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.
I’m sure there was a time greens wanted to protect forests from bulldozers.
OCTOBER 16, 2025
5 MIN READ
Can We Bury Enough Wood to Slow Climate Change?
Wood vaulting, a simple, low-tech approach to storing carbon, has the potential to remove 12 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year—and some companies are already trying it.
Flashy, high-tech proposals that promise to vacuum pollutants out of the sky, or to scrub them from smokestacks before they hit the atmosphere, have attracted attention and investment—but are falling far short of expectations. Now a growing number of scientists and entrepreneurs are trying a vastly simpler approach: collecting truckloads of logs, branches, wood chips and sawdust—and burying them.
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“If we want to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere,” says the study’s lead author Yiqi Luo, a Cornell University ecosystem ecologist, “we basically need to create new reservoirs in land, ocean or geological structures.”
Limiting climate warming to 1.5 °C requires reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and CO2removal. While various CO2 removal strategies have been explored to achieve global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions and account for legacy emissions, additional exploration is warranted to examine more durable, scalable and sustainable approaches to achieve climate targets.
Here we show that preserving woody debris in managed forests can remove gigatonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere sustainably based on a carbon cycle analysis using three Earth system models.
Woody debris is produced from logging; sawmill wastes and abandoned woody products and can be preserved in deep soil to lengthen its residence time (a measure of durability) by thousands of years. Preserving annual woody debris production in managed forests has the capacity to remove 769–937 GtCO2 from the atmosphere cumulatively (10.1–12.4 GtCO2 yr−1 on average) from 2025 to 2100, if its residence time is lengthened for 100–2,000 years and after 5% CO2 removal is discounted to account for CO2emission due to machine operation for wood debris preservation.
This translates to a reduction in global temperatures of 0.35–0.42 °C. Given the large potential, relatively low cost and long durability, future efforts should be focused on establishing large-scale demonstration projects for this technology in a variety of contexts, with rigorous monitoring of CO2 removal, its co-benefits and side-effects.
Imagine bulldozing up to 12 billion tons of forest every year, just to bury it.
At least the biomass people want to use the wood, to produce ridiculously expensive power. But this idea is obscene – destroying vast tracts of nature, just to bury the wood.
How did we end up in a world where anyone could genuinely believe this is a good idea?
The poor suffering Blob experts are losing the information war
They can’t seem to get a break, even with all the Governments, bankers, media, universities and the United Nations to help them.
If only they had truth on their side, they could just explain it, but since they don’t — the next best thing is publishing concocted studies demonizing the truth-tellers as conspiracy theorists, and blaming profiteering Big-tech. Free speech is so dangerous, they warn, that “Elon Musk-owned X lacked fact-checks or Community Notes on 99% of the posts”. Ninety nine percent! Clearly, The Blob wants warnings and labels on every single damn tweet. No moment in the public town square can be left unguarded.
We can’t have adults thinking for themselves! And that’s the thing isn’t it, there is something profoundly condescending and undemocratic about those who believe adults can’t be trusted to have conversations that no one corrects, live, one tweet at a time. The incredible unbridled smuggery of the Blobocrats is there for all to see, (as is the desperation) yet so rarely mocked, tarred and feathered as required.
But it’s true, climate misinformation (put out by Professors) puts lives at risk — right now people are dying because they can’t afford air conditioning or heating. Climate sorcerers at universities took public money and told them the “science was settled” and they needed to redirect jet-streams with solar panels and windmills. It was a wanton electro-weather experiment that pushed the price of electricity up.
Censorship is the real killer
Climate misinformation can always be fixed if the skeptics are not censored
Major social media platforms are enabling and profiting from misinformation around extreme weather events, endangering lives and impeding emergency response efforts, a research group said Tuesday.
The report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH)—which analyzed 100 viral posts on each of three leading platforms during recent natural disasters including deadly Texas floods—highlights how their algorithms amplify conspiracy theorists while sidelining life-saving information.
Just name-calling:
“The influence of high-profile conspiracy theorists during climate disasters is drowning out emergency response efforts,” the report said, adding that the trend was “putting lives at risk.”
The crime of writing something un-fact-checked!
Nearly all of the analyzed posts on Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram lacked fact-checks or Community Notes, a crowd-sourced verification system increasingly being adopted as an alternative to professional fact-checkers, the report said.
DeSmog are now “reporters on climate misinformation” (and prophets too):
Following natural disasters, misinformation tends to surge across social media—fueled by accounts from across the political spectrum—as many platforms scale back content moderation and reduce reliance on human fact-checkers, often accused by conservative advocates of a liberal bias.
“Climate disinformation costs lives,” said Sam Bright of DeSmog, which reports on climate misinformation campaigns.
“As extreme weather events become more and more frequent, these falsehoods will only get more dangerous.”
Converting power stations to global air conditioners costs a trillion or two, and the price is not just money, but blood, sweat and tears.
Mortality increases in rooms that are too cold or too hot, and financial stress increases death rates. For example…
Cumulative hazards for mortality across each level of financial strain are shown. The light blue line indicates severe financial strain, or those who reported not having enough monthly income to make ends meet. The orange line indicates moderate financial strain, or those who reported having just enough to make ends meet. The dark blue line indicates those with no financial strain, or those who had more than enough money to make ends meet.
Climate activists employing tort law firms have lost one lawsuit after another in their misguided crusade to bankrupt energy companies by blaming them for the effects of climate change. This isn’t about justice, for victims deserving or otherwise, but instead a nakedly unscrupulous effort to achieve progressive policy ends by ulterior means.
