COP29: Shifting tides and climate fallacies – Andrew Kenny - Biznews

At COP29 in Azerbaijan, the usual climate rhetoric met a surprising twist. Attendance dropped sharply, major nations stayed away, and the host nation, led by President Ilham Aliyev, openly defended its fossil fuel economy. With growing rebellion against expensive renewables and Net Zero goals, the conference underscored a shifting global perspective. Andrew Kenny critiques COP29, dismantles common climate fallacies, and argues for a science-driven, pragmatic approach to energy and development.

Andrew Kenny

I was not going to bother to comment on the usual wretched nonsense of the latest UN climate change conference, COP29, taking place in Azerbaijan (a country between Russia, Armenia and Iran). 

I knew they would say nothing new, and sure enough they didn’t, except perhaps for a surprising address from the host country. But some new conclusions about COP conferences did come out, and it is these I should like to discuss. I should also like to list some of the common fallacies about climate change, from all sides. (A myth is a legend that might be based on fact or not; a fallacy is an idea that is just wrong.)

There was widespread agreement, met with consternation on one side, delight on the other, that COP is failing completely in its aims of persuading countries to reduce their CO2 emissions drastically. The people of more and more countries are rebelling against the replacement of good, cheap, reliable fossil fuels with horribly expensive, environmentally damaging solar and wind for grid electricity. 

The German economy has been crippled by phasing out fossil fuels and nuclear, and the attempted replacement by staggeringly expensive and largely useless wind turbines and solar arrays; her industry is shrinking. The UK is going the same route. Ordinary people have had enough. 

Attendance at COP29 was sharply down from previous COPs. The airport had fewer expensive jets releasing huge amounts of CO2 to bring in the super-rich green elite to condemn air travel for the poor – so COP29 had this one practical success in reducing CO2. Most of the major countries stayed away. An exception was the UK, represented by her new Labour PM, Keir Starmer, who must be the most destructive climate idiot on the planet. Within a short time, he has proved even worse than the awful Tory PMs before him, and he is hell-bent on destroying British industry with sky-high energy prices from solar and wind.

By far the best speech at COP29 came from Ilham Aliyev, President of Azerbaijan, the host country, whose economy depends on its fossil fuel resources. He declared Azerbaijan’s oil and gas were a “gift from God”, and he was going to continue drilling for them and pumping them as hard as possible. In other words, “F- y-!” to the disgusting hypocrites of the rich, smug, developed world. India and China, massive emitters of CO2, have been in practice saying the same thing but not so openly. (Neither of their leaders has attended COP29 so far.)

The mad quest for “Net Zero” (zero emissions of CO2 by 2050) has collapsed. Thank heaven for that. But it has collapsed because achieving Net Zero would ruin the world’s economy and cause mass poverty. The reason it should have collapsed is the fact that rising CO2 is doing nothing but good; it is having no effect on the climate (it has no effect above 150ppm) but is doing plants a power of good. This is backed by overwhelming science and by historical record. I now want to list some of the fallacies I hear all the time, mostly from the climate alarmists but some from my side, which says there is no reason for alarm. Let me start with my side.

Volcanoes release more CO2 than the burning of fossil fuels. Wrong. Volcanic activity in recent centuries has been very low, and its only climate change effect has been cooling from the white aerosols it releases, which reflect sunlight upwards. The rise in CO2 in the air, from about 280ppm in the mid-19th century to about 430ppm now, is caused by burning fossil fuels. I can prove that by isotope percentages and by observing the very slow rate of CO2 releases as seas warm.

CO2 is such a small percentage of the air that it cannot possibly have a major effect on anything. Wrong. Tiny concentrations of gases, liquids or solids can have massive effects for good or bad. Think of the effects of tiny amounts of Vitamin C on humans or the effects of a tiny dose of cobra venom. CO2 is about 430ppm in the atmosphere or about 0.043%. If the atmosphere had 0.043% of SF6 (the best electrical insulator we know and a ferocious greenhouse gas), we’d be in big trouble. More dramatic: look in the mirror. That being looking back at you could not exist without that 0.043% of CO2. CO2 is a gas of life. Without it, all life except for very primitive bacteria living in the ocean depths would expire. But it would be nice to have far more than 0.043%.

