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.
Back in February, CBS News reported that food prices had continued to rise faster than the rise in the overall Consumer Price Index. Restaurant prices were increasing at an annual rate of 5.1 percent, while grocery prices were up 1.2 percent. But the real story is that supermarket prices are 25 percent higher now than in January 2020, while inflation had increased by 19 percent.
Combine harvester at work harvesting field of crop. Harvest season themes and other agriculture
Back in February, CBS News reported that food prices had continued to rise faster than the rise in the overall Consumer Price Index. Restaurant prices were increasing at an annual rate of 5.1 percent, while grocery prices were up 1.2 percent. But the real story is that supermarket prices are 25 percent higher now than in January 2020, while inflation had increased by 19 percent.
At the same time, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that “climate and conflict are two leading drivers of [our] global food crisis.” UN climate chief Simon Stiell chimed in that, “Rapid, sustained action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to increase resilience is needed now to help stop [chronic hunger] from spiraling out of control.”
There are just three things wrong with the UN pronouncements. First, the slight increases in carbon dioxide have left the planet 20 percent greener than it was just 24 years ago – according to NASA. Crop yields have increased by 13 percent over the same period. Deserts are shrinking. This suggests, and science indicates, that decreasing atmospheric carbon dioxide would likely reverse this trend, decreasing the amount of arable land.
Second, the UN has done nothing to stop the carnage of war in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, Myanmar, and many other countries. UN policies and even personnel (notably in Gaza) have exacerbated conflicts in many areas. Third, UN climate-related mandates have caused major misalignments in African infrastructure development and hindered their efforts at self-reliance and food security.
The European Union, too, has gone all out on forcing changes in agriculture as part of its pious campaign to suffocate crops by lowering carbon dioxide levels in the vain belief that failing to do so will cause a minor temperature rise that will wipe out civilization.
The same nations that after World War II saw that farmers were the key to ending food insecurity have begun demanding that the same farm families quit farming or radically change the way they farm. Perhaps the most egregious example was the demand by the Dutch government in late 2022 that up to 3,000 farmers sell their land and quit unless they innovate to drastically reduce emissions (of CO2 and methane), transition to a new kind of business, relocate, or just stop.
Earlier this month, the World Bank dropped a glossy report entitled, “Recipe for a Livable Planet: Achieving Net Zero Emissions in the Agrifood System,” a target it says is vital to achieving overall net zero and “saving the planet.” Food production, they said, generates nearly a third of humanity’s carbon dioxide, more than heating and electricity.
Yessir – food production is bad for the planet. Bad for people, too. That’s why the “solution” is laboratory-derived “meat,” crickets, and worms.
And so, to achieve this “noble” goal, the World Bank outlined a “practical guide” to rein in those evil farmers who are killing the planet with food. Countries at all income levels (including the poorest African nations) can focus on six key areas – investments, incentives, information, innovation, institutions, and inclusion.
One suspects the spokes-species for this program will be a six-eyed spider.
What this means in practical terms, says Politico, is repurposing the billions rich countries spend to boost products like red meat and dairy for more “climate-friendly” options like poultry, fruits, and vegetables. One major target is the EU’s Common Agriculture Policy, where over 70 percent of the budget subsidizes livestock, and a third of all agricultural subsidy schemes support red meat and dairy production.
British journalist Andrew Orlowski, however, says that industrial action by farmers across Europe, Latin America, and Asia has returned food security to the news agenda after decades of complacency. The brand-new “No Farmers, No Food” campaign already claims four times the number of supporters that the National Farming Union has paying members. Most joined to fight against environmental decrees they say make no sense.
Orlowski notes that livestock fertilize and improve the quality of land, and the methane released by the belching of ruminants is a very short-lived greenhouse gas. Overall, the balance between livestock and crops is a virtuous, not a vicious, cycle that ensures “sustainability” of the land. Measures that reduce the food supply are counterproductive.
The World Bank, says Orlowski, used to encourage poor countries to become richer through economic development, but today’s Malthusian constraints (including Earth’s supposed “operating limits”) encourage poor nations to remain poor. They boast that “low-emitting developing countries have the chance to go straight to green technologies, leading the way toward a new development model and healthier planet.”
When Sri Lanka tried that (organic farming without fertilizer or pesticides), the result was a massive famine.
Our own National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration just released a study claiming that cooking food pollutes the air. Those volatile organic compounds (VOC) released through cooking food negatively affect air quality, says NOAA.
NOAA’s tome flatly blames cooking for releasing aromas into the atmosphere. “If there’s one thing the researchers at NOAA’s Chemical Sciences Laboratory (CSL) have learned in their multi-year deep dive investigation into the unrecognized and underappreciated sources of urban air pollution, it’s this: If you can smell it, there’s a good chance it’s impacting air quality.”
That apple pie in the window is bad for the planet. Right?
In the study, which focused on Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Boulder, researchers determined that 50 percent of the human-caused VOC in downtown Las Vegas was due to chemical products. The other half was split between traffic and cooking emissions. They estimated that cooking emissions accounted for 20 percent of “anthropogenic VOCs” in Las Vegas. Clearly, people there are gambling with their very lives just by eating cooked food.
It gets worse. A British study found that “Exhaled human breath can contain small, elevated concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, both of which contribute to global warming.” The “scientists” urged caution in the assumption “that emissions from humans are negligible.”
And, OMG! The “scientists” “report only emissions in breath in this study, and flatus emissions are likely to increase these values significantly.” Just as bad for the planet, they concluded, are exhaled emissions from livestock and “other” wild animals (and we thought livestock were domesticated).
Apparently, house cat emissions are just fine.
So, what’s the solution for the planet? Fewer people mean fewer crops, fewer livestock, and, of course, fewer “gas-guzzling” motor vehicles, fewer buildings, fewer everything.
In the meantime, I think I will have a hamburger with bacon and cheddar, a milkshake, and some cheesecake for dessert.
“In addition to the poor driving range and higher purchase price that comes with an EV, owners of cars in northern states will soon be forced to contend with poor performance in cold weather. Federal and state officials should reconsider their efforts to ban gasoline vehicles.”
January of this year brought near-zero temperatures to Chicago and other northern cites, producing an electric vehicle (EV) charging nightmare. National media showed images of owners pushing dead EVs around charging stations and waiting for hours to try to charge their vehicle. Drivers lucky enough to connect to a charger sat in their freezing-cold automobile, unable to run the heater while the car tried to charge. Nevertheless, the federal government and many states continue to push to eliminate gasoline vehicles.
