Carbon category error

We are a carbon life form. Decarbonising is therefore self-harm, no? 

There have been a number of books and articles published recently which push back against well-meaning but harmful Greenthink. Michael Shellenberger’s Apocalypse Never nails the energy-density uselessness of solar and wind; Bjorn Lomborg’s False Alarm continues decades of meticulous exposure of benefit of adaptation versus cost of interventions; the UK’s Global Warming Policy Foundation ploughs its lonely furrow of financial common sense; and possibly the greatest recent impact came from Michael Moore’s production of Jeff Gibbs’ Planet of the Humans: – no one should be in any doubt now about the bad policy that involves cutting down trees in North America, processing them into wood chips, sailing them across the Atlantic, and trucking them to a Yorkshire power station.

But none of these will achieve cut-through.

None.

That’s because they all pay homage to an underlying error: the belief (it feels like we are dealing with a religious phenomenon here) that man-made carbon dioxide (hereinafter CO2) is leading to dangerous climate change. It may be more, it may be less, we could adapt, but at the bottom of all this, it is our fault and it is bad.

Well. I will try to explain why it is neither a problem, nor our fault, in what follows. But before I stumble through my reasoning, please just step back for a moment, suspend disbelief, hold fire on closely argued refutation and ask yourself – what if I’m right? 

How many trillions of net zero costs would we avoid? How much could we lower energy costs by cancelling green taxes? How much economic vandalism would be avoided in not scrapping our cars, boilers or grids? How much money made available for recovering from Sars2? How amazingly popular and vote-winning would it be? Half the country celebrates Brexit; just about everyone would be cheering cancellation of net zero.

OK. 

Deep breath. 

This is why I don’t think CO2 is the main driver of climate change, by which of course we mean dangerous global warming. 

Depending who is counting, there are about ten clear swings from ice age to warm conditions over the last million years, and over twenty wiggles. And more before that. Look up Marine Isotope Stages and you will see. What strikes me is that the temperature peaks and troughs are roughly at the same points, and parallel. The graph is graceful, natural, rhythmical. And flat, no upward trend. There is some sort switch, and it is very powerful (and of course has nothing to do with man made CO2 because we were barely there most of the time).

Look closely and for much of the time (not always, as cycles reinforce and cancel out with odd timing and lags), temperature changes lead CO2 concentration. 

No way can CO2 be the cause of temperature change if its own changes follow rather than precede. That’s not how cause and effect works.

That’s it, really. End of alarm.

Think about the simple physics and it is not that surprising. Gasses like CO2 are increasingly absorbed by liquids as temperatures fall, and are released as temperatures rise. Changes in CO2 concentration are the result of temperature change, not the cause. Temperatures have been rising since about 1800, which was around the end of a cold period, and CO2 release from oceans follows. Indeed, the rise is unaffected by Sars2 shutdown, which in itself argues it is not all man-made. 

So it’s natural variation and not our fault. Phew.

Correlation is not causation, but lack of correlation absolutely rules out causation.

Now the UN IPCC talks about CO2 forcing being of the order of 1.5 to 2 watts per square metre. They admit this is too little to make a dent in glaciation, so they come up with all sorts of angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin feedback loops to account for it. And they ignore natural variation. 

Orbital variation can swing up to 100 watts per square metre when cycles align. That’ll do it for me. 

Then there’s the death spiral. One of the most insidious, unshakable bad ideas of the crisis lobby is that rising temperatures will cause polar ice to melt, entering into an unstoppable feedback loop as less sunlight-reflecting ice area allows more sea to warm, melting more ice and so on until we all drown. Didn’t happen in Viking times, when Greenland was green. Didn’t happen in those lovely Marine Isotope Stages. Temperatures have often risen faster than they are now. Check out Dansgaard Oescher events and The Younger Dryas. No death spiral.

Arctic sea ice has been a bit low this summer, but Antarctic is at the top of the graph, and above the 1981 – 2010 average. That’s after forty years. If there was anything in this warming malarkey each year, or to be fair each five year average, say, would be lower than the preceding one. Not happening.

And lastly, greening. Plants turn CO2 into carbohydrates. Food. More CO2, more plant. Satellites calculate a measure of of plant cover called Leaf Area Index. It has grown by at least 17% over the last 35 years or so. A new green area about twice the size of the USA. That’s got to be good, right? Moreover, plants take in CO2 through holes in the undersides of their leaves, and lose water through those holes too. When CO2 concentration rises they can get by with smaller holes so survive in drier lands. Greening has been greatest in semi arid country – deserts shrink. And crop production is at record levels. Famine is about politics not climate.

So. That’s what I think. Lots of people have put it better, and I list a few below. But it did occur to me that I was barking up the wrong red herring so I wrote to a few of the great and the good asking if they thought change in concentration of CO2 was the main driver of climate change. Amazingly, more than a third were kind enough to reply. See what you make of what they said (I paraphrase a little). Senior opinion writer: I’m not a scientist so I don’t know. Senior journalist: the science is settled, don’t waste my time with references to nonsense like notrickszone.com. Economist: I don’t do science so can’t comment. Professor of Astrophysics: the UN IPCC says so. Another senior journalist: you are trying to trick me, but I don’t care. I believe climate change is the greatest risk to civilisation right now. MP: I believe climate change is the greatest risk to civilisation right now but can be a great opportunity for government to create green jobs. Sigh. Appeals to authority.

I read most of the UN IPCC fifth report during lockdown. It starts with an assumption, that CO2 is the only thing they can think of to drive climate change, then launches models to make projections based on that assumption. Forty five of them. We have had a bit of experience with models during this health crisis. The old rule – garbage in, garbage out – applies to climate models too. The models are running three times hotter than history. They have been running for more than thirty years but are not getting better. Seems careless to be counting on models to justify trillions of dollar costs to decarbonise. 

Also, there is controversy about corruption of the IPCC’s central message; Nasa fiddling the numbers to make the past cooler and the recent warmer; the hockey stick; hiding the decline; Climategate; cancelling of dissenting scientists, and so on. 

It has become common to talk about carbon pollution when referring to CO2. Industries or cars are said to emit this or that many tons of carbon. Carbon is thereby meant to feel bad, dirty, sooty, toxic. This is climate crisis propaganda but words have power, bad ideas have a life of their own just as good ones do. I am searching for stronger words but I am no wordsmith. It would take genius like Stay home, Save lives. I tried Green Taxes Kill: too ugly; CO2 is Food: too bland; Greenhouses good: hmm; We are Carbon – oh well.

All I am asking really is for you to think for yourselves. Read a few of the suggestions below. Maybe red team the issue before going Tonto. Make up your own mind. Try listening to the first line of that old Sam Cooke song – no, not that one: “If you ever/change your mind…” there, that’s you hooked.

References

Click to access The_phase_relations_among_atmospheric_CO2_content_temperature_and_global_ice_volume_over_the_past_420_ka.pdf

Coupled atmosphere-ice-ocean dynamics in Dansgaard-Oeschger events – ScienceDirect

Goklany Carbon Dioxide: The Good News | The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) you might start with the second section at p 21

Robinson, Robinson, Soon:

Nature Unbound I: The Glacial Cycle | Climate Etc.

