21 May 2024

From the director

We’ve all known for several years that official estimates of the cost of Net Zero are little more than convenient fictions. I’m not even sure that anyone still pretends that the Climate Change Committee’s figure of £1.5 trillion is not completely discredited.

At the centre of all of these lowball costings are equally fictional figures on the cost of renewable energy. It was therefore good to see Lord Frost trying to pin down energy ministers on the knotty question of why we are offering increasing subsidies to technologies that Whitehall insists are already by far the cheapest. There’s a link to the video towards the end of this newsletter.

The contradiction that Frost highlighted is extremely important, and it is completely indefensible for the Government to try to stick with a position that is logically inconsistent. We will keep asking until they, and their civil servants, tell us the truth.

Elsewhere, the big news of the weekend was the suggestion of a wholesale retreat from Net Zero by the incoming Dutch government. It’s not a done deal yet, and of course the EU may prove a major barrier to delivering, but it’s yet another sign that the tide is turning.

Best wishes

Andrew

As always, please don’t reply to this email address, which is not monitored.

The headlines

Mandatory heat pumps abolished as Dutch government begins Net Zero rollback
The Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2024

Electric car disaster as EU ports fill up with 100,000s of Chinese models no one wants
Daily Express, 17 May 2024

European utilities cut renewable targets as high costs and low power prices bite
Financial Times, 19 May 2024

Just Stop Oil eco-zealots will be forced to pay compensation to the people whose lives they make a misery
Daily Mail, 18 May 2024

Editorial: The Tories should go to war on net zero excess
The Daily Telegraph, 19 May 2024

Labour accused of setting 'unrealistic' short-term climate goals
Daily Mail, 16 May 2024

Ross Clark: Tony Blair’s Foundation takes Ed Miliband to task over Net Zero
The Spectator, 16 May 2024

Jeremy Warner: Idiotic net zero rules are driving Europe’s carmakers to extinction
The Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2024

Cambridge professor slams climate ‘scientists’ peddling catastrophism
Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 20 May 2024

Roger Pielke Jr: How Democrats Left the IPCC Behind
The Honest Broker, 20 May 2024

The detail

Mandatory heat pumps abolished as Dutch government begins Net Zero rollback

The Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2024

Geert Wilders ushers in new Right-wing coalition government that pledges to reverse green policies

The Netherlands will tear up rules forcing homeowners to buy heat pumps as part of a war on net zero by Geert Wilders and the Dutch farmers’ party.

Six months after his shock election victory, Mr Wilders this week struck an agreement to usher in a Right-wing coalition government of four parties. “We are writing history,” he said as he announced the programme for the new government.

The new coalition marks the first time that a party focused on the interests of the agricultural sector has got into power in the Netherlands. Earlier this year, mass farmers’ protests swept Europe.

The coalition pact includes pledges to reverse green policies introduced under the previous government to hit EU climate targets, including compulsory buyouts of polluting farms. It also plans to end subsidies for electric cars in 2025 and rejects an EU demand that the Dutch reduce livestock numbers to cut pollution.

The Dutch branch of Greenpeace said the coalition agreement was “an attack on nature”. The deal has put Mr Wilders, the Party for Freedom leader who has been described as the “Dutch Trump”, and his coalition partners on a collision course with the European Commission.

The incoming government is demanding that Brussels allows the Netherlands to emit more nitrogen per hectare than other EU countries beyond 2026, when a temporary exception for the Dutch expires. Dutch judges had ordered the halting of all new construction projects in the midst of a housing crisis until the Netherlands met its EU nitrogen targets.

The last government’s buyout plan to reduce nitrogen emissions, which are caused by agriculture, precipitated a string of tractor protests.

The BBB triumphed in regional elections after a vote dominated by the tractors’ protests that inspired similar populist uprisings against EU green rules across Europe. In the general election held after the last government collapsed, the BBB, formed in 2019, won seven seats – a seven-fold increase since the previous elections in 2021.

It was the first European farmers’ party to get elected into parliament since the EU set its net zero objective. It won 4.6 per cent of the vote, while Mr Wilders won 23.5 per cent, equivalent to 37 seats.

The BBB also demanded the end of a law that would require homeowners to switch to a hybrid heat pump when replacing their central heating boiler from 2026.

The act, introduced shortly after the EU announced its objective to install at least 10 million additional heat pumps by 2027 to hit its 2050 net zero goal, would have made them standard in Dutch homes.

Switching to heat pumps would have driven down Dutch household use of natural gas for heating, which is the largest source of its gas consumption, equivalent to about 30 per cent in total.

Caroline van der Plas, the BBB leader, said she was “mega-proud” of her party, which boasted that a “large part” of its manifesto was reflected in the pact. The party said: “Thanks to BBB’s efforts, the mandatory heat pump will be abolished.”

Full story

Electric car disaster as EU ports fill up with 100,000s of Chinese models no one wants

Daily Express, 17 May 2024

Major EU ports are almost full to capacity with Chinese electric vehicles (EVs) that no one wants to buy. A slump in sales across Europe has caused parking lots at the Belgian ports of Antwerp and Zeebrugge to fill up with the Chinese imports.

The parking lots are each able to accommodate about 130,000 vehicles and are crammed full of MGs, BYDs, Nios, XPengs, Lynk & Cos, Omodas and Hongqis, among others.

Chinese EV companies have aggressively targeted European markets as they look to take advantage of the EU's green agenda.

Under the regulation, new cars sold in the EU must achieve 55 percent emission reductions from 2030-34 compared with 2021, while vans must attain a 50 percent cut.

But as of 2035, all cars and vans sold in the EU must have 100 percent emission reductions.

In an effort to encourage drivers to go green, many EU states have offered generous incentives using millions of euros of taxpayers' money.

Yet EV sales in March slumped by 11.3 percent overall across the EU, with purchases in Germany down by as much as 28.9 percent.

Full story

European utilities cut renewable targets as high costs and low power prices bite

Financial Times, 19 May 2024

Trend of scaling back and reviewing plans highlights difficult economics of transitioning away from fossil fuels

A number of major European power companies have scaled back or are reviewing their targets to develop renewable energy because of high costs and low electricity prices, in a sign of the difficulties of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Statkraft, Europe’s largest renewable energy producer, said this month that it was reviewing its annual targets for new renewables capacity, while Portuguese energy company EDP is cutting back its plans, citing high interest rates and lower power prices.

At the same time, Denmark’s Ørsted — the world’s largest offshore wind developer — has slashed its renewable targets for 2030 by more than 10GW, enough to supply potentially millions of homes, after it was forced to abandon two large projects in the US because of rising costs.

Full story

Just Stop Oil eco-zealots will be forced to pay compensation to the people whose lives they make a misery

Daily Mail, 18 May 2024

Just Stop Oil will be forced to pay compensation under new plans being drawn up by Dowing Street to combat its protest mayhem.

The group, along with other eco-clowns, will have to pay people whose lives their antics disrupt under the commissioned review into political violence and disruption.

Those who can prove they endured loss, distress or suffering from an illegal protest would be entitled by law to reimbursement.

The Telegraph reported that the plans are supported in principle by Downing Street and are due to be announced on Tuesday.

Led out by Lord Walney, the independent Government adviser, the plans are intended to bring sanctions upon protesters who hold up ambulances, stop or delay employees from getting to work, and losing businesses money.

It may also extend to students being prevented from getting to classes or getting their degrees, like with the recent pro-Palestinian protests at universities.

The review will set out more than 40 recommendations for dealing with disruption.

The Telegraph reported that the review will recommend the Home Office and Ministry of Justice to come up with a legal framework for compensation.

A Home Office source told the newspaper that if JSO organises a major roadblock and someone cannot get to work or miss a hospital appointment, there would be a framework where they could 'more easily sue the organisation'.

Full story

Editorial: The Tories should go to war on net zero excess

The Daily Telegraph, 19 May 2024

The Dutch government’s new programme shows there’s a political market for protecting consumers and prosperity

It is a favourite argument of green campaigners: Britain should go further and faster than other countries in the race to net zero to show climate “leadership”. This has always been dubious. Why would India, China, or any other developing economy deny its people improved living standards just because the UK was doing so?

But now even Western countries are starting to turn against the worst excesses of the green movement. The new Dutch coalition has released its programme for government, and at the heart of it are a swathe of pro-consumer, pro-energy security policies, reversing some of the bizarre environmental schemes introduced by its predecessors.

Among them was a programme to compulsorily purchase farms to meet EU climate targets. The result was a farmers’ revolt and a new insurgent political party. The coalition agreement tears up rules forcing homeowners to buy heat pumps, and scraps an obligation that the Netherlands should pursue a “more ambitious environment policy” than the rest of Europe.

A false conclusion drawn from the recent local and mayoral elections in the UK is that there is no market for politicians who promise to unwind burdensome environmental policies. The failure of Susan Hall – who campaigned on scrapping the expansion of London’s ultra-low emission zone – to win in the city has been taken by some as a vindication of Sadiq Khan’s costly green agenda. It has also been described as a warning to the Tories to shift to the “centre” on net zero.

But Ms Hall significantly outperformed the Conservatives’ national vote share, in a city that is widely considered to be a Labour stronghold. The real lesson of her campaign is that a clear, compelling pledge on a policy that imposes considerable costs on many households galvanised support behind the Conservatives at a time when their national popularity had plummeted.

Rishi Sunak has to some extent recognised this, with his decision to push back the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. But it was only a half-measure, since the Government has kept strict quotas on the proportion of electric cars that manufacturers must sell, which threaten to drive up the price of petrol vehicles. There could be similar issues with the sale of boilers: ministers have only delayed the introduction of a boiler tax, which is meant to encourage the adoption of heat pumps.

The Dutch government, as an EU member, will have to fight tooth and nail to see many of its new policies enacted because of bloc-wide climate targets. The UK has no such restriction on its freedom for manoeuvre. While Labour persists in the delusion that rapid decarbonisation can be achieved, before the requisite technology is ready, without being extraordinarily costly, the Conservatives should stand up for prosperity and the consumer.

Labour accused of setting 'unrealistic' short-term climate goals

Daily Mail, 16 May 2024

Labour’s net zero targets are out of step with public opinion and 'distorting' effective policy on climate change, the Tony Blair Institute warned yesterday.

The organisation, run by the ex-PM, said politicians must focus on infrastructure and technological innovation instead of arbitrary dates.

Sir Keir Starmer previously laid out plans to 'decarbonise' UK power by 2030 – a goal he admitted was 'difficult' but 'doable'.

But new polling for the Tony Blair Institute (TBI) shows just 19 per cent of Britons believe we will achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

TBI senior policy adviser Tone Langengen said: 'It's time for political leaders to stop setting unrealistic new short-term goals, and double down on the technology and innovation that will deliver on long-term commitments.

Full story

Ross Clark: Tony Blair’s Foundation takes Ed Miliband to task over Net Zero

The Spectator, 16 May 2024

Is Tony Blair, like Margaret Thatcher before him, about to become the voice from beyond the political grave that makes life difficult for his party?

Labour’s climate secretary in waiting – Ed Miliband – won’t find a lot of comfort in a paper put out today by the Tony Blair Foundation, Reimagining the UK’s Net Zero Target. The conclusion of the paper, whose authorship is attributed to ‘multiple experts’, is not that Britain should drop its overall target to achieve net zero but that its strategy has become too dogmatic, and revolves around unrealistic targets which, by threatening to make people poorer, are in danger of hurting public support for net zero and setting a damaging precedent for international efforts to tackle climate change.

Just look at this passage:

“Deploying intermittent renewables rapidly and without sufficient focus of storage solutions, frequency services, baseload power and whole-system integration could increase energy costs or reduce energy security, with major economic and social consequences for the country. This is made more challenging by increasingly affordable gas prices making non-renewable sources more economically attractive.”

Ouch! It just so happens that Miliband has proposed a target to fully decarbonise Britain’s electricity grid by 2030 – five years earlier than the current government has proposed – and without much of a plan as to how it can be achieved. Moreover, Miliband has repeatedly asserted that switching to wind and solar will save consumers substantial sums – apparently on the basis that the very high spike in gas and oil prices in 2022 would signal permanently higher prices. It hasn’t. On the contrary, while the cost of oil and gas has fallen substantially over the past 18 months, the cost of building wind and solar farms has rocketed upwards thanks to higher interest rates. With renewables, most of the costs come upfront, meaning that the high cost of credit is particularly bad for profitability.

The Tony Blair Foundation report goes on to warn that an over-rapid effort to reduce emissions from Britain’s power sector will thwart the growth of industries which Britain needs to prosper, such as energy-hungry AI. The foundation says that its work with a think tank Carbon-Free Europe has concluded that most estimates of future power demand woefully underestimate future demand for power. It also challenges the argument, made by Miliband and others, that switching to renewables will promote energy security. ‘Replacing foreign sources of oil and gas with foreign sources of clean technologies displaces one security risk with another’, it asserts. Renewable energy, as well as the car industry, is becoming heavily reliant on Chinese-made batteries.

Full post

Jeremy Warner: Idiotic net zero rules are driving Europe’s carmakers to extinction

The Daily Telegraph, 18 May 2024

Punishing green targets are turbocharging China’s electric car assault

Europe’s motor industry, including that of the UK, faces an extinction event, and in large measure it’s because of fanciful net zero targets enacted in haste, and now being repented at leisure.

