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

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.