On March 20, 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a final rule, Multi-Pollution Emissions Standards for light vehicles sold in model years 2027 to 2032. The rule includes restrictions on the amount of carbon dioxide that can be emitted per mile, restrictions which most gasoline cars will be unable to meet. The goal of the rule is to force manufacturers to produce EVs for up to 56% of new light vehicle purchases by 2032.
Twenty-two states have adopted zero emissions vehicle (ZEV) mandates. California regulations call for 100% ZEV sales by 2035. Seventeen states have adopted the California ZEV regulations. Many of these are northern states with cold winters.
“Zero-emissions vehicle” effectively means electric vehicle. Hydrogen fuel-cell cars are failing to penetrate the US market. California has 55 public hydrogen fueling stations, but that number has been declining. Hawaii has a single hydrogen fueling station, the only other station in the US. Battery electric vehicles and plug-in hybrid EVs are the only vehicles that can meet the mandates at this time.
I recently met a guy from Cleveland at a conference whose wife had a Tesla. Two years ago, winter temperatures dropped to 10 degrees Fahrenheit at their home in Cleveland and her vehicle would not charge. She complained to the manufacturer to no avail.
In cold weather, electric vehicles lose driving range and take longer to charge. A 2020 study by the Norwegian Automobile Federation found an average loss of 18.5% in driving range during winter temperatures of 21─37 degrees Fahrenheit. Cold weather charging times increased up to 50 percent longer, depending upon car model. And as the woman in Cleveland found out, EVs will not charge at temperatures near zero degrees Fahrenheit.
A solution might be a heated garage or heated charging facility. But all US charging companies are losing money today, even without building heated public charging garages. About 30 percent of the US population lives in multi-unit housing, without a garage. Stretching a charging cable across a public walkway in the snow is a poor solution. And many homeowners with a garage do not park their car in their garage or cannot heat it.
Minnesota was the first midwestern state to adopt California’s ZEV regulations. The average high and low temperatures in St. Paul, Minnesota in January are 26oF and 7oF, poor conditions for EV charging. Montpelier, Vermont’s January average temperatures are the same as in St. Paul, with a 100% ZEV mandate in 2035 as well.
Maine’s mandate will require 43% of new vehicles sold by 2027 to be ZEV and 82% by 2032. But Augusta Maine’s average high and low January temperatures are 28oF and 11oF, not much warmer than Minnesota. Don’t state political leaders realize that gasoline car bans will force winter hardship on their citizens?
Last December, Canada mandated that all light-duty vehicles must be 100% zero emissions by 2035. Unless you have a heated garage in Canada, you soon won’t be able to charge your new EV for most of three months of the year.
In addition to the poor driving range and higher purchase price that comes with an EV, owners of cars in northern states will soon be forced to contend with poor performance in cold weather. Federal and state officials should reconsider their efforts to ban gasoline vehicles.
ArkeaBio, a Boston developer of a vaccine to reduce livestock methane emissions, raised a $26.5 million in venture capital funding led by an investment fund founded by Bill Gates.
ArkeaBio, a Boston developer of a vaccine to reduce livestock methane emissions, raised a $26.5 million in venture capital funding led by an investment fund founded by Bill Gates.
Why it matters: Caring about cow farts (or burps) has become a political punchline, but they’re estimated to create more than 5% of global greenhouse gasses.
Vaccines could be a relatively low-cost, scalable solution, particularly as food demand increases.
The science: Methane is much more potent than is carbon dioxide, in terms of its trapping atmospheric heat, although it also dissipates down faster.
The deal: Breakthrough Energy Ventures led the Series A round, and was joined by Grantham Foundation, AgriZeroNZ, Rabo Ventures, Overview Capital and The51 Food & AgTech Fund.
BEV previously funded ArkeaBio’s $12 million seed round.
The bottom line: The whole thing feels a little dystopian — giving animals injections so they cook the planet a little less before we cook some of them — but agribusiness sailed over the dystopian hurdle long ago.
In a climate discourse saturated with the axiom that global warming is the harbinger of unidirectional catastrophic changes, a recent study from Nature Geoscience stands out—not for its groundbreaking insights but for the peculiar manner in which it contorts observations to fit the prevailing climate change narrative. The study, focusing on the Himalayan glaciers, notably those around Mount Everest, reveals a cooling phenomenon, where localized areas experience temperature drops despite the global trend of rising temperatures.
In a climate discourse saturated with the axiom that global warming is the harbinger of unidirectional catastrophic changes, a recent study from Nature Geoscience stands out—not for its groundbreaking insights but for the peculiar manner in which it contorts observations to fit the prevailing climate change narrative. The study, focusing on the Himalayan glaciers, notably those around Mount Everest, reveals a cooling phenomenon, where localized areas experience temperature drops despite the global trend of rising temperatures.
The Paradox as Presented
Abstract
Understanding the response of Himalayan glaciers to global warming is vital because of their role as a water source for the Asian subcontinent. However, great uncertainties still exist on the climate drivers of past and present glacier changes across scales. Here, we analyse continuous hourly climate station data from a glacierized elevation (Pyramid station, Mount Everest) since 1994 together with other ground observations and climate reanalysis. We show that a decrease in maximum air temperature and precipitation occurred during the last three decades at Pyramid in response to global warming. Reanalysis data suggest a broader occurrence of this effect in the glacierized areas of the Himalaya. We hypothesize that the counterintuitive cooling is caused by enhanced sensible heat exchange and the associated increase in glacier katabatic wind, which draws cool air downward from higher elevations. The stronger katabatic winds have also lowered the elevation of local wind convergence, thereby diminishing precipitation in glacial areas and negatively affecting glacier mass balance. This local cooling may have partially preserved glaciers from melting and could help protect the periglacial environment.
The authors of the study document a decrease in maximum air temperatures and a reduction in precipitation in the glacierized areas of the Himalayas, a pattern observed over the past three decades. The narrative quickly turns to global warming as the prime mover of this paradox, attributing the local cooling to enhanced katabatic winds driven by increased glacier melt—a consequence of global warming.
“We show that a decrease in maximum air temperature and precipitation occurred during the last three decades at Pyramid in response to global warming.”
This explanation, however, smacks of a rationalization crafted to align with the larger narrative of climate alarmism. The irony of glaciers cooling their surroundings, even as they melt, should prompt a reevaluation of our assumptions about climatic responses to global warming, not reinforce them under the guise of novel mechanisms.
