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No Climate Emergency

This doesn't seem to appear in the Daily Mail or the BBC, I wonder why:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/29/scientists-tell-un-global-climate-summit-no-emerge/

There is no climate emergency
A global network of 500 scientists and professionals has prepared this urgent message. Climate
science should be less political, while climate policies should be more scientific. Scientists should
openly address the uncertainties and exaggerations in their predictions of global warming, while
politicians should dispassionately count the real benefits as well as the imagined costs of adaptation
to global warming, and the real costs as well as the imagined benefits of mitigation.
Natural as well as anthropogenic factors cause warming
The geological archive reveals that Earth’s climate has varied as long as the planet has existed, with
natural cold and warm phases. The Little Ice Age ended as recently as 1850. Therefore, it is no
surprise that we now are experiencing a period of warming.
Warming is far slower than predicted
The world has warmed at less than half the originally-predicted rate, and at less than half the rate to
be expected on the basis of net anthropogenic forcing and radiative imbalance. It tells us that we are
far from understanding climate change.
Climate policy relies on inadequate models
Climate models have many shortcomings and are not remotely plausible as policy tools. Moreover,
they most likely exaggerate the effect of greenhouse gases such as CO2. In addition, they ignore the
fact that enriching the atmosphere with CO2 is beneficial.
CO2 is plant food, the basis of all life on Earth
CO2 is not a pollutant. It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is
beneficial for nature, greening the Earth: additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global
plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yields of crops worldwide.
Global warming has not increased natural disasters
There is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and
suchlike natural disasters, or making them more frequent. However, CO2-mitigation measures are as
damaging as they are costly. For instance, wind turbines kill birds and bats, and palm-oil plantations
destroy the biodiversity of the rainforests.
Climate policy must respect scientific and economic realities
There is no climate emergency. Therefore, there is no cause for panic and alarm. We strongly
oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050. If better approaches
emerge, we will have ample time to reflect and adapt. The aim of international policy should be to
provide reliable and affordable energy at all times, and throughout the world.

https://clintel.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ecd-letter-to-un.pdf

At last some people talking sense. After the relatively rapid rise of around 1°C between 1975 and 2000 in the Northern Hemisphere the temperatures have been relatively flat.

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/figures/Figure11.png

We certainly need to reduce our consumption of finite resources and reduce our impact on the planet but focusing on CO2 is not the way to do it. Let's start with real pollutants that are directly harmful.

Best regards

Roger

0 Graham Bennett over 4 years ago

You are of course correct Alasdair. Whatever solutions we choose, improved energy efficiency and reducing our consumption is the best place to start. It's a great example of a win win, as reducing consumption reduces our bills, we do however need to bring society along with us, with well regulated and subsidised schemes to avoid some of the "doorstep cowboys" that have reduced consumer confidence in the past.
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0 Malcolm Davies over 4 years ago

Hi Roger P, thank you for your excellently researched submission regarding the necessary conditions for 'stability' in our synchronously powered 50Hz rotating machine derived national grid system. It is so refreshing and about time we had some properly considered analysis of what is actually possible and truly cost effective.

It occurs to me that there is a simple, but necessarily expensive solution to this problem of incompatibility between the competing systems, namely:

We plan and financially budget for the provision/purchase of individual (or access to shared community based systems) solar/wind powered installations to charge up the batteries - e.g. every purchase of an (enormously wasteful, payload inefficient - 75Kg driver as payload carried by anything from an 800Kg to 2400kg kerb weight platform) electric car or SUV - HAS to be accompanied by the mandatory purchase/rental of a suitable roof mounted solar panel installation - principally designed to charge up the (currently fashionable 300 Kg of 64KWh Li-Ion based battery) 400 volt battery typically deployed in such vehicles.

Admittedly, this action would place even more of the financial burden of making the transition to a BEV to the customer. It is already a prohibitively expensive purchase with initial price comparisons of nominally similar vehicles already being typically £17k for a conventional small family SUV vs circa £35k for its battery electric version.

Calculations of comparative cost of ownership of ICE vs BEV over any period of time - say from 3 years to 20 years appear to indicate that the BEV offers little or no real domestic cost saving and apart from the benefit of zero tailpipe emissions from the BEV when travelling in built up areas, 'whole life cycle' carbon footprint and environmental impact assessments do not make a sufficiently compelling case for us to all make the transition.

