Andrew L. Urban
The trap that won’t let go…. As climate change and energy minister Chris Bowen takes climate alarm zealotry to 12 out of 10, you might have noticed how even the most hard core anti-alarmist commentators (on Sky and elsewhere) qualify their critiques of the climate alarmist playbook by including a line acknowledging fossil fuel emissions as culprits.
It goes something like this: “Cutting emissions shouldn’t mean we have to destroy our economy…” Or “We shouldn’t close coal fired power stations until we have alternative emission-free base load power generation…” Or “Nuclear energy is clean…”
I need to stop talking loudly at my TV…hence this article.
Accepting the role of fossil fuels as the drivers of climate change is the fatal error in the fight against climate extremism. That’s the trap effectively set up by the IPCC itself.
When the IPCC was set up over 30 years ago its objective was “to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic [i.e., human-induced] interference with the climate system”. The original mandate from the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the IPCC was to address ‘dangerous human-caused climate change’. That set the agenda, which became the ruling orthodoxy, a circular argument that starts with the conclusion it is trying to prove.
By referring to climate change as a man made problem, the IPCC successfully set up a sleight of hand that has stuck in the world’s consciousness. It has trapped the subject in a debate prison from which there seems no escape. But there is.
Climate change is a natural phenomenon and part of earth’s 4.5 billion year story. For example, ice ages came and went before humans burned fossil fuels. Geologists know that atmospheric CO2 builds up after the planet warms, not as its cause.
To deactivate this trap, it is necessary to separate the two elements of the climate change phenomenon. Ever-present natural climate variability on the one hand, and its possible drivers on the other. Debunking climate alarmism requires the clear separation of these two elements that go into the simplistic formulation ‘climate change’.
Extreme weather events, for example, are often referenced as proof of harmful man made climate change.
Because the narrative of sharply rising global temperatures has failed, alarmist scientists have switched their narrative to “extreme weather” and its alleged hazards. This new story flies in the face of the IPCC’s own SREX special report of 2012 on extreme weather, which conceded that warming could well reduce extremes, rather than increase them. Further, it would be 20-30 years before any climate effects on extreme weather would even be detectable against natural climate variability. The 2013 IPCC report broadly endorsed those findings.
Yet even our Prime Minister trots out the false connection as proof of imminent catastrophe.
It is audacious of climate alarmists to deny proof that burning fossil fuels does NOT drive global warming when they offer no proof to support their claim to the contrary. It has never been shown that CO2, which makes up 0.04% of the atmosphere of which just 3% is man-made, drives warming.
Independent climate scientists like Dr Judith Curry, have described climate change as a “wicked problem”, being so complex and involving so many diverse fields of science. Scientists in the field who are not bound to the ruling orthodoxy are uncertain what are the drivers of climate change. It is certainly not as simple as a CO2 control dial. Or is it about something else….?
Exhibit A:
November 14, 2010: Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, is quoted by the Zuricher Zeitung:
“Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.”
Andrew L. Urban is the author of Climate Alarm Reality Check (Wilkinson Publishing).
Your “Geologists know that atmospheric CO2 builds up after the planet warms, not as its cause.” seems at odds with The Geological Society’s Statement on Climate:
“The geological record provides powerful evidence that atmospheric CO2 concentrations drive climate change, and supports multiple lines of evidence that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are altering the Earth’s climate.”
[https://www.geolsoc.org.uk/climaterecord]
Your use of a reference to Edenhofer (as your ‘Exhibit A’) is interesting:
1 Edenhofer’s actual words are not quoted (in translation or in German). What is quoted (by you, Andrew) is the Zuricher Zeitung’s reference to what Edenhofer said/wrote on or before 14Nov2010.
2 I expect that Edenhofer did say/write (in German?) words to that effect, in the way that they appear as ‘reported speech’ in your quote from the Zuricher Zeitung. Here is a link to Edenhofer being interviewed, https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/11/18/ipcc-official-climate-policy-is-redistributing-the-worlds-wealth/ I find the interview not easy to understand/summarise.
Lastly, I return to your “Climate change is a natural phenomenon and part of earth’s 4.5 billion year story.” Underlying this statement is the suggestion that ‘All climate change is a natural phenomenon…’ – which I do not accept. I prefer the following:
“Climate change may be due to natural internal processes or external
forcings, or to persistent anthropogenic changes in the composition of
the atmosphere or in land use“.
[p29 of ‘Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation’ aka ‘SREX special report of 2012’]
Incidentally, it would be good if you could point to the particular page of the SREX Report which (in your words) “conceded that warming could well reduce extremes, rather than increase them.” I’ve had trouble finding such a concession – thanks, -Garry.
Sadly the Geological Society is no longer a reliable source of information on this subject. As I’ve reported before, its own members complained in a letter – see https://pursuedemocracy.com/2021/01/16/most-climate-alarms-are-scaremongering-say-geoscientists/
I’ll just quote a bit of geologist Ian Plimer’s book, Green Murder: “Ice core measurements of the current interglacial show us what we know from chemistry. As the temperature increased, the atmospheric carbon dioxide increased 650 to 1,600 years later.”
But this is missing the central point of my article: global warming / climate change is one thing, but its causes are still largely unknown; it has never been shown that man is responsible.