The truth about climate change

[UndercoverElephant]

This has come up on Powerswitch recently with respect to Reform UK's climate policies, but there is a wider question. I have written about this in detail before (https://www.geoffdann.co.uk/on-collapse/), but here is an updated and shortened version.

My claim is that nothing being done by governments so far to limit climate change is going to have any long-term effect on the final outcome. Assuming we do not invent a technology that makes it possible to return carbon to the ground on an a mega-industrial scale, the only way to limit long-term climate change is to leave economically-viable fossil fuels in the ground forever. "Economically viable" means there is no economic-practical reason why those fuels cannot be extracted and sold at a profit (or at least not at a loss). It means countries that have viable oil and gas reserves voluntarily choose to leave them unextracted, not just for now but forever.

There is always a possibility that we invent multiple new gamechanging technologies. For example we could invent cheap nuclear fusion and a means of inducing electric current over large distances, eliminating the need for batteries. The problem is that this is pure science fiction, so it would be insane to assume it is going to happen. We must also assume that the world will remain split into 200+ independent sovereign states -- if there's going to be a change to that then it won't be in the direction of a global government. More likely to go the other way.

If we discount technological gamechangers and unified global governance then The Tragedy of the Commons comes into full play. Even if the West got its act together, countries like Russia and India aren't going to stop extracting/trading/using fossil fuels. They may well slow down their usage. This makes a lot of sense given that they are a limited resource. They are going to run out eventually anyway, so moving away from a dependency on them and slowing down your consumption is the only way to ween your country off them, in preparation for the day when they cease to be available. Indeed -- this is all that is currently being done. But that doesn't make any difference to long-term net carbon movement and hence net climate change. All it does is slow the process down a bit. Ralph has said that this in itself is helpful, because it gives nature more time to adapt, but the difference we are making is measurable in years, not millenia.

My conclusion is that as a species we aren't going to limit climate change at all. We will continue to use fossil fuels until we're forced to stop using them because they've run out (although the graph may have a very long tail). That means we are going to cause climate change right up until the point where either (a) the atmosphere is losing heat to space more rapidly than we are warming it or (b) the effects of climate change have reduced human numbers/activity to the point where we aren't capable of making a global difference anymore anyway.

This is why I don't think Reform UK's climate policies matter very much. Their denial of the science is unacceptable -- as a general standard we need to resist anti-scientific nonsense and educate people about science and realism. But there is nothing wrong with their policy conclusion -- that we can't stop climate change so there's no point in even trying. Even if they were in power, it wouldn't make any difference to anything, because ultimately they are correct. They have arrived at a true conclusion even though they used anti-scientific reasoning to get there.

There is also a positive reason for accepting this conclusion, and that is that if this was widely understood then it would revolutionise the public debate about sustainability, because we'd have no choice but accept that Business As Usual cannot continue and that we must prepare for a worst case scenario regarding climate change. Since that's what is actually going to happen, then the sooner this is acknowledged, the better.

[Ralphw2]

Ok.

I Will gloss over the moral point of being the nation that through coal, started the whole climate change process off, and gained enormously from it, whilst as usual, it is the resource rich under developed nations that will suffer and increasing are suffering as a result of the carbon emissions. I do see global,economic and in all probability population collapse will happen in the next 50 years or sooner. We cannot help other nations survive if we collapse first. Hierarchy of needs et al.

So the question becomes how can we survive as a culture through the coming contraction? I see Reform as a classic head in the sands reaction. Climate change is happening, and accelerating. Fossil fuel decline is imminent globally, and happened to the UK decades, or in the case of coal, a century ago. Drilling for more oil and gas will barely offset the natural decline in current UK production for another decade at most. Global trade is going to collapse, partly because of peak oil, but mostly because the sea routes will become increasingly unsafe. The UK is going to have to become more self sufficient in both food and industry. Already, we import half (maybe more?) of our food by value, this figure could need to rise if weather patterns become increasingly volatile, with more drought years and washout years and storm years each decade. We need a massive redesign of UK agriculture, eating lower down the food chain, if we are ever going to get close to calorific break even with our food needs, and it will do us little good if we do it by destroying the productivity of our soils by extreme intensification, and destroy what little remains of our natural ecosystems, just to get through the demographic bulge.

