It must be painfully apparent, even to the Milibands of the world, that the rich OECD countries are rapidly becoming irrelevant in overall terms. Whatever sacrifices we make, the rest of the world will carry on with business as usual.
A compelling work of fiction which a lot of people took way too seriously is “prescient” – has the Guardian finally said something we can agree with?
The Day After Tomorrow at 20: a strangely prescient ecological warning
The disaster flick is riddled with inaccuracies, cliches and gusts of machismo. But with its global climate catastrophe, it feels more relevant than ever
Lauren Collee Wed 5 Jun 2024 01.00 AEST
In the winter of 2013, a breakdown in the polar vortex allowed freezing cold air to escape southwards towards the North American continent. As ice storms, tornadoes and blizzards swept across the US, Donald Trump tweeted. “I’m in Los Angeles and it’s freezing,” he wrote. “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”
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The film, 2004’s summer box office hit, was lampooned by critics and scientists alike. Members of an internet chatroom allegedly paid the paleoclimatologist William Hyde $100 to see it. “This movie is to climate science what Frankenstein is to heart surgery,” he concluded.
Nevertheless, a series of studies showed that the film did sway public opinion about the climate crisis. Twenty years after its release, it remains a unique specimen: a climate disaster blockbuster that adheres to all the tenets of the genre, while also explicitly attributing its carnage to the greenhouse effect.
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Like every disaster film, The Day After Tomorrow is riddled with inaccuracies, cliches and strange displays of machismo (in one scene, Gyllenhaal battles wolves on a frozen ghost ship). But, if anything, the film’s absurdity feels closer to our reality in 2024 than it did in 2004. After all, we live in the age of climate surrealism – it is generally understood that things are going to get weirder as they get worse. Today is the day after tomorrow, we mutter to ourselves, as we read about ancient anthrax-infested reindeer carcasses defrosting in the Arctic Circle.
I really enjoyed “The Day After Tomorrow” when it first came out, and still watch it occasionally. It has a racy plot, interesting characters, sacrifice, heroism and some smoking hot intelligent women.
I’m a big fan of actor Denis Quaid, who played the science hero. Quaid’s outspoken support for President Trump is just icing on the cake.
But watching “The Day After Tomorrow”, you really have to put your scientific skepticism on hold.
Even worse for “The Day After Tomorrow” believers, the Younger Dryas meltwater influx theory, which was the cause of the abrupt cooling in the movie, appears to have fallen out of favour.
Evaluating the link between the sulfur-rich Laacher See volcanic eruption and the Younger Dryas climate anomaly
James U. L. Baldini,Richard J. Brown,and Natasha Mawdsley
Abstract
The Younger Dryas is considered the archetypal millennial-scale climate change event, and identifying its cause is fundamental for thoroughly understanding climate systematics during deglaciations. However, the mechanisms responsible for its initiation remain elusive, and both of the most researched triggers (a meltwater pulse or a bolide impact) are controversial. Here, we consider the problem from a different perspective and explore a hypothesis that Younger Dryas climate shifts were catalysed by the unusually sulfur-rich 12.880 ± 0.040 ka BP eruption of the Laacher See volcano (Germany). We use the most recent chronology for the GISP2 ice core ion dataset from the Greenland ice sheet to identify a large volcanic sulfur spike coincident with both the Laacher See eruption and the onset of Younger Dryas-related cooling in Greenland (i.e. the most recent abrupt Greenland millennial-scale cooling event, the Greenland Stadial 1, GS-1). Previously published lake sediment and stalagmite records confirm that the eruption’s timing was indistinguishable from the onset of cooling across the North Atlantic but that it preceded westerly wind repositioning over central Europe by ∼ 200 years. We suggest that the initial short-lived volcanic sulfate aerosol cooling was amplified by ocean circulation shifts and/or sea ice expansion, gradually cooling the North Atlantic region and incrementally shifting the midlatitude westerlies to the south. The aerosol-related cooling probably only lasted 1–3 years, and the majority of Younger Dryas-related cooling may have been due to the sea-ice–ocean circulation positive feedback, which was particularly effective during the intermediate ice volume conditions characteristic of ∼ 13 ka BP. We conclude that the large and sulfur-rich Laacher See eruption should be considered a viable trigger for the Younger Dryas. However, future studies should prioritise climate modelling of high-latitude volcanism during deglacial boundary conditions in order to test the hypothesis proposed here.Read more:
“The Day After Tomorrow” was a great movie, a climate disaster blockbuster which even skeptics can enjoy. But the only thing prescient about “The Day After Tomorrow” is how a bunch of greens getting excited about a work of fiction when the movie was first released foreshadowed today’s mainstream climate activism.
A recent article at The Guardian, “Brutal heatwaves and submerged cities: what a 3C world would look like,” claims that 1.5°C of warming, while not the end of the world, still will have many catastrophic effects on the planet, including the death of tropical corals, intense storms, and ice sheet collapse. This is false. There is no evidence that 1.5°C will have any of these effects, this is mere fearmongering.