Climate activists employing tort law firms have lost one lawsuit after another in their misguided crusade to bankrupt energy companies by blaming them for the effects of climate change. This isn’t about justice, for victims deserving or otherwise, but instead a nakedly unscrupulous effort to achieve progressive policy ends by ulterior means.
But it hasn’t panned out, as a growing number of “public nuisance” cases–tried in liberal and conservative jurisdictions and adjudicated by Democrat- and Republican-appointed judges alike–have been dismissed or lost for abusing law, science, and common sense.
Rather than admit defeat and abandon this strategy, however, the lawyers and activists are trying a new approach: wrongful death suits. No longer are oil companies only at fault for statewide climate damages caused by everyone’s CO2 emissions—now the tactic is to make them responsible for specific, individual fatalities. At least that’s the fantastical argument they’re hoping to present in court.
The first such case was filed last month when Washington resident Misti Leon brought a wrongful death complaint in state court against seven major energy companies and a subsidiary pipeline firm claiming the greenhouse emissions from their products contributed to a 2021 heat wave that killed her mother, Juliana Leon. The victim was found dead after a long drive in a car without air conditioning during a record-breaking 108°F day in Seattle.
The lawsuit alleges these companies knowingly altered the climate, failed to warn the public, and are liable for Juliana’s death by hyperthermia.
While the tragedy of Juliana’s death is undeniable, this lawsuit is a scientifically preposterous and ideologically driven attempt to exploit personal loss for political gain, masquerading as a quest for justice.
A flawed premise
The premise of the lawsuit—that oil companies’ emissions directly caused a specific heat wave and, by extension, an individual’s death—is a leap that collapses under even the slightest scrutiny. Climate science cannot pinpoint a single weather event as the direct result of any one company’s actions. CO2 emissions are a global, cumulative phenomenon, with contributions from countless sources—industrial, agricultural, and individual. Furthermore, there are so many other factors beyond CO2 emissions that could affect particular weather events.
When global warming skepticsemploy this curious logic in the opposite direction, using specific weather events like heavy snowfall to debunk climate change, environmental activists rightly highlight the flawed logic: you can’t deny a global phenomenon based on regional weather events. “… [W]hat happens locally, or over short periods of time, is not necessarily representative of what’s happening nationally and globally,” Yale University’s Center for Environmental Communication explains.
Yet when Leon claims that “each Defendant is transacting or has transacted substantial business in Washington,” she is committing the same fallacy by trying to tie global phenomena to company-specific operations in a single state. As judges presiding over previous climate cases have concluded, the plaintiffs can’t have it both ways.
It’s simply untenable to allege a global corporate conspiracy while demanding restitution for a local tragedy.
The lawsuit’s reliance on attribution science, which estimates the likelihood that climate change made an event more probable, underscores this problem. It’s widely recognized within mainstream climatology that “Event attribution is not ready for a major role in loss and damage” claims, as a recent article in the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change observed. One of the key reasons for this conservative stance toward attribution science is that it’s based on complex models built on myriad assumptions about the atmospheric conditions across entire countries–and around the world.
Legitimate wrongful death claims require clear causation and foreseeability. Here, the chain is impossibly attenuated: emissions from multiple companies, mixed globally over decades, allegedly intensified a heat wave, which, combined with Juliana’s tragic personal circumstances (a long drive with no air conditioning, diagnosed comorbidities, and recovering from major surgery), led to her death. There is simply no reasonable way to leap from existing attribution studies to that conclusion.
Rehashing “Exxon Knew”
The lawsuit’s narrative hinges on the claim that these companies “knew” their products would cause “catastrophic climate disasters” yet misled the public. “Defendants have concealed their knowledge of and deceived the public about these risks,” Leon’s complaint alleges, “hooking consumers on fossil fuels without their understanding or consent to the risk of harm to themselves, others, and the planet.”
The gaping flaw in this logic was recently exposed by a Delaware judge presiding over a related climate suit, which also blamed specific damages in the state on the oil industry. As Firebreak’s analysis of that case pointed out, the “Exxon Knew” trope is based on the assumption that the effects of climate change have been “open and obvious” for decades. The plaintiffs, Ms. Leon included, are desperately trying to accuse the energy industry of successfully denyinga phenomenon that everyone has been aware of for decades. The plaintiffs’ response to this criticism? Dead silence. As the Delaware judge observed in her decision:
“There were reports and stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times that warned the public about global warming and the deception used by oil and coal industries … Defendants have provided evidence showing that the general public had knowledge of or had access to information about the disputes, regarding the existence of climate change and effects, decades prior …This information and evidence is unrefuted by the State.”
While it’s true that energy companies conducted internal research on the potential environmental impacts of their products–as all companies do as part of basic risk management scenario building–so did governments, universities, and other industries. What all of these groups have in common is that they wanted more information about the potential risks, and tradeoffs, of an extremely useful and civilizationally pivotal source of energy.
Combined, these knowledge seekers built a gradual, evolving scientific consensus on global warming—which is far less alarmist than the public has been told. For instance, it’s now widely recognized by many experts (even if with a degree of disappointment) that a runaway warming scenario is highly unlikely.
The fact that energy companies contributed to this consensus about climate change isn’t scandalous—and it’s certainly no justification for a wrongful death suit. Internal industry documents from decades ago confirm that oil companies were studying long-term climate trends, but they certainly didn’t have a crystal ball that predicted the effects of warming half a century later.