Finally, may I add that any one who lives in our almost permanently traffic congested home counties here in the UK will be aware of how much time and money is wasted just driving to work and back. An obvious remedy to AT LEAST 50% of all this unnecessary pollution and dilution of our 'work - life balance' has been available for over 20 years, courtesy of high speed, high capacity, secure, fibre optic telecommunications systems. When is the dream of congestion free roads and more 'spare time for all' going to become reality?

Where there is a will - there is a way ! Maybe governments and corporations should reconsider their lack of support for this way of living - after all - it is not rocket science is it ?
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0 Roger B over 4 years ago

There are plenty of thoughts on the engineering solutions that could be applied and some on the resource problems that would limit them. Some things can be solved by ‘simple’ engineering others will require significant structural changes (but hopefully not as significant as the one applied by Thanos)

I will take this back to the original question: Is there a ‘Climate Emergency’ that means we must rush these solutions into place which will result in a significant spike in all our emissions due to the resources required to implement them. Does it actually make environmental sense to decommission systems before they have reached the end of their lives? Would we just be wasting finite resources. Is it just a ‘Climate Problem’ in which case rather more sensible and practical timescales can be used.

Is the ‘Climate Emergency’ just political hype? Is it for control (see my post 1984)

communities.theiet.org/.../24015

I posted this piece before which was written in response to ‘The Engineer’ poll on language and the climate which was based on the Guardian Editor’s instruction to ‘Hype Up’ climate change. As expected it did not pass the moderators. I have tried to use the best sources I could find ( In this forum I can directly include the pictures)
www.theengineer.co.uk/.../
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The climate has changed, is changing, and will continue to change with or without us. What do we actually know?
The longest directly measured temperature series is the Central England series held by the UK Met office:
www.metoffice.gov.uk/.../

If you look at the chart, the temperature rose by more than 1.5°C between about 1700 and 1730. The temperature rose around 1°C between about 1975 and 2000. Were both of these man made? Were both of them natural? How do the climate models explain the rise in the 1700s.

The longest measured CO2 series is from Mauna Loa:

www.esrl.noaa.gov/.../full.html

This is always shown with an offset zero. It is a fairly trivial task to import the raw data and draw a ‘normal’ graph starting at zero. Much less scary.

What about global temperatures? There are several series available. As this is a UK magazine I will use the ones from the Met office:
www.metoffice.gov.uk/.../Figure11.png

What do we see on these graphs? Firstly the various temperature series are in reasonable agreement. Secondly they only go back to 1900. If you look at the Central England series quite a lot happened before then. There is also a significant difference between the north and south hemispheres. For the northern hemisphere there is somewhat dubious attempt to show an increasing rate of temperature rise by starting from a cool spell in the 1970s.

Does anything look scary enough to justify all this ‘Climate Emergency’ language?

The next graphs comes from the IPCC AR5 Working Group 1, The Physical Science Basis:

www.climatechange2013.org/.../hartmann13agu_U22A_final.pdf

On page 18 it shows the model outputs in red with a confidence band. Measured temperatures are black. The measure temperatures are always below the model and are starting to leave the confidence band. It also records the reduction in the rate of warming after 1998.

Is reality scary or is it just the models?

The IPCC uses four scenarios, RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6.0 and RCP8.5. RCP8.5 is the worst case and it has been suggested it could be difficult to dig coal fast enough to achieve it. Most of the scaremongering is based on this scenario. RCP6.0 is around business as usual, RCP4.5 is if an effort is made to reduce CO2 emissions and RCP2.6 is an unlikely best case.
This is shown graphically in this article:

judithcurry.com/.../

Figure 4 shows it quite well.

So does Climate Change deserve scary language? In my view no. What is important is reduction in the use of finite resources, reduction in change of land use and sustainable use of natural resources such as fish.
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Where is the reality? Is the world burning up? As I posted earlier the official website on Greenland ice offers on three different pages, no problem, some problem and catastrophe. What is the ‘Truth’.
Best regards
Roger
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0 Philip Oakley over 4 years ago

When were we last at (within a reasonable precision) zero carbon (fraction of the overall world natural carbon cycle), and how big was the world population at that time? (e.g. 1800, 1900, 1914, 1939, 1960, or maybe as far back as 1650, 1750, etc.

