significant weather chart lists the position of volcanoes active for the day and we have at least one and sometimes three or more volcanoes just to our near North erupting and doing what volcanoes do best, spew out gasses etc. by the millions of tons so how do these experts suggest we deal with that minor detail, large corks sans asbestos of course, Temple Virgins perhaps, or better still, a few of the experts.
The obvious Australian response to Net Zero should be to spruik the Bradford Scheme. My back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest that greening that much of OZ would cancel out *China’s* emissions!
The refusal of the trendy set to consider should open a few eyes. “That would upset the ecology of the deserts!’
Yep. The primary mammal of the deserts is the rat.
The left literally could not give a rat’s arse to ‘save the planet’.
Just our arses.