From Jennifer Marohasy

By jennifer

They are successfully creating a story that is unifying the conservative message on a range of issues, I am referring to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship that will be meeting in London this week.  They include so many influential politicians even Mike Johnson the 56th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives.   Donald Trump mentioned him by name second, or was it third, in his inaugural address on becoming President.  Johnson is on the advisory board of ARC and spoke at the first ARC conference in London in November 2023.  I was there.

They claim to be working to “re-laying the foundations of our civilisation”, but there will be no mention of science.

The conference will be in London the home of the Royal Society, that has more recently been captured by much that is fashionable. And fashion is of course the lowest form of ideology.   Founded on 28 November 1660, the Royal was granted a royal charter by King Charles II and is the oldest continuously existing scientific academy in the world.

Then there is the British Museum of Natural History, also in London.  This, and so many other science institutions, including Australia’s science agency the CSIRO, now take their lead from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC sits under the United Nations.   It was established under the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC), ostensibly with the aim of measuring the impact from humankind on the Earth’s climate, to the extent that the FCCC have instructed the IPCC to only consider the human component of climate change. For simplicity, this would mean that if there was for example 100 mechanisms of action and interaction driving changes in climate, and the category of human action was one of those mechanisms, the FCCC has instructed the IPCC they are only allowed to talk about that one mechanism and must ignore the other 99. This kind of myopic directive is how you get nonsense claims like the one on the front page of the CSIRO website that “90% of the world’s emissions of carbon dioxide are from the burning of fossil fuels”.

What they might mean is that 90% of human emissions are from fossil fuels, but the way it is written most people would assume that 90% of the carbon in the atmosphere is from us – you and me, our cars, factories and plastic bags.   That is a nonsense!  When all the natural sources are considered, emissions from combustion of oil, gas and coal are a small percentage and impossible to separate from other plant sources including all the carbon dioxide breathed out by forests and phytoplankton, not to mention forest fires.  Carbon dioxide is indeed a well-mixed gas, and very soluble in the ocean.

Meanwhile, at the conference this week, in London, ARC will likely also continue to promote the policies of one of the darlings of the heterodox climate consensus community, political scientist Bjorn Lomborg.

Lomborg will likely tell the delegates that global warming is real, human caused, but he will say, it is just not an emergency.  It will speak nonsense, and he will be applauded by all the conservatives and the hangers-on.  He will tell them what is fashionable or what could be fashionable never mind the facts.

Lomborg and one of his funders, Bill Gates, now see an advantage in an energy transition to nuclear.  That was something Margaret Thatcher first spruiked back in the 1980s, only to be told by Nigel Lawson that nuclear could only be competitive with North Sea gas etcetera if there was government intervention, subsidies, and on it goes.

When I attended the first ARC conference, I was dismayed by all that I heard, especially the penultimate closing address that was by Lomborg. As well as assuring us that carbon dioxide was responsible for climate change, he mentioned the advantages of vaccines.  Almost in the same breath, and without context, certainly without acknowledging the role of big pharma in the Covid fiasco of mandates and adverse events denied at the time and at the first ARC conference, and it is not on the agenda for discussion this week.

At the conference this week a book will be launched, ostensibly bringing together the sharpest minds of our times in history, economics, philosophy, as well as artists and statesmen.   So, their story goes.  There is no mention of science or women.   There is mention of this new book uncovering the best that our civilization has given us, but again no mention of science.

I put some effort into a series of blog posts when I attended ARC in 2023.  I explained how I was dismayed at how many conservative Australian politicians were there, all agreeing vigorously with everything that was said that did not include any discussion of the direction of science that has been critical to western civilization.

There is ARC Research that claims to be a not-for-profit company which exists to renew social fabric, develop a pro-human vision of energy, business, and governance, and ultimately, tell a better story for our future.  But how can any organisation undertake research if it does understand the fundamental principles of evidence and method.  If it will use words as the IPCC does to quarantine discussion to a minuscule component of the natural world, of the natural order of things.

For sure science has been abandoned by today’s conservatives, who are on the political ascent, and this should be of concern to us all.

My blog posts from November 2023 with a focus on climate are here:

Reconciling with Nature, God and Qantas, Part 1, https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/10/reconciling-with-nature-god-and-qantas-part-1-arriving-london/

In Denial about the Science, ARC Part 2, https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/11/04/

The second half of Part 3 gives something of an overview of who attended and what they said, once you get past my short history of how the Thames and Europe used to freeze over,  https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/11/political-and-natural-hazards-arc-part-3/

In Part 4 ( https://jennifermarohasy.com/2023/12/2024-carbon-dioxide-warming-part1/ , that I wrote from Seattle, I included comment that:

“ … at the ARC conference in London, there was this assumption that everyone knows carbon dioxide causes warming of the Earth and the oceans and that as atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide rise we risk even more warming, but no-one was prepared to engage in any detail or explain the physical mechanisms. Certainly, no-one wanted to explain to me how the spike that was occurring in global temperatures while I was in London, how it had been caused by carbon dioxide.”

I wrote back in December 2023 in my final blog post about ARC, that I wanted to begin some discussion about the science, about carbon dioxide and climate change.  It has taken me some time to get going, and I thank you for your patience.

It was a year later, in December 2024 that I interviewed Bill Kininmonth, and next Tuesday I will be interviewing Ivan Kennedy – a professor at Sydney University.

We will be discussing both the surprising history of how it is that carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa has come to define global trends, and the chemistry of carbon, it being so soluble in seawater.  Kennedy is quite the expert when it comes to carbon chemistry, especially issues of acidification and calcification.

It is likely that we will hypothesise that what is being measured at Mauna Loa is almost certainly degassing from the ocean, I am going to suggest from the equatorial Pacific Ocean, rather than emission from the combustion of coal, gas or oil – and certainly not uneven respiration from northern hemisphere forests that is so often proposed to explain seasonal trends in carbon dioxide concentrations at Moana Loa.

If you are so inclined to come down this rabbit hole with us, you will need to register for what will be my first Zoom webinar!

When: Feb 25, 2025 12:00 PM Brisbane
Topic: Oceans Breathe Out Carbon Dioxide. Part 2/Towards a New Theory of Climate Change

Register in advance for this webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_NfQkdaPZR46zfrKSxrKTBQ

After registering, you should receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the webinar.

Part 2 follows on from Part 1, that was my discussion with Bill Kininmonth about convection and how the tropical oceans don’t overheat because of the hot towers/the massive anvil cumulonimbus clouds that transport energy from the bottom to the top of the troposphere at the equator.  There is a summary of this meeting, also as a blog post, 

https://jennifermarohasy.com/2024/12/oceans-warm-atmosphere-with-meteorologist-william-kininmonth-audio-and-summaries/