UN IPCC 2 watts/sq m https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2020/01/certainties-and-uncertainties-in-our.html 

Mr. Koonin was undersecretary of energy for science during President Obama’s first term.

(Hat tip Dominic Cummings’ blog)

MIT’s Dr. Lindzen Pokes Fun At The ‘Naïve’, Well-Funded ‘Scientific Reasoning’ That 1 Factor – CO2 – Controls Climate

Steve Koonin again: https://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf

100 watts/ sq m: https://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf skip through to pp 314 – 318. Its a quick read, single column double spaced. “I don’t know of a better correlation in geophysics”.

APS pp 342 – 361  Christy demolishes editors.

p 466 DR. LINDZEN: In the models,

what causes the 1919 to 1940 warming? DR. HELD: The models tend to

underestimate it. 

Sea ice Sea Ice and Icebergs: Polar Portal  , Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis | Sea ice data updated daily with one-day lag

Greenland SMB_curves_LA_EN_20200921.png 846×1,080 pixels

Greening https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth, : https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate3004  , the planet has greened by about 14% during 35 years of satellite observations (Donohue et al., 2013) , Zhu et al. (2016) 

Deserts recede: Donohue RJ, Roderick ML, McVicar TR and Farquhar GD (2013) Carbon dioxide fertilisation has increased maximum foliage cover across the globe’s warm, arid envi- ronments. Geophysical Research Letters 2013; DOI: 10.1002/grl.50563.

Crops record http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare

UN assumes 

Models run hot https://www.rossmckitrick.com/uploads/4/8/0/8/4808045/cmip6-ess-acceptedversion.pdf

Controversies https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/01/24/a-history-of-dr-ben-santer-and-his-ipcc-trick/

“The balance of evidence suggeststhat there is a discernible human influence on global climate” According to Christopher Booker (Groupthink 2020 p 17,18) this definitive sentence was written into the Summary for Policymakers in the UN IPCC second report 1996, despite not having appeared in the formally approved draft. 15 key statements expressing doubt over the human contribution to global warming had also been deleted.

Santer again New Santer Study Totally Debunked | NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

NASA NOAA adjusting the numbers:  Understanding NOAA US Temperature Fraud | Real Climate Science

Hide the decline Scientists Expose Data Manipulation, ‘Hide The Decline’, And The Post-1940s Hockey Stick Temperature Myth

Climategate Climategate: Untangling Myth and Reality 10 Years Later

Climategate | Watts Up With That?

Nasa adjusts

A History of Climate Fraud (I) – Electroverse

EVs for John

Heavy, really heavy.

The links below set out what’s wrong with EVs better than I can. To save you jumping backwards and forwards to links and footnotes I will lay out some main topics long hand, then repeat the headings with links.

But to start with the obvious, since there is nothing wrong with carbon dioxide, aka “carbon” (you know the story, green ink third try), there is no need to decarbonize and certainly no need to waste our tax paid money on subsidizing inferior technology. If people want to buy EVs that’s fine, but it should be their choice, not something the government has any right or business imposing on us-the-people. As for banning IC (internal combustion) – bans? How fracking great is that?

Why replace something that works with something worse? Volvo know:

The ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ report for the pure-electric £57,400 C40 Recharge says it would take nine years for the EV to beat the IC on carbon cost of manufacture and operation.
Not that I care about “carbon cost”.

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Inferior Technology

VW is putting a five seater van body on its new EV platform. Trouble is, the vehicle weighs two tonnes and is rated for two and a half so it is not much use. Not even a seven seater – two large blokes would tip it over the limit.

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Weight. 

That’s the trouble with batteries. Ever dropped a car battery? Hurts your toes and cracks, spraying acid which makes holes in your trousers. Lithium ion batteries don’t have the acid, but they are heavy. Maybe a third of the weight of a car. It is like driving around with a millstone in the boot. And they stay heavy no matter how much electricity you take out. IC petrol or diesel tanks might weigh 10% of the car when full but then average 5% on a long trip. 

The weight means tyre wear is greater, also brake pads. With stop start there is not much to chose between EV and IC in urban traffic, but the EV will pollute more with particulates from brakes and tyres. Pothole makers.

Weight means handling is poor. Nose out understeer. Higher kinetic energy in accidents. 

Best cars have a high power to weight ratio. Mk1 golf GTI, Polo, MGB GT. EVs? Not so much.

Flat tyre is a big problem. I don’t have a link for this, but the story is, if you get a flat in an EV you need to call out a specialist tow truck. You can’t just jack up a corner because the weight of the battery tray which is the sub frame means it would buckle. I can believe that, having put a misplaced jack half way through the bottom of a Mercedes ML270.

And Wait. 

Half an hour for a top up to get you home, maybe. Half a day for a full charge from the mains. And if you live in a block of flats or a terraced house, don’t think the extension lead will reach, or survive the prams and mobility scooters and schemies.

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There is not grid enough.

Many electric chargers are often broken at motorway service stations. The ones working are woefully small in number. The 100 kW ones use electricity at the rate of 200 UK homes. If you had all electric cars, no diesel or petrol, a major services would need 2000 plus chargers working most of 24 hours per day, due to the charging time needed. (We can look at a large petrol station at busy periods – often 30 or more vehicles at pumps, but they only stop for 5 minutes. That’s 360/hour. If charging takes 6 times longer, around 30 minutes, you easily fill your 2000 chargers.)

So, you’ve created an equivalent city of 400,000 homes in electricity use at ONE service station.

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System losses.

The electricity has to come from somewhere.

Gas from pipelines is pretty good. Liquified Natural Gas loses 10% in the freezing, compressing and reversing. Solar is about 18% efficient at best, less when cloudy, low incident sun, 0% of course when dark. Wind turbines are never going to pay back the energy used in making them. Doesn’t matter how many you have when you get a couple of weeks of no wind in the winter. 

High Voltage Direct Current from Norwegian Hydro? If they can spare it. Very expensive and you lose ? how much to heat over the distance. 

Come to think about it, most of the solar panels and much of the wind turbine kit comes from China, made with cheap labour (shhh, slaves) and cheap power from…coal.

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And none of this is really green.

A small, ever-so-green, 100-megawatt wind farm needs 30,000 tons of iron ore; 50,000 tons of concrete and 900 tons of non-recyclable plastic.

For the same power from an ever-so-green solar farm you need to increase that by 150 per cent.

An electric car battery weighs half a ton, making just one requires shifting 250 tons of earth somewhere else on the planet.

All require what are called ‘rare earths’, so a phenomenal 200 to 2,000 per cent increase in toxic mining, processing and shipping is required somewhere else on the planet, usually from unregulated regimes with very lax environmental standards.

Solar and wind have weather-dependent limits, but we need energy ALL the time, so we have to have permanent back-up. The giant Tesla factory in Nevada would take 500 years to make enough batteries to supply the USA with electricity for 1 day!

After 30 years and countless billions in subsidies wind and solar supply less than 3 per cent of the world’s energy. On top of that, like all machines ‘renewables’ are built from non-renewable materials – and have to be replaced time and time again, so definitely NOT a one-off cost.

To accommodate 2,000 MW of gas or nuclear power generation requires the same area of two 18-hole golf courses. Whereas, accommodating 2,000 MW of wind power requires an area the size of Belgium!

