Davos Doom-mongers herald a new dark age for climate science–Sherelle Jacobs
By Paul Homewood
h/t Mike Jackson
I mentioned Sherelle Jacobs earlier. This, I believe, is the second sceptical piece in the last couple of weeks:
There is something sinister in the stiff mountain air at Davos this year. As ever, the spectacle is almost burlesque in its grotesqueness: the world’s elite has descended on the luxury ski resort in their private jets to discuss global warming over pan-seared Indonesian soy cutlets cooked by a celebrity vegan chef flown in from Canada. But underneath the seedy hypocrisy lingers an even murkier mendacity: an unthinking consensus on how to “save the planet”.
Take the speech by Greta Thunberg, who rattled off Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change figures pertaining to requisite cuts in carbon emissions. “I’ve been repeating these numbers over and over again,” she droned as gormless CEOs and UN apparatchiks blinked at the hoodie-clad managtivist standing before them, grinding on about missed deadlines and squandered targets.
Greta’s bland, corporate-friendly strategy is intriguing; it reinforces her ruse – that the science is mind-numbingly clear, the necessary actions are unquestionable, and that her task is simply to “continue to repeat” it until we are bored.
Naturally, Donald Trump was having none of it. He let rip at this paper-shufflers’ PR stunt, dismissing the “predictions of the apocalypse” and “prophets of doom”. In his own ham-fisted way, the president was groping at – if not quite grasping – the disconcerting truth. Global warming is happening, but the climate science itself is messy, mystifying and ambivalent; the certainty with which eco-warriors present their case is thus disgracefully dishonest.
The causal links made between global warming and the Australian bushfires is one example. Greta has tweeted her despair at the world’s failure “to make the connection between the climate crisis and extreme weather events and nature disasters like the #AustralianFires”. But the inconvenient truth is that scientists have not definitively linked the bushfires to climate change alone. It may be a factor among many. The Australian Academy of Science itself concedes: “Population growth, climate change, temperature extremes, droughts, storms, wind and floods are intersecting in ways that are difficult to untangle.”
The misleading bushfires rhetoric barely scratches the surface of the problems with this consensus. “We know perfectly well” that humans are behind the heating of the planet, Sir David Attenborough proclaimed in a recent BBC interview: this is now a “crisis moment”. But Sir David’s onomatopoeically crumbly prose can’t distract from the shaky foundations of his apocalyptic assertions.
You don’t need to dispute that man is contributing to global warming to question whether it is healthy to talk about the issue with such unwavering certainty, or to ask whether the situation is so urgent as to require the impoverishment of billions to fix it. Scientists have not indisputably proved that other factors are not also contributing. Studies of the heat going into the oceans by dissenters like the Israeli physicist Nir Shaviv, for example, suggest the Sun has a large effect on climate change. Eco-catastrophists have not credibly invalidated his findings, published in the prestigious Journal of Geophysical Research.
Such uncertainties matter when people are being asked to make vast sacrifices in the name of reaching net zero carbon. All our efforts may not make a difference anyway. But contrary views are not permitted. Some researchers are chilled by the shift from scientific endeavour based on theory and evidence to reliance on IPCC-endorsed predictive modelling. Here the cult of managerialism and the mania of eco-catastrophism have dangerously intersected – as university bureaucrats push for research projects which pull in mouth-watering computer-based investment.
Like Galileo and Descartes on the eve of the Enlightenment, scholars have found subtle ways to dodge the suspicions of inquisitorial reactionaries. They discreetly publish papers without press releases, or with incongruous “eco-consensus” inserts, even though these often jar with their findings.
When did Western civilisation enter this new Dark Age? The creepy scenes of Greta’s machinic protestations at Davos offer a clue. Managerialism, an ideology that has filled the vacuum created by the collapse of communism and post-Seventies disillusionment with market capitalism, infects every corner of society. The twist is that it relies for its survival on the flagrant denial of the chaotic complexity upon which it feeds. It deems that all problems (like all corporations) share more similarities than differences, and can thus be solved through generic, optimised processes.