Thanks for the cheap energy, see you in court
The overarching problem with Ms. Leon’s claim is that fossil fuels power modern civilization with the literal and figurative “buy-in” of governments, businesses, and citizens. As willing consumers of abundant food, affordable electricity, life-sustaining and life-saving tools, and medical devices, we are, all of us, undeniably contributors to the effects of climate change, whatever they turn out to be.
The lawsuit’s accusation of a grand conspiracy sidesteps this shared responsibility for social choices, painting oil companies as singular villains. We can’t build a sprawling, global civilization powered by oil and gas and then turn around and sue the industry that supplied us with so much inexpensive energy. Quite literally every plaintiff in these climate damage suits–every city, state, and now individual–has been and continues to be alongtime customer of the fossil fuel industry. The hypocrisy is off the charts.
Demand for justice or ideological crusade?
And while Leon’s complaint frames the suit as a quest for justice, her demands expose just how disingenuous the case is. Beyond unspecified damages, Misti Leon seeks to force these companies to fund “a public education campaign to rectify Defendants’ decades of misinformation.” This smacks of activism, not justice. It suggests the goal is less about compensating a loss than about scoring points in the culture war over climate policy.
The Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group backing the case, frames it as a landmark effort to hold “Big Oil” accountable. Yet, their rhetoric—calling the lawsuit the first to tie an individual death to a “climate disaster”—reveals a strategy of emotional manipulation, leveraging Juliana’s death to galvanize public sentiment rather than establish legal merit.
Ultimately, this lawsuit cheapens a genuine tragedy. Juliana Leon’s death should be mourned, not exploited. Climate change is a real challenge, but addressing it demands rigorous science, honest policy, and collective action. Frivolous lawsuits that clog courts don’t aid in those efforts. This case, like many before it, will likely falter under its own weight, a cautionary tale of zeal outpacing reason.
In an exclusive extract from Friederike Otto’s new book, she says climate disasters result from inequality as well as fossil fuel.
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So how does weather become a disaster?
We can’t say exactly how the effects of climate change vary by location and type of weather, but what is absolutely clear is that the more people are in harm’s way and the more vulnerable they are, the greater their risk.
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For example, one of our studies from 2021 showed that the food insecurity linked to the drought in southern Madagascar was caused mainly by poverty, a lack of social structures, and heavy dependence on rainfall, but not by human-induced climate change. Nevertheless, just as with the Nigerian floods, international reports talked only of the weather and climate. The international media barely mentioned that, in fact, the local infrastructure, which had remained unfinished for decades, played a decisive role in the disastrous drought.
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But it always proves true that the people who die are those with little money who can’t readily obtain all the help and information they need. And that doesn’t have to be the case, no matter where they are.
The above was taken from an excerpt of Frederike’s book “Climate Injustice”, which will be available from the 24th April.
I left a fair bit out in the quotes above, most of the guardian book excerpt in my opinion is social justice gibberish.
But when you cut away the obligatory assertions of white male dominated climate science and complaints about colonial exploitation of the Global South, the central point seems clear. Weather disasters, climate driven or not, are mostly a problem for poor people. Rich societies can afford advance tornado and typhoon warnings, flood mitigation, rescue operations, fast personal transport on good roads, insurance, alternative accommodation and food imports to cover crops lost to adversity.
The good news is Africa is already addressing their poverty problem, by massively ramping up exploitation of fossil fuel resources.
Granted a lot of the profit from such activity will end up in the beloved leader’s Swiss bank account or be distributed to his Wabenzi cronies, but you can’t have economic activity on that scale without local workers getting their hands on some of the money. For projects on this scale, it is always cheaper to train locals with low wage expectations than to import 10s of thousands of expensive foreigners. Even the UN admits the African fossil fuel boom is driving rapid economic growth.
An important benefit of all this economic growth is it will foster the development of civil society and will eventually increase people’s resilience and ability to survive climate disasters – just as it did in the West. If nothing else, better weather forecasting and flood management will be essential to protect the fossil fuel infrastructure.
The message seems clear – if you want poor people to become more resilient to weather disasters, climate driven or otherwise, you can help by buying their oil, gas and coal exports.
A new scientific study has confirmed what GWPF reports and statements have emphasised for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century
London, 6 June – A new scientific study has confirmed what GWPF reports and statements have emphasised for some time: Natural and climate-related disasters have been declining rather than increasing during the 21st century.
For years, international agencies such as the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the International Red Cross (IFRC) have been issuing reports claiming that climate-related disasters are currently escalating (Weather, climate disasters surge fivefold in 50 years, says UN report).
For years, the GWPF has been pointing out that such claims are wrong and contradicted by empirical data. The UN agencies’ misleading claims arise from a failure to account for the major increase in disaster reporting engendered by the arrival of new technologies since the 1970s.
Not only has the annual number of climate-related disasters trended downwards over the last 20+ years.
The number of people killed by natural and climate-related disasters has also been falling steadily over the past 120 years.
Source: Alimonti & Mariani (2024)
In a new study, analysing temporal trends in the number of natural disasters reported since 1900, two Italian scientists confirm that the 21st century has seen “a decreasing trend to 2022” which is “characterized by a significant decline in number of [disaster] events…”
Source: Alimonti & Mariani (2024)
“The statement that we are facing an increasing trend of natural disasters, as claimed in the three official reports by UNDRR and FAO on the basis of the same EM-DAT dataset […] are not supported by data” (Gianluca Alimonti & Luigi Mariani (2024) Environmental Hazards, 23:2, 186-202).