Then, of course, you still need 2,000 MW of gas or nuclear power to accommodate those hundreds of occasions each year when wind and solar power is producing absolutely nothing.

George Herraghty

Elgin

(Letter in Shetland News)

They know about these things in Elgin.

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Cost

£70k for a big Tesla? Not exactly a folks wagen. But even the small ones cost more than the perfectly good super mini they are legislated (by law! Numpties!) to replace.

£50k for a BZ4x, i.d.4, MB eqa, Tesla Y.(why?).

And they cost more to service. Because they are unexploded bombs. I had a chat with my local BMW dealer. Servicing EVs involves specially trained staff – costly – and a segregated service bay. In case they catch fire. You know those warnings about overheating laptops and phones on aircraft. Times lots. And battery fires can’t be put out with water or foam. They keep re-igniting. 

And the battery degrades with each charge cycle, so don’t buy a high mileage low age second hander – the battery will cost more to replace than the car cost.

Actually, that might be the key to why the car industry has rolled over and not tried to defend its position – enormous margins and planned obsolescence. That’s what our old au pair Volkan says, and he worked for Valeo. I put the question to motoring correspondent Andrew English – he said he asked all the big bosses and they just looked at their feet and mumbled.

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Smart or not so smart

Early adopters got all the subsidies. The rich, who didn’t need them. Fleet buyers, who bought the hybrids for the tax breaks and never opened the charging cable pack. Company car schemes which save the users thousands.

It has to be a bait and switch. Road tax and fuel duty are huge contributors to the exchequer. The Treasury thinks all money belong to it. Smart meters (paid for by the many, used by the few – definition of liberal labour conservative socialist consensus) will turn into a bad fat controller. No charging for you, sir, you cooked too many steaks. Smart motorway gantries and underground sensors look to be a precursor to road pricing. Then they’ll have you coming and going. It’s that “them” again. Who dey?

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Where does the electric come from?

In 2015 the percentage of energy coming from renewable and waste sources (such as wind, hydro power and biomass) was 9%.

Nine

91% came from real reliables. And we want to junk them.

In 2015 a third of the UK’s fuel imports were crude oil

Natural gas made up around 29%

Petroleum products made up 27%

We imported 1% of our electricity by cables.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/environmentalaccounts/articles/ukenergyhowmuchwhattypeandwherefrom/2016-08-15

It is sneaky how often the government and the media mix up “power “ with “energy consumption “ and electricity.

On its best days wind and solar, hydro, nuclear and bio can generate half our electricity. You can track it on

Gridwatch, iamkate, the crown estate.

But so what? You need back up for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun – oh it’s obvious. We are being made to pay twice.

But the electricity grid is only twenty per cent of the country’s power needs. Think of transportation, heating, industry.

So all this fuss. Subsidies adding a third to bills. Market distortions. All for nine per cent. Subsidy farmers are making out like bandits.

++Links++

Volvo  https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/cars/article-10161697/Volvo-says-electric-car-making-emissions-70-HIGHER-petrol.html and the assumption that electricity from wind is “clean” needs to be ridiculed. Back up, replacement, probably four times the cost of old school mix.

System losses. Electricity leaks. Who knew? https://notrickszone.com/2022/08/16/charging-electric-cars-like-spilling-liters-of-petrol-hidden-losses-during-charging-are-huge/

Cost https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/battery-replacement-familys-ev-ford-focus-would-cost-more-car-itself

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/consumer-affairs/electric-cars-cost-effective-five-years-even-6000-subsidy/ This from 2020. Price of electricity has gone up a lot more than petrol.

Service https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/evs-cost-16-23-times-more-service-internal-combustion-vehicles-new-study-shows

Weight https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/05/30/electric-cars-should-face-tyre-tax-says-air-quality-adviser/

Wait https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/tesla-owners-wait-half-mile-long-line-charge-their-cars-black-

Smart https://dailysceptic.org/2022/09/09/how-taxpayers-lose-24000-a-year-when-someone-switches-to-an-electric-car/

Grid https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/11/01/net-zero-goals-will-require-installation-hundreds-miles-cables/

None of this is really green.

Follow the money. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/10/25/goldman-sachs-jeff-currie-3-8-trillion-of-investment-in-renewables-moved-fossil-fuels-from-82-to-81-of-overall-energy-consumption-in-10-years/

Lord Deben – chairman of the independent * cough * climate change committee, runs a green consultancy which gets £600,000 from … the CCC. Check that out. OK it is Delingpole and the Mail

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/02/03/climate-change-chief-lord-deben-takes-hidden-payments/

There is a lot more in this vein at TCW

The global climate change cult and the war on the mind – 1

Bottom line: compared to normal petrol or diesel cars EVs cost more, don’t go so far, cost more to service, take much longer to refuel and have no benefits – quite possibly harms – for the environment. But they accelerate like shit off a shovel. So they are very desirable.

I’ll park this, for now.

Wuhan

This is a bit old now, and the mainstream is catching up. But I said I would, so here goes.

I thought I was going to write a solid, cross-referenced, clear and logical account. I clipped several dozen articles to offer up to the gods of fact checking. But I found myself haring off on so many tangents, and I have ended up much more concerned about us AUKAS than I am about any nefarious goings on in China.

Shooting from the hip, off the top of my head and in no good order –

Research on viruses is dangerous so of course you want to do it in deepest dark Porton Down, or better still a longer way away, because accidents will happen and all labs leak, so America and I think France funded Wuhan. The French had a typically french hissy hit about sharing results or costs or something and don’t need to come into the story again.

The idea seems to have been to look at SARS 1 and see if you couldn’t make an antidote, a vaccine. To do this you scrape up some samples from infected bats and multiply the stuff with genetic manipulation to make it easier to work on. The absolute giveaway is the genetic sequence which doesn’t happen naturally because amino acids have polarity sort of like magnets and this combination cannot occur in primordial soup. But researchers splice it onto viruses to act like a tag.

Gain of Function, too. SARS1 was not too bad because it infected the bottom of your lungs. CV2 likes the top, throat and nose. Great for transmissibility. Oh those puir wee humanised mousies.

We can argue about whether the C19 virus was being developed for good, or was a weapon that went wrong, but I am pretty sure it didn’t evolve naturally, by jumping a thousand miles from a cave in the mountains to a caged pangolin in a wet fish market which just happened to be next to a leaky lab. A cover up, then.

Wuhan used to be something called BLS2: not exactly bullshit level security two but it means close to what you get at your dentist. Some time in the summer of 2019 there was seemingly a bit of a panic and the budget quadrupled on orders for the sort of kit you need to go up to BLS3. I think they moved to a bigger lab, which often creates leak risk, like when the plumber leaves the stop cock open or the builder heats his lunch in the autoclave. Anyway, pretty sure the virus was in circulation well before officially admitted, which makes all the containment and lockdown measures even more stupid and (possibly deliberately) ineffective.

Deliberately? The tinfoil hat brigade thinks big pharma was ready for the chance and sat on treatments so that an emergency could be declared so they could skip phase three testing and be exempt from any prosecution arising from longer term side effects. Well what would it have looked like if that is what they did do?

