"Climate change" debunked

The Victorian Government, despite Melbourne's what can be at times bitter late autumn and winter climate (in southern hemisphere terms) has a mad proposed moratorium on new connections for gas heating, hot water and cooking to 'achieve its 2030 target of cutting carbon emissions by up to half'.

This is among a number of long term threats to APA, and will see Victorians pay more for energy. There is no sound intellectual basis for this unnecessarily alarmist, Green-Left sort of public policy.

Interestingly, in today's 'The Weekend Australian', there's comment about a new book by former Barack Obama Chief Scientist Steven Koonin:

"Demands to act on climate change reached fever pitch at President Joe Biden’s climate summit last month, where 40 world leaders gathered on Zoom to outdo each other in their ambitions to slash carbon dioxide emissions to achieve “net zero” by 2050.

For well over half the population, to question the urgency of “action on climate change” is to question science itself, to wish a dystopian climate carnage on mankind. “It’s the existential crisis of our times,” the President said. “The signs are unmistakeable. The science is undeniable. But the cost of inaction keeps mounting.”

Yet for New York University scientist Steven Koonin, Barack Obama’s former chief scientist, it’s anything but. The gap between rhetoric and facts has never been greater. His new book, Unsettled, released digitally this week, hasn’t lobbed a grenade so much as fired a bazooka at the climate “consensus”.

“Leaders talk about existential threat, climate emergency, disaster, crisis, but in fact when you actually read the literature, there is no support for that kind of hysteria at all,” he says. “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change in coming decades, much less what effect humans will have on it.”

Climate scientist and author Steven Koonin.

Koonin, “increasingly dismayed” by climate alarmism, will be hard to “cancel”. He’s still alive, a self-declared Democrat, with impeccable academic and career credentials: a Caltech-trained physicist who became chief scientist at BP in 2005 and then Barack Obama’s undersecretary for science in 2009.

Yes, the planet has warmed, he concedes, and the burning of fossil fuels is partly to blame, but the impact is tiny, complex and uncertain, and occurs against a backdrop of natural climate change over thousands of years that dwarfs the recent increase in temperature.

At least half the warming since 1950 — about 0.7 degrees — is due to human influence, but it could just as easily be a quarter, climate science says.

“We are trying to understand a chaotic, multiscale system with incomplete observations, so it’s no surprise the science isn’t settled,” Koonin says. Humans affect only around 1 per cent of the world’s natural energy flows.

“We have this big system and we’re tickling it a bit,” he adds.

Since 1880, as far back as modern measurements go, global average temperature has risen haphazardly by about one degree centigrade. But it rose as rapidly between 1910 and 1940 — when emissions and the Earth’s population were tiny fractions of today’s levels — as the average temperature did over the past 30 years.

“Variations in the temperature are not at all unusual; what’s of interest is to what extent the changes are driven by humans or part of natural variation,” Koonin says, pointing out that the world’s temperature has been much higher, and much lower, in the distant past

The 1600s saw a little ice age, while the dinosaurs put up with much warmer weather.

In short, zoom in, and it looks scary; zoom out, and it’s hard to see what all the fuss is about...

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What’s worrying is that the advocates for drastic action to stop climate change, in the media and bureaucracy tend to be the same people who have made significant errors about COVID-19, a phenomenon that should have been much easier to forecast than the climate 100 years from now.

For all our sakes, let’s hope they aren’t so wrong about the outlook for global temperatures, given the increasing marginal cost of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

In 1982, the head of the United Nations Environment Program forecast “an ecological catastrophe as devastating as a nuclear war”.

Nothing remotely like that has come true.

If Koonin’s less alarmist take on climate science prove mores in keeping with reality, a lot of people will be very embarrassed in coming decades. For everyone else, much poorer than they might have been, the amusement will be small consolation."