Tag Archives: Ross McKitrick

McKitrick: COP28 Worse Threat Than You Think

Crude Oil Reserves Concept with 3D Rendered Oil Barrels and Oil Pump Photo.

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

A demonstration against fossil fuels at the COP28 United Nations climate summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. PHOTO BY PETER DEJONG/AP

Ross McKitrick writes at Financial Post: The only thing wrong with the globalist climate agenda — the people won’t have it  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Phasing out fossil fuels is going to cost way more than ordinary people
will accept.  Delegates to COP28 clearly didn’t understand that

It’s tempting to dismiss the outcome of COP28, the recent United Nations climate change conference in the United Arab Emirates, as mere verbiage, especially the “historic” UAE Consensus about transitioning away from fossil fuels. After all, this is the 28th such conference and the previous ones all pretty much came to nothing. On a chart showing the steady rise in global CO2 emissions since 1950 you cannot spot when the 1997 Kyoto Protocol entered into force (2002), with its supposedly historic language binding developed countries to cap their CO2 emissions at five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012, which they didn’t do. The 2015 Paris Agreement also contained “historic” language that bound countries to further deep emission reductions. Yet the COP28 declaration begins with an admission that the parties are not on track for compliance.

Still, we should not overlook the real meaning of the UAE Consensus.

COP agreements used to focus on one thing: targets for reducing greenhouse gases. The UAE Consensus is very different. Across its 196 paragraphs and 10 supplementary declarations it’s a manifesto for global central planning. In their own words, some 90,000 government functionaries aspire to oversee and micromanage agriculture, finance, energy, manufacturing, gender relations, health care, air conditioning, building design and countless other economic and social decisions. It’s all supposedly in the name of fighting climate change, but that’s just the pretext. Take climate away and they’d likely appeal to something else.

Climate change doesn’t necessitate such plans.

Economists have been studying climate change for many decades and have never considered it grounds to phase out fossil fuels, micromanage society, manage gender relations and so on. Mainstream scientific findings, coupled with mainstream economic analysis, prescribe moderate emission-pricing policies that rely much more on adaptation than mitigation.The fact that the UAE Consensus is currently non-binding is beside the point. What matters is what the COP28 delegates have said they want to achieve. Two facts stand out: the consensus document announced plans that would cause enormous economic harm if implemented, and it was approved unanimously — yes, by everyone in the room.

The first point is best illustrated by the language around eliminating fossil fuels. Climate policy is supposed to be about optimally reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. As technology gradually allows emissions to be de-coupled from fuel use, there may eventually be no need to cut back on fuels. But activist delegates insisted on abolitionist language anyway, making elimination of fossil fuels an end in itself. Such fuels are of course essential for our economic standard of living, and 30 years of economic analysis has consistently shown that, even taking account of emissions, phasing out fuels would do humanity far more harm than good. The Consensus statement ignores this, even while claiming to be guided by “the science.”

The second point refers to the fact that all representatives of all governments worldwide endorsed policies that will, if implemented, do extraordinary harm to their own people. Where governments have made even small attempts to take these radical steps, the public has rebelled. This calls into question whom the COP28 delegates actually “represent.” A few elected officials did attend, but no one voted for the great majority of attendees. And have no doubt: even if some heads of state, whether courageous or foolhardy, did go to COP intent on opposing the overall agenda, they would almost certainly be browbeaten into signing the final package.

The UAE Consensus is the latest indication that the real fault line in contemporary society is not right versus left, it’s the people versus (for lack of a better word) the globalists. A decade ago this term was only heard on the conspiracy fringe. It has since migrated to the mainstream as the most apt descriptor of a permanent transnational bureaucracy that aspires to run everything, even to the public’s detriment, while insulating themselves from democratic limits.

A hallmark of globalists is their credo of “rules for thee but not for me.” Thousands of delegates fly to Davos or to the year’s COP, many on private jets, to be wined and dined as they advise the rest of us to learn to do without.

Two sides of the same coin.

On both COVID-19 and climate change, the same elite has invoked “the science,” not in support of good decision-making, but as a talisman to justify everything they do, including censoring public debate. Complex and uncertain matters are reduced to dogmatic slogans by technocrats who force-feed political leaders a one-sided information stream. Experts outside the process are accorded standing based solely on their obeisance to the preferred narrative, not their knowledge or qualifications. Critics are attacked as purveyors of “misinformation” and “disinformation.” Any opposition to government plans therefore proves the need to suppress free speech.