It is another of those convergent opportunist thingies. We have probably all heard enough of clever quotations, but I am minded to mention two: given it is China, Sun Tzu springs to mind. He said something along the lines of the best battles being those where you didn’t even need to turn up on the field because your enemy had destroyed himself; and Napoleon’s never interrupt an enemy when he is making a mistake.

So China sees us wrecking our economies, scaring and scarring our children, and damaging trust in institutions and authority, and sits back and smiles.

I can’t forget that WHO chap interviewed early on who would not, could not utter the name Taiwan out loud. Like the UN with the IPCC, big quangos fight for legitimacy and money. China has bought them as it has Jesus College Cambridge, former chancellor George Osborne and formerly respected journals such as the Lancet, Scientific American, National Geographic, New Scientist, the Economist, etc, etc. The fifth columnists write on.

It seems a bit lurid to cast China as an enemy, perhaps aggressive competitor playing by different rules would be fairer. I get the impression China thinks they should be top nation which they were for millennia whilst we were still brawling in the mud. They dropped the ball for a bit and were mugged and drugged by the East India Company, but if you think we have production problems for cars due to chip shortages now just wait until they take Taiwan. Putin took Crimea. These things are noticed.

Back to being upset. In America, NIH – national institute of hygiene? – and Anthony Fauci chanelled money into Wuhan via Eco Health Alliance, and denied it. See Peter Daszak. First enquiry into Wuhan whitewashed. Seven out of ten panellists with links to Eco Health. Third enquiry not much better, and includes Peter Drosten, promoter of the infamous PCR test which was never meant for mass screening but which by amazing coincidence appeared as the gold standard recommendation for finding CV just a week before the west went brainlessly into lockdowns.

But really what bothers me is the cancel culture, and the facebook/twitter self appointed fact checkers who lead the cancel witch hunts. Shouldn’t matter to me, who uses neither, except for the nagging statistic that 87% of “the young” get their news from fb. Must be true, I read it on the internet.

Here in Britain we have BIT (Behavioural Insights Team) originally David Cameron’s nudge unit, now a private company but owned 30% by the Cabinet Office. Nasty.  And the hubristically self-named SAGE committee which advises the government and on March 22nd 2020 recommended that frightening people was an effective way of gaining compliance with the coronavirus restrictions by using such phrases as “the perceived level of threat needs to be increased”. And produced the truly horrible idea of asymptomatic transmission. You can have it and not know it. Don’t kill grannie.

Infamous Professor Ferguson noted that “people’s sense of what is possible in terms of control changed quite dramatically between January and March”. Referring to China’s lockdown, he elaborated, “We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought… And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.”

So to wrap up, I am not surprised at China, or Russia behaving as they do. But wheras I used smugly to think we would never have behaved as badly as some Europeans did during WW2, now I am not so sure.

Don’t follow leaders, watch your parking meters!

— — —-

well ok. might as well attach the clips.

Not just Peter Third of Team Appointed by WHO to Investigate Origins of Covid Have Conflicts of Interest – The Daily Sceptic

New Peter Surprise! New WHO COVID Origin Investigation Team Includes Another Peter Daszak Minion | ZeroHedge

Censor Major Blow To YouTube Germany Censorship…Court Orders Reinstatement Of Removed Corona-Critical Videos

Bats Wuhan Scientists Submitted Plans to Release Coronaviruses into Bat Caves in 2018 – The Daily Sceptic

How it was designed https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/21/wuhan-scientists-planned-releaseskin-penetrating-nanoparticles/ 

“Like It Was Designed To Infect Humans”: COVID-19 ‘Cell Culture’ Theory Gains Steam | ZeroHedge

China Lodges Formal Protest With US Over Possible Taiwan Diplomatic Office Name Change | ZeroHedge

Calls For Investigation Grow As “Close Ties” Emerge Between Huawei, Cambridge Research Center | ZeroHedge

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/09/10/revealed-scientists-dismissed-wuhan-lab-theory-linked-

Not all bad .At the start of January 2020, before the pandemic had been declared, Chinese scientists from Fudan University in Shanghai posted the fully sequenced genetic code.

FOIA Release: Fauci Funded Construction Of ‘Chimeric Coronaviruses’ In Wuhan | ZeroHedge 

China’s ‘Volcker moment’ is a mounting risk to the global recovery the “Li Guangman Ice Point Commentary”. His diatribe was reprinted across the state-run media with the clear blessing of the regime.

“Everyone can feel that a profound change is taking place,” he stated, proclaiming an end to China’s love affair with Western culture and “return to the essence of socialism”. It was framed as a fight to the death with the West, the unvarnished Xi doctrine.

China Foreign Minister Slams Blinken For “Double Standards” And Fighting Terrorism “In A Selective Way” | ZeroHedge 

Twitter Permanently Bans Alex Berenson After Viral COVID Tweets | ZeroHedge

Dismantling the environmental theory for Covid’s origins | The Spectator

Winnipeg? Early COVID Patient Samples From Wuhan Had Genetically Modified Virus Similar To Canadian Lab’s: Report | ZeroHedge

https://www.theepochtimes.com/samples-from-early-wuhan-covid-patients-had-genetically-modified-henipa-one-of-two-types-of-viruses-sent-from-canadian-lab_3963836.html

Why the left doesn’t like the lab leak theory – by Noah Carl – Noah’s Newsletter

WSJ Op-Ed: Covid-19 Most Likely ‘Worked On’ In Lab, Then Escaped | ZeroHedge

India’s Ivermectin Blackout | ZeroHedge

Covid may have begun with Chinese scientist collecting bat samples, says WHO investigator

Peter Daszak, 2015;

“We Need to increase public understanding of the need for medical countermeasures, such as a coronavirus vaccine.
A key driver is the media and the economics will follow the hype. We need to use that hype to our advantage to get to the real issues, investors will respond if they see profit at the end of the process.”

The Republican probe into the Wuhan lab proves conspiracy theories aren’t always wrong

gligena

3 Aug 2021 10:57PM

Adding a Furin cleavage insert to the genomic sequence of the S-Protein to make it infectious to humans via aerosolised delivery more than fits the gain-of-function definition. Much more than is needed. But even taking the original virus specimen out of a cave and transporting it 1000 miles to a lab in a city of 12 million fits the definition as far as I am concerned.

Imagine there was a “Wigan Virus Research Facility” that was known to be researching how to make a certain virus transmissible between humans and that a virus of that exact type appeared out of nowhere in Wigan Market and spread out to engulf the world. And imagine that virologists asserted that the virus had nothing to do with them but said that the virus had come from a colony of bats somewhere in Kent and had somehow been transported to Wigan without first appearing anywhere else.

A much more interesting article, based on the release of the House Republicans’ report, is available in National Review.  Of particular interest is the information that the Chinese were planning a $600 million renovation of the air conditioning and ventilation system of the Wuhan virology labs just prior to the start of the pandemic, and also that this information subsequently vanished from the internet.  $600 million, for a HVAC system, is a mind-boggling sum.  That would be a helluva HVAC system, more suited to the BSL-3 or BSL-4 labs of a biological weapons facility than an ordinary virology institute.

I wouldn’t mind betting that the labs where they were developing SARS-Cov-2 as a human-to-human transmissible agent were under negative pressure but that they were venting to the outside air without HEPA filtration or any other form of treatment.