I saw that Greta T mentioned that even the Nordic countries weren't as great as they might hope as they consumed 4 times the earth capacity, which on a `Malthus` scale (he worried about food supply) would need a population reduction factor of 4. I'd heard America was a factor of 6.

Are we avoiding the Elephant in the Room, and proposing Octopus in a String Bag solutions which slip away all too easily. There are a lot of gross underlying assumptions about values and expectations that may need surfacing. Or maybe it's just catastrophe preparation (there was a theory for that) that's needed.
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0 Philip Oakley over 4 years ago

Roger Pendleton:

There seems to be a basic error in the engineering of zero carbon electricity. All distribution is based on 50 Hz AC transmission which is the only practical system for long range (over500 metres) electricity Distribution. This 50 Hz frequency is set by large turbo alternators running at 3000 rpm (for 6 pole machines).

Alll the "green" alternatives (Except Nuclear) generate DC power. This has to be Inverted to 50 Hz AC by synchronous systems. It has been calculated (By greater minds than mine) that the the minimun level of synchronous power for a stable system is 40% so we can not have more than 60% renewable energy even assuming that it would be available in low wind, low light conditions.

Eur Ing Roger Pendleton DipEE.CEng. MIET

I'm not sure that I would trust this. The problem is that it fails to define the system boundaries over which the (unreliable by implication) renewables are averaged, relative to the 'base load' (trustable?) generation.

Tidal and pump storage are renewable energy but are unlikely to be part of that 60/40 limitation.

There is a lot of work on-going for the conversion of such short term renewable energy (e.g. wind & cloudy solar) into stored energy.

My main point was to always be cautious of these grand 'facts' and 'limitations' and to discern the hidden assumptions.

Do we have too many people wanting too comfy a life that is dependent on the carbon cycle (plant absorption (CO2 -> O2, and combustion C+ O2 -> CO2)

Philip
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0 Alasdair Anderson over 4 years ago

Philip,

I think that we were never at 'zero carbon' as Cro-Magnon man burned wood in fires for cooking and keeping warm 30,000 years ago, thus adding to atmospheric carbon dioxide. However I think you are right to say (or at least imply) we should consider the population in the equation, and is certainly something that I have always believed.

Alasdair
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0 Ernest over 4 years ago

Roger, thanks for posting this article and bringing the issue to attention of members.
Your observation that the approach by Climate Intelligence Foundation to the UN has received little to no media coverage in the UK, is mirrored in other western countries eg Canada and Australia, where there has also been no media coverage.
Much of the media clearly take a partisan approach on this subject, and fail to provide unbiased reporting, while there is increasingly pressure from various institutions and activist groups to shut down the discussion on climate change all together, and denigrate prominent scientists or professionals who question the hypothesis. This behaviour in itself, should make us all concerned. Science only advances when exhaustively investigated, challenged, is shown to be repeatable, and when all the facts are consistent with the hypothesis. The current level of understanding of climate, and the ability of models to predict future change does not meet that test, when compared with what is actually measured. All climate models over predict the rate of warming compared with measured data, yet these same climate model predictions (consolidated by the IPCC) are the primary driver for climate policy legislation, and by association the 2050 zero carbon implementation timeline for the UK.
The UK’s progress on Carbon Dioxide Emissions Reduction up to 2017, is summarised in the Cambridge Economics Report ‘How the UK met its carbon Budgets Report’ 2019: This Report was prepared for the Climate Change Committee.
“The long-term pathway is designed to bring about measures to incrementally reduce GHG emissions. However, we find that success in meeting the first two carbon budgets is not the result of measures but of changes in accounting for the EU ETS and the traded sector cap; and the impact of the global economic downturn in 2009. We find that rather than an emissions surplus there is, in fact, a policy measures gap”. Target achieved but not through measures applied.

Against this backdrop, and as the focus on carbon budget reductions move to other sectors (transport and housing), Government data on fuel poverty in the UK shows that in 2017, 20-25% of households in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland were categorised as in fuel poverty (more than 10% of income devoted to home heating). In England the figure is 10%, based on a revised metric that reduced that original criteria number substantially. Implementing climate policy change in transport, home heating/power will fall disproportionally on those in the population that can least afford it. It is therefore important that the path to decarbonisation is outlined along with the policy, tax, costs, technologies, timeline and transition measures such that they can be appropriately advised to the UK’s inhabitants/electorate.
Low cost, reliable and affordable fossil fuel energy enabled the industrial revolution and brought immense benefits to society in all aspects of life, freedom, choice and longevity. Removing or restricting personal freedoms, removing choice and implementing rationing as advocated in another part of this thread may not be a cause the UK public will embrace. They may not want to be martyrs to a cause where the cost may be disproportional to the gain, especially when the global impact from UK’s emission reductions will not be measurable. They should however be made aware of what this transition will entail and how it will affect their future, choices and lifestyle and therefore be able to make informed choices, or advocate for change.
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0 Former Community Member over 4 years ago

The CO2 myth just doesn't add up.