A Critique of Convenient Conclusions
The assertion that glaciers, through their melting, induce local cooling effects that then counteract the very warming causing their melt, serves as a perfect emblem of the circular reasoning often pervasive in climate science discussions. The study details complex interactions between atmospheric conditions and melting glaciers leading to this cooling:
“Katabatic winds arise from adiabatic warming due to air subsidence and cooling of the near-surface air by sensible heat exchange with the glacier surface… This process generates a divergence of air masses along the northern and southern Himalayan valleys and causes further drying of the katabatic winds.”
While the mechanics described are scientifically plausible, their portrayal as a direct outcome of global warming stretches credulity. It exemplifies the trend in climate research to frame every observed change in the environment, however contradictory or counterintuitive, as a consequence of global warming. This not only stifles genuine scientific inquiry but also muddles the public understanding of climate dynamics.
The Broader Implications of Misframed Research
The implications of such studies extend beyond academic circles into policy making, where they can lead to misguided efforts based on oversimplified models of climate interaction. The localized cooling and drying around these glaciers, while scientifically fascinating, are presented with an undue emphasis on their supposed linkage to global warming, potentially skewing policy responses to these phenomena.
This framing might distract from more pressing environmental issues or lead to policies that fail to address the actual complexities of regional climate dynamics. It is crucial to not shoehorn every observation into the global warming narrative.
Conclusion
This study, while contributing to our understanding of high-altitude climatic processes, also highlights the problematic tendency in climate science to conform observations to established narratives. True scientific progress requires the dispassionate assessment of data and phenomena, free from the compulsions of ideological conformity. In the realm of climate science, as in all fields, skepticism should not just be a tool but a fundamental stance, ensuring that our understanding of the world remains as unbiased and grounded in reality as possible, something that is becoming exceedingly rare in this age of ideological conformity.
I suffer eco-anxiety. It hit new highs when the UN’s socialist Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that “the era of global boiling has arrived” but I continue to draw comfort from counsellors at Psychology for a Safe Climate, who have a website full of tips on how neurotics like me can cope with global boiling.
I suffer eco-anxiety. It hit new highs when the UN’s socialist Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced that “the era of global boiling has arrived” but I continue to draw comfort from counsellors at Psychology for a Safe Climate, who have a website full of tips on how neurotics like me can cope with global boiling. The members, largely female and Sydney-Melbourne based, will tackle the panoply of clients’ eco-anxieties including anger, fear, hopelessness, guilt, betrayal, sadness, shame, shock, trauma and delusion, plus some 200 other discomforts catalogued in a taxonomy of climate hurts by endlessly quoted eco-psychologist Panu Pihkala of the Theology Faculty of Helsinki University.
PSC now offers a “Climate Feelings Space” which went live a few months back. As they alerted me by email (Feb 15) ,
Preparing ourselves emotionally for unpredictable climate events may also be leading to unpredictable internal worlds. This is why we created this new offering. The Climate Feelings Space is filled with practices, events, and training to support your emotional wellbeing as we navigate complex climate impacts.
For my heebie-jeebies about global boiling, they recommend I take a slow walk into my back garden. It’s actually my wife’s territory and the length of a kitchen bench. I’m not normally permitted near it. But under PSC guidance I allowed myself to notice a flower and “be allured by it.” PSC continues,
Move toward this other being, with curiosity. Notice it: take in its details, savour its scent, its colour, its shape, its sound, whatever moves you in the moment … As it feels authentic to you, offer your praise to this other being, out loud. Speak (or sing or dance!) about what drew you to this Other…Appreciate its mysteries and unknowns. Let yourself be surprised at what you express. If it feels right, you might even bow to this being, or offer it a gesture of thanks. Then keep wandering!
I spotted an orange snapdragon and moved close to savour it, although it was actually on its last legs because we’ve been away in Portugal. I spoke to it, “Congrats on surviving. Sorry about you getting parched, and eaten by those pesky caterpillars.”
My next task was to sing and dance to this petalled Other. Not easy as the seedlings bordered my study wall, restricting my dancing to a half circle. I sang to it, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina!” To finish I honoured the plant with the bow I last practised in 1962 in Hamlet at UWA Drama, where I played an attendant lord.
Little escapes my wife. As I scraped off the garden dirt at the back door she called,
“Are you OK? What were you doing out there anyway?”
“Yeah no! Nothing really, like, those seedlings needed a squirt.”
PSC SAYS its reach extends to hundreds of mental health professionals. Members are closely allied with the UK Climate Psychology Alliance and cross-contribute to each other’s journals. Not all the Alliance’s UK psychotherapy is successful: its journal chronicles how a disturbed person, “Charlie”, was being counselled about the planetary CO2 death drive.
Charlie’s own personal journey through climate activism and psychological difficulty came to a head in 2019 when he jumped from the six-storey roof of his psychotherapist’s consulting room. He survived, but only just, and both of his legs had to be amputated. (p27).
Charlie’s own therapeutic and “brilliant” book begins, “I am pretty mad, by conventional standards”. To me he seems just as sane, or insane, as all the green-Left alarmists, writing,
the politics of late capitalism divides, alienates and disorders those who struggleagainst the climate crisis……[involving] the depressing interrelationships of colonialism, disrespect for indigenous culture and environmental destruction…
The Alliance’s reviewer Ro Randall concludes that
there is much here for us as mental healthpractitioners, particularly in his accounts of his own and others’psychological struggles as part of the climate movement.
I expected the leftist PSC crowd to be offering counselling gratis to mentally distressed Hamas fighters, but found no such evidence.The UK Alliance twin, however, has gone the full keffiyeh. Last March the Alliance’s co-founder Paul Hoggett wrote
The liberal West needs to face up to another truth, that the catastrophe unfolding in Gaza may be the forerunner of the catastrophic loss of life that the deepening climate crisis will visit upon the Global South in the coming decades. We don’t yet have a word for it – a mass extermination which will affect many different peoples who nevertheless will have one thing in common, they will be overwhelmingly non-white.
He deplores what he calls “the events” of October 7, but claims
we are afraid to face up to the difficult truth that, despite suffering persecution at the hands of Christians for a millennium, despite the Holocaust, Jewish people are themselves capable of becoming perpetrators … The comforting distinctions we hold to between good and bad, right and wrong, collapse under the rubble of Gaza … There is a genocidal dimension to the Israeli attacks on Palestinians, one which could prefigure the massive casualties to come in the Global South arising from the climate crisis. If we let this happen in Gaza we have taken a step towards ensuring that our indifference will be visited upon the peoples of the South in the climate deranged future.