The article is somewhat confused in its presentation, claiming at once that passing the 1.5°C limit will lead to “catastrophic heatwaves, floods, and storms,” while also saying it is not a “cliff-edge leading to a significant change in climate damage.” Catastrophe certainly sounds like “significant change,” and later comments further confuse the point. It’s important to note that, according to the E.U.’s climate and weather agency Copernicus, the average annual temperature has already exceeded 1.48°C the pre-industrial benchmark. Also, data from the longest continuously running temperature network indicates that Europe has already exceeded a 2.0℃ temperature rise with no appreciable negative climate impacts.
In an interactive graphic in the center of the article, the 1.5°C warming “benchmark” is claimed to be the point at which “heatwaves and storms intensify, tropical corals die off and tipping points for ice sheet collapse and permafrost thawing may be triggered.”
There are no citations or sources given for these claims. Luckily, Climate Realism has dug into the available data in previous posts on all of the mentioned subjects.
Regarding the 1.5°C warming claim, scientists have admitted that the value is arbitrary and political, and was not settled upon based on scientific or data-driven reasoning. The fact of the matter is, as discussed in “Reason is Right, There is No ‘Climate Cliff’,” that threshold was developed in the 90s by an 11-member German political “advisory board,” only one of whom was a meteorologist. The panel’s stated goal was to find a way to preserve the state of the Earth in its current form at the time, which is of course impossible in a dynamic system that is influenced not only by human activity but also by things well outside our control and ability, like space weather and tectonics.
There is no evidence showing that storms are getting worse, from tropical cyclones to drought, no climate signal is visible despite the warming of the past hundred-plus years. In regards to heatwaves, many recent media-promoted record-breaking heat spell claims have been shown to most likely to be a artifact of the Urban Heat Island effect due to the proximity to urbanization, which skews results much hotter than they otherwise would have been. In the United States at least, where a good reliable record exists, average temperature anomalies have not been on an upward trajectory. In fact, the worst recorded heatwaves occurred in the 1930s. (See figure below)
As Climate at a Glance: U.S. Heatwaves explains, “the lion’s share of the Earth’s modest warming occurs during winter, at night, and closer to the poles.”
The coral reef death claim is particularly strange, especially since far from dying off, corals in locations that previously suffered bleaching like the Great Barrier Reef are at their highest extent ever right now despite (or perhaps because of) recent warming. Corals arose, evolved, survived, and thrived when global average temperatures were much higher than they are today. There is no reason to think this trend would suddenly reverse with another 0.02 degrees warming. The empirical data rebuts this claim so thoroughly, it’s a wonder The Guardian would try to slip it by.
The ice sheets likewise do not appear to be on the verge of collapse. Several posts at Climate Realism (here, here, here, for samples) demonstrate that, while a short-term decline polar ice loss in the arctic occurred at the beginning of the 21st century, sea ice extent has largely stabilized since then. The previous decline is hardly alarming, and definitely did not provide evidence for or presage an imminent total collapse. Two-time Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report Expert Reviewer Dave Burton pointed out in “Media Regurgitates Nonsense About Greenland Ice Cap and Sea Level Rise,” that hysteria over Greenland melt ignores the facts on the ground, that is, it’s way too cold to have a total ice loss in the region without a much more dramatic warming trend.
“Thanks to “Arctic Amplification,” Greenland should get more warming than most other places, but still no more than a few degrees,” Burton wrote. “That much warming would be nice for the hardy people who live there, but it could not melt the southern part of the Greenland Ice Sheet, because water has to get above 0°C to melt, and the southern part of the Greenland Ice Sheet averages much colder than that.”
Finally, the permafrost “tipping point” claim is also meritless. Predictions about the loss of northern permafrost have failed to materialize since at least 2005.
In a shameful display of science-free propaganda, The Guardian revealed it does not care at all about providing their readers with facts. It is quite simple to look up weather records and the current state of coral reefs. Instead, The Guardian chose to outsource their thinking to alarmist fearmongers, eschewing data for the drama of doomsday predictions. This is yet another instance of mainstream media outlets failing in their duty to responsibly and accurately inform the public concerning the true, unalarming, state of the planet.
Ah, The Guardian, ever the beacon of balanced journalism, has outdone itself yet again. With a flourish of melodramatic despair, they’ve painted a portrait of Donald Trump as an eco-villain, brandishing policies like a black cape in a horror show of environmental doom. Let’s dive into their latest apocalyptic prophecy.
Donald Trump has vowed to immediately halt offshore wind energy projects “on day one” of a new term as US president, in his most explicit threat yet to the industry and the latest in a series of promises to undo key aspects of the transition to cleaner energy.
The drama unfolds with Trump, the presumed puppet master of planetary destruction, vowing to dismantle the beloved wind projects. Never mind that the industry might warrant a critical inspection of its impacts; The Guardian is more interested in framing this as an opening scene of a Shakespearean tragedy.