The rest of the fallacies come from the alarmists.

Rising CO2 is causing global warming. Wrong. CO2 is a weak greenhouse gas. Laboratory testing in dry air shows that CO2 has a considerable warming effect up to about 150ppm; after that it is very slight. In the real world it has no warming effect at all above 150ppm. Professor William Happer and another have published a physics paper giving the theoretical reasons for this. The maths is beyond me, but the paper correctly models other effects, previously unexplained, such as the behaviour of the Antarctic.

CO2 is now at an unprecedented, dangerous high. Wrong. It is now at an unusually low level in the history of the Earth, far too low for a healthy planet. About ten million years ago it had sunk to a very dangerous low, threatening mass extinction. After the last ice age, it rose a bit (because warming seas release CO2) and in the last 150 years humans have lifted it out of the danger zone by burning fossil fuels. It needs to be higher.

Rising global temperatures can only be explained by rising CO2. Wrong. Graphs of temperature and CO2 concentrations over the last 10,000 years, taken from Greenland ice cores, show no correlation between the two. For all this period until the last 150 years, CO2 was steady at about 270ppm, while temperatures went up and down. The industrial era may be said to begin in 1700 AD. For most of the pre-industrial period, the 9,000 years before that, global temperatures were higher than now. Only in the horrible Little Ice Age (LIA), about 1300 to 1850, were temperatures consistently lower than now. If there is no correlation between temperatures and CO2 levels, there is a strong correlation between solar activity and clouds and temperatures. The fewer clouds, the more warming; solar electromagnetic activity reduces clouds by reducing nucleation sites caused by incoming galactic radiation. Reduced solar activity increases cloud cover, causing cooling. There was record solar activity during the LIA, high activity during the Mediaeval Warm Period and high activity in the 20th Century.

Rising CO2 causes more floods and drought. Wrong. This argument goes: “Rising CO2 causes warming (wrong); warming causes more evaporation (right) and so this causes more rainfall and more floods.” But the same people that say this, also say that rising CO2 is causing more droughts! When you ask them to explain the paradox, they start waffling about CO2 upsetting some delicate balance, which is nonsense again. There has been no increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the last century. They have either stayed the same or declined somewhat. The recent floods in Spain, reported by the mainstream media as unprecedented proof of global warming, were nothing of the sort. Rainfall data from Spain showed there was heavier rainfall in the early 20th Century and much worse flooding during the cold of the LIA.

Warming causes wilder weather. Wrong. Quite the opposite, it causes milder more equable weather. The most horrible weather extremes of the last 10,000 years were in the ghastly cold of the LIA. These have been extensively reported (example: “Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century”, by Geoffrey Parker.) Even worse were the real ice ages before that, with unimaginably terrible weather in the 90,000 years before the present era.

Rising total energy causes hurricanes. Wrong. This fallacy is countlessly reported. A recent article in The Economist, which is rational about economics but irrational about climate change, reported that the science of hurricanes was simple: the more energy in the sea, the more hurricanes. This shows not the slightest understanding of the simplest principles of thermodynamics. A hurricane is a heat machine, which operates between a heat source (the warm sea surface) and a heat sink (the cold air above it). The bigger the difference in temperatures between the two, the more energy is available for work and the stronger the hurricane. If the heat source and the heat sink were both at the same very high temperature, there would be more total energy and no energy available for work – so no hurricanes at all.

Attempts to reduce CO2 by turning to renewables are win-win even if CO2 does not cause climate change. Wrong. They are lose-lose. Solar and wind for grid electricity are bad for the economy and the environment.

Here is a more difficult class of fallacy, which isn’t really a fallacy at all, but which assumes some fallacy to make a good point.