The Republicans also found out that the Chinese had tried to order a very large number of containment suits suitable for work in BSL-3/4 labs from the French and that the French refused the order because they were suspicious about the intended use of such equipment.

Covid-19 is the Chinese Chernobyl.

Covid did leak from Wuhan lab, say Republicans who want to question British virus hunter

Language ‘Obey the rules’ Beijing tells UK as Royal Navy enters disputed South China Sea

China Warns Biden Over New Taiwan Arms Sale To “Inalienable Chinese Territory” | ZeroHedge

China now Western investors are ‘road kill’ in China’s war against its own tech giants

French Intelligence Warned Obama State Department About Wuhan Lab In 2015: Former US Official | ZeroHedge

Rand Paul Asks DoJ To Investigate Fauci For Lying To Congress | ZeroHedge

IAN BIRRELL: British head of Wellcome Trust accused of stifling debate on Wuhan lab leak theory | Daily Mail Online

Censorship https://michaelshellenberger.substack.com/p/why-bidens-climate-agenda-is-falling

Censorship Policymakers: 400 PPM CO2 Killing The Climate, But 14,000 PPM Okay For Kids! Doctors Warn Against Masks

“Sadly, It Starts With Two Lies”: Peter Daszak’s Latest Wuhan Screed Shredded | ZeroHedge

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-china-bought-cambridge

Facebook removes any content relating to Vitamin C and COVID19. Covid19 – the final nail in coffin of medical research | Dr. Malcolm Kendrick

Ambrose is a bit erratic theses days as he approaches retirement but

“China’s modernisation tsar Cheng Siwei confessed to me at a dinner, after some wine, that GDP growth was minus 8pc when adjusted for water depletion, soil erosion, air pollution, and so on” rings true. Xi Jinping’s totalitarian regime cannot coexist with the democratic world

Ps. Totally unconnected to the above but very relevant to covid generally. This paper has just been posted by a serious researcher. Very early genomic sequences of covid were *deleted from the NIH archive*. The author partially recovered them from google cloud. Concludes: ‘likely the sequences were deleted to obscure their existence’. This makes me update further towards the view: China’s government is covering up the origins of covid because the lab leak hypothesis is true: ie. the ‘gain of function’ work I warned about a few times including here in 2019. I don’t mean ‘this is what happened’, I mean: this is another bit of evidence that nudges my belief in this direction. Dominiccummings.substack.com – after the rant about Heywood.

Authors of Lancet Letter Welcome Investigation Into COVID-19 Origins, but Don’t Apologise for Calling Lab Leak a “Conspiracy Theory” – Lockdown Sceptics

Inside the risky bat-virus engineering that links America to Wuhan | MIT Technology Review

Stinky Trust me – I’m from Big Pharma | The Conservative Woman

The Lancet Scandal of the suppressed case for ivermectin | The Conservative Woman

Third try*

Net Zero policy rests on the assumption that man-made carbon dioxide is driving dangerous runaway global warming (now disingenuously referred to as climate change) and this assumption in turn rests on the work of the United Nations IPCC reports.

The UN reports are coming under increasing criticism for being biased, politicized and unreliable, and I will offer a few comments to that effect at the end of this essay, but I want to show you that carbon dioxide is not responsible for climate change and is not bad, in fact it is good.

Which makes Net Zero policy wrongheaded, ruinously expensive and quite simply unnecessary.

Four arguments and some replies:

There’s the physics,

There’s logic,

Recent history,

And Geology.

……

Recent history

Temperature went up moderately 1880-1940, then went flat or declining for 40 years, during intense industrial activity. Then it went up again 1980 to 1998. Then it went flat 1998 to 2015, which alarmists never could explain, bobbled around a bit and is now not even 0.2 degrees centigrade higher than the forty year average. Very scary.

h/t Tom Nelson. The peak was dust bowl times. We haven’t beaten those record temps.

This is from Dr Roy Spencer’s site. He and Dr John Christy track temperature with balloons for the University of Alabama, Huntsville.

The scale on the left – less than one degree centigrade. And the bottom axis starts from 1979, which if you look back up to the first graph was the end of a cold phase. Sea ice was at a recent maximum in 1979. NOAA likes to claim its satellite readings started then, but the Apollo programme was in the sixties.

Tony Heller’s site

CO2 goes bottom left to top right with not even a dip for lockdowns. Does that look like correlation to you?

No correlation, 

No causation.

If we stop looking at anomalies from a mean to cherry-pick trends, recent temperature change is all but invisible.

The 1880s were towards the end of a long cold stretch, which included crop failures and famines early in the century, Washington riding through a very cold Valley Forge, and the Thames and Holland freezing over in the seventeenth century. Before that we had warmer temperatures than today in Medieval times, a nasty cold nasty snap that forced the Vikings out of Greenland, a Roman warm period when Egypt was the bread basket of Empire, cold again, a Minoan warm period and so on. Big fluctuations in temperature, not a lot of man made CO2.

Temperature inferred from Greenland ice cores

Aha! Say (shout) the climate catastrophists, maybe there is natural variation, but CO2 is a greenhouse gas so more of it can only make things worse.

Well no.

EPICA Dome, via Nature

….

 

There’s the Physics

Nobody is claiming that CO2 is not a “greenhouse gas”. It is just not a very important one. From low concentrations you get quite a bit of warming, but doubling from current levels would produce less than one degree centigrade, and the effect is “S” shaped and tapers off the higher you go. Search for Professor Will Happer and you will get the clever stuff. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/04/interview-series-of-will-happer/ Steve Koonin likens the effect to brushing a first coat of black paint over a window: some light gets through in streaks, but a second or third coat makes less and less difference. Dr Richard Lindzen is pretty funny, too: https://clintel.org/the-imaginary-climate-crisis-how-can-we-change-the-message-a-talk-by-richard-lindzen/

Now it is true that Koonin implies we are still doomed because CO2 stays around doing its thing sort of forever, but I don’t buy that. Plants and shellfish are so desperately hungry for CO2. They suck it up as fast as they can – which is why the world has added as much green area as two USAs in the last three decades or so. Carbon in CO2 becomes carbohydrate = food. Or shelter for shellfish, also food. Carbon is good.

….

And Logic

If we have learned one thing from the covid affair it is that people, and people in government are mostly rubbish at maths and statistics, but are still quite good at argument. Here’s the last million or so years. Temperature goes up and down, and CO2 zigs and zags in apparent lock step – if you use Al Gore’s thick lines. With better definition you see that CO2 sometimes leads but more often than not follows changes in temperature. That’s what you would expect: gasses come out of solution when times get warmer, and the reverse is true. But following cannot be cause. Huh. Logic, eh?

Another thing: the range for CO2 concentration is about 180 ppm to 280 ppm. Now we are off the chart at the right, but temperature is not. No correlation, no cause for alarm. Oh, but maybe it is a lag? The heat is buried in the oceans? Really?

Sorry this is a bit cluttered. Look at the top two lines.

There is a strong natural cycle, but it isn’t driven by CO2. Look at the graceful, elegant turning points. If CO2 drove climate , each time it warmed there would a feedback doom loop with more melting of the polar ice leading to more outgassing leading to – well it just doesn’t happen. No ocean burial.