Trump repeated false accusations about wind projects as being lethal to whales during a rally on Saturday in Wildwood, a resort city on New Jersey’s coast, promising to stamp out an industry that has been enthusiastically backed by Joe Biden.
Here, Trump is almost comically vilified, conjuring images of dead whales washing up by the dozens, courtesy of those nefarious wind farms. The Guardian, in its infinite wisdom, assures us these claims are “false,” brushing aside any pesky nuances about the environmental cost of these structures.
“They destroy everything, they’re horrible, the most expensive energy there is,” Trump said of the wind turbines. “They ruin the environment, they kill the birds, they kill the whales.”
One can almost hear the ominous music swell as Trump lists the crimes of these whirling dervishes of doom. Of course, The Guardian couldn’t possibly entertain the thought that he might be exaggerating but not entirely fabricating. Instead, they prefer their villains cartoonish and their plots black and white.
And just when you thought it couldn’t get more theatrical:
McLeod said that there has been a concerted misinformation campaign, funded by oil and gas interests, to mislead voters. “Big oil is benefiting from all of this fear mongering,” she said.
The plot thickens with the introduction of Big Oil, the shadowy antagonist lurking behind the curtain. According to The Guardian’s script, anyone who questions the sanctity of wind power must be a marionette dancing on petroleum-coated strings.
Finally, Trump’s distaste for the Paris Agreement is presented not as a policy position but as a nefarious scheme to single-handedly warm the globe:
“In one of the most vivid illustrations of his stance towards the climate crisis, Trump removed the US from the Paris climate agreement during his first White House term.”
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“The Paris climate accord does nothing to actually improve the environment here in the United States or globally,” Mandy Gunasekara, Trump’s former EPA chief of staff, told the Guardian in February.
In the world according to The Guardian, this statement is less a legitimate argument and more a declaration of war against Mother Earth, conveniently ignoring any substantive issues with the agreement.
In this latest piece The Guardian crafts a narrative so richly woven with bias that one could mistake it for a tapestry of fiction. Trump’s environmental policy positions, whether one agrees with them or not, deserve a platform for discussion rather than dismissal as the raving of a would-be planet plunderer.
So here’s to The Guardian, our tireless sentinel against the apocalypse, ever vigilant, ever fearful, ever entertaining. If journalism ever tires them, there’s always a spot open in Hollywood script writing. Cheers to that!
The Guardian last week published its survey of ‘climate experts’. The results are a predictable mush of fire-and-brimstone predictions and emotional incontinence. This stunt may have convinced those already aligned to the newspaper’s ideological agenda to redouble their characteristically shrill rhetoric, but encouraging scientists to speculate and emote about the future of the planet looks like an act of political desperation, not scientific communication.
For the purposes of creating this story, the Guardian’s Environment Editor Damian Carrington contacted 843 ‘lead authors’ of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports (IPCC) and 383 responded to his questions. The actual substance of the survey does not seem to have been published by the paper, but the main response Carrington wanted to get from his respondents was an estimate of how much global warming there will be by the end of the century. “World’s top climate scientists expect global heating to blast past 1.5ºC target,” claims one headline. A graphic in the article shows the responses:
The obvious problem this raises is that such a wide range of views on the next three quarters of a century discredits the notion that the IPCC represents a ‘scientific consensus’ on climate change. The ‘consensus’ – the putative expression of agreement by the worlds ‘top climate scientists’ – is the lynchpin of the narrative, epitomised by the Guardian, that the climate debate is between scientists and denialists. “Seventy seven per cent of climate scientists expect a rise of at least 2.5ºC,” explains the chart. Well, yeah, but 23% of climate scientists do not. And a good number of those connected to the IPCC believe that there will be just 1.5 degrees of warming – a third less warming than is anticipated by their colleagues at the other end of the spectrum. Clearly, there is, or needs to be, a debate.
This in turn raises the question of why this survey was necessary at all. The IPCC’s main output is an Assessment Report (AR), of which six have so far been produced since 1990. Each AR consists of three main volumes, each produced by a Working Group (WG), whose focus is on assessing the available research on “the physical science” (WG1), impacts and vulnerabilities (WG2), and mitigation options (WG3). A Guardian opinion survey is hardly going to shed any light on science that these scientists, who authored the reports, have not already published. It would seem rather silly to ignore the thousands of pages of summaries of the state of scientific understanding that hundreds of scientists and other experts have compiled and substitute it with a DIY opinion poll.
Opinion isn’t science. Even scientific opinion is not science. Yet Carrington seems to believe that tapping into the emotions of scientists is of greater value than reading their work. And all sorts of mush seems to have been unleashed by his project. “‘I am starting to panic about my child’s future’: climate scientists wary of starting families,” claims one headline based on the survey. According to the article, the victim of the panic is a Professor Lisa Schipper, whom Carrington describes as “an expert on climate vulnerability”. Schipper’s profile, however, reveals her actual occupation: “I am particularly interested in socio-cultural dimensions of vulnerability, including gender, culture and religion, as well as structural issues related to power, justice and equity.” I’m smelling a rat here, and more than a whiff of humbug. Schipper is not a climate scientist at all, as Carrington seems to imply in both his headline and his article.
