Climate Change 101

Andrew L. Urban 16 September 2022 The Spectator Australia 

With Prime Minister Anthony Albanese (foolishly) declaring it ‘entirely appropriate’ last Sunday that King Charles III should continue advocating for ‘action to tackle Climate Change’, I feel it entirely appropriate that I continue advocating for politicians to be well-informed about the subject.

Following my earlier memo in The Spectator Australia to politicians, I have compiled a little reference manual to help them grasp some basic facts about Climate Change … as it is now commonly (mis)understood.

Schoolchildren are also invited to be reassured that the end of the world, by our own hand, is not nigh. These factoids are based on uncontested scientific facts – easy to discover and check.

101:1 Climate Change or Climate Variability?

For the record, I believe in Climate Change – or rather, in ‘climate variability’ to be accurate. The Earth’s climate has continually changed, warmed, and cooled over the ages. It is a cycle that has been going on pretty much since the Earth’s formation over 4 billion years ago and is widely documented by geologists. This process is referred to by scientists as ‘climate variability’. The phrase ‘Climate Change’ has devoured ‘climate variability’ in popular usage, implying man-made warming.

Article 1 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) defines ‘Climate Change’ as:

‘A change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.’

The UNFCCC thus makes a distinction between climate change attributable to human activities altering the atmospheric composition, versus climate variability attributable to natural causes. This redefinition of ‘Climate Change’ to refer only to man-made changes in the climate has effectively eliminated natural climate variability from the public discussion on climate.

Any change that is observed over the past century, on whatever time scale, is implicitly (and wrongly) assumed to be man-made. This assumption leads to connecting every unusual weather or climate event to man-made Climate Change from fossil fuel emissions.

101:2(a) Fossil fuel emissions – the propaganda tool

Fossil fuel emissions, once described as Greenhouse Gases (GHG), were chosen as the scapegoat for global warming, albeit there was no evidence to underpin that allegation. It was a politically astute choice because it used a simple idea that was easily ‘sold’ as the single control knob for Earth’s climate.

This served – and still serves – the political agenda of changing the world’s economies. I’ll save you the trouble of doing the fact-check:

‘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 economic summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.’ – Zuricher Zeitung, November 14, 2010. (Edenhofer was then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III.)

‘Propagandists and social scientists have long known that if you repeat a falsehood loudly and long enough, people will come to believe it,’ wrote Janet Albrechtsen, in The Australian.

And as Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s successful propagandist observed, ‘The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.’

Notably, he also believed that ‘It’s not propaganda’s task to be intelligent, its task is to lead to success.’

101:2(b) Net Zero … que?

Why are attempts to dramatically reduce man-made emissions futile? That’s a big question. It’s the most consequential question of our time and demands a big answer.

The question challenges almost every energy policy in the Western Hemisphere, from the banning of petrol cars to the closure of coal-fired power plants and the withholding of loans to finance new ones. And so on … pretty well ad infinitum.

(In Godzone Australia, we have the entire political class welded to Net Zero, without knowing what it means. In case you missed it, in the Senate, Labor’s Tanya Plibersek couldn’t answer what Net Zero meant, trying to ridicule the question. ‘Well, it means … Net Zero?’ she smirked.)

The ‘big answer’ is, in reality, a simple one: of all the carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere, 97 per cent is naturally occurring such as outgassing from the oceans, decomposing vegetation (and other biomass), venting volcanoes, naturally occurring wildfires, and belches from ruminant animals. Yet it is man-made emissions, the remaining 3 per cent, that are claimed to drive warming. Until that claim is proven, common sense dictates that efforts to reduce man-made emissions are futile. By extension, Australia’s deadly efforts to cut its emission output – all 0.0002 per cent of it – are pathetically misguided and horrendously expensive – not least in the loss of reliable energy.

To add insult to injury, the hapless politicians seem unaware that Australia has already passed a Net Zero position. Australia’s grasslands and forests annually suck up some 940 million tonnes of carbon dioxide – roughly double our total emissions of 400-500 million tonnes.

Net Zero: futility to the nth degree…

101:3 Beware of the dog(ma) … and the modelling

The sign on the entrance to Australia’s Parliaments – state and federal – should read, ‘Beware of the Dogma’.

Normal scientific research becomes impossible by introducing a strong group bias against questioning the dogma.

Once dogmas are established, they tend to evade scientific scrutiny. The main dogma of Climate Change science is stated in the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:

‘It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in GHG concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.’ (IPCC 2014).

However, there is no evidence confirming this dogma. It is based on computer model results that were programmed with the same assumptions that emerge from them, in a clear case of circular reasoning.

‘The 1992 Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade Climate Change,’ notes Dr Judith Curry, American climatologist and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

She was a member of the National Research Council’s Climate Research Committee, published over a hundred scientific papers, and co-edited several major works.

Curry added, ‘The perception of man-made Climate Change as a near-term apocalypse has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.’

My previous note to hapless politicians on Climate Change matters.

Andrew L. Urban is the author of the forthcoming book, Climate Alarm Reality Check – What You Haven’t Been Told (Wilkinson Publishing).