Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

Climate change, models, recent long-term temperature data and energy policy: is Covid-19 affecting our leading minds?

By Charles Essery - posted Friday, 6 November 2020


Before climate change activism, people would argue passionately about the cricket, footy and whether Fords were better than Holdens. Having an opinion about climate change, let alone declaring it, is now the centre of personal, political and international disputes. After 40 plus years' as an earth scientist, I will retain the right and indeed enjoy questioning any theory put forward by other scientists, its is the scientific method and why so many of us remain scientists (it's certainly not for the money or respect!).

Climatology was until the late 1980s the domain of earth scientists, meteorologists and academics studying both current and historic climate using signals locked onto the records of sediments, ice cores and tree rings. In the late 1980s, things changed with the explosive growth of computing power and the development of global circulation models (GCMs) that allowed simulations of the global climate using crude 500km square grids. Two other elements blossomed at this time. Firstly, the software that enabled dramatic global images/videos 'demonstrating' the outputs of these GCMs in simple videos that could be used to engage stakeholders with easy to understand story-telling graphics. Secondly, political activists' gained the ability to promote their environmental holocaust views in the blossoming globalisation movement and its associated international government quangos. The IPCC is the ultimate pinnacle of this well-funded movement.

Having been intimately involved in this area at the time, I was sceptical as to the voracity of this new movement, choosing seek solutions to practical, achievable and realistic issues, such as water supply and pollution issues. These were real issues in need of urgent attention in the real world. Most of my colleagues continued in academia and have reaped the benefits of a 100-fold increase in the funding available to their new careers as "climate warming/change/adaptation" experts.

Advertisement

For three decades the GCM models have increasingly influenced global politics, while real datasets have been "homogenized" to match their unstable models forecasts. Climate models are now treated more like "Moses's tablets of stone", rather than the still simplistic, fallible modelling tools that have difficulty predicting past climate, let alone predicating future climate. Indeed, the last 20 years has demonstrated a continued need to reassess, adjust, homogenize (filter) data and add additional computing complexity to these inaccessible GCMs. Political activists and GCM proponents declare "97% consensus", smear opponents with "sceptical/denialist" labels and blatantly fiddle with the data to make the data match the GCM predications (see climate gate, Hockey Stick CSIRO Rutherglen-gate).

In the background, many thousands of scientists/academics/ researchers around the world carried on investigating, measuring and analysing paleo-records of temperature contained in the proxies of tree rings, ice cores, peat bogs and sediment records around the globe. This tedious/hard work is offering few rewards other than satisfaction One recent study reported via Nature's Science Reports (Margerelli et al 2020) caught my attention. Interestingly the tenet of their paper is to demonstrate that the Roman Empire may have been broken by natural climate change. The paper, while being scientific, is quite readable and worth a full read over a coffee or glass of wine. They use Mediterranean Sea sediment cores to detect temperature of the Sea and hence infer the trends in climate over the last 5000 years.

I have extracted the key element from their Figure 2 and added some clarificatory comments to assist.

 

The 5000 year temperature record align with the rise'n'fall of the Roman Empire, although I am sure the historians may say the corruption, disease, political/religious unrest and economic over-reliance on foreign conquests may have also had a significant impact. More interesting is the actual temperature record and the perspective it gives to the current debate of post-industrial temperature rises and the whole C02 argument promoted by GCM modellers and climate change activists.

Their temperature data shows several trends in temperature:

Advertisement
  • Today's temperatures are much lower than the Roman Empire peak
  • The maunder maximum warm period did occur (this data has been massaged to remove as per Mann et al in the infamous Hockey stick debacle).
  • The current warm period is a result of us coming out of the Little Ice Age.
  • Most significantly, Roman Empire growth occurred during a period when the climate was 2-3 degrees warmer than today.

The last point is probably the most significant and raises many questions. A warmer climate was certainly good for the Roman Empire. More significantly, it was warmer by 2-3 degrees and remained so for centuries. Further examination also shows that many other advances in civilisation occurred during periods of warming (Bronze Ages, Ancient Greece, European Renaissance). Climate change activists/politicians/GCM modellers have aggressively told us that 2'C warming would put us beyond the "climate tipping point" and lead to global catastrophe, our generation's "greatest existential threat".