Another article – an interactive page on the Guardian website – claims: “We asked 380 top climate scientists what they felt about the future.” The article quotes, among others, Lorraine Whitmarsh from the University of Bath, who tells Carrington:
[Climate change] is an existential threat to humanity and [lack of] political will and vested corporate interests are preventing us addressing it. I do worry about the future my children are inheriting.
But Whitmarsh is not a climate scientist either. According to her academic profile at Bath, She did a BA in Theology and Religious Studies with French at the University of Kent, graduating in 1997. She followed this with a Masters in ‘Science, Culture and Communication’, before completing a PhD in Psychology in 2005. Now Director of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST), Whitmarsh researches “perceptions and behaviour in relation to climate change, energy and transport” and “regularly advises governmental and other organisations on low-carbon behaviour change and climate change communication”.
I have discussed the nature of climate psychologists’ work before in the Daily Sceptic. And of course, CAST is of that lofty academic milieu which wraps naked Stalinism in motherhood-and-apple-pie. “We want to work closely with people and organisations to achieve positive low-carbon futures — transforming the way we live our lives, and reconfiguring organisations and cities,” says the group’s website. What it doesn’t have an answer to, however, is people who do not share CAST’s radical ideology and do not want their lives, cities or organisations transformed or reconfigured by self-regarding shrinks – who are manifestly the ones in need of help.
There are of course a number of respondents with scientific backgrounds who have replied to Carrington. But these scientific credentials do not seem to have made those who own them any more rational. “Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” says climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who at least appears to have a PhD in Atmospheric, Oceanic and Planetary Physics, “after all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change…”
But perhaps Cerezo-Mota forgot to read IPCC AR 6 in which her colleagues conclude that any detectable increase in floods and meteorological and hydrological droughts cannot be attributed with confidence to anthropogenic climate change. And perhaps she forgot that two decades of wildfire data in all regions of the world show significant declines.
I think it is probably for the best that such nervous wrecks do not reproduce. Their grasp on the data is particularly myopic. Despite their apparent belief that the climate crisis is upon us, life for children born in recent years is immeasurably better that of earlier generations. Rather than being dominated by the weather, today’s children are not only far more likely to survive their fifth birthday, they are going to live longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any generation before them.
That is, unless these crazy climate scientists get their way. Because they would strip away every last benefit of industry, capitalism,and freedom to ‘save the planet’, and deny those children the abundant and affordable resources that has created their historically unprecedented position.
It goes further than humbug. I sense very little data and science underpins their anti-natalism, but a great deal of ideology and manipulation. So how can we explain these scientists’ views, if we don’t believe that they emerge from science?
One answer might be that, for nearly 40 years now, green ideology has been poured into classrooms throughout the world, without any care for the consequences. It has largely bounced off most people. But several generations of children have now come up through this system into the adult world, through higher education. The institutions of climate and environmental science have increasingly become the centres to which unhinged individuals are drawn. Emotionally unstable people naturally seek reasons to explain their dysphoria and believing there is a crisis unfolding in the skies above their heads (rather than in them) is a way to explain their anxieties. After all, if you were not a climate loon, why would you volunteer your time to the IPCC? Gradually, rational views have been weeded out of these institutions.
I believe that is the implication of Carrington’s series of Guardian articles and his survey. It shows that people with no scientific expertise to speak of are nonetheless routinely presented as ‘scientists’ and experts. It shows that even those with scientific expertise will happily and radically depart from both the consensus position and the objective data on both meteorological events and their societal impacts. And it shows they have no reluctance to use their own emotional distress as leverage to coerce others. Carrington thinks that showing us scientists’ emotional troubles will convince us to share their anxiety. But all it shows is that it would be deeply foolish to defer to the authority of climate science. It’s an unstable mess. Science must be cool, calm, rational, detached and disinterested, or it is just a silly soap opera.
A recent article in the newspaper The Guardian reports that some of the ”world’s top climate scientists” believe that disaster is soon to occur due to what they claim will be an additional degree of warming on the planet. This is a false narrative. The earth has experienced similar temperatures in the past without disastrous consequences. In addition, one should note that opinion when it comes to climate science has had a terrible track record.
Almost 80% of the respondents, all from the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), foresee at least 2.5C of global heating, while almost half anticipate at least 3C (5.4F). Only 6% thought the internationally agreed 1.5C (2.7F) limit would be met.
Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts, and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.
First, as Climate Realism has previously discussed, here, for instance, the 1.5°C so-called limit is an arbitrarily made-up threshold. There is no scientific evidence that surpassing the 1.5℃ politically established amount of warming will result in worsening extreme weather events. What’s true of the 1.5℃ threshold is equally true of the 2°C limit, as Roger Pielke Jr., Ph.D. explains in his article, The Two Degree Temperature Target is Arbitrary and Untethered.
In The Guardian article, the opinion of “climate experts” suggests that disasters are afoot, with experts telling the paper that “massive preparations to protect people from the worst of the coming climate disasters were now critical.”
Leticia Cotrim da Cunha, at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, said: “I am extremely worried about the costs in human lives.”
“I am convinced that we have all the solutions needed for a 1.5C path and that we will implement them in the coming 20 years,” said Henry Neufeldt, at the U.N.’s Copenhagen Climate Centre. “But I fear that our actions might come too late and we cross one or several tipping points.”
What’s ironic, is that both The Guardian and those “climate experts” have missed the fact that in Europe, both the 1.5° and 2°C “limits” have already been surpassed, with no deleterious effects.
Below in Figure 1 is the Berkeley Earth average surface temperature record for Europe since about 1780. Europe is a good location to analyze, because some of the longest continuous temperature records are from Europe. It shows that not just 1.5°C, but 2.0°Cof warming has already occurred.
Figure 1. (click to enlarge) Berkeley Earth average European temperature showing a 2.0°C rise since about 1820. Source: http://berkeleyearth.lbl.gov/regions/europe Annotated by Anthony Watts
Also, Cotrim da Cunha’s stated worry that warming will result in more humans dying is belied by the fact that research shows that 10 to 17 time more people die of cold than heat, and that as the Earth has warmed the number of people dying from temperature related illnesses has fallen dramatically.
Given that track record, it hardly seems likely that some additional warming will result in disasters. According to a 2023 study by the University of California Santa Cruz, Earth has experienced higher CO2 levels and warmer temperature in the past, as seen in Figure 2 below:
Figure 2. Temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide over the past 66 million years. Bottom numbers indicate millions of years in the past; right-hand numbers, carbon dioxide in parts per million. Hotter colors indicate distinct periods of higher temperatures; deeper blues, lower ones. The solid zigzagging line charts contemporaneous carbon dioxide levels; shaded area around it reflects uncertainty in the curve. (Adapted from CenCO2PIP, Science 2023)
Earth survived, and history shows that humans are highly adaptable, thus the alarm over missing some arbitrary climate target temperatures we’ve already reached is both unjustified and moot.
What we have here is nothing more than an opinion poll of people whose entire careers are built upon hyping climate catastrophe, whose and reputations will be destroyed if the climate crisis narrative is untrue.
Scientific thinking and practice involves forming testable hypotheses, deciding how to test those hypotheses, doing the tests and analyzing the results to formulate proof and test theory. The claims of climate catastrophes, when they have been tested by experience and time, have proven false. And the future disastrous climate scenarios the experts are forecasting can’t be confirmed outside of the climate models that the self-same experts reference and rely upon to for their opinions. Opinion about science is not science at all but a belief.
This Guardian article is not news, but rather simply gives voice to so-called “experts,” whose past claims about the future are one long train of failed predictions. The Guardian has proven time and again that when it comes to “reporting” on climate change, it and its writers are shameless promoters of the climate crisis narrative which has no basis in evidence or data.
First published JoNova; If you fell for the government propaganda that renewables are the cheapest form of energy, the Guardian will help set you straight.
Here’s the truth: energy transition is hard. Not everyone gets a pony
Jobs will change, communities will be affected, but we have a shot at rising to the challenge of global heating
The climate crisis has long been defined by its lies: From the original sin of science denial, to Tony Abbott’s confected carbon tax panic, to the latest yellowcake straw man. But the most damaging porky of all might bethat the transition to renewable energywill be easy.
Government messaging has propagated this myth, vacillating between the torpid technocracy of targets, acronyms and megawatt hours and the sunny spin that promises “a cheaper, cleaner energy future!”.
When asked to rank energy sources in order of cost, renewables are rated the most expensive. Fossil fuels are seen as a cheaper solution, while nuclear is preferred by those who don’t support the transition anyway.
These findings are hardly surprising, the result of higher electricity bills as global prices for fossil fuels soar. Energy companies, like all big corporations, clip the inflation ticket and roof-top solar incentives are phased out.
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When US president JFK announced the project to reach the moon within a decade in 1962, he famously proclaimed he was doing things “not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.
There has been a lot of commentary about how to measure the cost of renewables – but much of it misses the point
If you’ve been reading or watching any rightwing media of late, you will have heard some extraordinary claims being made about the cost of renewable energy and the transition away from fossil fuels.
The opposition’s energy spokesperson, Ted O’Brien, suggested the Labor government could be “wilfully lying” about the “true cost” of the energy transition, while others have questioned the evidence that solar and wind are the cheapest forms of power.
In the Australian, two columns claimed to have uncovered a fatal flaw in how the cost of solar and wind gets compared with coal, gas and the currently-illegal nuclear.
There is a lot to unpick – but not because any true scandal has been uncovered.
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The LCOE metric shows clearly that solar and onshore wind are easily the cheapest forms of electricity right now. But Lehmann, and critics she quotes, say it’s misleading because it does not account for the cost of adding transmission lines and storage to the grid that enable those renewables.
A little humility, a mea culpa, I mean I would have accepted an apology from The Guardian for sometimes unintentionally misleading readers.