The authors emphasise that the empirical data “sits in marked contradiction to earlier analyses by two UN bodies (FAO and UNDRR), which predicts an increasing number of natural disasters and impacts in concert with global warming. Our analyses strongly refute this assertion as well as extrapolations published by UNDRR based on this claim.”
In their conclusion, the scientists emphasise that they “are concerned about the misrepresentation of the natural disaster trend because such claims have been uncritically broadcast by many different media and by FAO itself, thereby deforming the perception of the public on the risk of natural disasters… Misinterpreting the trend of natural disasters is a very serious matter because exposes the world population to the risk of inconsistent policies at both a national and an international level, thereby wasting resources or diverting them from the resolution of much more concrete problems.”
Dr Ralph Alexander who has authored a series of critiques of erroneous climate disaster claims said: “The new study by Alimonti and Mariani vindicates what we said in a GWPF report three years ago – climate-related disasters are not on the rise, despite global warming. Claims to the contrary have been made for years by several international agencies. Yet, these agencies failed to recognise that the apparent increase in natural disasters since the 1970s simply reflects a major increase in disaster reporting due to new technology.”
GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said: “There is a famous saying that sums up the GWPF’s efforts to set the record straight on disaster trends and climate disasters: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they join you.”
Roger Pielke Jr has long challenged the fraudulent “billion dollar” disaster disinformation campaign.
Now he has gone one step further with this peer reviewed paper:
Abstract
For more than two decades, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has published a count of weather-related disasters in the United States that it estimates have exceeded one billion dollars (inflation adjusted) in each calendar year starting in 1980. The dataset is widely cited and applied in research, assessment and invoked to justify policy in federal agencies, Congress and by the U.S. President. This paper performs an evaluation of the dataset under criteria of procedure and substance defined under NOAA’s Information Quality and Scientific Integrity policies. The evaluation finds that the “billion dollar disaster” dataset falls short of meeting these criteria. Thus, public claims promoted by NOAA associated with the dataset and its significance are flawed and at times misleading. Specifically, NOAA incorrectly claims that for some types of extreme weather, the dataset demonstrates detection and attribution of changes on climate timescales. Similarly flawed are NOAA’s claims that increasing annual counts of billion dollar disasters are in part a consequence of human caused climate change. NOAA’s claims to have achieved detection and attribution are not supported by any scientific analysis that it has performed. Given the importance and influence of the dataset in science and policy, NOAA should act quickly to address this scientific integrity shortfall.
Over the period 2000 to 2021 the global value added of agriculture, forestry and fishing rose by 84 percent from about USD 2.0 trillion to USD 3.7 trillion per year. In other words, global agricultural production was not “reduced” by disasters.
Proponents of the thesis that humans are causing catastrophic climate change insist that changes in the earth’s climate observed over the past century and a half are causing significant increases in extreme weather events and major economic losses.
United Nations organizations often support this view. The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) regularly issues reports on climate change and weather as though the two are inexorably linked. In May 2023, the WMO published a report entitled Economic costs of weather-related disasters soars but early warnings save lives. The reported economic losses rose significantly from about USD$184 billion in the 1970s to about USD 1.47 trillion from 2010-2019.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) periodically issues reports describing how disasters, linked allegedly to climate change, are harming agriculture and food security. In 2023, it issued a report entitled The Impact of Disasters on Agriculture and Food Security. It warned that “disasters are producing unprecedented levels of damage and loss to agriculture around the world…Research aimed at deciphering the impact of climate change on agriculture indicates that climate change is likely to lead to more frequent anomalies and a decrease in agricultural production.”
Both reports neglected to provide context for their findings. In more than 80 percent of the disasters in the developed countries cited by the WMO, the economic losses were equivalent to less than 0.1 per cent of the countries’ gross domestic product. Over the period 2000 to 2021 the global value added of agriculture, forestry and fishing rose by 84 percent from about USD 2.0 trillion to USD 3.7 trillion per year. In other words, global agricultural production was not “reduced” by disasters.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) seeks to define and assess what it considers to be real or potential adverse effects of climate change. Every few years the IPCC publishes an “assessment report” in which it attempts to set out the state of the knowledge. The most recent report was the Sixth Assessment Report, published in 2021. The executive summary of this report states that evidence of observed changes in extremes and their attribution to human influence has strengthened, in particular for extreme precipitation, droughts, tropical cyclones and compound extremes (including dry/hot events and fire weather).It gives an impression, reflected in media reports, that the world faces a grave situation.
A more detailed reading of the assessment reveals an entirely different conclusion.
The most revealing part of the report concerns the probability and timing of the emergence of “climate impact drivers” and the related “impacts” and the IPCC’s collective judgments about whether the impacts are already occurring or may be expected to emerge in future. The only impacts for which the IPCC has a “high confidence” of impacts already increasing are in mean air temperature, extreme heat, mean ocean temperature, and atmospheric carbon dioxide at the surface. There is also “high confidence” of decreases in the dissolved oxygen in the ocean and in lake, river and sea ice. There is a “medium confidence” that ocean salinity at the surface has already occurred. There is also “medium confidence” that decreases in cold spells and in permafrost have already occurred.
For the rest of the potential climate impacts, there is a “low confidence in the direction of change” of most of the impacts that get almost endless media attention, including precipitation, aridity, drought, fire weather, cyclones and severe wind storms, snow and sea ice, sea levels, coastal erosion, ocean acidity and air pollution. The dire outcomes that so many in governments and the media predict are, in many cases, not confidently foreseen by the IPCC scientists even under the worst-case scenarios.
The benefits of not meeting Paris Accord emissions-reduction targets outweigh the costs associated even with worst-case-scenario global warming throughout the 21st century.