“Deranged”? They got it in one. Back home, PSC members divide their time between hand-holding ferals at “coal protest camps” and relieving the eco-distressed of their professed emotional loads. PSC members appear to be let loose by the Education Departments on “teachers and students and parents”. But they struggle to get government grants for mental support for highway blockers, and others “grappling with grief, fear, despair, rage and hope”. In 2019 PSC did raise $40 from a workshop on “grief for activists”, but the financial grief involved a $2.98 cash loss after $42.98 for the name-tags. In 2021-22 their accounts show fundraising of $4,449.16 but offset by fundraising fees of $15,143.97. Website costs rocketed from $116.18 in 2019 to a phenomenal $11,030.07 in 2022 — if they put this job out to tender I’ll certainly apply The PSC’s top team has included founder Carol Ride, senior psychiatrist Dr Charles Le Feuvre, activist Dr Sally Gillespie, newsletter stalwart Bianca Crapis, secretary Dr Yalcin Adal and scribe Dr Susie Burke of Castlemaine from the parent Australian Psychological Society (27,000 members). Without wanting to create an encyclopedia, I’ll sample their talents and output.
Dr Sally Gillespie is a Jungian “with a background in depth psychology and ecopsychology”. I was initially perplexed to read that she’s a recent guest editor of Quadrant, but found that her Quadrant is the Journal of the CG Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology (New York), “embracing different cultural, mythological, and arts-based perspectives including painting, music and dance.”
She authored Climate Crisis and Consciousness: Re-imagining our world and ourselves, “an essential resource for counsellors, psychotherapists, social workers and other helping professionals, as well as climate campaigners, policy makers, educators, scientists and researchers.” In this book[i] she describes how, because of a dream “which felt more like a vision”, she abjured her previous career and lifestyle to focus on stopping global warming. Her dream
was a terrifying depiction of global chaos caused by climate disruption. In my dream I swung on a rope above the Earth as land masses shifted around beneath me. I saw continents sinking beneath rising seas. Millions of people in the oceans desperately attempted to cling to fast disappearing land. Somehow I knew I had to join them. I let go of the rope and dropped into this catastrophe, becoming one of many attempting to hold on to the heaving shores. In the midst of this horror, a desperate poodle swam into my arms. I cared for my newfound companion as best I could, while feeling the futility of everyone’s struggle to survive.
I’d label that account as expurgated, because in her PhD thesis, which involved five years’ work, she includes that she “cared for my newfound [poodle] companion as best I could” by stealing biscuits for it.[ii] Maybe dreams of biscuit-stealing wouldn’t look good on a Jungian’s CV. In any event, she was
dazed by the “shock and awe” experience of dropping into an apocalyptic world. Any possibility of distancing myself from climate change reports collapsed…
That dream
catapulted me out of my old life and view of the world. I shook for the vulnerability of all beings on Earth, as my consciousness opened up to the realities of collective fate… my world, the one I knew as a reality, was ending…I felt in my gut that I had to acknowledge the full seriousness of global warming, and that, in one way or another, I would spend the rest of my life acting in response.
My own questioning of myself, my society and our world has catapulted me into a voyage of discovery which I am grateful for, despite the horror and grief I feel.
In following years she had new dreams rounding out her poodle-powered epiphany:
In each dream, I was approached by an animal who looked for care and connection. In one, I gazed into a stormy sea, eagerly anticipating the end of the human race and, with this, the restoration of the health of the oceans. But then a thirsty, bedraggled and crusty-skinned seal unexpectedly leapt into my arms, jolting me into the present. My mind abandoned its bleak and guilty imaginings in order to work out how to best care for this desperate creature….
This series of climate change dreams navigated me through a sea of feelings. Over time, waves of despair, guilt, judgement, grief and confusion made way for currents of tenderness, connection, delight, wonder and love. In 2012, nearly four years after my initial dream, I had two successive dreams which brought some sense of resolution.
In the first, I swam in the ocean circled by two seals and a dolphin who all looked deeply into my eyes before the dolphin reached forward with its snout and touched my arm. In the second, I travelled to the United States and walked along a waterfront when a seal swam up close to greet me. I gazed back, marvelling at its rodent-like features, golden eyes and grey mottled skin…Taken together, my dreams felt like a kind of initiation. They brought me face to face with my human self, my animal relations and my place in the world. Both in dream and waking life, I found my way from hopelessness and horror to commitment and care.
Her PhD thesis[iii] (no longer online) includes another dream, which assigned her to critique a Doris Lessing novel about climate change. She gets low marks from “a young woman, a smart cultural theorist” who provides comments written on ravioli.
The tantalising image of the ‘ravioli marks’ stayed with me, strangely apt in its sensual interplay of inner and outer, forms and fillings, offering richly-embodied sustenance and meaning (p39).
For her thesis she created and tracked a seven-member group of excitable women, some 50-plus, to share their own climate-apocalypse dreams – “fellow crew members sailing a vessel of inquiry.” By their second meeting they’re fantasising about surviving “systemic collapse.” For example, “stories of cannibalism are shared” (p106).
Gillespie:I wonder what those stories are serving for us at the moment, in teasing us into these questions. Not only the literal question: would I eat someone else or not [but] what’s the value of human life and culture and society?
Participant Veronica was the most notable member, in a car-crash sort of way, of the therapeutic group of seven. Sally writes that Veronica
broke into tears on her way to our meeting when she walked past a cat, explaining “I want a cat, but I don’t want a cat. And that’s climate change in terms of species preservation … I mean the tentacles of this issue are every freaking where!” (p186).
Veronica watched the US gas documentary Gaslandon television one night and sobbed “huge wailing tears–my parents live right near where fracking is going on, they’re having earthquakes for the first time in recorded history” (p119). She and her husband fled to Australia from “their very grief-filled time” in the US, “in the hugest bastion of [Republican] denial”. She confessed that if she didn’t believe in the eternal soul, “I would be one angry bitch.” (p77).
