Climate "Crisis"? Trust but verify

CO2 levels, temperature and a peek at Energy.

Your life is changing now and will continue to be changed at increasing speed via the Climate Change narrative. Of all forces acting on you over the next 30 years, this will be the biggest because it underpins all other change. Why? Because it affects energy policy, price, availability, consumption and legislation and there is literally nothing more fundamental to human life on the planet than energy.

Climate narrative is also insidious and relatively slow acting. Change from this narrative is incremental, unlike Covid, which was a step-change. In the face of a fear-backed step-change narrative, more than half of the population did what they were told. Take a bigger fear-backed narrative, stretch it out and chop it up into manageable change chunks and even more people will comply with zero resistance or question.

Add to the Climate narrative a manmade energy “crisis” set inside a manmade economic meltdown and the pressure to go along increases. Just look at energy rationing that is now in place in the EU.

Efficient knowledge - what do you need to know to ask questions?

Do you think you need to be a climate scientist or some related “expert” to verify the quality and integrity of the climate narrative?

You don’t.

• You just need to get to the heart of the narrative, break it open and then look at whether it stands up to scrutiny in context of evidence.

• You could also look at the integrity of the methods and data that underpin the narrative.

This is not that hard to do. There are people out there doing this for you in such a way that all you need to do is quickly and efficiently avail yourself of their analysis in order to be able to question the narrative and those who peddle it, for yourself.

You don’t have to be exactly right. That’s not the point. You just need to be in a position to ask key questions then judge the answers that you get back. Those answers will tell you whether the people giving you the answers have integrity, knowledge, and can be trusted.

If you cannot get into such a position, you are a slave to the narrative.

If the narrative is wrong, you are complicit in being misled and you are responsible for your own doom in whatever form that comes.

Core Issues

Greenhouse gas emissions from human activity and energy production and consumption are, as I understand it, the key issues. They stem from and precede, respectively, all other “environmental and sustainability” issues such as general consumption and pollution.

If there is a reduction in energy availability per capita, greenhouse gas emissions should drop because all human activity will be curtailed. It’s that simple at its core.

CO2 and temperature

Take a look at global atmospheric CO2 levels according to the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science (IAC).

That’s a right old tea-blurter, innit? At this point we might swear a lot and go round telling everybody we’re doomed. Or are we? The first thought that sprang to mind when seeing this hockey stick of hockey sticks1 was: that’s an awful lot of unprecedented rise in CO2 to produce a warming of just under a degree in 100 years!

John Dee points out that the “hockey stick” rise of CO2 levels from about 1850 to now is an increase of CO2 levels from 280ppm to 400ppm (43%) over 170 years.

This is backed up by NASA:

According to an ongoing temperature analysis led by scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), the average global temperature on Earth has increased by at least 1.1° Celsius (1.9° Fahrenheit) since 1880. The majority of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20°C per decade.

So, it is fair for John Dee to say that over the hockey stick period, global average temperatures as measured/estimated/modelled by NASA et al is “at least 1.1° Celsius”.

Note: beware of assuming certainty about the meaning of:

The majority of the warming has occurred since 1975, at a rate of roughly 0.15 to 0.20°C per decade.

In order to understand this at below surface level, you have to understand how global temperatures are “measured”. Again, John Dee’s Climate substack gives some flavour of various aspects of temperature modelling, and it is not an exact science that has remained consistent. Nor is it entirely defensible. It’s a big topic, beyond scope of this brief article.

What I will say is that you should remain very, very cautious of believing that since 1975, only human activity has been triggering an inexorable temperature rise that is catastrophic. The situation is not that simple. For example, you must be able to factor in this scenario:

1. You have no idea how that global average temperature figure is calculated now or has been in the past.

2. If you don’t know the difference in changes to temperature measurement and calculation, you don’t necessarily know why there might have been a temperature rate change since 1975.

3. If temperature measuring station are located in many “hot” places, temperature measurement data could be skewed. Do you know where all the temperature measurements are done and how they are amalgamated?

4. It is unsafe to assume that climate science experts take care of all this and produce clean, defensible results and therefore you can safely trust the surface level statements and assume the entire thing is trustworthy. In short, unless you look and learn, you have no ability to verify. Therefore, you are unable to “trust and verify”. Instead you can only “assume trust”, which is totally inadequate. If I asked you to give me £10k to invest for you because I knew what I was doing, would you assume I was trustworthy or would you assess and verify?

The hockey stick in historical context

The industrialisation of the human race has occurred between 1760 and now. That’s the industrial revolution of the entire globe (unevenly distributed) and the entirety of mankind, not just the nations of the Industrial Revolution. According to the graph above, CO2 levels did not exceed the rough, prevalent average of 280ppm until 1850, which is after the end of the Industrial Revolution period of 1760 - 1840 during which Europe, US, UK industrialised.

ALL of that CO2 increase of 120ppm has resulted in a 1.1° Celsius average global temperature rise (ignoring the complex estimation method of that figure).

Industrialisation 1760 - Now

This period includes ALL of mankind’s worst industrial and environmental crimes:

• Egregious fossil fuel use for energy and heat production;

• Full scale chemical engineering including all plastic use and production;

• All pollution associated with fossil fuel use and industrial production in all forms;

• Zero sustainability approaches to human living;

• Industrialisation of the food cycle;

• Globalisation i.e. the trans global shipping of resources, goods and food.

This period has also resulted in:

• Technological improvements of industrial practises to change energy consumption and lower waste and pollution;

• Changes to consumer and industrial consumption and waste behaviours in some parts of the world.

Energy sources as of today into the future

Look at these two charts on energy sources and consider what they mean in the context of 120ppm CO2 increase over 170 years and the attendant 1.1° Celsius temperature rise.

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Reports%20and%20Pubs/2025_Global_Trends_Final_Report.pdf

https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2019/11/KellyWeb.pdf

Now, I’ll introduce you to Professor Michael Kelly of Cambridge University. Watch or read his 2019 presentation and ask yourself if ANY of what you are witnessing in the global Climate “Crisis” narrative tells you anything Kelly tells you, or deals with any of the questions Kelly raises.

https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2019/11/KellyWeb.pdf