There is already talk of reshoring more and more industry, as global jit supply chains become just to late. Apart from the massive reskilling of our population, this is going to need a big increase in energy demand in the UK. We are not going to be able to afford to import that energy post peak oil because we will have little the remaining energy exporters will want from us. We need to build our own energy supplies and that means renewables, and on a massive scale. Forget climate change, there will be not enough fossil fuels to go round. Absolute net zero is a luxury, and probably an impossibility in industrial society, but any and all indigenous renewable energy flows will be gold dust in 20 or 30 years. However much we build will not prevent economic collapse, but every kwh will reduce the pain and limit the ecological damage. I personally reject nuclear, because in a declining energy world we will see every single nuclear power station left to rot filled with intense radioactive contamination once the last fuel cycle is completed. There will never be enough energy to decontaminate and dispose of the waste, let lone the skilled workforce to complete the task. Every station on the planet will become a timebomb of future disease and no go areas for centuries or millenia.

This leaves immigration. It is clear that we have had massive immigration since Brexit for a mixture of economic, political and humanitarian reasons. At the same time, manynofnthe EU migrants that were in the UK before Brexit have left, as they can now find more profitable employment elsewhere, or their visas have not been renewed. We have brought immigration back under UK political control, and we have used it to import millions of low paid, low skilled workers into the precariat with very few if any employment rights, and little taste for asking for them for fear of being expelled again. The rate of illegal immigration is hard to measure but is tiny in comparison. The public at large hate this because they see it as keeping wages down, and for putting more pressure on housing supply. The government and pension funds and city love it for the same reasons. They are wealthy land owners and want to keep the ponzi scheme that is UK house prices rising for ever. In practice, all this is doing is piling more and more unpayable debt onto the UK workforce to pay mortgages that are pure profit which is offshored to corporate tax havens up to if not beyond retirement age. The massive rise of the UK universities serves the same purpose, make the population docile by keeping them in debt.

The remaining wealth in the UK general population is now almost exclusively in the over 50s property owning classes and they see no reason (until recently) to change the dynamic. I have profited substantially just by being in the right place at the right time, although I have never voted for any party which supported this arrangement. The big question of course is how do we feed these extra people in the coming decades? We will not need all the manual labour on the farms as the fossil energy inputs to farm machinery are tiny in the overall picture, and their loyalty to our culture will be questionable when times get tough and they meet the inevitable racism that the opportunists will stir up when times are hard. Their loyalty and shared values will be less than the European people we pushed out with Brexit. The old are going to face a very hard time as we go through the demographic bulge. The NHS will not support the life extending treatment for the final years that it currently does, and social care is already in near collapse. Health of the old is almost certainly declining already, as decades of reduced physical,activity and overprocessed factory foods take their toll on our bodies into pandemics of chronic disease like diabetes. We are going to die slow and hungry and lonely deaths as we have so few children of our own, and we can no longer pay our immigrant workers to spend their time supporting us.

I do not know the solutions. I am almost certain there are no solutions. I am absolutely certain they Farage and Reform is the opposite of a solution, he is snake oil and mirrors and just wants to make himself richer by lying to us.

[UndercoverElephant]

Thanks for taking the time to answer, though your actual answer to my question was this:

Forget climate change, there will be not enough fossil fuels to go round.

In other words you agree with me. We cannot limit climate change, and there's no point in even bothering to try. Rather, we should continue to transition to renewable energy because fossil fuels are going to run out anyway.

I agreed with almost everything you said. I'm ambivalent about nuclear -- there are too many massive pros and cons to be able to make a clear decision. I don't know on that one.

I think the moral point you made at the start is irrelevant -- we aren't somehow born guilty because we are descended from the culture which invented science and industrialisation. More to the point, it won't have any bearing on what happens in the future, because when the shit hits the fan then even the people who currently talk about these things will stop doing so.

I do not know the solutions. I am almost certain there are no solutions. I am absolutely certain they Farage and Reform is the opposite of a solution, he is snake oil and mirrors and just wants to make himself richer by lying to us.

There is no solution if the problem is "how do we save western civilisation as we know it", which is what I assume you meant by "culture" at the start of your 2nd paragraph. Which leads directly to another question that you didn't ask, which is "which parts of western civilisation are worth saving, and which parts must end?" And "must" is a logical must here, not an ethical one. Growth-based economics must end, because it is physically impossible to sustain. But there's all manner of other things where there might be very strong moral arguments as to why they must end ("inequality" for example), but that doesn't mean they will end. It is entirely possible to have a sustainable civilisation which is extremely unequal. It may not be the best possible sustainable civilisation, but it is an improvement on having no idea of how we could make civilisation sustainable at all.

As for Farage, I am not interested in his motives, and I don't believe he is offering any coherent solutions to any problems at all. I am choosing to vote for Reform for strategic reasons -- partly because I want to help in Farage's project of destroying the Conservative Party (and he may well succeed), and partly because I want to keep up maximum political pressure on immigration.