Dr Gillespie in her book pays homage to “teenage student climate strikers who call out adult political leaders for their reckless lack of responsibility and maturity in failing to address the climate emergency.” She feels the kids highlight the “inappropriate adolescent behaviour in adult leaders”. She quotes Greta Thunberg, who seems a patron saint of green psychologists and these days gets around in a keffiyeh. Sally quotes Greta, “They [politicos] know they haven’t done their homework – but we have.” Although Dr Gillespie decided that “throwing scientific evidence at dogged denialists never works”, her tract concludes on a hopeful note:
As I finish writing this book, hundreds of thousands of school students around the world are taking to the streets demanding action on climate with placards reading “Save our planet, save our future,” “We are all in the same boat, stop drilling holes in it,” “Global warning,” “We can’t drink oil, we can’t eat money.” Their signs tell us that a global myth of alarm and danger, and care and respect is being born.[iv]
Dr Charles Le Feuvre: Melbourne psychiatrist and psychotherapist Charles Le Feuvre has been the group’s intellectual leader and now its Honorary Senior Advisor. He’s also been a consultant psychiatrist at Royal Melbourne Hospital and psychotherapy chair of the College of Psychiatrists. Sadly, his house at Wye River was completely burnt in the 2016 climate-caused bushfires. Only his statue of Venus was saved.
With fellow-psychs’ help he laid out the PSC manifesto as “The Pschodynamics of Climate Change Denial,” a work heavily referencing fellow-shrink Harold Searles and his Unconscious processes in relation to the environmental crisis. Searles rates the climate-ecological crisis as an even more dire threat to humankind than a brisk exchange of thermonuclear missiles, and he frets that people continue with “severe and pervasive apathy” about climate. Le Feuvre continues,
He (Searles) discusses the Freudian phallic and oedipal stages. Our genital primacy, he suggests, symbolized by our cars, is threatened. He mentions, for example, that our envy and hatred of Oedipal rivals, in particular succeeding generations, makes us happy for them to be polluted into extinction. These factors can contribute to Oedipal guilt. He also speaks of the moralizing tone used by writers on the subject, who imply ‘that we have raped Mother Earth and now we are being duly strangled or poisoned’ (p. 364) projecting, he suggests, their Oedipal guilt.
Searles elaborates:
“Environmental pollution shields one from the full depth of emotional depression within oneself —instead of feeling isolated within emotional depression, one feels at one with everyone else in a realistically doomed world”.
Le Feuvre finishes with a final quote from Searles:
It seems to me that we psychoanalysts, with our interest in the unconscious processes which so powerfully influence man’s behaviour, should provide our fellow men with some enlightenment in this common struggle.
Le Feuvre thinks that our global predicament is so overwhelming and so difficult to process that news on the alleged climate crisis almost needs to come with a mental health warning. Eco-anxiety victims need to get to a health specialist or Lifeline, he recommends.
He’s no fan of conservative politicians, having written (as at 2019)
In Australia there continues to be Government denial. Our leaders could be seenpsychiatrically as deluded and a danger to others and if so certifiable. At worst they can be seen as guilty of crimes against humanity and nature-homicide and ecocide — and indeed in the future they may be found to be …What is the nature of Scott Morrison’s denial?
The authors discuss the failure of political leadership in the face of the climate and ecological crisis, particularly in the Australian context. This failure exacerbates the climate distress of young people.
Dr Yalcin Adal, the group’s secretary, who does cybersecurity at the Bureau of Meteorology. For those who thought BoM staff were dispassionate sciencey types, Yalcin writes that he “believes deeply in PSC and the work it does” and is proud to be its secretary. He says that the BoM’s mission is “zero lives lost from climate hazards” which I find a bit weird. Firstly, droughts storms and floods involve weather hazards not climate. And, secondly, lives lost globally from weather are already down 99%-plus in the past century. I don’t know how Dr Adal or the BoM can stop someone being hit by a falling tree on a windy day, but I hope Yalcin is working on it.
Bianca Crapis, PSC newsletter author, is a foe of “extractivism”, which I assume refers to Australia’s useless mining industry. She works in LGBTQIA+ mental health and ecological justice, and is “passionate about apprenticing in collective liberation practices for all beings.” She did the PSC newsletters for the past three years, “a monthly act of delight,” she says. However, for Ms Crapis
Despair, confusion and alarm about our collective climate collapse floods me regularly …. I am no stranger to catastrophic thinking, the departure of connection to my body, and the regular buzz of anxiety. But each month, I’ve had a ritual [the newsletter] that has kept me grounded…I am reminded of the power that lies in choosing to weave our griefs into something tangible. How that process of remaking our hurts into something that can be shared opens up a part of my heart that wants to keep putting time and energy into dreaming futures beyond collapse, beyond oppression, beyond extractivism and individualism. (email, May 3, 2024).
Dr Susie Burke, of the Australian Psychological Society, is also a member of the Safe Climate crowd, running similar gigs for the distressed and offering similar tipsheets for assuaging climate griefs.
Burke in her co-authored tipsheet for parents wants a total overhaul of Western lifestyles “to stop climate change”, insisting these lifestyle changes “could make us happier and healthier.” The tract illustrates its mantras with a pic of girls about 12-15 parading around Melbourne Central Station with signs “Act Green”.[vii] Her tipsheet [viii] wants parents to teach kids “active citizenship skills” including
♦ “Getting them to join you on marches/protests” (I assume not the farmer-tractor protests against greens’ attacks on farmers’ livelihoods, or covid anti-jab protests)
♦ “Showing them how to write letters and emails to politicians, CEOs of fossil fuel companies, etc.” (Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill must have a pretty full daily mailbox of kids’ templated climate rubbish).
♦ Discuss ways they [parents] could help them, like asking their school to bring in speakers who can raise awareness, raising money to send to communities that are affected by climate change, writing to the government to ask for more overseas aid. (This looks like the magic-pudding economics of unlimited government money).
The Psychological Society feels it is “contributing to a more mentally resilient, future-ready Australia”. Incidentally, 94% of the 27,000 APS members are fretting about the mental health impacts on Australians of the establishment-backed global warming hysteria.
In my opinion the PSC and APS credentials on global warming science are stuck at kindergarten level. The highly-educated members believe every word of the “global boiling” hyperbole from the UN’s climate crazies like Guterres. Like Flannery’s Climate Council, they blame all bad weather, including “droughts and floods” (make up your mind please), on CO2 emissions.
If these thousands of psychs and shrinks really want to help their new-found eco-anxious paying clientele, they should start by reassuring them that
♦ The IPCC’s global warming suite of models has to date over-hyped actual warming by a factor of two or more (also here)
♦ CO2 increases have assisted crop yield growth that shows a prolonged rising trend and is feeding the planet’s burgeoning population. Humanity has never been healthier than today.
♦ The IPCC’s latest Working Group 1 report, as distinct from “Summaries” written and vetted by its political masters, found human influence on weather as follows: Heatwaves, yes: heavy rain, yes; flooding, no; meteorological/hydrological drought, no; ecological/agricultural drought, yes; tropical cyclones, no; winter storms, no; thunderstorms, no; tornados, no; hail, no; lightning, no; extreme winds, no; fire weather, yes.