True enough, it’s not going to happen overnight; the threatened denouement is on a long fuse and will take some time to show through in significant job losses and decline in market share. But the threat is already real and growing, and shockingly, seems to have taken most policymakers entirely by surprise.

As on much else these days, the threat comes from China and it is not going away. Call it clever industrial strategy if you like, but China has positioned itself uniquely well to take advantage of punishing targets for zero emission vehicles, and on the present trajectory looks likely to clean up.

In the past, China never had much of a motor industry, and what it did have was vastly inferior to its Japanese, European and US counterparts.

Instead of trying to play catch-up, it therefore systematically targeted next-generation all-electric vehicles (EVs), ploughing billions of dollars in state subsidy into ensuring superior design, performance and price.

This is quite an achievement and to be fair on China, its purpose was not that of deliberately undermining the West, initially at least. Rather, the goal was to leapfrog the old technology into an entirely new era of less polluting cars that would ensure cleaner air for Chinese cities and galvanise the domestic vehicle market with home-grown products.

While high income economies pursued the technological cul-de-sacs of diesel and hybrids, China got on with developing the necessary supply chains and today has a stranglehold on many of the raw materials and components needed for battery powered vehicles. As is now generally agreed, its latest models are far in advance of anything that Europe, Japan and the US produces, and not just in terms of performance and price.

If cars are today as much travelling iPads as vehicles, then China has stolen a march in this area of the technology as well, with models believed by some to be superior in their IT even to Tesla.

Last week, the White House took matters into its own hands and slapped a 100pc tariff on all Chinese EVs in a throwback to similar charges that were imposed on Japanese vehicles by the Reagan administration back in the 1980s.

Coming on top of already very considerable tariffs and other barriers to entry, this is Smoot Hawley-style protectionism and is almost certainly illegal under World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules designed to prevent discrimination. Established rules on free trade are once more being tested to destruction by growing superpower rivalry. Whether it was ever possible to have free trade with a country now widely regarded as a hostile power is an interesting question. The US plainly believes not.

For the time being the tariffs shoot at a phantom threat, in that hardly any Chinese EVs are imported into the US market. The decision is instead instructed almost entirely by domestic political considerations. The United Auto Workers are still a powerful force in certain swing states. No one loses votes on a Sinophobic ticket.

But the tariffs also speak to a wider concern about the green transition, which is that if you are going to pursue net zero, you need to carry the voters with you by demonstrating tangible economic benefits.

If many of the transition’s jobs and industries are seen to be going to China, then politically the pursuit of a low carbon future becomes much more difficult.

The last thing the White House wants to see is its near trillion dollar package of green energy tax breaks and subsidies being channelled into Chinese EVs.

In any case, Biden’s tariffs have put the fear of god into Europe’s once mighty auto manufacturers. With the US essentially closed to Chinese EVs, Europe and the UK make an obvious target for China’s excess production.

Made-in-China cars already account for nearly 10pc of the UK market. Publicly, all the big mass market manufacturers say they welcome the competition, but it is plain as a pikestaff that they do not.

China’s EV assault is a far more potent threat than they have ever faced before, and without urgent government intervention, may even be existential.

For the moment, the Chinese manufacturers are treading warily for fear of inviting the same response in Europe as they have encountered in the US.

In its customary plodding and diligent manner, the European Commission is trying to build a case against China, but unlike America it aims to do so within the framework of WTO rules.

The EU is further constrained by the fact that many European manufacturers, as big exporters of conventional internal combustion engine cars to China, fear retaliation.

What’s more, Chinese EVs are much more expensive in Europe than they are back home in China, making it hard to accuse Beijing of dumping.

As ever, the UK finds itself caught in the crossfire.

On the one hand the Government is keen to limit the perceived costs to consumers of net zero by ensuring that EVs are as cheap as possible.

Poor EV take-up, to date, is largely because of high prices. For instance, the all-electric version of the Fiat 500 is £10,000 more than its petrol equivalent. Why buy?

Yet the Government won’t be thanked if low-cost Chinese competition ends up destroying the British motor industry, worth nearly a million jobs and £67bn of annual turnover.

As it is, the Chinese assault is being turbocharged by the Government’s insane zero emissions mandate, which progressively ramps up the proportion of sales that must be EVs.