In simple terms, if a warming climate aided the rise of the Roman Empire, why should it harm our far more advanced and 'intelligent' world today?

Like the Roman Empire, our current 19-21 Century Globalised Western Civilisation will most likely eventually decline. So, will climate change (a 2'C rise existential threat) be the cause of our decline? I would suggest maybe any decline may be the result of global terrorism, religious fundamentalism, China's desire for world domination, deforestation (much of which is intended to produce clean green fuel), pollution, land degradation, over-fishing, epidemiology-driven pandemics, population growth, destruction of western economies through investment in renewables or even just plain old human greed.

$Trillions in expenditure will be needed (Global Climate Adaptation Commission 2019, co-chaired by Ban-ki-Moon and Bill Gates)to meet the 2030 demands of climate change political activists. While I support the value of maximizing the use of solar, wind, tidal, hydro and geothermal energy, in must not be driven by ridiculous subsidies which appear to be a global approach to transfer money to the rich at the expense of the poor. International companies and well-off citizens benefit from such subsidies, while the working class majority pay for them with compulsory renewal energy target levees and inflated electricity prices. Not many poor people can afford even the subsidized costs of solar energy. Recently I came across two interesting articles which highlighted the thinking of a Professor of Anthropology and a National leader.

The first came from a professor of anthropology in an article in the Boston Review (McDermott-Hughes 2020). Ostensibly he believes that we in the west should adopt the electricity practices of Puerto Rico and Zimbabwe. In those countries, the populations have had to ration their usage because of unreliable and insufficient power supply. He mistakenly refers to this as similar to "load-shedding" used in the West. It's a wide ranging article, so to save time, go to the section in paragraphs 14-19 to inform yourself of his 'argument.' where he states "Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico thus provide models for what we might call pause-full electricity". Both countries are in fact incompetent and force their populations to live with inferior electricity supplies and accept black-outs as normal. His argument is that we greedy westerners need to do the same! Would this senior academic in a well-funded university accept no air-conditioning, unhealthy tap water, a dunny-toilet... combined with intermittent electricity supply to run his computer, microwave, barista style coffee maker, electric Tesla car charger and hair-drier?.

Equally dismaying, is the exposure of a second renewable energy program scandal in the Province of Northern Ireland (Invest NI, 2020).The first renewable energy scandal there resulted in the suspension of the Provincial Government and involved GBP500 millon back in 2016/17. This second scandal is the result of a UK PM Boris Johnson initiative. This lucrative scheme will cost taxpayers GBP1.4 billion over the next 20 years (Wind-Watch, 2020). This will fund private sector wind farm investors about GBP350,000 per annum for electricity from each wind turbine that will deliver only GBP 50,000 worth of electricity!

Clearly, common-sense, sound economics and any regard for the consumers of electricity are missing in these two examples. Having severely damaged developed economies, perhaps Covid-19's latest symptom seems to be specifically targeted at the minds of academics and country leaders' capacity, disabling their perspective on reality! Like the claimed climate change "97% consensus", renewables are deemed as our only future energy option.

Are the current forecasts of climate catastrophe driven by questionable simplistic GCMs really worth the costs and energy insecurity to society? They are now blaming human-induced climate change for every natural disaster including flooding, drought, bush-fires, sea rise, ice melt, the extinction of millions of species,,,,, etc. Meanwhile, real scientists continue to deliver us temperature records that show we have seen similar, if not greater, changes in temperature many times before C02 became labelled a global pollution threat! The fact that we appear to be enforcing global energy policies that ignore historic climate trends, preferring simplistic mathematical GCM forecasts seems naïve. Perhaps such behaviour is the real "global existential threat" for future societies.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. 2
  4. All


Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

49 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Charles Essery is an independent water consultant, who has been an Australia resident since 1990.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Charles Essery

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Charles Essery
Article Tools
Comment 49 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy