Guest essay by Larry Hamlin

The UN IPCC’s politically contrived 2018 report claims that the world must take economically Draconian actions based upon global and regional speculative claimed outcomes spewed from flawed and failed “computer model” projections showing that that we have only 12 years to limit future CO2 emissions or the resulting global temperature increases will destroy the planet because some contrived 1.5 Degree C “temperature limit” will be exceeded is totally ridiculous.

This climate alarmist report offers the following pure conjecture supposedly justifying this hyped “temperature limit”:

“Limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society, the IPCC said in a new assessment. With clear benefits to people and natural ecosystems, limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C could go hand in hand with ensuring a more sustainable and equitable society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said on Monday.”

“The report highlights a number of climate change impacts that could be avoided by limiting global warming to 1.5°C compared to 2°C, or more. For instance, by 2100, global sea level rise would be 10 cm lower with global warming of 1.5°C compared with 2°C. The likelihood of an Arctic Ocean free of sea ice in summer would be once per century with global warming of 1.5°C, compared with at least once per decade with 2°C. Coral reefs would decline by 70-90 percent with global warming of 1.5°C, whereas virtually all (> 99 percent) would be lost with 2°C.”

“The report finds that limiting global warming to 1.5°C would require “rapid and far-reaching” transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport, and cities. Global net human- caused emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) would need to fall by about 45 percent from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching ‘net zero’ around 2050. This means that any remaining emissions would need to be balanced by removing CO2 from the air.”

“The Paris Agreement adopted by 195 nations at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC in December 2015 included the aim of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change by “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”

In addition to this UN report relying upon flawed, failed and unvalidated “computer models” that are unable to establish accurate and meaningful global or regional climate outcomes the report further damages and destroys its credibility by falsely claiming that future global temperatures increases must be limited to 1.5 Degree C.

This alarmist hyped “temperature limit” is largely derived from prior politically conjured up claims of a 2 Degree C global “temperature limit” scheme that was fancied about in the mid 1990s.

The climate alarmist hyped prior 2 Degree C “temperature limit” has no sound scientific basis whatsoever as discussed in a 2010 article in Der Spiegel where the “Invention of the Two-Degree Target” is addressed revealing and exposing the clearly politically contrived origins of this phony and scientifically unsupported asserted “limit” as articulated by Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and father of the two-degree target.

The article notes:

“For this reason a group of German scientists, yielding to political pressure, invented an easily digestible message in the mid-1990s: the two-degree target. To avoid even greater damage to human beings and nature, the scientists warned, the temperature on Earth could not be more than two degrees Celsius higher than it was before the beginning of industrialization.”

“Rarely has a scientific idea had such a strong impact on world politics. Most countries have now recognized the two-degree target. If the two-degree limit were exceeded, German Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen announced ahead of the failed Copenhagen summit, “life on our planet, as we know it today, would no longer be possible.”

“But this is scientific nonsense. “Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.

Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.”

“We looked at the history of the climate since the rise of homo sapiens,” Schellnhuber recalls. “This showed us that average global temperatures in the last 130,000 years were no more than two degrees higher than before the beginning of the industrial revolution. To be on the safe side, we came up with a rule of thumb stating that it would be better not to depart from this field of experience in human evolution. Otherwise we would be treading on terra incognito.”

As tempting as it sounds, on closer inspection this approach proves to be nothing but a sleight of hand. That’s because humans are children of an ice age. For many thousands of years, they struggled to survive in a climate that was as least four degrees colder than it is today, and at times even more than eight degrees colder.

This means that, on balance, mankind has already survived far more severe temperature fluctuations than two degrees. And the cold periods were always the worst periods. Besides, modern civilizations have far more technical means of adapting to climate change than earlier societies had.

Since the first rough estimate was made, many other good reasons have emerged to support the two-degree target, says Schellnhuber. At the same time, however, the constant appearance of new studies has also made the picture significantly more complex.”

“Critics say that the climate impact researchers have gone too far with their brand of political advice. “The two-degree target has little to do with serious science,” says Hans von Storch. Many of his fellow scientists, he adds, now see themselves too much as political activists who want to get something done. This, in turn, harms the credibility of science as a whole, he adds, and it is also a more deep-seated cause of the Climategate affair and the sloppy work on the IPCC report.