Companies that don’t meet these thresholds must pay heavy fines. EU requirements are not quite as punishing as Britain’s “world leading” targets, but even so are bad enough. According to outside estimates, VW faces EU fines next year of around €4.5bn (£3.9bn) on its present sales mix. As pure EV manufacturers, most Chinese suppliers face no such penalty.

It is as if in pursuit of net zero we are deliberately allowing China to disable our key industries. Beijing meanwhile shows no sign of changing its economic model in a manner which would reduce these pressures.

Full post

Cambridge professor slams climate ‘scientists’ peddling catastrophism

Chris Morrison, The Daily Sceptic, 20 May 2024

The world of climate science is in a terrible state. Riven with political activists claiming to be scientists, funded by green billionaires and state actors interested only in the Net Zero agenda, reported by blockhead mainstream journalists who believe science can be ‘settled’ – and increasingly being questioned by bored populations fed up with listening to year-after-year, decade-after-decade ‘Jim’ Dale-style claims of boiling and collapsing climates.

That is why the recent paper published in Nature by Cambridge Professor Ulf Buntgen has sent shock waves through a heavily-corrupted climate scientific community. At one point, Buntgen referred to the “ongoing pseudo-scientific chase for record-breaking heatwaves and associated hydroclimatic extremes”. He argued that quasi-religious belief in, rather than the understanding of the complex causes and consequences of climate and environmental changes, “undermines academic principles”.

Professor Buntgen is not a sceptic of the idea that humans control the climate by burning hydrocarbons. It is unlikely he would be published in a major journal like Nature if he was. But he is worried about climate scientists becoming activists by failing to work from actual observations. He is also worried about activists who pretend to be scientists. An excellent example of this can be found in the recent Guardian report that portrayed some of the hysterical claims of 380 “top scientists”. Billed as the views of writers of recent International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, a suitable response might have been ‘spot the scientist’.

The Cambridge geography professor observes that there is a thin line between the use and misuse of scientific certainty and uncertainty, “and there is evidence for strategic and selective communication of scientific information for climate action”. Where to start on this one? There is overwhelming evidence that almost any scientific finding that casts doubt on humans controlling the climate thermostat will be ignored, and if that is unsuccessful, traduced or erased from mainstream view. In extreme cases, and certainly if the findings get any publicity, it might be necessary to put a billionaire-funded ‘fact’ checker on the case. A Guardian journalist helped get a science paper, Alimonti et al, retracted from a major journal because it cast observational doubt on claims of a climate emergency. Google has banned its ads from a page showing accurate satellite temperature on the grounds of “unreliable and harmful claims” of global readings. Less than curiously, the readings from this source happen to be generally lower than those produced by heat-corrupted surface readings. The state-influenced BBC has refused to discuss any sceptical view of the anthropogenic science opinion since at least 2018. Meanwhile, a UN communications official states that the world body “owns” climate science, and the world should know it.

Protected by the political and media class, the well-funded arrogance is off the scale. Buntgen notes that activists often adopt scientific arguments as a source of “moral legitimisation” for their movements, which can be radical and destructive, rather than rational and constructive. “Unrestricted faith in scientific knowledge is, however, problematic because science is neither entitled to absolute truth nor ethical authority”, he says. The notion of science to be explanatory rather than exploratory “is a naïve overestimation that can fuel the complex field of global climate to become a dogmatic ersatz religion for the wider public”, he added.

One well known activist who frequently claims ‘the science’ to shut down sceptical debate is the BBC broadcaster Chris Packham. Last year, he presented a number of Earth programmes that attempted to link past increases in carbon dioxide to rapid rises in temperature – all in the “terror” cause of drawing links with current and upcoming climate collapse. Alas, the ‘science’ shows that over 600 million years there is little or no link between rising CO2 and temperature. But Packham perfected the art of taking imprecise proxy data from the geological record – imprecise as in a margin of error of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years – and comparing it to accurate modern measurements. You can do that of course, but the BBC should surely be under an obligation to provide space for others to dispute the suggestions. No such obligation is evident, needless to say.

Buntgen finds it “misleading” when even prominent organisations, such as the IPCC, tend to overstate scientific understanding of the rate of recent anthropogenic warming relative to the range of past natural temperature variability over 2,000 and even 125,000 years. “The quality and quantity of available climate proxy records are merely too low to allow for a robust comparison of the observed annual temperature extremes in the 21st Century against reconstructed long-term climate means of the Holocene and before”, he observes. Happily, it didn’t stop Packham working back no less than 55 million years.