But I doubt we’ll get any of that from The Guardian. They seem to be set on sailing straight from singing the praises of “the cheapest reliable energy system”, to blaming misconceptions about the cost of renewables on lying politicians.
And that talk of moonshots – that certainly doesn’t sound like the cheapest option.
I wonder how green politicians feel about being thrown under a bus by journalists?
We’re never going to find out, because at the rate this political transformation is going, pretty soon it’s going to be difficult to find any politician who admits they supported renewable energy. Renewables will turn out to be a ghastly mistake, which nobody was responsible for.
Legacy media filled its columns last week with poppycock ‘attribution’ stories suggesting that recent heatwaves in Mali (the hottest country in the world), Burkina Faso and the rest of the Sahel would have been impossible without human-caused climate disruption. Needless to say, a number of important facts were missing from this latest bout of climate catastrophism. Average temperatures in both Mali and Burkina Faso have barely risen in the last 85 years, rainfall in both countries has increased slightly in recent times, agricultural production is up, while de-desertification is under way across the entire Sahel region.
This last fact is never likely to be mentioned in these footling stories dreamed up to promote Net Zero collectivisation. To do so would be to open a Pandora’s Box showing global plant levels have accelerated due to the recovering levels of carbon dioxide in a previously denuded atmosphere. A recent science paper revealed that over the last two decades, plant growth had accelerated over large areas of the planet. During the last 40 years, it is thought that there has been 14% more plant growth, bringing immeasurable benefits for local biodiversity as well as more food for human consumption.
The above illustration shows the boost to the natural world over just the last 20 years. Big increases in leaf growth are reported across India, Europe, Brazil and significant parts of Africa. The growth across the Sahel region south of the Sahara desert can be clearly seen.
None of this seems to attract the interest of activists writing in the mainstream media, seemingly concerned only to fear monger and push populations to embrace the insanity of Net Zero. The Guardian wrote of a protracted heatwave in the Sahel that “filled hospitals and mortuaries”. Matt McGrath of the BBC reported a claim that additional heat “would have been the difference between life and death for many people”. Both media operations were reporting the findings of World Weather Attribution (WWA), an operation partly funded by green billionaire Jeremy Grantham, that the “deadly heatwave” would have been “impossible” without humans ratcheting up the climate thermostat.
Regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will be aware of the model-driven crystal ball gazing of WWA. The service produces pseudoscientific opinions, but fails the test of the scientific process since its claims cannot be falsified. Further details are available here. Despite this lack of scientific rigour, the service provides useful ‘scientists say’ cover for legacy media in their Net Zero work.
Both the BBC and the Guardian picked up on the claim by WWA that the temperature rose above 48oC in the Mali city of Kayes on April 3rd, with the Guardian claiming the 48.5oC was the hottest day ever recorded in the country. Some doubt on this figure us cast by the data below provided by Time and Date.
According to this data, April 3rd saw a 44oC high, which was over four degrees lower than the claimed record, and this dropped away two days later to 41oC. As we have seen across the world, the collection of surface temperature data is subject to numerous corruptions. In the U.K., the Met Office compiles nearly 80% of its data from stations that have ‘uncertainties’ set by the World Meteorological Office of between 2-5oC. WWA states that “extreme five day maximum heat as rare as the observed event over Mali/Burkina Faso would have been between 1.5oC cooler and 1.4oC cooler over the larger Sahel region if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels”. Quite where such precision comes from is anyone’s guess, including, it might be suggested, the computer wizards claiming their garbage-in-gospel-out models can unlock the mysteries of a chaotic atmosphere.
Away from the elites catastrophising about the weather for domestic political purposes, the countries of the Sahel including Burkina Faso and Mali have actually enjoyed a remarkably stable climate over the last 85 years.
Both Burkina Faso and Mali show similar average temperature trends and in common with many countries near the equator recent warming has been much less than territories further north. In fact, a large spike during the 1930s, presumably unrelated to humans burning hydrocarbons, was followed by an 85-year pause with little or no warming. The five year 2022 smoothed average temperature of 29.57oC in Burkina Faso, shown above in a World Bank climate graph, is almost exactly the same as that recorded in 1938. In Mali, the temperature difference between these two years is just 0.2oC.
Of course rainfall is very important, and in both countries precipitation amounts have risen in recent years. In Burkina Faso, annual amounts rose from 798.04 mm in the period 1961-1990 to 831.07 mm in 1991-2020, while in Mali the rise over the same period was 313.7 mm to 328.93 mm. Meanwhile, in the course of the BBC story, it is claimed that Senegal is seeing “decreasing rainfall as a result of climate change”. Not according to World Bank figures which show an annual rise in precipitation from 707.87 mm in 1961-1990 to 722.91 mm in the latest 30-year period.