♦ Climate science after 40 years is still in its infancy, bereft of knowledge and data about key variables including long-term oceanic cycles, impacts of cloudiness and solar irradiance and even causes of warming-cooling cycles in the 20th century, let alone Minoan, Roman and medieval warming.
Why the medical/psych community (or sorority) are so out-front as climate crazies is a mystery. They need to touch base with Hippocrates about “First, do no harm”.
Tony Thomas’s latest book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here
[ii] “My thesis ‘Climate Change and Psyche: Mapping the myths, dreams and conversations in the era of global warming’ charts the psychological terrain of those who are actively engaged with climate change issues. Based upon phenomenological research, its aim was to capture something of the shifts in worldview, meaning-making, identity, behaviours, social and political understandings and anticipations of the future within individuals whose daily realities involve thinking about and working with global warming concerns.”
At another stage I cling to the shore line and a poodle swims up into my arms. I steal biscuits for us…I know billions must die and only tens of thousands will remain… The air is running out, death is close.
[iii] The book costs $44 even as a Kindle, putting it above my Quadrant pay grade, but I was able to access a sample chapter or two. I’ve infilled with material from her PhD.
[iv] School strikers aren’t actually smart or literate enough to cook up these sassy slogans themselves, it’s done for them by climate PR professionals who provide the templates on line for the kids to download.
[v] “We depend on our leaders to engage with climate reality. However we know they are only taking limited action. To feel this uncared for is deeply traumatic and can also lead to unbearable anxiety, born of a feeling of helplessness and aloneness in the face of survival threats.”
[vi] “Debate: How can child and adolescent mental health professionals show leadership in the face of the ecological and climate crisis?”
[vii] The apparent word “act” is a little hard to read on the sign.
[viii] Another co-author is Professor Ann Sanson who sings in the Melbourne Climate Choir
The methodology here is wild. Instead of using local climate data to diagnose the impacts of extreme weather events that drive damages, the authors use the global temperature time series.
The methodology here is wild. Instead of using local climate data to diagnose the impacts of extreme weather events that drive damages, the authors use the global temperature time series. The logic is circular and baseless. The mean global temperature does not cause extreme weather, nor does the variability in global temperature. The climate itself does not cause nor fuel extreme weather.
So, the authors find that local temperatures (as in national scale) are not correlated to damages with huge variance, yet global temperatures are b/c of smaller annual variability.
At this point of the analysis, the authors should have quit, yet they plowed ahead undaunted. 😬 pic.twitter.com/3YccBZB8cx
The authors create a new metric called “global temperature shocks,” which to most climate folks probably looks like a detrended variance of about 0.2°C. Why would global temperature variability (warm or cold) related mainly to tropical temperatures (El Niño & La Niña) be a more appropriate metric to represent climate damages from extreme events rather than the extreme events themselves? We have extensive disaster databases and GDP at the national scale. Why not use those? Because that (more appropriate) analysis does not show much of a climate change damage signal. It’s tiny.
So, the authors find that local temperatures (as in national scale) are not correlated to damages with huge variance, yet global temperatures are b/c of smaller annual variability.
At this point of the analysis, the authors should have quit, yet they plowed ahead undaunted. 😬 pic.twitter.com/3YccBZB8cx
So, the authors find that local temperatures (as in national scale) are not correlated to damages with huge variance, yet global temperatures are b/c of smaller annual variability. At this point of the analysis, the authors should have quit, yet they plowed ahead undaunted.
Here is the original X (formally Twitter) thread
The methodology here is wild. Instead of using local climate data to diagnose the impacts of extreme weather events that drive damages, the authors use the global temperature time series.
So, the authors find that local temperatures (as in national scale) are not correlated to damages with huge variance, yet global temperatures are b/c of smaller annual variability.
At this point of the analysis, the authors should have quit, yet they plowed ahead undaunted. 😬 pic.twitter.com/3YccBZB8cx
An article in Inside Climate News (ICN) reports on a proposed change in Florida’s state code to remove climate change as a consideration for policy issues, now in the hands of Gov. Ron DeSantis. Based on who ICN interviewed for the story and what they said, the story implies that the bill is putting Floridians at risk by ignoring climate change. This is false.
An article in Inside Climate News (ICN) reports on a proposed change in Florida’s state code to remove climate change as a consideration for policy issues, now in the hands of Gov. Ron DeSantis. Based on who ICN interviewed for the story and what they said, the story implies that the bill is putting Floridians at risk by ignoring climate change. This is false. Because climate change is not exacerbating hazards in Florida, but it is threatening the state’s energy security, the bill before DeSantis will benefit Florida and merits final approval.
The article begins:
Addressing the human-caused emissions warming the global climate and contributing to impacts here like hotter temperatures, rising seas, and more damaging hurricanes could no longer be part of Florida’s energy policy, under legislation before Gov. Ron DeSantis.
The measure, approved earlier this spring by the Republican-controlled legislature, would erase several instances of the words “climate change” from the state code and restructure Florida’s fossil fuel-based energy policy around reducing reliance on foreign sources and strengthening the energy infrastructure against “natural and manmade threats.”
…
The legislation now before DeSantis would repeal state grant programs encouraging energy efficiency and renewable energy and ban offshore wind facilities within a mile of the coastlines, none of which currently exist. The measure also would require the Public Service Commission to assess the security and resiliency of the electric grid and natural gas facilities against physical and cyber threats. Rep. Rick Roth (R-West Palm Beach), one of the bill’s sponsors, characterized climate change as a “made-up problem.”
Florida’s Legislature is correct in removing this language in the state code because it is misleading and unnecessary. Many of the so-called “climate threats” discussed in the ICN article, are actually short-term weather and not long-term climate events, and the claimed harm that ICN is linking to climate change is refuted by real-world data.
Most notable in the threat list are hurricanes. For example, after Category 5 Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in late August 2005, scientists and pundits alike began claiming that sort of devastation was the “new normal” and that hurricane frequency and intensities were only going to get worse. Climate model projections were cited as “proof” for such claims. Former Vice-President Al Gore exploited the Katrina disaster in a call for climate action.
Yet, after Katrina, the United States entered a hurricane drought. Between October 24, 2005 and August 17, 2017, a 4,323-day (142-month, 12-year) period, the United States entered its longest recorded period of no major hurricane of category three or higher making landfall within the country. Climate models failed to simulate the hurricane drought. Florida was spared the so-called “climate threat” from hurricanes.