I'm happy to explore the question of which parts of western civilisation are worth saving and which must go, since there isn't much response to my opening post. Maybe everybody agrees with me, but don't want to say?

[Ralphw2]

What I want to preserve is basic human rights and respect. Equality and an end to class system, which is still very evident even in my 'classless' new town. We may not have aristocracy, but the class divide could not be more visible than at the town 'hub' and council office, where the wealthy have their so precious U3A talks next door to the food bank where the refugees and battered single mums share a free cup of tea. The U3A crowd don't even notice there is a food bank in their town, but moan to the council about the smell of the food.



I still say voting for the likes of Farage is dangerous. Giving that kind of man or organisation any sort of legitimacy ends up in race riots or insurrection attempts.

[Default0ptions]

Wasn’t the arctic supposed to be ice free and the Solomon Islands under water by now?

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-yea ... edictions/

None of these have happened. We would have noticed.

Show me a real problem and we can work out a solution. The statistics are not on your side here.

It’s just not happening, is it.

[Default0ptions]

Atmospheric CO2 is about 0.04%. What tiny percentage of that tiny percentage does the UK’s tiny percentage make any difference to?

They still have to add CO2 to commercial greenhouse operations to get optimal plant growth.

“The UK has over time emitted about 3% of the world total human caused CO2, with a current rate under 1%, although the population is less than 1%.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenho ... ed_Kingdom

I think that means that the UK contribution to world CO2 is now around 0.0004%.

This seems a ridiculous figure to wet one’s pants about.

I often wonder if the whole climate change / net zero stuff is just an attempt to get us all on board with having to live with a rapidly reducing amount of energy due to oil production having already peaked and the need to manage expectations after the fact.

Reposted. Is there actually some agenda behind the ridiculous claims about climate change?

Because the claims themselves just don’t stand up.

[Default0ptions]

This has come up on Powerswitch recently with respect to Reform UK's climate policies, but there is a wider question. I have written about this in detail before (https://www.geoffdann.co.uk/on-collapse/), but here is an updated and shortened version.

My claim is that nothing being done by governments so far to limit climate change is going to have any long-term effect on the final outcome. Assuming we do not invent a technology that makes it possible to return carbon to the ground on an a mega-industrial scale, the only way to limit long-term climate change is to leave economically-viable fossil fuels in the ground forever. "Economically viable" means there is no economic-practical reason why those fuels cannot be extracted and sold at a profit (or at least not at a loss). It means countries that have viable oil and gas reserves voluntarily choose to leave them unextracted, not just for now but forever.

There is always a possibility that we invent multiple new gamechanging technologies. For example we could invent cheap nuclear fusion and a means of inducing electric current over large distances, eliminating the need for batteries. The problem is that this is pure science fiction, so it would be insane to assume it is going to happen. We must also assume that the world will remain split into 200+ independent sovereign states -- if there's going to be a change to that then it won't be in the direction of a global government. More likely to go the other way.

If we discount technological gamechangers and unified global governance then The Tragedy of the Commons comes into full play. Even if the West got its act together, countries like Russia and India aren't going to stop extracting/trading/using fossil fuels. They may well slow down their usage. This makes a lot of sense given that they are a limited resource. They are going to run out eventually anyway, so moving away from a dependency on them and slowing down your consumption is the only way to ween your country off them, in preparation for the day when they cease to be available. Indeed -- this is all that is currently being done. But that doesn't make any difference to long-term net carbon movement and hence net climate change. All it does is slow the process down a bit. Ralph has said that this in itself is helpful, because it gives nature more time to adapt, but the difference we are making is measurable in years, not millenia.

My conclusion is that as a species we aren't going to limit climate change at all. We will continue to use fossil fuels until we're forced to stop using them because they've run out (although the graph may have a very long tail). That means we are going to cause climate change right up until the point where either (a) the atmosphere is losing heat to space more rapidly than we are warming it or (b) the effects of climate change have reduced human numbers/activity to the point where we aren't capable of making a global difference anymore anyway.

This is why I don't think Reform UK's climate policies matter very much. Their denial of the science is unacceptable -- as a general standard we need to resist anti-scientific nonsense and educate people about science and realism. But there is nothing wrong with their policy conclusion -- that we can't stop climate change so there's no point in even trying. Even if they were in power, it wouldn't make any difference to anything, because ultimately they are correct. They have arrived at a true conclusion even though they used anti-scientific reasoning to get there.