“Unfortunately, some of my colleagues behave like pastors, who present their results in precisely such a way that they’ll fit to their sermons,” says Storch. “It’s certainly no coincidence that all the mistakes that became public always tended in the direction of exaggeration and alarmism.”

The article presents a number of highlighted section headings which summarize the absurdity of this temperature limit scheme and that provide the information exposing the contrived basis of the “Two-Degree limit”.

The article highlighted sections include the following three headings which pretty much sum up the bottom line regarding the lack of credibility underlying the temperature limit claim: “Clearly A Political Goal“, “Completely Speculative” and “Completely Absurd”

To achieve the purely politically contrived and scientifically unsupported UN IPCC phony 1.5 Degrees C “temperature limit” scam year 2018 global emissions of 37.887 billion metric tons of CO2 would have to be reduced to about 19 billion metric tons of CO2 (a 45% reduction from year 2010 levels) by year 2030. This level of global CO2 emissions was last seen in year 1977 over 40 years ago.

So the UN IPCC and its climate alarmist “scientists” apparently believe that although it required more than 40 years for the world’s nations to create and build the infrastructure, institutions, resources, capital investment, knowledge and skills to achieve the year 2018 global energy and economic accomplishments the world can simply “undo” all that and create an entirely new set of ways for global societies to achieve the economic and energy benefits we now enjoy in just 12 years.

This is absolute lunacy particularly in light of the phony and scientifically unsupported justification regarding the 1.5 Degree C “temperature-limit” political scheme.    

But the UN IPCC CO2 future reduction demands are even more onerous and absurd than presented above because the world’s developing nations are forecast to significantly increase their CO2 emissions beyond year 2018 outcomes with EIA data showing increases of more than 1 billion metric tons by year 2030 and on top of that an additional increase of 6.7 billion metric tons by year 2050.

The developed nations will not be increasing CO2 emissions at all during the period 2018 through 2050 but will not be seeing declines anything close to the 45% below year 2010 levels by year 2030 that the UN IPCC climate alarmist politically driven schemers are demanding,

EIA data shows that the developing nations accounted for about 60% of all global energy use in year 2018 and about two thirds of all global CO2 emissions. By 2050 EIA forecasts that the developing nations will be accountable for about 70% of all global energy use and about three quarters of all global CO2 emissions.

The developing nations have no emissions reduction commitments whatsoever under the incompetently contrived Paris Agreement and yet are dominating all global energy use and growth as well as all global CO2 emissions increases since year 2008.

Furthermore the EIA most recent energy and emissions forecasts assumed that the developing nations would be continuing government mandated provisions to increase the use of renewable energy with that assumption now shown to be completely wrong.

In fact the developing nations led by China are committing to use even more fossil fuels in the next five years than previously, including priority use of increasing coal, to meet their future energy and economic objectives.

China has announced that it is committed to building new coal power plants equivalent to the entire EU’s existing capacity starting in its next next five year energy planning and building cycle that continues through year 2025.

These enhanced fossil energy use plans include other developing nations as well from the Southeast Asia region which are a part of China’s aggressive multi trillion dollar Belt and Road Initiative which is creating new energy, related infrastructure and financing building programs.

The UN IPCC’s purely politically contrived, scientifically unsupported and globally unachievable schemes demanding that world CO2 emissions be reduced by year 2030 to levels 45% below year 2010 global levels are a complete bust or as the Germans would say “kaput”.

There is no scientific support for UN IPCC’s phony 1.5 Degree C global “temperature limit” that was purely politically contrived by climate alarmist schemers.

Additionally there is no justification for capitulating to the UN’s ridiculous climate alarmist demands arrived at by utilizing flawed and failed “computer models” that are unvalidated and unable to accurately forecast global or regional climate outcomes as the rationale for making global climate claims with resulting economically Draconian action demands that are based upon nothing but politically driven, scientifically unsupported and unreliable assessments.

The world’s developing nations are simply ignoring the UN IPCC’s pompous political pontifications and proceeding as they believe is in their best economic and energy interests. These nations completely control their own energy and emissions outcomes as well as those outcomes at a global level.

The arrogant climate alarmist political elitists in the developed nations can huff and puff all they want about their preposterous 12 year long save the world claptrap but they cannot control or change the power and jurisdiction over global energy and emissions outcomes that now resides solely with the world’s developing nations.