Thus activists like Greta reduce climate change to a clearly diagnosed illness that can be treated by meeting precise deadlines, while the rest of us pay the bill. And thus our elites – who share the same arrogant belief that we have all the expertise to address the Earth’s intricacies – cravenly refuse to acknowledge anything that throws into doubt established “facts”. Sadly, until the era of managerialism falls in on itself, we are probably stuck.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/01/23/davos-doom-mongers-herald-new-dark-age-climate-science/
I particularly like this bit, which has rarely been touched upon in the media before:
Here the cult of managerialism and the mania of eco-catastrophism have dangerously intersected – as university bureaucrats push for research projects which pull in mouth-watering computer-based investment.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Meanwhile our Greenblob government continues its policy of closing down industry and wasting even more money on the climate change scam:
Latest hogwash from the CCC here…
‘Committee on Climate Change warns a fifth of all agricultural land needs to be released for climate mitigation to help the UK achieve carbon neutrality’
https://www.climatechangenews.com/2020/01/23/uk-must-cut-land-use-emissions-two-thirds-meet-2050-goal-advisers-warn/
A Telegraph columnist refuting an article printed only yesterday? A DT columnist actually saying there are two sides to an argument? Crivens! My only criticism is the use of the word “onomatopoiecally” when referring to St Davids “rumbling”, he has no idea about the shaky foundations he is rumbling about!
Hi Joan It is good to know that you want to continue reading. Here is an interesting piece from the Telegraph posted by Paul Homewood on his blog. My only criticism would be that Sherelle Jacobs misses the point of the anti-CO2 movement which was started IN ORDER TO prevent the development of industry where there is none, to ruin industry where it exists and, generally, to reduce prosperity, preserve primitive economies and decrease human populations. That it would all cost billions (and increase fuel poverty in Scotland) does not upset these anti-people nasties. The costs, sacrifices and poverty are what they want; the desired outcomes, not collaterel damage. Unfortunately, most criticisms of alarmists like Greta do not make the point that the anti-CO2 movement’s PURPOSE is to create poverty. Poverty is not collateral damage caused by reducing fossil fuel use. Poverty is the goal. Ariane
Ms. Jacobs states: ” In his own ham-fisted way, the president was groping at – if not quite grasping – the disconcerting truth. Global warming is happening, but the climate science itself is messy, mystifying and ambivalent; the certainty with which eco-warriors present their case is thus disgracefully dishonest.”
Apparently, to Ms. Jacobs, stating calmly, yet forcefully, what are the objectives of the Trump Administration and should be the objectives of every country is “ham-fisted”? I have watched his speech twice and may watch it yet again. He made the case for what the United States would be doing in order to lift those who have been neglected, left behind and actually harmed by prior elitists. He stated what already had been done in his administration. He made a plea for every country to put its citizens first and look make their well-being a central policy. I have heard that his remarks were well received by many there…..Ms. Thunberg excepted.
Her notion that Donald Trump does not grasp the “global warming” situation is preposterous. Apparently she joins the crowd who thinks him slow-witted and bumbling. She and they do so at their own peril. Does she not realize that we are still rebounding from the last glacial episode. It has been shown that we are warming in one of the coldest periods in any recent times and that is a good thing. For the elites who have made a hobby of pushing the United States around, expecting us to grovel and beg forgiveness for existing while putting vast amounts of our taxpayers’ money into their hands……there is a new sheriff in town. His name is Donald John Trump and he is no fool.
No body who has looked after a family member as they pass 85 would take any serious notice of what they are rambling on about on a given day. Note Attenborough watchers
Same goes for 17 year-olds.
Hang on a bit here. As an 84 year old I ramble on about the stupid naivety of Attenborough; but many of the younger generation take no notice or their eyes glaze over; so I often keep my council to avoid contention. After all it is not I who will reap the consequences; for it is writ that each generation must make it’s own mistakes.
Why not wait and see if there is any validity of the alarmists’ warnings before crippling the nations and their peoples emitting less than half the global greenhouse gases ?
Anyway, 1)decarbonisation is like an untested medicament and2)UK emits one third of 1% of the planet’s total manmade CO2, so we could safely opt out of these crazily damaging means of proving nothing useful..
It’s good to see some fight back, but again language is important, as in: “Global warming is happening”
But as a recovery from global cooling. There is a claimed increase of 1.1 C since 1850, the probable end of the Little Ice Age. Thank goodness, why would we wish that earlier period back?
The last 30 years in the UK have been warmer than the previous 30 years, 1961-90, a period with some of the coldest temperatures of the 20th century. The CET annual average declined from 1949 to 1986, by 1.88°C, in spite of an atmospheric CO2 increase of 36.5ppm.