The benefits of not meeting Paris Accord emissions-reduction targets outweigh the costs associated even with worst-case-scenario global warming throughout the 21st century.
A new comprehensive analysis (Tol, 2023) weighs the cost-benefit of meeting Paris Accord emission policy targets to keep global warming in check, or under 2°C.
The analysis reveals that even in the best case scenarios (that assume emission reduction policies fully meet their avoided-warming targets), as well as in the worst case scenarios (that assume “constant vulnerability” to global-warming-induced climate disasters and widespread economic austerity), the tens of trillions of USD costs associated with moving away from fossil fuel consumption to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 (4.8% of GDP) still outweigh the net benefit losses (3.0% of GDP) in 2100.
“The central estimate of the costs of climate policy, unrealistically assuming least-cost implementation, is 3.8–5.6% of GDP in 2100. The central estimate of the benefits of climate policy, unrealistically assuming high no-policy emissions and constant vulnerability, is 2.8–3.2% of GDP.”
There is a nearly 10 times worse cost versus benefit if we only consider the net impact of best- and worst-case-scenario emissions reduction policies through 2050, which is the year it is assumed the world economy will have reached net-zero targets if all goes according to plan.
“In 2050, the year of net-zero, the best estimate of the benefits of the 1.5∘C target are about 0.5% of GDP while the costs are almost 5%.”
Of course, if the more realistic outcomes with regard to achieving emissions reduction targets eventuate, and if the global warming on tap for failing to achieve these targets is not as exaggeratedly hot as models assume (e.g., 5°C warming by 2100), the net costs of climate “action” exceed the benefits of avoided warming two-, three- and even four-fold.
Simply put, the “Paris targets do not pass the cost-benefit test.”
Draft resolution on a ‘loss and damage fund’ has attracted more than $400 million, but climate-vulnerable countries say more cash is needed.
DUBAI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES – NOVEMBER 30: Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber (C), President of the UNFCCC COP28 Climate Conference, attends the opening session of the conference shortly after he was confirmed COP28 president on November 30, 2023 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The COP28, which is running from November 30 through December 12, is bringing together stakeholders, including international heads of state and other leaders, scientists, environmentalists, indigenous peoples representatives, activists and others to discuss and agree on the implementation of global measures towards mitigating the effects of climate change. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
The media is replete with announcements of a “breakthrough” agreement at COP28 to make “operational” a fund through which “developed” countries compensate “developing” countries for “loss and damage” from “climate change.” The six terms in quotations highlight the ambiguity depending on how those words are defined. Let’s start with “breakthrough “, “operational” and “developed” vs. “developing” countries.
Draft resolution on a ‘loss and damage fund’ has attracted more than $400 million, but climate-vulnerable countries say more cash is needed.
Researchers and campaigners welcomed the move, while recognizing that much more is needed and that pledges are not the same as money in the bank. “It remains to be seen how much money rich countries, developed countries and the polluting countries will be willing to put into that fund,” says Romain Weikmans, a climate-finance researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Brussels.
Countries calling for the fund, especially those highly vulnerable to climate change, are expecting it to eventually reach at least $100 billion per year. Tom Mitchell, executive director of the International Institute for Environment and Development, an environmental-research think tank in London, says the total amounts so far “are really, really very modest”. Some of the least developed countries see the US commitment as “a slap in the face”, he adds.
Further details, such as how much of the money will be given out as grants versus loans and who will be eligible to receive funding have not been announced. [China, India?]
There’s still a lot that needs clarifying about this fund. Some of the big outstanding questions include the fund’s size, its relationship to other funds, how it will be administered over the long term, and what its funding priorities will be.
In response to the announcement, leadingAfrican think-tank representative Mohamad Adhow noted there were “no hard deadlines, no targets, and countries are not obligated to pay into it, despite the whole point being for rich, high-polluting nations to support vulnerable communities who have suffered from climate impacts”.
“One thing I’d like to make clear is that climate change is real. It’s serious, and it deserves urgent attention to both mitigation and adaptation,” Pielke said. “But I’ve come to see, across my career, that the importance of climate change is held up by many people as a reason for why we can abandon scientific integrity. This talk is about climate and scientific integrity, how we maintain it, and how we use it in decision-making. Reasonable people can disagree about policies and different directions that we want to go, but none of us are going to benefit if we can’t take expertise and bring it to decision-making to ground policymaking in the best available knowledge. Overall, climate science and policy have a narrative problem.”
Hurricanes
In addressing the narrative problem, concerning the first area of public discourse- hurricanes, Pielke displayed a graph of official data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. It displayed landfalling hurricanes in the U.S. and showed a long-term trend of no increase in hurricanes overall – despite environmental websites claiming the opposite. Pielke noted the reason for misreporting is the fact that there were no major hurricanes to hit the United States between 2005 to 2017, a pause reflected in the data chart which had a gap there from 2005 to 2017. So if you recently became climate aware in the last 20 years, which many in the media have, you would think that hurricanes were increasing.
“That’s why we do science – because our lived experience is not a good substitute for looking at data and evidence,” Pielke said. “So if you’re paying attention to the news, just this week, it was all over the news that the proportion of hurricanes that have become major hurricanes has increased. Well, not according to the science. So, one of the challenges that I try to emphasize is that there is good information out there.
If the media ignores it and in the political debates it’s ignored, then it’s all of our responsibility to ferret out what’s real.”
Disasters
In addressing his second subject, disasters, Pielke differentiated disasters from extreme weather defining a disaster as an extreme weather event that intersects with an exposed and vulnerable society.