Here’s a nice oscillation with sea level and human evolution as a bonus.

Logic, eh?

Critics of anyone questioning the climate crisis dogma often say ”you are not a scientist so are not qualified to speak”. But we are all able to think, and use logic. The following link is to a piece written by a French geologist who applies logic, or as he puts it epistemology, which I had to look up. It sort of means how you can know which beliefs to rely on and which are merely opinion.

Click to access 2021-05-26_hgss-2021-1_latest-version-of-the-manuscript.pdf

….

Geology

Further back, the recent pattern collapses entirely. 

It’s all over the place

Having read Geology at university in my first year I was initially rather taken with the idea that burning all that Carboniferous era coal and gas would return the atmosphere to hot pre-carboniferous temperatures. Only recently did I learn that a major reason that the coal measures were so energy-full was that wood eating fungi hadn’t evolved yet. Releasing that carbon now just makes for record crops and shrinking deserts. Good carbon! And we only use a fraction of what is there, which in turn pales into insignificance against the amount that is bound up in chalk and limestone. No, there is no signal suggesting CO2 drove climate in geological time.

Does it annoy you that I put carbon in bold? It annoys me too, as it has become a commonplace to write carbon (= dirty, bad) when what is really meant is carbon dioxide, which is plant food. The power of truespeak.

Half a thought on the UN IPCC. The UN felt afraid of going the way of the League of Nations once the cold war had apparently been won with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Soviet Russia. Running the UN is very expensive in terms of salaries, pensions, conferences, studies – how about a carbon tax? In fact, how about collecting carbon reparations from wicked rich countries who benefited from bad capitalist industrial revolutions and redistributing it to new client countries, after suitable deductions for operating costs, ten course lunches not including the nuts, and suitable sweeteners. Tax the world to save the world. Bingo!

The UN are dumb enough to have repeated the hockey stick graph, so here are Hockey stick demolition experts Ross Mckitrick https://www.rossmckitrick.com and Steve McIntyre https://climateaudit.org/

Notrickszone https://notrickszone.com/2021/08/16/the-ipccs-latest-pages-2k-2019-temperature-hockey-stick-is-contradicted-by-pages-2k-2015/

Paul Homewood/ the Spectator https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/08/16/the-un-ipcc-buries-two-millennia-of-fluctuating-temperatures/

Roger Pielke via Wattsup https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/08/09/pielke-jr-on-ar6/

Plenty more like that. Bad ideas can have a life of their own. Decarbonisation is the worst since the old church coined original sin and started charging for indulgences.

….

Some replies

I asked some of the great and the good whether they thought CO2 was driving climate change, and if so, why? The total consensus among those who agreed to share replies is pretty striking:

Talk Radio host: “ it cannot be doubted that there is a man made element to this.”

Professor of Astrophysics: “ the UN IPCC says so.”

MP: “climate change is the greatest danger facing the world right now, but is a great opportunity for Government to create jobs.”

Senior pension fund manager: “even if it is a load of old Boris it is a fantastic opportunity for Keynsian pump-priming.”

Senior economist: “I am an economist so I don’t comment on science.”

Senior commentator for a highbrow weekly: “I don’t know much about science.”

Business journalist: “don’t bother me with this notrickszone.com rubbish.”

I paraphrased a little.

*Third try: first effort https://quentinmichael.wordpress.com/2020/10/18/carbon-category-error/ was unfocussed, obscure, confused, boring, and those were the kindest comments. One friend said if I insisted on writing about marine isotope stages I should include some pictures and graphs, which led to https://quentinmichael.wordpress.com/2020/11/12/colour-version/. That reply about Keynesian pump priming led me off into the horrors of socialist economics, Wilson/Callaghan, Bastiat, and the clinching argument which is that we have had several real world experiments and the Ossies got Trabants while the Wessies got BMWs.

Where did the wind go?

Some time before Christmas 2020 I read an article written by a Minister of State boasting that wind and solar power had generated more than half of our electricity on a particular day.

This made me curious, and I started watching the various contributions to our basic electricity mix on a site called gridwatch.co.uk. I counted over thirty days when wind and solar contributed barely ten percent – list at the end of this post.

Of course, solar can’t be expected to do much after dark, but the theory was that the wind generally blew stronger at night, and would always be blowing somewhere to make up the difference.

It turns out that is often not the case, and what are we going to do then? High pressure weather systems are quite frequent here, and they bring calm airs which mean wind is often below five per cent of the mix. In winter they often bring fogs, and slow-moving grey overcast, which cuts back solar at the same time.

This is what we have in the middle of April:

• 

Where’s the wind?

And as a check, here is another reading, from enegynumbers.info

• 

• 

High Pressure

So I am questioning our energy security. And I am wondering why our Government wants to close down 90% of our energy supply, to replace it, at great cost with sources which cannot be relied on.

Why?*

Meanwhile, here’s the diary:

1 Sunday 29/11/20 2% each at 10.30

6% wind, no solar at 19.30. Demand still 38.9 Gw

2 Monday 7/12 8.25 am 41.8Gw 5% wind, 0% solar

3 Saturday 12/12 7pm 40Gw demand. Wind 7%, solar zero

4 Tuesday 22/12/20 15.37 demand 40Gw, wind 4%, Solar 0%

5 Wednesday 30/12, 17.25. Demand 43.4 Gw, wind 6%, solar nought.

6 New Year’s Eve. 7pm demand 40 Gw. Wind 11% No solar, of course.

7 Wednesday 6th Jan 21. 15.18. Demand 43Gw, wind 8%, solar 2%, dark soon. Yup. 18.20, demand up to 46Gw. Wind 9%. Reliables 91%.

8 7/1/21, 12.25 demand 45Gw. Wind 7%, but hey, solar 5%. For a few hours, anyway. Tea time now, 16.40. Demand 45.6. No solar, wind 7%. Reliables 93%. 

9 And this morning, 8th Jan, 9.32. Demand 42.2Gw, wind 9%, solar nil. Minus two. Cold kills. Winter mortality four times summer. 43.7, 6%, 2% at 14.35

10 9 jan six pm. Wind 13%. Dark. Reliables 87%

11 Midday 12 Jan. looks like a blustery day. Wind only 10%. Too blustery?

12 Strange. 6.40pm Wednesday 13 Jan, demand as usual 43.6 something Gw. Wind only 9%, and of course no solar. Pretty normal day on windfinder.com

13 15th Jan and less than ever. 10.19am, 4% wind, 1% sun, 42.6Gw total

14 And again , Sunday 21 Jan 2021. 35.8 GW demand. 5% wind, 1% Sun. And at tea time 17.09, 44.26 Gw demand, 8% wind, dark.

15 Good morning, Tuesday 26/1. Chilly again. 40Gw demand. 6% wind, no solar at 8.15

16 Wed 27, 39 Gw, 10% wind and no sun. By 10.25, 40 Gw, 7% wind, 1% solar.

Oh. I thought, you know, weather? It’ll blow through. 16.55, demand up as you would expect as people come home from work, 43.4 Gw. Wind 5% and it is dark. And cold.

17 1st February, tea time: 16.50. 43.2Gw of demand. Wind 6%, solar nil.