There was a sharp rise of 0.72°C in 1988 and a further 0.73°C in 1989, to reach the CET high of 10.63°C in 1990. There has been no tracking of CO2 by temperature. Annual changes in Mauna Loa CO2 have not correlated with annual changes in CET since the start of that record in 1959.
There has been little increase in the CET since 1990, with a peak of 10.95C in 2014. 2019 was the 24th warmest in the CET, whilst CO2 has continued its monotonic rise, as reported here. https://www.thegwpf.com/down-and-up-2019-global-temperature/?
“Some Methodological Issues in Climate Science” Jamal Munshi
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2873672
“Although the science of the greenhouse effect of atmospheric CO2 is well established, all efforts to relate this phenomenon to fossil fuel emissions has failed because of deficiencies in the methodology used in the presentation of empirical evidence.
Circular reasoning is used in the IPCC carbon budget to relate atmospheric CO2 to fossil fuel emissions as a way of dealing with insurmountable measurement problems. No evidence exists to relate changes in atmospheric CO2 or the rate of warming to fossil fuel emissions because correlations presented for these relationships are spurious.
The UNFCCC holds annual COP meetings and calls for reductions in fossil fuel emissions to attenuate global warming without evidence that warming is related to emissions.”
I like to express this in simple terms, as a challenge to alarmists.
Of the rise in temperature since pre-industrial times, about half occurred before the rapid rise in CO2 (ie before WW2) and half since. Please explain what caused the earlier rise if CO2 caused the latter.
Even better – ask how the Vikings could farm on Greenland during the Medieval Warm Period whereas nobody can at the moment. And then query why during Roman times grapes were grown as far north as Newcastle which nobody can manage to do now.
A Very good analysis Dennis – BUT
The UNFCCC holds annual COP meetings and calls for reductions in fossil fuel emissions to attenuate global warming without evidence that warming is related to emissions.”
Just as Ariane Loening states above with regard to the alarmists general intentions, the UNFCCC are not doing science, they are aiming to pin the fault on us come what may and destroy capitalism.
In many ways the CO2 one club golfers lost the argument long ago, but one club golfing is what they are all about.
Remember that Christiana Figueres, then head of the UNFCCC, told us back in 2015 –
“This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history.”
Why would we think it was about the science???
Having said all that, facts like you present, and strategies like those of Pancho and Gerry are important to approach those who don’t realise the true nature of threat. It is also why NALOPKT is so important – thank you Paul.
I am minded to return to Rio 1992 where the current craziness began and now has developed into a new profitable eco-industry
The Canadian Maurice Strong, who organized the fateful 1992 Rio Conference and the hoax of CC, and his dream of World Government by the UN. A quote from Maurice Strong–‘Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized nations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?’ How better to accomplish the collapse then to create mass hysteria proselytized by the willing dupes in our education system that CO2 is going to destroy the world because allegedly it will cause the temperature to go up 3*C.
The wiping out of the West’s industries is now well underway and will be fully destroyed with all the net-zero actions by the politicians genuflections at the green altar and the doomster “eco priests”. The carbon taxation will be the biggest bonanza in history so where will the money go – the parasites in Davos see this as their best opportunity since globalisation. The eco-industry has already cashed in on the bonanza. There may be a trickle down to the hoi Poloi, but, this will be minimal and they will become poorer,
Shells Jacobs: “the new Dark Ages’. So right.
Argh. Auto spell check!
“Thus activists like Greta reduce climate change to a clearly diagnosed illness that can be treated by meeting precise deadlines, while the rest of us pay the bill.”
Lower CO2 emissions to net-zero by 2050? Wait until big shortages in gasoline, diesel and biofuels start showing up as these destructive policies take hold. Everyone will be paying the bill. Some are already complaining. This is crazy.
A companion analysis from Spiked;
“Today’s ‘radical activists’, including Greta, don’t tell politicians to get out of our lives. Instead, they call on them to play a bigger role in our lives, whether by changing our eco-behaviour, censoring hateful speech or managing our health. And that is music to the political class’s ears. The ‘1%’ needs these activists.
And the activists need the 1%. Social movements have been a force for good when they have demanded more freedom and less discrimination from the powers-that-be. But they tend not to do that anymore. Now, many social activists ask the state to take freedom away from ordinary people.”
Article: https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/01/22/why-davos-loves-greta/
My synopsis: https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2020/01/22/the-greta-davos-collusion/
That paragraph is a good one, Paul.