He quoted from an October 21, 2023 Financial Times article that at a private event last month, one executive at Lloyd’s of London that oversees the market told underwriters that they had not yet seen clear evidence that a warming climate is a major driver in loss claims. Pielke attended the event in person and perceived a concern in the room that anyone making that statement publicly would be called a climate denier, leading to a suppression or minimization of the statement.
Pielke also addressed UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ claim that the number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years. He noted that Guterres used data from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) to make this claim. Pielke referred to notes in CRED reports that have advised for decades “Don’t look at our data and use it to say anything about the weather” and advises their data shows the evolution of registration of natural disaster events over time, which has increased with better means of communication.
As well, since there is more international aid for disaster affected communities, more communities are reporting.
The number of global weather and climate disasters has declined this century.
On the subject of U.S. disasters, in his sixteen years of affiliation with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Pielke observed a reporting phenomenon – an addiction to reporting billion-dollar weather disasters. The reports are used by advocacy groups, and then the media, who publicize that climate change is causing more billion-dollar weather disasters, something Pielke says isn’t supported by science. He points out that as the United States has gotten wealthier, the actual proportion of that wealth that is damaged in disasters has gone down dramatically.
Misinterpreting Climate Scenarios
Pielke then addressed his third subject, climate scenarios and the effect of misinterpretation.
He referred to the Special Report on Emissions Scenarios (SRES) – a report by the IPCC that was published in 2000. The 1,184 greenhouse gas emissions scenarios described in the Report have been used to make projections of possible future climate change. Pielke noted that the area of discussion of climate scenarios “is so full of jargon and technical details, that it is almost impenetrable”. Since 1,184 scenarios weren’t easy to study, the community decided to simply to study the four you see representedby the four bold blue lines on the first graph below- namely RCP8.5, RCP 6.0, RCP4.5 and RCP2.6.
(RCP 4.5 is described by the IPCC as a moderate scenario in which emissions peak around 2040 and then decline. RCP 8.5 is the highest baseline emissions scenario in which emissions continue to rise throughout the twenty-first century. Climate change projected under RCP 8.5 will typically be more severe. RCP 2.6 at the bottom is what today we would call the Paris Accord target)
Pielke pointed out that the assumption underlying all the SRES scenarios is that the world is going to turn to coal as the dominant energy source in the 21st century. For this to happen, Pielke calculates that over 3000 new coal plants would have to be built by the year 2100, which he says won’t happen and the IEA expectation is in agreement.However, the Canadian government, the U.S. government, and the Indian government, all rely on the RCP 8.5 scenario and it is pervasive in global climate policy as the IPCC remains focused on it. Pielke points out that all the SRES scenarios have assumptions about GDP, the carbon intensity of energy, and more that are already out of date. Pielke also pointed out that the scientific community has increasingly relied on RCP 8.5 – the most extreme scenario and in 2023, the RCP 8.5 remains the most used scenario in research with many studies published each day using it.
“So why is that?” Pielke said. “The reason is, if you do a study with RCP 8.5 with massive amounts of emissions to 2100, you’re going to get big effects. You can publish that in a prominent journal. Your university will put out a press release on it. You might even get into the New York Times because these very extreme scenarios are notable. Scientists agree there are legitimate reasons for using extreme scenarios in research. Usually, it’s what we call exploratory research, not projective research. Scientists tell me ‘Well if we want to separate the signal of forced climate change from the noise of internal climate variability, we need these strong scenarios’.”
Pielke referred to this attitude as “noble cause corruption”- the idea that less rigorous science and even bad science is excusable if it advances a cause.
A revision of the scenario projections was initiated in June 2023 and the process of generating the next generation of scenarios has begun and Pielke reports they have removed the top RCP8.5 and RCP 6.0 scenarios. However, he says because we are currently using scenarios developed in the early 2000s, leading media and advocacy narratives which use them extensively are problematic “because a lot of bad science has gotten mixed in with the good science and it’s really hard to tell the difference.”
Unfortunately for the alarmists, so far all they have is clanks and creaks and spooky lighting. Once you shine your torch its way, that ghost behind the arras turns out to be a trick of the light.
The other day, I decided to try out the PressReader app, to see what my local library had subscribed to (and that therefore I could read without my own subscription, and stripped of digital ads to boot). Well, scrolling through the front covers of the available magazines, I came across what looked like a bomb going off on the front cover of The Monthly, with below it,
The summer ahead by Joëlle Gergis
The summer ahead Down Under is looking rather apocalyptic. Gergis is of course well known to those sceptics who have read Climate Audit over the years, and I refer readers to articles there for discussion of the detrending “controversy.” Here, for instance is what mild-mannered Stephen McIntyre said about the 2016 reboot of the PAGES2K paleotemperature reconstruction:
In 2012, the then much ballyhoo-ed Australian temperature reconstruction of Gergis et al 2012 mysteriously disappeared from Journal of Climate after being criticized at Climate Audit. Now, more than four years later, a successor article has finally been published. Gergis says that the only problem with the original article was a “typo” in a single word. Rather than “taking the easy way out” and simply correcting the “typo”, Gergis instead embarked on a program that ultimately involved nine rounds of revision, 21 individual reviews, two editors and took longer than the American involvement in World War II. However, rather than Gergis et al 2016 being an improvement on or confirmation of Gergis et al 2012, it is one of the most extraordinary examples of data torture (Wagenmakers, 2011, 2012) that any of us will ever witness.Climate Audit
So, seven years on, what does the summer ahead have in store? Well, our Australian readers will be lucky if they survive it. The subhead:
The climate disasters unfolding in the northern hemisphere are a sign of what’s in store here, as governments fail to act on the unfolding emergency
But the article doesn’t begin with the disasters of the northern hemisphere. Instead – annoyingly describing something that happened in the past in the present tense – we have a seemingly idyllic scene where Fam. Gergis go camping in the rainforest of New South Wales’s Nightcap National Park. But all is not right in this subtropical paradise. There are blackened trees and a layer of charcoal on the ground – the ghost of the wildfires of the summer of 2019-2020.
