‘We’re all going to die’ – Part 98
ONCE every five years, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes its latest Assessment Report on the state of the climate. And every five years, governments get together to write their own scary version, known as the Summary for Policymakers (SPM). This has very little in common with the full scientific report, which nobody reads and won’t appear for several months.
The latest SPM has been released this week in an attempt to ramp up the propaganda for the next climate jamboree, COP26 in Glasgow. As the BBC’s ‘environment correspondent’, the absurd Matt McGrath, reports, there are all sorts of predictions of a two-metre sea level rise, an ice-free Arctic, droughts, floods, hurricanes, an increasing occurrence of some extreme events ‘unprecedented in the historical record’, and wildfires.
Yet curiously the report offers little evidence that any of this extreme weather is actually getting any worse, despite the world’s climate warming up since the Little Ice Age.
The whole thing is, of course, a charade. Literally billions of pounds worth of grants are paid to thousands of climate scientists to come up with ‘the right results’. And while Western governments and media take it all very seriously, the rest of the world merely pays lip service.
The Paris Agreement six years ago, for instance, did not commit the world to keeping temperature rise under 2C, as some like Matt McGrath would like you to believe. Far from it, the actual commitments made ensured that emissions would carry on rising just as before. Indeed, between 2015 and 2019 emissions of carbon dioxide in non-OECD countries increased by 7 per cent.
Meanwhile South Africa is demanding more blood money: $750billion a year for developing countries. Under UN rules, by the way, developing countries, which strangely include China, India, Saudi Arabia and South Korea, are under no obligation at all to cut emissions.
And global temperatures? They’re no higher now than they were twenty years ago!
That was the heatwave that was!
There has been much hullabaloo concerning a nice bit of warm weather last month. But the data shows it was not extraordinary at all.
According to the Central England Temperature series, the long-running, high-quality dataset which has been carefully pieced together over many years, last month was only the 21st hottest July since records began in 1878, based on daily maximum temperatures.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/index.html
It is interesting that July 1921, a hundred years ago, was much hotter, with average temperatures a full two degrees higher.
The Met Office’s Monthly Weather Report at the time called the month ‘remarkable for the heat and drought’,with many places posting record temperatures. That July was part of a remarkably warm and dry year, the driest on record for England. The hot, dry weather was not confined to Britain, but affected much of Europe and Asia. The Great Famine that ravaged Russia claimed an estimated 5million lives and has been called ‘one of the worst human disasters of the 20th century’.
However the Met Office has decided that last month was really the fifth warmest July on record. Of course, their figures are based on temperature readings from Heathrow and a host of unsuitable urban sites, such as Cambridge, Bradford and Cardiff.
It is well known that temperatures can be several degrees higher in towns compared with rural areas; it is called the urban heat island effect or UHI. The Met Office numbers therefore overstate the warming.
Scientifically and statistically, the Met Office data is worthless. It is very useful for propaganda purposes though.
The end of coal?
In the week that it was announced that Britain’s last coal power plant at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, will close prematurely in 2024, a study revealed that Germany is still getting nearly a quarter of its electricity from coal.
Indeed, Germany has spent the last decade building 11 coal power plants totalling 10 GW. Even last year saw an opening at Datteln. These state of the art, clean power stations will remain in use for many years, not least because Merkel is shutting all nuclear plants down by next year.
Unsurprisingly, Germany’s per capita emissions of carbon dioxide are 43 per cent higher than in the UK.
Meanwhile on the other side of the world, China continues remorselessly to increase its coal power output. Generation from thermal power, predominantly coal, for the first half of this year is 7.4 per cent up on 2019 as new capacity comes on stream. By comparison, increases in renewable generation are tiny. Despite the hype, wind and solar power still only account for less than one tenth of China’s electricity.
Maggie saves the planet
Boris Johnson had his tongue firmly in his cheek this week when he claimed that Margaret Thatcher had given Britain a head start in reducing carbon emissions by shutting so many coal mines.
As we know, they were closed for economic reasons long before Mrs Thatcher was bamboozled by her advisers, such as Crispin Tickell and John Houghton, into believing the global warming threat. And as Christopher Booker related here, she quickly became sceptical.
But the real irony is the crocodile tears of the Labour Party, who claim to be shocked at Johnson’s heartlessness. Labour, of course, long ago abandoned their traditional working-class voters and are now only interested in their North London woke agenda, prepared to sacrifice millions of jobs on the altar of the Great Green Goddess!
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