Among the other supposed “climate threats” facing Florida, according to ICN, are sea level rise, coastal flooding, and increased temperature in cities.
Florida’s “sea level rise” is actually more attributable to subsidence rather than in a climate change induced increase in rates of rise. This fact is clearly examined in the scientific paper “Land subsidence contribution to coastal flooding hazard in southeast Florida,” published in Proceedings of IAHS in 2020. The paper clearly states:
Preliminary results reveal that subsidence occurs in localized patches (< 0.02 km2) with magnitude of up to 3 mm yr−1, in urban areas built on reclaimed marshland. These results suggest that contribution of local land subsidence affect[s] only small areas along the southeast Florida coast, but in those areas coastal flooding hazard is significantly higher compared to non-subsiding areas.
Subsidence is also driven by freshwater withdrawals from the region’s groundwater reservoirs to satisfy the Miami metro area’s growing population. As discussed in numerous previous Climate Realism articles, here and here, for example, sea level rise in Florida and beyond is not increasingly rapidly and has more to do with subsidence and land management than climate change induced rise.
Coastal flooding isn’t even a recognized climate threat by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which says it has found no indication that climate change is causing increased coastal flooding, as is shown in Table 12.12 | on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) in time periods, shows no correlation. The color corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal. The section is highlighted in yellow. Neither sea-level nor coastal flooding has been an observed element of climate change.
Even in 2050 and 2100 the IPCC forecasts no coastal flooding attributable to climate change.
Temperatures in Florida are in rising on average, but a cursory examination of where it is happening reveals a clear pattern. An increase in overnight low temperatures is a clear indicator of an increased Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). Florida’s population has doubled from about 10 million in 1990 to over 20 million now. This more than doubling of the state’s population is reflected clearly in UHI data compiled by Dr. Roy Spencer as seen in the graph below. Note the huge temperature effects from development in Florida’s fastest growing cities.
Climate change isn’t selective about the where of temperature increases, but UHI is.
In short, DeSantis is right to “shrug off” the climate hype and focus instead on the real problems facing Florida. Doing so might reduce the chances of sea water incursion and subsidence, and minimize damage done by hurricanes undoubtedly in store for the state in the future. Ending fossil fuel use in the vain quest to control the climate will do neither.
We commend the Florida legislature for recognizing that real-world data does not support climate alarmism in Florida and believe the law currently before DeSantis puts Florida on the right track to improved energy security and sound regulatory policies with regards to real environmental and economic threats facing Florida.
You may not be giving a second thought to setting your washing machine on the hot cycle, cranking your showers to a steamy temperature or scrubbing your dirty dishes under a stream of scalding water.
If you did, you’d find that you probably don’t need to use so much hot water — and that you could be saving energy and cutting your utility bills. Water heating is responsible for more than 10 percent of both annual residential energy use and consumer utility costs, the biggest share after air conditioning and heating, according to the Energy Department. An American household uses an average of 64 gallons of hot water a day — close to the amount needed to fill an average bathtub— by doing laundry, showering, washing the dishes and running kitchen and bathroom faucets.
While there are home improvements that can help you cut back on the energy it takes to heat water, including installing a heat pump water heater, one easy solution is to switch to cold water.
…
“If you’re wasting cold water to get your hot water, then you’re really wasting both water and the energy resources,” she said. “Those energy resources still come largely from fossil fuels, and so they’re adding to emissions in the environment at a time when we really need to be doing everything we can to reduce carbon emissions.”
The real question in my mind, how is the climate movement going to top this absurdity? Self flagellation every time you are tempted by machine age transport? Drinking your own pee to save water? Comment suggestions welcome, but please keep them family friendly.
It is often said that only a madman — or economist — could believe that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. Resources are scarce and dwindling, we’re told. Day in and day out, we seem poised to use up some civilization-critical ingredient, or we might overuse materials to the point of our own downfall.
Joakim Book shines considerable light into modern doomsday darkness, writing his AIER article Unlimited Growth, Forever. Book exposes how fundamental human positive aspiration, proven by historical progress and innovation, has been perverted by those nowadays claiming to be progressive, when all they preach is hell and damnation. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
It is often said that only a madman — or economist — could believe that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet. Resources are scarce and dwindling, we’re told. Day in and day out, we seem poised to use up some civilization-critical ingredient, or we might overuse materials to the point of our own downfall.
The mindset that makes people believe that we’re perennially on the cusp of some disaster is on display everywhere from the big screen to the big assembly halls. It has been humanity’s plague since we first broke free of the Malthusian constraints that govern every non-human ecology. And never once do we seem to consider that maybe, just maybe, the madmen/economists know something the rest of us don’t.
We’re routinely given hyperbolic predictions about our doom, and no matter whether those predictions come true, they’re renewed in the same or slightly altered form a few years later. In the meantime, individuals, businesses, workers, investors, tinkerers, and all the others that make up the world economy solve much of the “problem.”
New York University economist Paul Romer, whose work on economic growthrewarded him the Nobel Prize in 2018, explains that “non-economists have said that [his article] helped them understand why unlimited growth is possible in a world with finite resources.” He credits that conclusion to his work on the proliferation of ideas, which he condenses into the following two statements:
“we can share discoveries with others,” and
“there are incomprehensibly many discoveries yet to be found.”
The basic rationale is thus simple: “Although we live in a world of a limited number of atoms,” as Marian Tupy and Gale Pooley say in their masterful creation Superabundance, “there are virtually infinite ways to arrange those atoms. The possibilities for creating new value are thus immense.”
Economic growth itself, said University of Mississippi economist Josh Hendrickson in an interchange with The Guardian’s George Monbiot a few years ago, is about “finding more efficient uses of resources.” It’s about observing how market prices and the profit motive urge entrepreneurs and businesses to economize on production while producing more value for consumers. We can visibly see this in the products that technology has merged into one (smartphones displacing a dozen or more physical appliances), or thethinner cans or more efficient engines that innovation routinely delivers.
Economists aren’t just playing word games when they say that growth can keep going forever. We can always make more stuff since the physical atoms under our command right now are far from all the physical atoms on our planet (or solar system). By growth, economists mean value-creation exchanged in the marketplace, a market that can change in the types of value we exchange, and the growing portion of our economies can involve fewer atomsthan what came before.
“Resource” which the general public think of as physical collections of elements in the ground, economists define much more broadly. Nothing becomes a resource until the human mind makes it so, i.e., “there are no resources until we find them, identify their possible uses, and develop ways to obtain and process them” to quote Julian Simon, whose pioneering work in resource economics prompted Tupy and Pooley to launch their Superabundance project.