Full post

Roger Pielke Jr: How Democrats Left the IPCC Behind

The Honest Broker, 20 May 2024

Partisan realignment on the science of climate change

On Wednesday, I’ll be testifying before the Senate Committee on the Budget in a hearing titled, “Droughts, Dollars, and Decisions: Water Scarcity in a Changing Climate.” My testimony is embargoed until then, but after the hearing, I will post my oral and written testimony here and I will be happy to engage questions and comments.

I have been invited by the minority (Republicans) and asked to summarize for the committee the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on drought. The first time I testified before the Senate, in 2002, I was invited by Democrats and I was similarly asked to summarize the findings of the IPCC on extreme events.

That has me thinking about how the views of the IPCC, Democrats, and Republicans1(and my own views as well) may have changed over the past several decades on the science of climate change — and on extreme weather and climate events specifically.

As I will relate in my testimony on Wednesday, the IPCC (Working Group 1) has been remarkably consistent in its periodic assessment reports in its findings on the detection and attribution of trends in extreme events. My research with many colleagues over decades has often been cited in those assessments, and — looking back at my past peer-reviewed studies, commentaries, and testimonies — my views have developed over time but also stayed highly consistent and also consistent with the findings of the IPCC.

Thus, the fact that Democrats used to invite me to testify about the IPCC and now Republicans do cannot be explained by a change in the findings of the IPCC or a rethinking of my own perspectives.

Instead, it’s my observation and experience that the views of the political parties on the assessments of the IPCC has shifted dramatically over the past several decades.2The schematic below shows my impression of how things looked in 2002, when I first testified before Congress. At that time, Democrats, for the most part, had views on climate change and extreme events largely in line with the findings of the IPCC. I’d venture that this is why I was invited by Democrats at the time to testify.

Flash forward to 2024. Much more research has been published and three further IPCC assessments have been produced. Over this time, the IPCC’s bottom-line findings on climate and extreme events have become better supported with evidence and research.

In 2024, here is how I see views of the assessments of the IPCC in the current U.S. Congress.

Democrats — not all, but many — have left the IPCC behind in favor of an extreme view of climate and extreme events. Republicans — not all, but many — find themselves much more in line with the findings of the IPCC on climate and extreme events. Similarly, I’d guess that explains why in recent years I’ve been invited to testify by Republicans.4

Of course, consistency with the IPCC (or not) says little about policy preferences. Democrats remain the party championing action on climate policy and Republicans remain much less supportive. Of course, the key question here is, What action? I have long argued that there are unexplored opportunities for greater bipartisan support for pragmatic energy and adaptation policies that would accelerate decarbonization and reduce vulnerabilities — but that’s a topic for another day.

Policy aside, with respect to the IPCC and climate science, Democrats are currently the party of RCP8.5 and “billion dollar disasters,” while many Republicans express views much more in line with the findings of the IPCC.5

One consequence of this shift in perspective is that some climate activists have sought to delegitimize the IPCC. For instance, Naomi Oreskes has called for the IPCC Working Group 1 to be shut down:

“One step that could help that happen would be for the IPCC to declare the job of WG1 to be done and close it down.

After all, if human-made warming is as unequivocal as these scientists insist, then why do we need more reports to tell us the same thing?”

Others argue that the IPCC has been corrupted by “contrarians”:

“. . . contrarian views against anthropogenic climate disruption can lobby the scientific community, and the IPCC in particular, to be conservative and so reinforce contrarian views in a vicious, self-reinforcing circle.”

The battle for the soul of the IPCC has really only just begun — just wait for the coming battle over letting go of extreme, implausible scenarios.

The science of detection and attribution of extreme events under the IPCC’s longstanding framework can only change very slowly, as the additions to the observational record accumulate slowly as time passes, even under the seemingly glacial pace of IPCC assessments.6 In other words, five years more data on hurricanes, floods, drought, and so on will not alter the fundamental conclusions of the IPCC Working Group 1 on its assessment of long-term trends. At the same time, understandings that the extreme scenario once characterized as “business as usual” is now implausible means that projections of future trends will necessarily be less extreme.

Given these realities, I expect to see more attacks on the IPCC and mainstream climate science by climate activists, including those within the scientific community.

Full post

In the media

Energy minister Lord Callanan signally failed to answer Lord Frost’s question about why we still need to subsidise renewables.

Meanwhile, NZW director Dame Andrea Jenkyns announced that she has secured a Westminster Hall debate on “The True Cost of Net Zero”.

Support us

Dear Reader, Net Zero Watch only survives through the generosity of our donors. If you would like to help us fight for energy and climate realism, click the button below.