18 Spring! Lovely sunny morning, Friday 26th Feb. 8% solar at 9.30 out of 36.6 Gw, but that sun is partly due to high pressure, so low wind – 8% from the windmills too. Need something else for 84% of our electricity. As the day went on wind managed ten and sun fifteen, or vice versa, so yea, but at 7pm demand is nearly 40 Gw and wind is managing 10% and it has been dark for a while, so we need 90% from somewhere.

19 Saturday 27/2. A lesson . High pressure, clear skies, solar having a good run, currently 14% of 33.38 Gw demand. But high pressure also means low winds. Wind only managing 4%. So when the sun goes down…16.45, time to put the kettle on. Solar still 6% but wind only 2%. Ten past six. That’s it. 2% wind, zero,solar. 98% from reliables.

Wind Power Failed Again Last Week

20 And the thing about high pressure systems is that they often hang around. 13.25 Sunday 28/2. Low weekend demand of 34.25Gw and Go Solar! 6.3 Gw is 18%. But wind is only 3%. Demand up to 38.5 Gw as we make tea at 17.45 and wind doing 4% at but the sun has set, so we have to get 3%  – from coal!

21 Oh, and the other thing you often get with high pressure systems is fog. So at 9 am Monday 1st March, getting going, 38.34Gw demand, wind is 3% and the fog hasn’t burned off so solar is contributing 2%. 16.15, 40GW, solar nearly ten per cent earlier but six now. Wind four.

22 2/3/21 Tuesday started like Monday. 38.5Gw demanded at 8.40 am, wind managed 3% and solar 1%. At 11.25, 40.25Gw, wind 2%, solar 6%. At five pm, 41.5Gw (economy recovers?) wind is 1%, solar 4% and it will be dark in an hour.

Yes. Well. Demand is still 38.4 Gw at 20.45. Dark and cold. Wind is contributing 0.447 Gw. 1%. We need other sources for of our power.

23 Same again 8.35 Wednesday morning 3/3/21. We are using 38.38 Gw, wind is 1% and nothing yet from solar.  And at six thirty, forty two something, two per cent wind. Dark. Chilly.

24 4/3, noon 41.3 gig, looks breezy enough but wind is nine, solar three.

25 5/3/21.  14.40, 40.2Gw, wind 5%, solar 6% and coal 7% (nothing wrong with clean coal). 4,5 and 8 at four pm

26 Early breakfast Saturday 6th March. Country using just under 30 Gw at 7.15 am. 3% is coming from wind, nothing from solar. Managed more than ten percent at midday but of 38.3Gw at tea time, five pm, wind 4 and solar five, dark soon. Thirty nine gees at seven thirty five. And just for percent from wind. Thanks and goodnight. 

27 Sunday much the same. 39 needed at 17.50. 3% from wind . Getting dark.

28 Monday 29th March

Demand seems a bit low at 31.2 Gw but it’s a beautiful spring day, solar is doing 19% or 6 Gw and wind is 37% at 11.6 Gw.The gridwatch.co.uk site adds in biomass, 7% which I wouldn’t, and hydro 2%, fair enough, to get renewables at 65%. At 3 pm.

29 32.74, three pm the thirtieth. Solar 5.5Gw, 17%. Well great. Wind 3.9Gw or 12%. You know what comes next. Thirty gigs at nine pm. Nought for solar, of course. Nine per cent from a light south wind. 91% needed from other than wind and solar.

30 Ten pm 3/4. A good 30Gw of demand. Wind 3 Gw. 10%. Where’s the ninety to come from, net zeros?

Interesting that the country still needs 20Gw at half four in the morning on a Sunday.

Lunchtime Easter Sunday 60% from wind and solar. Hurrah!

31 16.15 Friday 19th March. 36.37 needed, 5% each from wind and sun. Daylight will last another hour.

Yes, we still need 36.8 Gw at 20.30 and wind can just manage 4%. Been dark for hours.

32 Friday 9/4, seven fifteen pm 35 Gw. Still a gleam of sun, 2%, but wind dying down, 8%.

33 7 and 8 this Sunday morning, 33, ten am. 33.9 at five fifteen. 12 and 6 

34 12/4 Monday, back to work. Need 37+Gw at 9.15. Wind offers 4%, solar 2%. Weather map says “developing gale” so perhaps on this occasion it is too much wind. Plenty of cloud, it snowed in the night and froze here in Colchester.

Wind still 4% , of 39.25 Gw at 10.30.

Here’s the letter that goes with the post

Dear Secretary of State,

You can’t fix a problem caused by too much power generation coming from unreliable wind and solar by adding more wind and solar. The physics of energy density are against you.

They need back up, so you are making us the consumer pay twice. They are subsidised so you are making us pay again. Storage is a wish, a hope, but if ever commercialised would be another cost, and anyway you cannot base policy on hope.

Energy is a cost for everything we make or do, and you are handicapping us. You are both hurting the poor and old, who have to use a greater than average share of their disposable income on energy, and you are hurting industry, which pays for pretty much everything.

Please don’t say green investment is a form of Keynsian stimulus. The money government spends is taken from tax payers who cannot then use it on something they freely chose, and it is subject to wastage in collection and distribution. You must have read Bastiat.

Lastly, don’t say green policy is a vote winner. If Government has one job it is to keep its people safe. Your policy is doing harm.

If Britain wants to show true global leadership at COP26 the message should be that we will conduct a fair “red team” debate on the so-called climate crisis. It would save everyone a fortune, which after corona we could really do with.

*Why. Ok, I haven’t written this yet, but it is likely to be some combination of follow-the-money, peer group pressure and the simple need to believe in something.

Colour version. Carbon error 2.0

Here’s the last half million years:

It strikes me that the peaks and troughs in temperature turn repeatedly at similar levels.

Here’s a bit more than a million years, with sea levels and human evolution as a bonus:

Regular and sort of graceful. Climate has changed frequently in the past. And it is true that concentration of co2 in the atmosphere zigs and zags in a similar pattern to temperature:

Climate catastrophe theory sees the range topping around 300 parts per million or ppm, notes that since the industrial revolution co2 concentration has risen above 400ppm and concludes that temperatures must follow off the scale, and we must decarbonise to stop that happening.

Well no. The overlap looks good, but close reading finds temperature often rising first and co2 following with a lag:

This was from Javier (Footnote 1 ). I had a better graph lining up the leads and lags but failed to save it. And now it seems to have been purged. Looked a bit like the orange lines in the next picture. Oh, and see co2 popping out of the top of the chart top right. But not temperature. There is powerful natural variation going on, but change in concentration of co2 is a result, not a cause.

Why am I bothering about this? Because blaming co2 for “dangerous, runaway” climate change is leading to a catastrophically expensive policy mistake as good intentions collide, or do I mean collude with disparate money seeking lobby groups, from industry to academia. Expensive to the tune of £46,000 per UK household. (GWPF, 2).

Mudelsee reckons the lag at around a thousand years:

Click to access The_phase_relations_among_atmospheric_CO2_content_temperature_and_global_ice_volume_over_the_past_420_ka.pdf

Sometimes co2 leads, mostly it lags. If its change in concentration follows change in temperature it cannot be the cause of that change.

End of scare.

Or should be if logic had anything to do with it.