In the aftermath of the fires, I visited this very patch of rainforest with a documentary film crew and wept as I tried to explain the significance of what we were witnessing.
It’s a pity the documentary film crew didn’t take an ecologist, who might have said something along the lines of, “fire is rare but not unknown in this habitat. The rainforest is surrounded by more fire-prone plant communities, and survives repeated wildfires in refugia created by local topography. Rainforest species can re-establish into the surrounding areas in the absence of fire, but there are areas they cannot spread into because they are too dry. The result is a dynamic equilibrium where the make up of the plant communities varies on decadal timescales, depending on fire frequency and intensity.” Something like that.
BIG FAT WALLOPING ASTERISK: I know nothing about Nightcap National Park. I do know that the former extent of rainforest in Australia was much larger than it is today, and that natural climate change resulted in only a few relict areas surviving in New South Wales. If I have that wrong, please educate me.
But I must not dwell too much on answering the specific claims made by Gergis in her essay, because if I do, my reply will be longer than her original. Instead, I want to highlight the more hysterical bits of the hyperbole that runs throughout.
After four years spent immersing myself in the minutiae of the global climate emergency [as an author on IPCC’s AR6], it’s painfully clear that the extremes we are witnessing right now are simply a prelude of what’s to come.
There follows a shopping list of disasters and omens, which either presage climate apocalypse or not, depending on whether you are an alarmist or a sceptic. We have the hot temperatures in Sardinia, Sanbao, the Canadian wildfires, floods in Beijing and the hottest ever month on record.
António Guterres, secretary-general of the United Nations, responded by declaring that, “The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” While cynics might dismiss his comment as hyperbole, the scientific community know he’s not wrong.
Dismissing it as hyperbole was the least it deserved. Plenty other descriptors could have been selected. How about “asinine.” That seems to fit the bill.
Today’s atmosphere has the highest CO2 levels in the past two million years, which was the last time we had an era of “global boiling,” “climate breakdown,” “contagious stupidity,” etc.
The evidence that the increase in temperatures is owing to human emissions of CO2 is unequivocal – something you will not find me arguing with. But I take issue with the conclusion Gergis draws:
Or put another way, scientists can now definitively say that humanity’s use of coal, oil and gas is cooking the planet.
That statement bears no resemblance to something that can be said definitively.
Next on the agenda is a series of paragraphs describing the emotional cost of being a climate scientist. It would be heartless to say exactly what I think about this section, and that ain’t me. All I will say is that it should be obvious that objectivity in science is important. The more important the question at hand, the more important it is to be objective. Objectivity will not guarantee that you get the right answer, any more than subjectivity guarantees that you get the wrong answer. But it helps.
Moving swiftly on to the next block, emotions still run hot. Here, we learn that
…the real stress comes from knowing that all the solutions we need to stabilise the Earth’s climate exist right now.
OK, I’m going to let you stare out of the window for a few moments and predict just what those solutions might be.
If you said “Net Zero,” give yourself a strawberry bonbon and a pat on the back, in that order.
Yet despite the enormous potential of these low-hanging fruit [wind and solar], our leaders are instead choosing to support the expansion of the fossil fuel industry to the bitter end.
I wonder what she would be saying if great lumps of the West were not nominally on a course to Net Zero by 2050? Next Gergis decries Australian subsidies for oil and gas – something I cannot comment on authoritatively, but if it’s anything like most of the “subsidies” that the UK government offers the fossil fuel sector, it will be pure prestidigitation. Apparently the 1.5 degree target aims to avoid “millions of climate refugees,” and to achieve it, most fossil fuels cannot be extracted. Therefore the decision of the UK government to issue new oil and gas licenses is perverse.
COP28 is a floating corpse – look who’s involved, and look what they are interested in. Carbon capture is useless (an opinion I tend to hew to as well).
It is clear that the urgency of the clean energy transition is being downplayed by vested interests with a criminal disregard for science and morality.
I would timorously suggest that those gung-ho for Net Zero based on a “clean energy transition” are also operating without regard for science and morality. They pretend that “renewables” can power our present civilisation, and don’t mention that the less well-off will pay for the displays of virtue of our leaders and opinion formers trying to flog us down this thistly track.
Of course, as things stand, we are not doing enough:
The world’s collective policies represent a catastrophic overshooting of the Paris Agreement targets, which promises to reconfigure life on our planet as we know it.
Quoth Gergis,
…the latest climate models show that under a very high emissions pathway, global average temperatures could warm as much as 3.3 to 5.7°C above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century…
Except it won’t, will it, because the very high emissions pathway is not credible, and if it was, the models promising 5.7°C aren’t.
Such catastrophic levels of warming will render large parts of our country uninhabitable, profoundly altering life in Australia.
If… could… maybe… will! In any case, most of Australia is already uninhabitable. Everywhere that doesn’t have a supermarket in easy reach. With due apologies to our Australian readers.
