Climate Science and the War on CO₂

Two separate issues, only loosely related, which are too often conflated.

As I have often remarked in previous articles, a constant tactic of the neo-Marxist globalist brigade is to mangle the language as far as possible, resulting in a modern version of Orwellian Newspeak that no one can understand - and no one is meant to understand.

This is how they got away with the Covid “case” nonsense, “cis” gender etc, and it’s how they’re getting away with the “climate crisis/emergency/breakdown” scam and the associated “Net Zero” grift.

Fortunately for you, dear reader, we are onto them, and I would like to straighten things out a little.

Let us go right back to basics; back to the start. If a sane global society had a newly identified concern that there might be an issue with anthropogenic global warming, what might they do? It would be reasonable to expect that they would establish a professional, organised programme of work to investigate impartially, develop policy decisions depending on the findings, and then manage delivery of that policy, at both national and international level. So what would that programme of work look like?

At the top level, it might comprise four main activities as illustrated at figure 1.

Figure 1: Top Level Breakdown of Climate and Net Zero Considerations

Firstly, and obviously, you would want to ensure a clear common understanding of the “drivers” that actually determine what the Earth’s climate looks like. The main inputs to that process would be our collective knowledge of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry and biology) - i.e. the theory of climate - and supporting empirical evidence, from actual climate history as well as any experimental results. The outputs would be a series of scientific and technical papers summarising humanity’s knowledge of how the Earth’s climate works. We would need to apply some collective humility here, recognising at the outset that a planetary climate is a very complex thing to understand, and that our knowledge is far from complete.

The empirical evidence would have to come from the geological climate record, together with actual weather metrics from the modern age - so your second top level activity would involve the need for a Climate Monitoring function. The inputs to this process would be from the natural world - historical reconstructions of climate using various mechanisms, monitoring of key metrics - such as polar ice, the extent of desert areas, and sea levels - and current weather observation data (wind, temperature, sunshine and precipitation) from across the globe.

So you can now build a picture of past and present climate, and make some testable predictions of how the climate might develop over time. You might, for example, conclude that average global temperatures might rise by a degree or two over a certain number of years. You would then want to ask yourself; “so what - what will such a change influence (you might say some glaciers could melt, for example), and what would be the impact of such results?”

Of course, if you were a truly impartial scientist or politician involved in this process, you would want to take a balanced view of the influences and impacts. You might want to consider, for example, that hugely more people die of cold than heat in today’s world, or that a warming planet with additional CO₂ would contribute to enhanced plant growth and food production. What you would probably not do - if you were a genuinely impartial scientist or politician - would be to emotively, and falsely, label CO₂ a “pollutant”, or claim that every impact of any change in climate whatsoever would be exclusively negative.

So far, so good. We have briefly covered the three yellow shaded processes at figure one which, together, we can say cover “Climate Science”. Note that none of this, so far, has anything to do with subsequent policy decisions, to engage in a poorly defined, poorly conceived, undemocratic War on CO₂ and call it “Net Zero”. This is process 4 at figure 1, shaded green.

But none of this is rocket science and it does not, so far, actually get us anywhere. To determine anything useful, we need to drill down a bit into some of the detail. Let’s start with item 1 - Climate Drivers - and “functionally decompose” this into something more useful for discussion.

Figure 2: Climate Drivers

Because Climate Drivers is process 1 at the top level, the sub-processes at this more detailed level are numbered 1.1, 1.2 and so on. In a real programme of work to understand global climate and any actions humanity should take to influence it, it would be necessary to apply several more levels of functional decomposition, until we could describe (and manage) very specific activities within the programme - for example to fully understand the mooted Bray & Eddy solar cycles (how many have even heard of these, amidst the constant propaganda and censorship?).

Clearly we cannot hope to do that with a short Substack paper, so we have highlighted just a few items for brief discussion.