There was an event at the Guildhall yesterday about battery vehicles. I spoke to somebody this morning who showed me a brochure for a battery minibus. Maximum range? 80 miles!!! He had also spoken to an exhibitor about a battery tipper truck. It has a limp home mode that cuts speed to first 10mph and then 5mph as the battery drains. Hope the route home doesn’t include the Dartford Tunnel as it is one of the few places with a minimum speed limit. Doubt it would make it up the bridge ramp.
I think I read somewhere that Greta is now demanding negative carbon, not net zero.
Talking about negative carbon, our pal Evans-Pritchard has been at it again:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2020/01/23/trailblazing-fossil-sinners-prove-greta-thunberg-wrong/
It seems pumping CO2 into the ground counts as negative carbon. How soon before the earth explodes?
NASA “Guru” Jim Hansen has been promoting negative emission technology for years. The problem? Billions of tons are required to be captured, but only a few millions can actually be geologically stored annually. Just one ppm of CO2 is almost eight gigatons. Hansen and some others want us to go back to 350 ppm. That’s 65 ppm or 500 gigatons. Greta has no clue, nor do the politicians.
Erm, and remind me what the weather was like when CO2 levels were at 350ppm? All nice and dandy was it? No bush fires, hurricanes, typhoons, tornadoes, droughts, floods, snow and rising sea levels were there? Exactly, the weather is more benign now than it was at 65ppm of CO2 ago. I’ll take the present thanks. Onwards and upwards!
Negative “carbon”? – Right. Everyone breathe in, and forget to breathe out.
You first Greta.
She still thinks that human activity is contributing to global warming and we certainly have no evidence for that. We can’t predict the weather more than a couple of days (as the rain in Australia proved), so where does our certainty about predictions of this too complicated a system for a hundred years come from? Apart from it all being about anti-capitalism, not the environment is bad enough, but it stops us incentivising industry to cut back broad based pollution. Which is actually important. The one true thing is, using a child to represent your views does echo the immaturity of those views.
How is humanity contributing to globull warming???? CO2 was far higher in previous ice ages than today, whilst recently- between 1940 and 1970 global temperatures fell sharply whilst CO2 levels went up.
This article gives the alarmists a foot hold.
T’other way about. CO2 levels drop during Ice Ages. About 670,000 years ago the CO2 concentration dipped to 174 ppm. Studies on a C3 annual plant showed that it cannot complete its life cycle at 150 ppm.
So we were close to the point at which most species of plant could no longer survive. I think CO2 deserves a cheer or two.
Article in PEI today: is this even worse than our CCA?
Germany’s government has committed to pay utility companies billions of euros to speed up the shutdown of their coal-fired power plants as part of the country’s efforts to fight climate change.
The agreement was reached between federal ministers and representatives of four coal-mining states, the regions most heavily dependent on mining lignite, black or brown coal. Together with imported bituminous, coal and lignite are responsible for about one-third of Germany’s electricity needs, as well as a large share of the country’s carbon emissions.
The German government has already promised 40 billion euros to soften the impact of abandoning fossil fuels. According to Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, operators of heavily polluting coal-fired power plants in western Germany will receive an additional 2.6 billion euros ($2.9bn) in compensation for switching them off early, while 1.75 billion euros will go to those with plants in the east.
The government said reviews will be carried out in 2026 and 2029 to determine whether Germany can exit coal-fired electricity generation in 2035, three years before the final deadline.
However, questions abound about how the electricity currently produced from coal will be replaced and whether renewable energy targets are sufficient to support the move.
Environment Minister Svenja Schulze acknowledged that Germany will need a “massive expansion of wind and solar energy” as the country is also in the process of exiting atomic power, with the last nuclear reactor set to go offline at the end of 2022. “We are the first country that is exiting nuclear and coal power on a binding basis, and this is an important international signal that we are sending,” said Schulze.
The tour down under (multi-day bicycle race) currently being run had its coldest day in its 22 year history. The CO2 level has gone up from 365 to 415 p.p.m. during its lifetime.
The TV reports were full of comments about the visual effects of the recent bushfires when the tour went through the burnt areas but will they say anything today (Friday) when the tour goes through green country?
I was hoping that someone would do a Reverse Hansen and turn the aircon AND heating off. Then I realised with all the hot air they wouldn’t notice.
