RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Tories’ pushback on Net Zero is causing horror among climate activists in Britain. Prime Minster Rishi Sunak has announced a carbon trading scheme that lowers the price on carbon emissions, linked to a planned expansion of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea to “max out” Britain’s underwater energy reserves. He has also announced that he is on the side of motorists complaining about city anti-car schemes.

This has freaked out climate activists who are claiming that it drives a coach and horses though the “climate emergency” agenda.

But it’s these activists who are doing the real damage to their cause through producing ever more ludicrous and hysterical exaggeration by any standards — and straight out garbage by the standards of science.

A prime example is the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres. As The Guardian reports:

“Humanity is in the hot seat,” Guterres told a press conference on Thursday. “For vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a cruel summer. For the entire planet, it is a disaster. And for scientists, it is unequivocal – humans are to blame.

“All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change. Climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.”

“Global boiling”? This while Dr Eli David tells us:

Antarctica plunges to -83.2C (-117.8F) — earth’s lowest temperature since since 2017.

This while Tony Heller of Climate Reality tells us:

Arctic sea ice extent is the highest in nineteen years and in the normal range since 1981

and also tells us:

Temperatures at the North Pole have been below the 1958-2002 average almost every day for the past three months, and will drop below freezing in about two weeks.  May was the coldest on record there.

 

This while ecologist Jim Steele tells us that, contrary to the claim that the world’s temperature is now the hottest in 120,000 years and that our “warming climate is causing our glaciers and ice sheets to melt”:

But the scientific facts tell us that the glaciers had mostly disappeared 3500 years ago and again 2000 years ago, showing the world our current climate is not even warmer than it was 2000 years ago.

And as Steele also tells us, contrary to the mantra that global sea level rise is catastrophically accelerating:

The sea level hoax is pushed by simply repeating ad nauseum that CO2 is warming the ocean, while ignoring other well-known factors affecting sea level measurements…By subtracting the rate of sinking from the tide gauge measurements,  Absolute Sea Level rise (gray bars) is very small, averaging a rise of just 0.125 mm/year…Additionally, instead of drowning Kench (2018) reported 74 per cent of the Pacific islands are increasing in size.

The former head of Greenpeace and now environmental realist, Patrick Moore, tweets:

Here is the continuous temperature record with thermometers for the past 364 years from central England. Note that temperature rose from 1659 to 1850 at about the same rate as from 1850 to present. Exponential rate of CO2 rise did not influence rate of temperature rise.

As for those “hottest July EVER” stories that were trumpeted around the world, here’s what actually happened according to Chris Morrison of the Daily Sceptic:

Mainstream media were full of reports last week that temperatures would hit 48°C in southern Europe, a steer that seems to have come from the European Space Agency (ESA). It said that many countries were facing a major heatwave including Germany and Poland, while air temperatures were expected to climb to 48°C in Sicily and Sardinia — “potentially the hottest temperature ever recorded in Europe”. The temperature in Sicily never went above 35°C, according to the Time and Date website that reports past weather from around the world.

But it turns out the ESA was pulling a fast one. It was not referring to  the “air” temperature, the standard measurement made two metres above the ground, but the actual temperature on the surface. This latter measurement of course is going to be many degrees higher. The climate science site No Tricks Zone noted: “By the time the ploy was exposed by careful readers, the news had already gone around the world.” Commenting on the affair, German’s Achtung Reichelt is reported to have called it “the most intense climate lie since temperature recording began”. Calling the ESA’s press release “sloppy and manipulative”, it charged that none of it was true.

Back in June, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecast that this month Germany would be experiencing a scorching summer. In fact, cool wet weather has moved in. A few days ago, No Tricks Zone reported:

By the weekend the temperatures across Germany will plummet into the single digits. The night from Friday to Saturday in the Alps there’s a chance of ground surface frost. For North Germany, temperatures will struggle to even reach the 20°C mark. Many Germans will have no choice but to turn on the heat, even though it’s the peak of summer.

Oh — and those terrible forest fires on Rhodes? Every single one was apparently started deliberately. It wasn’t the planet coming to the boil. It was arson.

Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there is simply no evidence that any of a long list of extreme weather events — including flooding, drought, cyclones, fire weather,  and others — has increased in frequency.

The Guardian reports Guterres saying:

Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning. It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action.

Yet even the new head of the IPCC, Professor Jim Skea, has warned it’s wrong and misleading for climate activists to imply that temperature increases above 1.5 degrees Celsius pose an existential threat to humanity.

In Paris in 2015, a warming target was agreed of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Skea said the world would overshoot this target because individual countries’ policies hadn’t been ambitious enough. But he also told two German news outlets that, although this would produce a “more dangerous world”, it would not constitute an existential threat to humanity. He said:

The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees. If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyses people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change.

Across Europe there are signs that, as in the UK, governments are beginning to slide away from their Net Zero commitments. This is the result of soaring energy costs, growing voter push-back and the realisation that China — one of the world’s most implacable, unrepentant and massive carbon producers — is poised to exploit the west’s suicidal anti-energy agenda.

Talk of the wheels now coming off the climate bus, however, is premature. The “climate emergency” has become a quasi-religious belief. Far too much money has been invested in it, far too much geopolitics revolves around it and far too many careers and reputations depend upon it for the world suddenly to acknowledge that the climate bus never had any wheels to start with.

Indeed, the hysteria is deepening yet further. Thus the Biden administration’s climate envoy John Kerry wants to destroy the farming industry. He said:

Agriculture contributes about 33 per cent of all the emissions of the world. And we can’t get to net zero—we don’t get this job done—unless agriculture is front and centre as part of the solution. You just can’t continue to both warm the planet, while also expecting to feed it. It doesn’t work. So we have to reduce emissions from the food system.

And both the US and the EU are exploring ways to block the sun’s rays — the very source of life on earth.

Now we read that nearly half of 16-25 year-olds in ten countries have claimed they are so worried about climate change that they struggle to function on a daily basis, the definition of an anxiety disorder. In the Wall Street Journal, Allysia Finley reports:

According to a World Health Organisation report last year, the very “awareness of climate change and extreme weather events and their impacts” may lead to a host of ills, including strained social relationships, anxiety, depression, intimate-partner violence, helplessness, suicidal behaviour and alcohol and substance abuse…

The New Yorker magazine earlier this month published a 4,400-word piece titled “What to Do With Climate Emotions” by Jia Tolentino, a woman in the throes of such neurosis. “It may be impossible to seriously consider the reality of climate change for longer than ninety seconds without feeling depressed, angry, guilty, grief-stricken, or simply insane,” Ms. Tolentino writes.

With her final adjective, no-one ever spoke a truer word about this entire issue.