Overall then, the great story missing from the headlines is that the Sahel is slowly turning green. A few thousand years ago the Sahara desert was full of vegetation. Natural process and climate change turned it into a desert, a process that can easily go into reverse. The desert has shown a greener image over the last 15 years notes Britannica with heavier summer rainfalls reported. “This is a blessing for the desert as the vegetation recovers,” it notes. Sub-Saharan Africa is a difficult place to make a living on the land. The area needs aid in the form of inorganic fertilisers to improve the soil and hydrocarbon power to boost productivity. But more rain from the heavens and higher levels of CO2 all have a part to play. What it really doesn’t need is the BBC and the Guardian spreading nonsense stories inspired by green billionaires about the mortuaries filling up because hot countries have a few hot days.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
A recent article in The Guardian, “Vanishing ice and snow: record warm winter wreaks havoc across US Midwest,” describes the very mild winter much of the American Midwest has experienced this year, claiming that it is due to climate change. While a declining trend towards less-severe winters may in part reflect modest warming, the intensity of this winter’s warmth is more likely explained by El Niño.
The Guardian asserts that ice cover across the Great Lakes has been declining since the early 1970s, writing that while the historic average for mid-February is around 40%, “this year it was about 4%.” Grand Forks, North Dakota; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Minneapolis-St Paul, Minnesota, are listed as having recorded their warmest winter, and the Guardian links to evidence in the form of an article from weather.com. Interestingly, directly beneath the states listed in the weather.com post referenced in the article is this statement, “[t]he Twin Cities’ warmest winter, by the way, was 146 years ago in 1877-78, when Rutherford B. Hayes was president.” The Guardian neglected to mention that.
Climate change is the culprit, claims TheGuardian, but their own weather.com source lists two natural causes for this year’s mildness, including El Niño and a lack of “persistent blocking patterns – such as the Greenland block – that pull cold air from Canada and lock it into the U.S. for longer than a few days.”
Regarding El Niño, weather.com says “[w]armer winters are typical across the northern tier of states during a strong El Niño.”
Continuing, weather.com reports:
Despite a few recent storms, this season’s winter storm pace across the country is the slowest in 10 years.
In case you missed the point, the ice was this low 51 years of global warming ago, when the Earth was not only cooler, but it was in a cooling trend. A recent post at Climate Realism covers this specific subject in more detail, with H. Sterling Burnett writing “the last time the Great Lakes ice coverage was this low in January was in the early 1970s, a time when global average temperatures were cooling, which many scientists claimed at the time could be a sign of a coming ice age.”
In fact, ice coverage data for the Great Lakes show that coverage is highly variable from year to year. Plotted annual maximum data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory show as much. (See figure below)
The data across all the Great Lakes do indicate that recent years have seen more below-average years, but high years are still found, and it depends on the individual lake. On Lake Superior, Erie, and Huron, for example, most winters touch the 90% ice coverage range. On Lake Michigan, which has lower ice coverage averages, the record ice coverage is tied between two years; 1977 and 2014. Lake Ontario likewise traditionally has less coverage, and has its record high in 1979, and second-highest ice coverage in 2015.
The Guardian also says that a “report published in January found that the number of -35F (-37.2C) readings in northern Minnesota have fallen by up to 90%,” they point out that low temperatures play a role in weed and pest control, which is true enough, however they neglect to mention that extreme cold kills human beings as well, and at much higher rates than extreme heat does. They also fail to mention that longer, colder winters result in fewer crop rotations and production.
In Climate at a Glance: Temperature Related Deaths, multiple studies back up the fact that cold is deadlier than heat all around the world. One study, published in the Lancet in 2021, found that while 600,000 people die globally from heat, over 6 million die from cold. (see the figure, below) Further, cold related deaths have declined at more than double the rate that heat related deaths have increased.
The table below provides some of the temperature related death numbers.
COLD RELATED DEATHS BY REGION
HEAT RELATED DEATHS BY REGION
Africa 1.18 million
Africa 25,550
Asia 2.4 million
Asia 224,000
Europe 657,000
Europe 178,700
South America 116,000
South America 25,250
UK 44,600
UK 8000
US 154,800
US 18,750
China 967,000
China 71,300
India 655,400
India 83,700
Australia 14,200
Australia 2300
Total: 6,189,000
Total: 637,550
Table 1. Global cold related deaths vs. heat related deaths from 2000 to 2019. Data source: Monash University press release.
The number of severely cold winters may be modestly trending downwards around the Great Lakes and across portions of the American Midwest, but almost everyone would agree that fewer -35℉ days is a blessing not a curse. This year’s winter is particularly mild not because of climate change but because of natural weather patterns, and a long-term trend in declining extreme cold is actually better for human survival. Contrary to The Guardian’s reporting, climate doomsaying is not an appropriate response to the available data.
As we all know, the Guardian is a leading protagonist when it comes to proselytising about the “climate crisis” and the “need” for Net Zero. If you’re an organisation which exists to push that agenda, then the Guardian will probably be happy to publish whatever you write, without first applying any critical editorial standards.
A good example is the “report” by CarbonBrief on 8th August 2022 (and updated on 24th August when gas prices peaked, but never subsequently updated despite gas prices now being less than 10% of the price they reached on that day).