Part of my work in 1990 included trying to dissuade the electronics industry from using Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). I attended numerous discussions and presentations often conducted by Dr Colin Lea of the National Physics Laboratory who did a wonderful job in bringing the issue to everyone's attention. Scientists at the time stated that, if use of CFCs ended in 1990, Ozone depletion would peak in 2015. Furthermore, the ozone levels in the upper atmosphere would not return to 1980 levels until the year 2070.

Another aspect of my work at the time necessitated a strong understanding of thermal energy transfer; conductive, convective and radiative. Being a former radar engineer, the radiative component was something I seemed to grasp quite well.

I now live in the Southern Hemisphere. On very cold days, in midwinter, the intensity of the sun's rays this year has seemed markedly stronger than I can ever remember. Which leads me to suspect that either the radiation from the sun has increased or the screening effect of UV rays offered by ozone has decreased in line with scientists' predictions.

I did read a scientist's report that suggested sunspot activity attenuates deep space cosmic radiation. The suggestion was that the reduction in sunspot activity in recent years has resulted in a marked increase in unhindered cosmic radiation reaching our (ozone depleted) atmosphere. That suggestion was debunked by another scientist as "climate change denial". However, the counter argument demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of radiation in general.

My point is, the CO2 debate hinges on the convective effects of thermal energy as did the methane scare in the early 1990s, when methane, as produced by cows, was seen as the greatest threat to the planet.

In reality, nitrogen (79%) and oxygen( 20.6%) have far more of an influence on convective energy transfer than Carbon Dioxide (0.0004 % ) or methane (negligible) could possibly have.

I am also led to believe that Carbon Dioxide levels have been as high as 700ppm as recently as 800AD when vineyards proliferated on the Bere Alston peninsula in South Devon.

I still believe global warming as we know it is primarily due to radiative thermal energy and a reduction in the screening effect offered by a depleted ozone layer.

The damage wreaked on the ozone layer by the increasing use of CFCs since their creation in the 1920s has adversely affected the atmospheric balance and will continue to do so for another 50 years. Climatic variations are a side effect.

However, the real elephant in the room is the fact that there are more human beings alive now, than have ever died. They all want houses, food, water, cars, holidays and toys. They also exhale Carbon Dioxide.

Colin Munro. I.Eng
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0 Simon Barker over 4 years ago

I am also led to believe that Carbon Dioxide levels have been as high as 700ppm as recently as 800AD when vineyards proliferated on the Bere Alston peninsula in South Devon.

Prior to the industrial revolution, CO2 levels had been roughly steady at 280ppm for hundreds of years. It's only in the last few years that it's gone over 400ppm.

Ice core data from Antarctica suggests that CO2 is now the highest it's been for around 130000 years. https://www.bas.ac.uk/data/our-data/publication/ice-cores-and-climate-change/
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0 Philip Oakley over 4 years ago

on the X hundred ppm of CO2 value: Who has actually converted that to a 'real' number that positively says how thick the CO2 thermal blanket is? e.g. at standard temperature and pressure it is the same as a layer 5m, 100m, 1km, thick of CO2.

The key point about CO2 is that the sun's energy is in the shorter wavelengths (Visible and UV) and as such nearly all comes straight through the atmosphere. Meanwhile the Earth glow is at the infra red end of the spectrum and the CO2 absorption is strong here, and is a large proportion of the emitted radiation, thus keeping us inside a thermal blanket.

We should be careful about the simple bandying about of magic numbers without giving a solid feel for the impact. The story goes that it was Kelvin that was one of the first to identify the CO2 problem as a 'slow burn' issue over a century ago.

Perhaps the larger problem is that of the human perception of criticality and urgence that can't cope with these slow build, hard to agree, problems.
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No Climate Emergency

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