We know from the geologic record that 1.5 to 2°C of warming is enough to seriously reconfigure the Earth’s climate. In the past, this level of warming triggered substantial long-term melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, unleashing six to 13 metres of global sea-level rise that lasted thousands of years.
Sounds scary. (#pedantry: you need an ‘al’ there. A historic record is not the same as a historical record, and similar comments apply to geology.) Care to put a timescale on the “unleashing” of the melting? No, thought not. Apparently the current level of ice loss has committed us to – what does she call it? (thumbs through digital magazine…) A “cascade of changes” that are “irreversible” and will “last for centuries” [in which case, it hardly seems worth the sacrifice of Net Zero?].
The IPCC report doesn’t mince its words here, stating that beyond 2°C, adaptation is simply not possible in some low-lying coastal cities, small islands, deserts, mountains and polar regions.
I presume Gergis did not write that phrase as part of her work for the IPCC. But the sentence as quoted is untrue. None of those places face an impossible situation with a further 0.8°C over the 1.2°C that we have already “suffered.”
Coral reef scientists are already panicking, as global reefs are being besieged by record ocean temperatures.
The Florida Keys has bleaching because of high temperatures, and the scientists are “panicking” about it.
As awful as this is, these impacts are entirely consistent with what scientists expect.
So why are they panicking? Oh, I knew you were going to do that. ARRRGGGHHH! This next excerpt can only be described as… well, I’ll leave you to be the judge (multiple choice quiz follows):
The IPCC warns that even with 1.5°C of warming, which we are set to breach in the early 2030s, 70 to 90 per cent of the world’s coral reefs will be destroyed. That number rises to 99 per cent with 2°C of warming, which could happen as early as the 2040s. An entire component of the Earth’s biosphere – humanity’s planetary life-support system – could be lost in under 20 years. Given that 25 per cent of all marine life depends on these areas, it’s hard to comprehend the domino effect that will be unleashed as these key ecosystems start collapsing globally.
MULTIPLE CHOICE OPTIONS
A) The paragraph is an accurate portrayal of the near future;
B) The paragraph uses acceptable rhetoric to enhance its emotional impact but is substantially true;
C) The bull**** was coming thick and fast, and the author hoped we were lapping it up, and the bovine among us probably were;
D) King Charles III.
So, lemme get this straight. Coral reefs which only occur in the hottest parts of the ocean are going to be wiped out in 20 years, because there will be no part of the ocean left that is cool enough for them. After this in my view entirely specious claim (I picked (C)), Gergis goes on and on about the Great Barrier Reef, how it should have been placed on UNESCO’s in danger list, but wasn’t because of politics. Look at the bleaching! Everything is terrible, but the politicians – even the notionally green ones that are now ruling the roost, the ones that all right-thinking peeps voted for – don’t want any bad news to be widely known about the GBR lest it dents the tourist trade. And there were we sceptics thinking that coral was at record levels. How excited would the alarmists get if it was on the decline?
But stop worrying about the coral. There’s something worse lurking behind the arras.
As overwhelming as all of this is to take in, the imminent demise of the world’s coral reefs isn’t the only thing keeping scientists up at night right now. There is something far more sinister plaguing our minds – the possibility that the Earth might have already breached some kind of global “tipping point”.
Well, no it hasn’t. I don’t think Gergis helps her argument here by extensively discussing The Day After Tomorrow. (I preferred the sequel, “A Week Next Tuesday.”) What are these putative tipping points? Low sea ice leading to low albedo leading to more solar energy absorbed leading to A TIPPING POINT! Except that for this sceptic, there is a little issue in the form of the period of total darkness each year. The poles are going to be brass monkeys every winter, sea ice is gonna form, etc, etc.
Are we nearly there yet? Yes! We end where we begin: at the rainforest campfire, whose embers are not glowing, but (speedily thumbs through thesaurus) “radiating.” As the finale, Gergis laments the false dawn of the Australian election:
While I do my best to try and switch off, it isn’t always easy. It is heartbreaking to accept the reality that our planet is warming, faster and more ferociously than we thought – and that our politicians are still not doing enough. In the aftermath of the euphoria of Australia’s “climate election” in 2022, I was filled with hope that our nation had finally come to its senses, and that we now had leaders with the vision to make Australia the renewable energy superpower we know it can be. And yet, over a year into the new government’s term, our leaders continue with business as usual, ignoring the deafening alarm bells. If we remain silent and let things go on the way that they are, our political disengagement will provide the social licence needed for the exploitation of fossil fuel reserves to go on for decades to come.
Wait, I think I’m spotting a logical inconsistency here. If we have reached a TIPPING POINT or something then even the most diehard sceptic is going to drop his trousers, or pull them up, one or the other, run to the station and jump on board the alarm train, and at that point, there will be no slacking at all, no opposition to Net Zero to be found anywhere, and the world will be saved. Hooray. It’s just like that annoying bespectacled accy type in the tweed who, accompanying the credulous into a haunted manse, pooh-poohs the possibility of ghosts until one leaps out at him and bites his nose off.
Unfortunately for the alarmists, so far all they have is clanks and creaks and spooky lighting. Once you shine your torch its way, that ghost behind the arras turns out to be a trick of the light.
And vanishes.
PS. I bet Academy Travel, who are running 16-day trips to Pompeii, Capri and the Bay of Naples from Oz, wish their half-page ad in the print edition was not placed right in the middle of Gergis’s essay, which might have swayed a few fence-sitters against the trip. I think – on the whole – if I were them, I’d be asking for a refund.
PPS. You can read the whole thing online whether or not you are considering a tour of Naples and its environs.
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