Note, firstly, the overall complexity of the climate system. Genuine scientists know that our understanding of the Earth’s climate is incomplete, and any hubristic attempt to meddle (e.g. by reflecting the Sun’s rays, or extracting CO2 from the air) could be catastrophic. Certainly, the pseudo-science frauds masquerading as “experts” and pumping out constant climate alarmist nonsense should be not be allowed anywhere near policy decisions. Oops!

So, to some detail. Of all the complexity illustrated at figure 2 , you are told that just one tiny component - the impact of a 0.04% concentration of CO₂ on the Earth’s “radiation balance”, as highlighted in green text, is the principal driver of our climate. You are not told that water vapour is a far more significant “greenhouse gas” than CO₂, or that the mechanisms and contribution of evapotranspiration and cloud formation to the radiation balance equation are poorly understood. You are told to ignore all the complexity of Solar activity, cosmic orbits, and a myriad of other natural factors.

You are not told, for example, that geological records indicate that, throughout history, changes in atmospheric CO₂ concentrations have tended to lag, not lead, changes in temperature. A key reason for this is that warming oceans release CO₂ and cooling oceans absorb it.

A particularly egregious trick of the climate alarmists is to ignore the impact of urban heat islands - so as to deliberately conflate the impact of humanity on local climate with that of CO₂ on the global climate. Modern “record high” temperatures”, such as those recorded in the UK during the Summer of 2022, are almost entirely due to the urban heat island effect (UHIE) - and that’s before we note that most of the temperature readings are taken at airports, fully exposed to the hot tarmac and concrete of taxi-ways and runways, not to mention the hot exhaust gases from the engines of fighter jets and intercontinental airliners!

The disingenuous propagandists of the MSM and the “climate movement” will tell you that temperature readings are adjusted to take account of the UHIE, and to some extent that is true when looking at long term climate trends - though there is much controversy among real scientists as to whether these adjustments are correct, especially with regard to some highly dubious manipulation of past records. However, the real-time news reports of “record high temperatures caused by climate change” conveniently quote raw, unadjusted readings from beside the runways at international airports.

So yes, in the words of the climate alarmist madmen, I am a “climate denier”. I deny (at least I am very far from convinced) that the climate is changing in any significant way as a result of anthropogenic emissions of CO₂ and other “polluting” greenhouse gases. But, in the end, it doesn’t actually matter what I, or you, think. Let’s have a properly impartial inquiry, with input from both sides of the scientific debate, to transparently uncover the truth of the situation. What are they so scared of?

Let’s look very briefly at a functional breakdown of items 3 and 4 at figure 1, firstly the main influence and impact areas of any changing climate.

Figure 2: Climate Influences and Impacts

We have highlighted just one item at figure 3 - the missing benefits of potentially warmer weather. Why is it that we are constantly indoctrinated with the idea that every impact of a changing climate is negative? A warmer average temperature in most highly-populated area of the globe would be beneficial to the people that live in those regions, likely reducing cold-related deaths, for example, by a significant margin. There are many nuanced discussions to be had about potential positive benefits, but you’ll never hear about them from the BBC.

Finally, a quick breakdown of item 4 and the war on CO₂, otherwise known as “Net Zero”.

Figure 3: Policy Management

Bizarrely - it’s an innocent omission surely - the situation is reversed here compared to figure 3. You are constantly told a pack of lies about the benefits of Net Zero (£300 off your electricity bills immediately under a Labour government?), while the true costs - a mere £3 Trillion or so in the UK - are constantly denied by the charlatans who want to destroy our lives on the basis of a scientific fraud.

Ask yourself, dear reader. Does the above summary align with anything you hear about the actual programme of activity to investigate the “climate science” - namely the activities of the captured IPCC and the regular COP jamborees? Are the BBC honest with you about the socio-economic costs of the Net Zero insanity - £100k + per household, the destruction of our remaining industrial base, the confiscation of your car, your gas boiler, your Sunday roast and your annual foreign holiday? If not, why not?

One might almost be tempted to dismiss the entire thing as yet another neo-Marxist globalist scam.