Eventually, however, the people get the last word. And despite nonstop fear-mongering about an alleged climate crisis, the people tolerate climate policy only insofar as it costs almost nothing.

The climate movement may think that by embedding itself in the globalist elite it can accelerate policy adoption without needing to win elections. In fact, the opposite is happening. Globalists have co-opted the climate issue to try to sell a grotesque central planning agenda that the public has repeatedly rejected. If the UAE Consensus is the future of climate policy, climate policy’s failure is guaranteed.

Ross McKitrick: The truth about forest fires goes up in climate-change smoke

Uttarkashi: A wild fire in the Tankore forest area of Uttarkashi district, Monday, April 5, 2021. (PTI Photo) (PTI04_05_2021_000119B)

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

We’re told we should listen to the science, but the science on forest fires is that they peaked in the 1980s


Until the recent Canadian wildfires sent plumes of smoke over the densely populated cities around the Great Lakes and along the Eastern Seaboard, few people in those cities had ever experienced the weird orange haze of a forest fire or the temporary spike in fine particulates and pervasive smell of smoke. Understandably, many people reacted with alarm. We city-dwellers typically only see wildfires on television, usually alongside footage of fire crews and water-bombers valiantly trying to put them out, which creates the impression they are somehow unnatural events that must be avoided at all costs. In reality, forest fires are not only natural but essential to the life cycle of the forest ecosystem.


Unfortunately, politicians, reporters and climate activists rushed in to exploit this unusual event by pushing their agenda. They made a lot of glib claims about climate change causing wildfires to become more common. For instance, Prime Minister Trudeau tweeted: “We’re seeing more and more of these fires because of climate change.”


That statement is false. Amid the smokescreen of untrue claims, nobody seems to have bothered looking up the numbers. Canadian forest fire data are available from the Wildland Fire Information System. Wildfires have been getting less frequent in Canada over the past 30 years. The annual number of fires grew from 1959 to 1990, peaking in 1989 at just over 12,000 that year, and has been trending down since. From 2017 to 2021 (the most recent interval available), there were about 5,500 fires per year, half the average from 1987 to 1991.


The annual area burned also peaked 30 years ago. It grew from 1959 to 1990, peaking in 1989 at 7.6 million hectares before declining to the current average of 2.4 million hectares per year over 2017-21. And 2020 marked the lowest point on record with only 760,000 hectares burned.


The record shows that the fraction of fires each year that become major (more than 200 hectares in size) peaked back in 1964 at 12.3 per cent. From 1959 to 1964, it averaged 8.7 per cent then dropped to 3.4 per cent in the early 1980s. As of 2017-21 interval, it had climbed again to 6.0 per cent, but that’s still well below the average 60 years ago.


At the global level, satellite data from the European Space Agency also show that wildfire activity has been trending downward in recent decades and is currently approaching its lowest level since the record began in the early 1980s.


In an extensive discussion on the Royal Society blog back in 2020, U.K. forestry experts Stefan Doerr and Cristina Santin acknowledged that climate change may be making conditions for fire more favourable in some areas, but also noted it’s leading to reductions in other areas. As for the tendency for some fires to become larger and more dangerous, this can be traced to our approaches to forest management. “[Very] aggressive fire suppression policies over much of the 20th century have removed fire from ecosystems where it has been a fundamental part of the landscape rejuvenation cycle” they explained. This has led to a buildup of fuel in the form of woody debris leading to the risk of more explosive and unstoppable fires.


“We cannot completely remove fire from the landscape,” they stressed. “That is the misconception that led to the ‘100 per cent fire suppression’ policies in the U.S. and elsewhere that have made things worse in many cases.”


As Environmental Studies professor Roger Pielke Jr. notes on his Substack, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is also reluctant to connect forest fire activity to climate change. While it notes there has been an increase in “fire weather” (hot dry conditions conducive to forest fires) in a few regions globally, it does not claim a “signal” of greenhouse gas influence is currently present in the probability of fire weather nor does it expect one to be detected over the coming century.


When it comes to climate change, we’re constantly told to “follow the science.” Yet the same people who say that also regularly fabricate claims about trends in forest fires, both here in Canada and globally, and the connection to climate change. Science tells us forest fires are not becoming more common and the average area burned peaked 30 years ago. It also tells us we could do better at reducing the risk of catastrophic wildfire, if we’re prepared to make the effort.

https://financialpost.com/opinion/truth-about-forest-fires-up-in-climate-change-smoke