The boundaries between dirt, mineral resource, and mineral reserve can therefore shift with technology, economic circumstances, or legal rules regarding their extraction — subject to the “degree of geological certainty” and “feasibility of economic recovery.”
What’s even more incredible is that material abundance (how economically accessible certain minerals or agricultural products are) has historically speaking increased with population. Instead of individually starving when there are more humans on our supposedly finite planet, we seem to be collectively producing more, having better access to raw materials and the goods and services we produce with them.
Take almost any foodstuff,meat or cereal, fruit or vegetable, for almost any country over any period and the numbers go up and to the right: For eight centuries (probably more), an English laborer has been able to afford more and more foodstuffs for their labor; yet there’s more food production today than at any point in the past.
The counterintuitive conclusion follows naturally from Romer’s work: More humans give us more chances for ideas that exponentially “make material progress possible.” Human society is dynamic, not zero-sum.
Illustration: oil. Thirteen years ago, Camilla Ruz for The Guardian enumerated six natural resource scares to pay attention to, of which oil was one. Dire predictions like these are a dime a dozen in the environmentalist world, and no matter how publicly or unequivocally they are disconfirmed by reality, they pop up with renewed vigor a few years later. At the time we had some 46 years’ worth of oil reserves left; that is, at the prices, consumption rate, and technology of 2011, humanity would run out of oil by the late 2050s.
With a billion more people on the planet since then, having suitably burned some 386 billion barrels of oil in the intervening years, we now have… drumroll…48 years’ usage in global proven reserves; Humanity will now last until the 2070s before its (supposedly limited) reserves of oil run dry. Disaster avoided.
The price system, profit-hungry entrepreneurs, and optimizing consumers are pretty good at remedying scarcities when they emerge. If there isn’t enough oil, gas, wheat, gold, nickel, or copper for current human processes, the (real) price of those commodities rise; extracting businesses dig deeper or explore further, and consumers substitute away from the expensive commodity, or we recycle the metals that forever remain with us into something new. Higher prices mean that lower-quality ores are now worth mining, more inaccessible sources and geologists’ best guesses for where we could find more worth exploring. The outcome over decades and centuries is that “prices of resources are declining because more people means more ideas, new inventions and innovations,” according to Tupy and Pooley.
That we do not run out is the powerful lesson of both the history of resources and the theory behind their economic uses: Our minds and the black box of nifty ways to improve the world aren’t limited. We don’t run out; We simply find more.
The recurring “we’re running out of X!” outrage therefore seems so peculiar, so out of touch with even a semblance of reality. 194 years ago, before having seen but a tiny fraction of the improvements humanity would make over the following decades and centuries, British historian and poet Thomas Babington (raised to the peerage as Lord Macaulay) wrote
though in every age everybody knows that up to his own time progressive improvement has been taking place,nobody seems to reckon on any improvement during the next generation. We cannot absolutely prove that those are in error who tell us that society has reached a turning point […] but so said all who came before us, and with just as much apparent reason.
He then ended his colloquy with the sentence that human progress-types know by heart:
“On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?”
That was a reasonable enough question in 1830, and a terribly relevant one in 2024.
While no one was paying attention, a Russian ship exploring Antarctica claims it has found oil and gas deposits that are ten times larger than the North Sea. Presumably quite a lot of countries would find this very interesting. At the moment Antarctica is supposedly protected by a piece of paper, but those who want to keep something so valuable to themselves will be needing more than cellulose.
While no one was paying attention, a Russian ship exploring Antarctica claims it has found oil and gas deposits that are ten times larger than the North Sea. Presumably quite a lot of countries would find this very interesting. At the moment Antarctica is supposedly protected by a piece of paper, but those who want to keep something so valuable to themselves will be needing more than cellulose.
It could take some fossil fuels to protect these fossil fuels
Hard to see any nation keeping control of this oil and gas field using sailing boats, solar powered ships and missiles running on palm oil.
Russia has found vast oil and gas reserves in the Antarctic, much of it in areas claimed by the UK.
The surveys are a prelude to bringing in drilling rigs to exploit the pristine region for fossil fuels, MPs have warned.
Reserves totalling 511bn barrels of oil – about 10 times the North Sea’s entire 50-year output – have been reported to Moscow by Russian research ships, according to evidence given to the Commons Environment Audit Committee (EAC) last week.
It follows a series of surveys by the Alexander Karpinsky vessel, operated by Rosgeo – the Russian agency charged with finding mineral reserves for commercial exploitation.
The total extracted from the North sea up until 2014 was about 42 billion barrels of “oil equivalent”. Green fanatics would be horrified to think of all the emissions that might be unleashed, but 3 billion cold people in China, Russia, India and Japan might have a different view.
It’s hard to believe no one has staked a claim on Marie Byrd Land. We’re they just too busy to attend the meeting?
Russia claims that its boat was just doing scientific research (just like those Japanese whalers were).
At least a part of the UK government apparently found out about this when a South African newspaper published a story on it. (Who needs intelligence when you can read the Daily Maverick?)
The EAC [Environment Audit Committee] decided to challenge the Foreign Office’s management of the UK’s Antarctic interests following reports in the Daily Maverick, a South African online journal, which discovered Moscow’s activities after its survey ship docked in Cape Town.
The British government has officially said they believe the Russians, but a few in the British government are skeptical. (From the Daily Maverick)
[Anna McMorrin, a Labour MP on the polar audit sub-committee] asked FCDO Under-Secretary David Rutley… if he was “aware” of the Rosgeo vessels, under US sanctions since February, and how the UK was to respond at the annual Antarctic Treaty consultative meeting (ATCM) in India from May 20 to 30.
The under-secretary defended Russia’s “repeated assurances” at ATCMs “that these activities are for scientific purposes”.
A sceptical McMorrin asked Rutley if he was “content to believe Russia when they say they’re just undertaking scientific action”. The Labour MP also quoted expert testimony to the committee, stressing that leading polar geopolitician Professor Klaus Dodds had flagged the “current Russian activity” and its possible “prospecting” links as “troubling”.
“There is a worry that Russia is collecting seismic data that could be construed to be prospecting rather than scientific research. And, if such, does this signal a potential threat to the permanent ban on mining,” asked Dodds, of Royal Holloway, University of London, “with knock-on implications for the integrity of the protocol in its entirety?”
Suddenly people might start paying attention to Antarctica.
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