So here’s more.

At 400 something parts per million by volume co2 is pretty diffuse, but it does do something. Feeds plants, and us, for a start. And is true that co2 is a “greenhouse gas” which is shorthand for “warms the planet”. It does, just not by very much, and its small effect follows an “s” shaped curve: quite noticeable as you go from low concentration to higher, but at current levels it is pretty much done. Any further rises in concentration fall into an increasingly diminishing effect. Is that even a thing?

Professor Will Happer on the physics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oog7-KOtpEA

And if you think denial is shallow, here’s the deep formulae.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03098.pdf

I think I follow, but to be honest that’s way above my number comfort level. Perhaps another argument from common sense would help. Sea Ice and the death spiral.

Actually that was Greenland. You might have thought after forty years of dangerous and accelerating global warming there wouldn’t be much ice left on Greenland, but last time I looked the surface mass balance was not far off normal for 1981-2010.

OK. The death spiral. One of the most insidious, unshakable bad ideas of the crisis lobby is that rising temperatures will cause polar ice to melt, entering into an unstoppable feedback loop as less sunlight-reflecting ice area allows more sea to warm, melting more ice and so on until we all drown. Didn’t happen in Viking times, when Greenland was green. Didn’t happen in those lovely million year oscillations. Temperatures have often risen faster than they do now. Check out Dansgaard Oescher events and The Younger Dryas. No death spiral.

Arctic sea ice has been a bit low this summer, but Antarctic is at the top of the graph, and above the 1981 – 2010 average. That’s after forty years. If there was anything in this warming malarkey each year, or to be fair each five year average, say, would be lower than the preceding one. Not happening.

Then to finish up with something even NASA agrees with, back to the greening.

“From a quarter to half of Earth’s vegetated lands has shown significant greening over the last 35 years largely due to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change on April 25 2016

An international team of 32 authors from 24 institutions in eight countries led the effort, which involved using satellite data from NASA’s Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer instruments to help determine the leaf area index, or amount of leaf cover, over the planet’s vegetated regions. The greening represents an increase in leaves on plants and trees equivalent in area to two times the continental United States.“

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth

Sorry, one more thing. How can I say co2 has only a small role in climate? UN IPCC says as much in its Fifth Assessment Report. This is where they start. “Forcings” are factors which push temperature one way or another.

The orange bar says they think co2 adds about 2 and a bit watts per square metre to the world’s energy budget. Is that a lot? No. About 340 watts per square metre come in from the sun. Then this energy bounces around quite a bit. The following picture is adapted from Kiehl and Trenberth 1997.

The aps.org is the American Physical Society. Revealing debate here.

Click to access climate-seminar-transcript.pdf

https://www.aps.org/policy/statements/upload/climate-seminar-transcript.pdf

Looks like a daunting read but it is narrow column, double spaced.

Go back and look at the error bars. The uncertainty is bigger than the effect they claim is all important. Co2 has been framed.

Reverse the spin.

Greenhouse Good!
Carbon is food!
Climate change is natural – people adapt!
Decarbonisation is dumb!

Right. OK. So if co2 doesn’t drive climate, that raises some questions.

Why do clever people think it does? Money and pride, fear of being thought to be in the wrong, that usually covers it. If decarbonisation is going to cost £30 bn, $3trillion (we don’t know but it will be a lot), then several people and companies are going to harvest that money. For academia it is where the grants are (why?). For individuals – your family, friends and neighbours would shun you if you said you didn’t want to save the planet for grandchildren etc. Or spend just £3.75 on “Global Warming: A case study in Groupthink: How science can shed a new light on the most important ‘non-debate’ of our time:” Volume 28 (GWPF Reports) Paperback – 26 Mar. 2018. It’s on amazon. A slim 100 page pamphlet.

And what does drive climate change? I might write that up too, but here’s a teaser. It seems to be about obliquity, albedo and dust.

Footnote 1. https://www.thegwpf.org/cost-of-net-zero-will-be-ruinous-new-reports-warn/

Footnote 2. https://judithcurry.com/?s=Javier

A ladder down

This might not age well.

Getting a donkey up a minaret is one thing, but its the getting it back down that’s the problem, to paraphrase Pratchett.

It could look like the Government overdid it with the Stay at home message, and the polls appear to say the public is right behind strict or stricter measures but I am with James Frayne who says this is not a time to listen to the polls, answers may not be without their own agenda.

I wrote to my poor long suffering MP:

Declare victory and leave. A Senator’s advice to end the Vietnam war applies to this health care crisis. 

It is easy to criticise –  my daughter’s museum job has been cut and her assistants sacked so my view of government policy has shifted from dismay to disgust – but you need constructive suggestions.

Positive test results were bound to rise once lockdown was lifted and students went back. More testing was bound to find more positives.

Stop the growth in testing. Keep it high for those in contact with the vulnerable, help the vulnerable boost resistance with vitamin D, take an honest look at daily prophylactic chloroquinine – safely used for over twenty years by arthritis sufferers.

Widen the Porton Down random antibody test to the more expensive and difficult T-cell immunity scan.

SAGE thinks only 7% of the population have antibodies so 93% are still at risk of catching Sars2. But early, small surveys of T-cells suggest 30% have immunity. 10% of the population are under ten years of age: won’t get it badly, and not badly enough to pass it on; testing in the first half of the year concentrated on the very sick and hospitals so missed an enormous number of mild and asymptomatic infections, estimated at 32% (had it, recovered, might get it again but not so bad) so only 28% at risk.

The population is not homogeneous. Some people meet a lot of others, some very few. National averages mislead. The at risk group might be half that 28%.

As of last week, 70,000 students in the United States had tested positive with just three hospitalisations (one released) and no deaths.

Hospital capacity is fine. “Looking at all respiratory episodes at Manchester University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust we see that until week 15 the 2020 admissions matched closely with the four year average for the corresponding week: average monthly activity was 96 per cent of the four year average. 

However, this began to diverge significantly after week 16, when the monthly activity became only 57 per cent of the four year average. Looking at emergency episodes alone shows a similar pattern: from week 17 they were at 60 per cent of the four year average.” 

“Cases peaked on the 30 September with 596 cases and a seven-day average of 461. As of 9 October, the 7-day average has fallen from the peak by nearly 20 per cent to an average of 374.”

Covid cases in Manchester are not out of control. Let’s leave Andy Burnham alone

Recommend the Prime Minister take off his mask – we know he has had it, won’t get it again badly, won’t pass it on. He looks like a fool and is treating us like fools too.

Have him say he has reviewed the science and thinks we have got close to community immunity, positive tests are still to be expected but fewer will lead to hospital and we are much better at treating those that do. 

Reverse the spin. Despite the 80 seat majority, 56% of the vote went to other parties, and 75% of teachers and university lecturers voted for other parties. They want you to fail, and those on safe public sector salaries don’t care either.

Pull the rug from under their feet. Declare victory and leave. The numbers are coming your way already. 

p.s.

End social distancing. That more than anything kills travel, hospitality, entertainment. 2 metres was made up because SAGE thought we couldn’t be trusted, or weren’t able to understand a 1 metre recommendation. End fines. Let masks be voluntary, but give care workers the top quality N93 kind.

Compulsion is un-conservative.