There is also a positive reason for accepting this conclusion, and that is that if this was widely understood then it would revolutionise the public debate about sustainability, because we'd have no choice but accept that Business As Usual cannot continue and that we must prepare for a worst case scenario regarding climate change. Since that's what is actually going to happen, then the sooner this is acknowledged, the better.

I’ve been hearing about climate change since back in the 70s when we were supposed to be in for global cooling and another ice age.

It’s now become more than absurd.

Tell me which of these predictions is impacting your life right now:

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-yea ... edictions/

Atmospheric CO2 is about 0.04%. What tiny percentage of that tiny percentage does the UK’s tiny percentage make any difference to?

They still have to add CO2 to commercial greenhouse operations to get optimal plant growth.

“The UK has over time emitted about 3% of the world total human caused CO2, with a current rate under 1%, although the population is less than 1%.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenho ... ed_Kingdom

I think that means that the UK contribution to world CO2 is now around 0.0004%.

This seems a ridiculous figure to wet one’s pants about.

I often wonder if the whole climate change / net zero stuff is just an attempt to get us all on board with having to live with a rapidly reducing amount of energy due to oil production having already peaked and the need to manage expectations after the fact.

[Default0ptions]

What I want to preserve is basic human rights and respect. Equality and an end to class system, which is still very evident even in my 'classless' new town. We may not have aristocracy, but the class divide could not be more visible than at the town 'hub' and council office, where the wealthy have their so precious U3A talks next door to the food bank where the refugees and battered single mums share a free cup of tea. The U3A crowd don't even notice there is a food bank in their town, but moan to the council about the smell of the food.



I still say voting for the likes of Farage is dangerous. Giving that kind of man or organisation any sort of legitimacy ends up in race riots or insurrection attempts.

Why can’t you just turn up and take part in the U3A talks Ralph?

You’re setting yourself up to fail right there by deliberately excluding yourself.

[Ralphw2]

Basic misunderstanding of the statistic quoted

We currently emit about 500 million tonnes of Carbon DIoxide Equivalent per year (that is we emit a range of chemicals that have a greenhouse warming effect, many more powerful that CO2. The CO2e figure is the amount of CO2 we would need to emit to cause the same amount of greenhouse warming). That is about 4 tonnes for each one of us on average.

The world as a whole emits about 40,000 million tonnes.

In global terms we are about average per capita, on emissions generated directly in our country

However, we import large amounts of material goods, and food. Far more than we export. The production of these goods and food generated CO2 emissions. If we take into account the emissions that were generated to keep us in iPhones and Autstralian wine then we are one of the world's highest emitters per capita.

There is no point discussing global warming with you. You clearly do not have the basic arithmatic skills to understand how wrong you are.

[UndercoverElephant]

Tell me which of these predictions is impacting your life right now:

The impact of climate change on my life right now is irrelevant. It has nothing to do with anything I have posted in this thread. I am talking about scientific facts and the long term future as predicted by science, not my personal lived experiences. That is weather, not climate.

Atmospheric CO2 is about 0.04%. What tiny percentage of that tiny percentage does the UK’s tiny percentage make any difference to?

The point is the global trend and the systemic reason why nobody has any real motive to do anything that makes a difference. The fact that the UK is relatively small isn't what is relevant. What matters is that the world is split up into 200+ sovereign states, and everybody knows that everybody else is going to keep using fossil fuels until they run out.

They still have to add CO2 to commercial greenhouse operations to get optimal plant growth.

That really isn't relevant either.

I often wonder if the whole climate change / net zero stuff is just an attempt to get us all on board with having to live with a rapidly reducing amount of energy due to oil production having already peaked and the need to manage expectations after the fact.

That is not what is happening. Climate science is clear -- humans are changing the climate more rapidly than it has at any point in the last 65 million years, and if we use all of the economically viable fossils (which we will) then we are looking at at least 5 degrees of warming and probably more like 10. The problem is that the political response to this, including "net zero", isn't actually doing anything to alter the long-term outcome, even though it is presented as exactly that and most people, including most politicians, seem to believe that is what it is. It all comes down confusion about the difference between slowing the rate of human-induced climate change and limiting the net change by the time we've finished changing it. And nobody wants to talk about this difference because if we admit that we're only slowing it down a bit, rather than limiting it, then we would have to admit that BAU must end and the global financial system would immediately blow up.

[Default0ptions]

Basic misunderstanding of the statistic quoted

We currently emit about 500 million tonnes of Carbon DIoxide Equivalent per year (that is we emit a range of chemicals that have a greenhouse warming effect, many more powerful that CO2. The CO2e figure is the amount of CO2 we would need to emit to cause the same amount of greenhouse warming). That is about 4 tonnes for each one of us on average.

