Climate change: the devastation

By Richard North - December 15, 2023

Now that CoP28 has concluded, we can afford to relegate the issue of climate change to the obscurity it undoubtedly deserves, until something else crops up to increase its profile.

Before we leave it temporarily though, one should spare a thought for the “scientists” whom the Guardian tells us are distraught over the failure of the CoP to include a specific requirement for a fossil fuel phase-out.

One such, whose unhappiness, I am sure, will concern many readers, is Michael Mann, still at Penn University – the one whose president is just fine with antisemitism as long as it is “in context”, until she was forced to resign.

Mann, at least, is not lending his support to the genocide of Jews. He has much bigger fish to fry as he is after the genocide of the entire human race, thereby absolving himself from any charge of discrimination. He just wants to kill everybody.

This is evident from his comment about CoP, who has declared the lack of a phase-out as “devastating”, but then choosing a remarkably vapid analogy, suggesting that to “transition away from fossil fuels” was “weak tea at best”.

He says: “it’s like promising your doctor that you will ‘transition away from doughnuts’ after being diagnosed with diabetes”, which doesn’t seem to describe the gravity of the situation which he would wish to convey.

Dr Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of the journal Nature is a little more strident, resorting to the usual vacuous mantra that “The science is clear”. To this she adds: “fossil fuels must go. World leaders will fail their people and the planet unless they accept this reality”.

It’s a dead cert that she has influenced if not actually written an editorial in Nature which complains that the failure over the phase-out was “more than a missed opportunity”, it was “dangerous” and ran “counter to the core goals laid down in the 2015 Paris climate agreement” of limiting global heating to 1.5ºC above preindustrial levels.

“The climate doesn’t care who emits greenhouse gases”, the editorial continued – without telling us that human activity is responsible for only a tiny fraction of the total atmospheric CO2, thereby being able sternly to advise us that: “There is only one viable path forward, and that is for everybody to phase out almost all fossil fuels as quickly as possible”.

Any condemnation of the CoP28 outcome, however, would not be complete without input from surface chemist David King who, despite his lack of formal qualifications on climate studies, gets to chair the Climate Crisis Advisory Group, having once been UK chief scientific adviser.

He is suitably robust, telling us that: “the wording of the deal is feeble. Ensuring 1.5ºC remains viable will require total commitment to a range of far-reaching measures, including full fossil fuel phase-out”.

Putting his finger on the weaknesses of the CoP agreement, he says there was a chasm between the stark statement of the emissions cuts needed and the action proposed to deliver those reductions.

“The Cop28 text”, he adds, “recognises there is a need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ to stay in line with 1.5ºC. But then it lists a whole bunch of efforts that don’t have a chance of achieving that”.

And that is the joy of climate change. One can go round and round in circles, never actually achieving anything apart from disrupting the economy and increasing the prices of energy, while keeping the “troops” happy with a never-ending succession of worthy conferences, suitable staged so that, as soon as one ends, the energy can go into planning the next one.

For as long as the zealots can indulge is such purposeless activity, they can completely ignore the real world, as we saw yesterday after the CoP document had launched into its surreal claim that the unit costs of wind power had fallen.

But there is no end to this degree of detachment, which would have us dispense with fossil fuels just at the point when the evidence is mounting on the inadequacy of the alternatives and the horrendous expenses involved in trying to fashion substitutes.

One small indicator of that comes from Ofgem which tells us that, as domestic users of natural gas start to dwindle – supposedly as more and more people move to heat pumps – costs of maintaining the gas network fall on a diminishing band of consumers and their charges start to go up, adding £43 in a year by 2026 and increasing year-on-year until the system shuts down in 2050.

At that point, compensation to the owners of the gas network for the loss of their asset value would amount to £26 billion, while the National Infrastructure Commission estimates that decommissioning the system would add another £74 billion to the bill, bringing the cost to a total of £100 billion, as the price for not using the system.

Yet this is only the start. To service the massive increase in electricity consumption, to feed heat pumps and the home chargers for the growing fleet of electric vehicles, at least £54 billion will have to be spent on upgrading the grid, while doubling or even trebling electricity generation capacity would cost untold billions more.

Attempting more accurate costs, though, is a waste of time and the whole transition ramp is fantasy. The chances of the nation having converted to heat pumps and other means of heating are next to zero, especially as existing households would probably have to invest in a total sum north of about £300 billion to “enjoy” the benefits of inferior systems.

As for electric vehicles, such sales as the manufacturers are able to make are going largely to business buyers, with private buyers sticking to conventional internal combustion engine vehicles, to the extent that sales of EVs to this sector are actually falling, despite new car registrations increasing.

The government thinks that 80 percent of new cars and 70 percent of new vans sold in Great Britain are set to be zero emission by 2030, but it is dreaming if it really believes that will happen.

But if Ofgem is being less then encouraging about costs, the OECD is being even less helpful as it warns that the cost of net zero to the global economy will run into trillions of pounds, even if the sums estimated are highly speculative.

The organisation estimates, for instance, that the cost of eliminating coal and cutting back sharply on oil and gas will take 0.2 percentage points off global GDP growth in the coming years.

The cumulative impact, we are told, will leave the world economy 3.7 percent smaller in 2050 than it otherwise would have been. In cash terms, this is equivalent to lost output of $3.6 trillion across the OECD’s 38 member nations.

Net zero will drag on growth as countries are forced to spend heavily to replace their existing power systems with new, cleaner technology and billions must be spent on new infrastructure, such as solar panels and wind farms, to get the same amount of energy output with little economic gain.

And therein lies the madness. Throughout the history of developed nations, money has been invested on infrastructure to make it more efficient, more cost effective and more reliable. Now the global community is being asked to invest trillions of dollars in making their essential system more expensive to run, less efficient and less reliable.

Still though, the politicians are imbued with the mythology that failing to get climate change under control will cost far more than the expenditure on reducing emissions. Many still actually believe this but, as we get closer to the deadlines and the costs mount, resistance will stiffen, as it is already doing.

Perhaps, though, the writing is already on the wall. The more one looks into the outcome of CoP28, the less convincing it looks, as a full-hearted scheme to tackle climate change. It looks more like the parties going through the motions, with no real commitment to meeting emission targets.

As with immigration and other policy issues, there will eventually come a point where the impact of the real world can no longer be ignored. My guess is that CoP28 brought that point a little bit closer. One’s heart bleeds for all those “scientists” who are so devastated.