Thursday 11 October 2018

8 things that the climate creed has to defend ... [updated]


Vinay Kolhatkar lists 8 things that those who follow the climate creed must defend if they are to be consistent -- "all eight, no exceptions—a single weakness in the chain and the climate creed falls flat" -- along with three further (bonus) observations:
Why the climate change movement is a fraud:
The Church of Climate Scientology ("Climate Change") is the creed that claims that 
(1) there is significant global warming,
(2) that any warming is dangerous,
(3) that it is manmade,
(4) that the catastrophe is near-term,
(5) that it can be reversed by replacing a whole lot of fossil fuels with wind and solar
(6) that such a replacement is feasible,
(7) that, to boot, is an expense that an economy can bear,
(8) that such replacement is the only avenue left, since geo-engineering solutions are destined to fail, because they are manmade as against a nature-worshiping withdrawal from fossil fuels, and ...
(9) Virtually any hurricane, flood, volcanic eruption, excess rain, drought, is offered as "evidence" of climate change as if the planet never used to have any of those before WWII.
Oh, and:
(10) Politicians who mouth rising ocean levels in the near-term buy ocean front investment properties.
And...
(11) They get upset when smog from volcanic eruptions creates a cooling effect for years.
You see, when you put it like that, there are 1-8 matters that the climate creed has to defend. All eight, no exceptions—a single weakness in the chain and the climate creed falls flat...
. UPDATE: Bjorn Lomborg puts it in perspective:
The Paris agreement on climate change is already an incredibly expensive way of helping very little. Those using the latest IPCC report to call for bigger political promises miss the point by a mile.
    Cutting carbon emissions is incredibly expensive. Green energy is not yet able to compete with fossil fuels to meet most of humanity’s needs. Forcing industries and communities to shift — or plying them with expensive subsidies — means everyone pays more for energy, hurting the poorest most.
    If all the promises in the treaty are kept, the resulting global hit to growth will reach $1 trillion to $2 trillion a year by 2030. Those resources could have been used to make everyone more resilient and prosperous.

5 comments:

Sam said...

Thanks for this... sums up my thinking on this issue. I would add another, maybe between 6 and 7... are government programmes (emissions tax etc.) capable of forcing the replacement? I don't think so... just another cash grab.

Dinwar said...

1) Outside of carefully-constructed statistical arguments, "significant" is (or will be seen as) a weasel word.

4) An interesting statement. Biologically speaking the catastrophe is actually ongoing--the dieout of the mammalian megafauna started at 12ka.

5) Another interesting one. The problem is, wind and solar on industrial scales are geoengineering. They require the re-shaping of square miles of terrain. And industrial solar plants using molten salt can light birds on fire mid-air.

8) This point is unnecessarily hostile. From a tactical perspective, it will eliminate any reasonable climate change activist from responding. That's the most extreme interpretation of what they say.

Unknown said...

I wonder what the ratio is for such questions to be posted on climate change denial blogs compared to asking the likes of NASA. I mean, if you wanted the correct answers you would ask a reputable scientific organisation, surely. Here's a link to get you started:

https://climate.nasa.gov/

SteveD said...

Hey Peter, I noticed a typo in your original post. Just a second.

(5) that it can be reversed by replacing a whole lot fossil fuels with nuclear.


There, fixed it. And that fixes 6) 7) and 8) as well.

Dinwar said...

NASA has the capacity to provide data for the second and third question. The first and fourth questions are the province of paleoclimatology, and NASA simply doesn't have the capacity to answer them. The rest are political questions, and NASA has an obvious conflict of interest there. NO scientific organization can possibly provide scientific answers to those questions, because they are outside the realm of science.

As a fun exercise, I recommend anyone interested in the climate change debate to read Zachos et al., 2001. Just copy and paste that into Google and the paper will come up. It's a systematic examination of climate over the course of the Cenozoic (going into the Cretaceous a little). Definitely some interesting data in that paper.