The world as a whole emits about 40,000 million tonnes.

In global terms we are about average per capita, on emissions generated directly in our country

However, we import large amounts of material goods, and food. Far more than we export. The production of these goods and food generated CO2 emissions. If we take into account the emissions that were generated to keep us in iPhones and Autstralian wine then we are one of the world's highest emitters per capita.

There is no point discussing global warming with you. You clearly do not have the basic arithmatic skills to understand how wrong you are.

Well then - let’s start with this:

https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-yea ... edictions/

Perhaps your superior arithmetic skills are up to the job and you can explain why I’m wrong?

Apart from a few intermittently snowy winters in the 60s, nothing much has changed in my lived experience.

We do have some breathless news of panic though, “Global average sea level has risen 8–9 inches (21–24 centimeters) since 1880.”

I’m not sure how well your maths stands up to this but here we go:

“Our chronology is developed in two stages. First, we synchronize Red Sea dust-flux data (Fig. 1b) with positive (U/Th-dated) δ18O anomalies, or weak monsoon events, within glacial terminations in Sanbao Cave, China (δ18Osanbao)8,12 (Fig. 1a, Supplementary Fig. 1). Dust-flux data for central Red Sea core KL09 comprise Ti/Ca ratios and hematite (‘Hem’) abundance from the same sediment samples as the RSL data so that timing relationships are unambiguous13,14 (Supplementary Note 1, Supplementary Fig. 2). All five glacial terminations (T1–T5) contain a large mid-termination dust peak, followed by a sharp drop toward the subsequent interglacials (Fig. 1b,c). Striking signal similarity between Red Sea and Asian dust records suggests covariation in dust mobilization over these regions due to large-scale atmospheric circulation changes14. This is corroborated by dependence of Red Sea dust fluxes on seasonal wind changes associated with Indian monsoon circulation15, which is closely coupled with East Asian monsoon dynamics16,17. We therefore hypothesize that a close relationship exists between weak monsoon events in Sanbao Cave and Red Sea dust spikes during glacial terminations. We test this hypothesis by correlating KL09 Ti/Ca to δ18Osanbao at T1 to T5 (Fig. 1a,b), transferring this age model (with linear interpolation between terminations) to the RSL data (‘RSLdust-Sanbao’, Fig. 1c), and then comparing the inferred timing of major sea-level rises in RSLdust-sanbao with that determined from 40Ar/39Ar-dated ash (tephra) layers deposited within sea-level-controlled sedimentary sequences from coastal plains of the Palaeo-Tiber River, Italy18,19 (Supplementary Note 2, Supplementary Figs 3–5, Supplementary Table 3). The inferred timing of T3 and T5 from our dust-δ18Osanbao correlation closely matches that of aggradational units from the Palaeo-Tiber River (Fig. 1c). Further validation of our hypothesis is provided by good agreement between RSLdust-Sanbao and the same RSL data on an independently constrained chronology for 0–150 kyr (ref. 5) (‘RSL150’, Fig. 1c). Hence, we retain the ‘dust-Sanbao’ synchronization.”

[BritDownUnder]

The sky is always going to fall in in a few years. Sells papers.

What will finish us first is overpopulation (and ethnic and societal conflict arising therefrom), resource depletion and falling EROEI. My favourite predictions are from the former Congressman Roscoe Bartlett a rare Republican who spoke a lot of sense about the state we are in. His name also makes me smile as it reminds me of the Dukes of Hazzard. Pity all the other Maryland representatives who were all Democrats conspired against him to gerrymander the district boundaries to get him out of Congress.

The heating from CO2 emissions will probably ensure that there will be no recovery from all the above.

[UndercoverElephant]

So the Russian troll is also a climate change denier. What a surprise.

[Default0ptions]

So the Russian troll is also a climate change denier. What a surprise.

I’m not denying that the climate changes, UE, just pointing out that the absurd predictions haven’t actually come to pass.

“Map reveals Greenwich could be underwater by 2030 due to climate change”

https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/technol ... r-AA17bYJE

Sea level rise really needs to accelerate if it’s going to keep up with predictions like this - I don’t think we’ll see Greenwich under water in the next 5 and a half years.

Do you?

“Changes in mean sea level around Great Britain over the past 200 years”

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 1121000112

[UndercoverElephant]

So the Russian troll is also a climate change denier. What a surprise.

I’m not denying that the climate changes, UE,

In other words, you are denying that humans are changing the climate. That is what climate change denial is.