Even if the UN’s predictions about the effects of rising CO2 on global temperatures were correct, efforts to reduce it would be prohibitively expensive with miniscule reductions of global temperature rise.Well, we know the UN’s predictions are wrong, but this argument does make a very good point. The first advocate of such an argument was Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish activist famous for his book “The Sceptical Environmentalist”. One of his central arguments is that money and resources would be far better spent in other ways to improve human welfare and the environment than by trying to reduce CO2, where the results would only be a miniscule reduction in global temperatures a long time into the future. This argument has been developed further by the excellent Willis Eschenbach in a recent post in the excellent website, Watts Up With That (Keir Starmer’s Climate Madness – Watts Up With That?). Starmer intends to spend £321 billion (R7.4 trillion) in trying to reduce British CO2 emissions by 81% by 2050. This would destroy the British economy. Eschenbach calculates that if the UN is correct (it isn’t) this would reduce global temperatures by 0.0007°C in 2050 – in other words by seven ten thousandths of a degree. Actually it will reduce them by 0.0ºC – but you get his point.

I want climate madness to end when everyone discovers that the science behind it is nonsense. Unfortunately, it is ending for other reasons. Trump is going to knock it on its head. But he is too lazy and impulsive to learn the simple science that shows it is nonsense. Yet, right at hand, he had the perfect advisor, Dr William Happer, to spell out the science to him. 

Trump might be turning to Robert Kennedy to advise him on the faults with the medical science authorities and the big drug corporations in the USA. Kennedy has spoken good sense about the terrible Covid vaccines, but he has unfortunately spoken nonsense about AIDS, autism and other matters. 

Happer has never spoken nonsense about anything. I know there are plenty of other good scientists who understand climate science (I can name them) and could advise Trump. Why on Earth doesn’t he use them?

I listened to a debate between Marc Morano, an American, who runs the website, Climate Depot, and an English activist of Just Stop Oil. Morano is superbly cheerful and ebullient, and his website joyfully collects every stupid prediction, every idiotic proposed policy, every mad utterance of the climate alarmists, and cites proper scientists refuting them. 

I didn’t get the English activist’s name but was interested to hear him say he had once worked for a big oil company. The debate happened at COP29. The English activist spoke utter rubbish about climate science but did say some revealing things about the oil corporations. He claimed they knew perfectly well that their oils were causing catastrophe and were lying about it. I think they are too stupid for that. 

Corporate executives usually have no scientific training at all and are easily misled by political fashions. Oil executives are becoming increasingly woke, some even adopting the ideology of ESG. Their Human Resources departments resemble sociology departments at woke universities, filled with DEI types. So the oil executives are both too stupid and too cowardly to discover the truth about CO2, that it is not causing climate change, and tell the truth to Just Stop Oil loudly and clearly. This they don’t do. Instead they mumble excuses, which the activist wrongly assumed meant they knew rising CO2 was dangerous. I attended the last online AGM of Sasol, where I did tell them the truth about CO2, but it had no effect at all. I’m not going to bother this year, which probably shows my feebleness. Marc Morano would attend every SASOL AGM.

Final fallacy: Africa is more susceptible to climate change than the rest of the world. Wrong. There have been many ludicrous claims that almost every country on Earth is warming twice as fast as every other country on Earth. But the most insistent claim is that Africa, which emits low CO2, will be hardest hit by climate change. 

In fact, it will be, and always has been, least affected by climate change, which is natural. The climate is always changing but it happens least at the equator, most at the poles. The higher the latitude, the more the climate changes. Modern humans evolved near the equator about 300,000 years ago. Since that time, temperatures at the equator have changed very little. South Africa is under no threat from climate change. 

But we are under a huge threat from the green imperialists who want us to stop using our huge resources of coal and want us to give up looking for oil and gas. They want to stop us developing. We must resist these new green colonialists and use our own resources to our best advantage. Above all, we must turn to science, not ideology.

Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal

https://www.biznews.com/rational-perspective/2024/11/17/cop29-climate-fallacies-andrew-kenny

This article was first published on the Daily Friend.