I read the Organization Man by William H Whyte (1956) many years ago and have had not great respect for the managerial class ever since. They seem to learn Management and then look around for something to manage. They can take up positions in any organisation from NGOs to local government. The courses at University or college do not ,it seems , contain any historical information about what happens to overblown bureaucracies. (v. Byzantium.)
My observations on the Anglican Church and climate change may have seemed odd but I have been listening to discussions on Anglican Unscripted on Youtube lately. qv . It’s always of interest . I wonder when it will be taken down?
Since I am over 80 years old now I’ll not bother you all again with my observations
As I’ve commented before, windmill installation make the Mail’s tree planting campaign look rather silly. But it’s worse than I thought. FOI request. Scotland alone, 13.9million trees replaced with inefficient land consuming bat and bird mashing monsters.
It is well past time to turn off Turbines due to known and documented health harm. Please ask anyone who denies health harm of Industrial Wind Turbines to watch this presentation. University of Waterloo, Waterloo Ontario Canada.
Title: “Infrasound and Low Frequency Noise: Physics & Cells, History & Health”
Speaker: Dr Mariana Alves-Pereira
Location: University of Waterloo
Date: September 12, 2019
Video archive of presentation:
https://livestream.com/itmsstudio/events/8781285
Dr. Alves-Pereira’s research profile is at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mariana_Alves-pereira
Note; there is approx 2 mins of dead air at the beginning. The talk is ~50 minutes, followed by a long Q&A
Hi Paul,
I always read your website It’s good stuff, and the comments are really good also. I just don’t have time to comment as I am running the PSI-Australia one.
Regards
Judy
PS answering from my preferred email address. The grapevine one is reserved for trolls.
>
I may be wrong but I have a gut feeling that Climate Alarmism either has already peaked or it is close to do so. I sense quite some panic in the Alarmist crew. If I only look at the extreme aggressiveness I am being attacked on this and other platforms. If Alarmists would be comfy that things go their way later o, they sure would not feel the need to hunt down every last Climate Realist. They could lean back and watch things unfold as – in their words – this in inescapable. I rather think they know that they are selling us for fools and that the fools start to wake up. Bad for business.
“Global warming is happening”
Let’s question this.
Very Good Expose of UHI Abuse
I must be getting really old! I remember when many scientists said we were all going to freeze to death in the ice age that was then starting.. circa 1978…. Then we came back to normal temperatures and they call it man made global warming… Duh!
Polar bears are doing the best ever for the past 50 years.
Sea level rise is a miniscule 3 mm/y. YES, mm!! How do they even measure that? (Hint: they don’t!)
Average global temperature rise measured only in North America and Europe up a whopping 1.5 C since 1880. Nothing but noise in the data and UHI with a statistical R^2 of 0.2.
And the cryosphere is doing nothing unusual over the past four decades.
Man caused climate change is an enormous trillion dollar lie!!!
By reflecting away 30% of the ISR the terrestrial albedo, sustained by the atmosphere, makes the earth cooler than it would be without that albedo/atmosphere.
Because of the non-radiative heat transfer properties of the terrestrial surface BB LWIR radiative energy upwelling from the surface is not possible. There is zero “extra” energy for the GHGs to “trap.”
The surface is warmer than ToA per Q = U A dT same as the insulated envelope of a house.
If the above statements are correct the greenhouse effect does not exist.
Zero GHE, Zero GHG warming, Zero CAGW.
It’s that simple.
It’s all science.
It’s all over.
“that the science is mind-numbingly clear”
More on that
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/01/02/greta-thunbergs-carbon-budget/
“Donald Trump does not grasp climate science”
And climate scientists don’t grasp statistics.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/01/29/the-aaactic/
I’ve been looking at the orbits of planets around the Sun and the orbit of the Moon around the Earth. They all show variations in the distance between the orbital object and the body it circumnavigates. We know quite well that the distance between the Moon and Earth is constantly varying and is only nominallly 240,000 miles. The variation is around 10,000 miles. The same appears to be true about the planetry orbits, with the variation seemingly greater. So it is highly likely that such variations are involved with the occurance of ice ages and extreme hot temperatures on Earth over long periods. We know, from contemproaneous reports, that in the Middle Ages we had a mini-ice age when the thames froze over in London and other rivers did likewise. Could it be that this orbital variatiopn is an important factor in what is called ‘Climate Change’ and it is more important than any human activity?