On 7th October 2022 the Guardian website featured an article by Caroline Lucas repeating the claim and linking to the CarbonBrief report, even though by the date her article appeared, the price of gas had already fallen steeply (by around 60%) from the peak of 702.95p per therm (which was used to justify the highly dubious claim made by CarbonBrief) to 285.04p per therm (today, by the way, it sits at 60.29p per therm). In other words, the original claim was highly dubious (as I pointed out in The Lies Have It), and it was already wildly untrue by the time Caroline Lucas wrote her piece and the Guardian published it. Amusingly (I missed it at the time) the url for the Caroline Lucas article was https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/07/energy-crisis-it-isnt-that-we-have-too-little-oil-and-gas-we-have-too-much-lucas. While the jury is out as to whether we have too little oil and gas, all of us hear at Cliscep would probably agree that we have too much Lucas.
The other day I spotted another article in the Guardian, this time by Gaia Vince. It broadly consisted of the stuff we have come to expect, both from her and from the newspaper for which she was writing, but the final section of her article included this:
Alarming forecasts from Big Wind this week, as the world’s three largest companies are struggling with hikes in raw material costs, delays, investment problems and high inflation — offshore wind is around 30% more expensive now.
Finally, I thought: recognition that the claims of cheap renewable energy are false – surely then, we will see something of a mea culpa for having mislead Guardian readers for so long, and perhaps a bit of sense will appear regarding the UK’s energy policy? I couldn’t have been more wrong. Instead the article assured us that we just have to accept higher prices:
Governments must create the conditions for rapid expansion in these challenging offshore and floating markets, even if it means agreeing higher energy prices in the short term. Now, where did we put that £28bn?
My own suspicion is that going down this road will saddle us with higher energy prices in the meduim and long term too. However, only time will prove which of us is right.
All of the above is a long-winded way of setting the scene for the huge surprise I received yesterday when I read another Guardian article, this time with the heading “Power struggle: fears for UK energy generation as green projects delayed” and the sub-heading “Path to relying solely on green power appears long as series of problems collides with reality of keeping the lights on”. Written by Alex Lawson, it could almost have been written by any of us here at Cliscep.
He starts by talking about the fact that the 280 miles between Hadrian’s Wall and Peterhead (which includes, he says, stunning Scottish countryside and quaint villages) is “to become a building site for vast power lines connecting offshore windfarms with urban centres.” This, he tells us, is part of the “national transmission plan” necessitated by net zero driving increasing demand for electricity and the consequent need to accommodate numerous “green” energy projects.
Policymakers face a tricky decade as the target of decarbonising the electricity system by 2035 collides with the day-to-day job of keeping the lights on and ensuring electric vehicles, heat pumps and industrial machinery are powered.
He goes on to point out that in worst-case scenarios we will struggle to meet the surging demand forecast for the early 2030s if “nascent technologies” (such as pie-in-the-sky – my words rather than his – CCS and hydrogen) fail to take off as hoped. Although “the scenarios vary wildly”, we in the UK could be left with “39 gigawatts less power than previous forecasts.”
The problem is exacerbated, given that gas power stations still provide most of our electricity (35.7% last month), nuclear power looks increasingly problematic (at least over the necessary timescales) given further delay to Hinkley Point C, and windfarm planning has been shaken by supply problems “that forced the world’s biggest developer, Ørsted, to scale back, and for Sweden’s Vattenfall to pull out of a huge offshore project [Norfolk Boreas]off the Norfolk coast after they said rising costs meant it was no longer profitable”.
Although he suggests that switching gas plants to hydrogen is viable, he acknowledges it will be costly. CCS is unproven at scale; and large battery projects are facking a backlog to connect to the grid. And even National Grid ESO acknowledges that we will struggle to meet security of supply by relying on battery technologies alone.
A section of the article then talks about the problems experienced by those project developers seeking to connect to the grid – a problem I discussed in Gridlock. Then there is talk of the need to shift consumer demand to times of greater supply and lower demand (in other words, customers are there to serve the needs of the grid, not the other way round).
Next he moves on to discuss the problems with the Labour Party’s energy plans such as its “target to decarbonise power by 2030 and how practical a target to only use gas-fired stations as a backup really is.” Its reliance on Drax is problematic, given its dubious green credentials and massive subsidies (as pointed out by Jit in The Beast of Selby). And there is the question mark within the party over how much money to commit to decarbonising home heating, and the problem of vested interests to be overcome in this area – not only gas companies, but also trade unions.
He concludes thus:
An industry source says: “Everything relating to government decarbonisation targets has an asterisk with ‘subject to security of supply’ attached.”
The path to relying solely on green power appears as long as the journey to Peterhead.
Well said Alex Lawson. And what a refreshing change, in the Guardian of all places!
I hail an independently-minded journalist committed to telling it like it is, and (unusually for me) I give considerable credit to the Guardian for allowing him to write there as he does. At least one journalist is allowed to let the Guardian’s readers know that chickens are coming home to roost.
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Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
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