Earlier today I posted a comment on Robin Guenier’s most recent piece about the UK’s Net Zero Policy. I was irritated (yet again) by an article in the Guardian. This one was headed “Factcheck: no, Richard Tice, volcanoes are not to blame for climate change” and was written by Simon Evans of Carbon Brief. Suffice it to say that Carbon Brief and the people who write for it see the world very differently from me. One example of our substantial differences can be found here. My opinion is that Carbon Brief’s work is anything but even-handed, and that they need to be fact-checked every bit as thoroughly as they feel the need to fact-check others. It’s a war of attrition, and although they are the ones with the resources and open access to a national newspaper that is fully on-board with their agenda, I am not inclined to be ground down and let them get away with peddling opinion under the guise of fact-checking. And so, having commented earlier, I decided that a more detailed analysis might be useful.

As I said in my earlier comment, I am not a fan of Richard Tice, and I shall not be voting for his Reform Party at the forthcoming general election. Nevertheless, I don’t believe he should be unfairly traduced. If Mr Evans wishes to present his disagreements with Mr Tice’s comments and with the Reform Party manifesto, that is of course his prerogative, but I bridle more than a little when I see an opinion piece masquerading as a fact-check.

The opening paragraph of the fact-check gets things off to a dubious start:

Despite 40C record heat in 2022 and the wettest 18 months on record this winter, this general election seems set to test the UK’s political consensus on climate change like never before.

The reference to 40C heat provides a link – but it links only to a Carbon Brief article. Fair enough – I shamelessly link to my own articles from time to time – but it doesn’t offer a factual, as opposed to an opinionated, basis for the claim. As we sceptics constantly point out, claims of record 40C heat in the UK are driven by dodgy practices, such as relying on low-grade weather stations that don’t meet WMO standards and which have high margins of error, as well as taking temperature readings when jet fighters are landing nearby, that sort of thing. The Carbo Brief article that is linked to duly relies on the Coningsby measurement that marginally exceed 40C. Well, if Carbon Brief can cite their own work, then we at Cliscep can do likewise – here’s Jit’s take-down of the hype around that dubious record temperature.

The wettest 18 months claim is backed up by another link, but only to a paywalled Financial Times article. Having said that, the claim is all over the internet, and whatever the truth of it, it has been unusually wet over much (but not all) of the country. Regardless, those two statements about weather don’t “prove” man-made climate change, nor do they make the case (implicit within the paragraph) that the UK’s political consensus on climate change is a good thing. After all, isn’t the whole point of an election to present the electorate with a choice, rather than with a consensus whereby it doesn’t matter who you vote for?

After observing that Reform has eschewed the consensus in favour of outright climate scepticism, we are told:

Last Friday, in an interview with BBC Breakfast, the Reform leader, Richard Tice, offered a summary, saying that the UK should scrap its net zero target since, he claimed, it would “make zero difference to climate change”. Instead, he argued we should simply adapt to global heating.

The link offered to the BBC Breakfast interview doesn’t work (though in the absence of a TV licence, I couldn’t watch it anyway), so I have to rely on Mr Evans’ summary of what was said. If Mr Tice said that the UK’s net zero target should be scrapped because it make zero difference to climate change, then Mr Tice is correct. The UK contributes less than 1% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions on an ongoing basis, and most of the rest of the world is increasing those emissions. Nothing the UK does can make any measurable difference to the climate. Adapting to climate change, rather than, Canute-like, forlornly and unsuccessfully seeking to stop it, is a sensible and thoughtful position to adopt.

We are told that he then cited the IPCC and blamed the sun and volcanoes for climate change. It’s at this point that Mr Evans actually makes a good point – the IPCC does indeed blame humankind for all of the warming that the planet is currently experiencing. And yet climate scientists seem to be at a loss to explain current levels of warming that weren’t predicted by their climate models. They are very reluctant to admit that the Hunga Tonga volcanic eruption has had anything to do with it, but it might have done. A lively discussion has been taking place in comments on my article about volcanoes here.

Mr Evans tells us that:

Contrary to Tice’s first falsehood, reaching net zero emissions is the only way to stop climate change, according to the IPCC.

This is where context and nuance are important. It’s true that the IPCC is keen on reducing emissions to net zero in order (in the view of its authors) to stop climate change. However, they are clear that those reductions have to take place globally. I challenge Mr Evans to find a single statement from the IPCC to the effect that a single country such as the UK can do anything about climate change by unilaterally achieving net zero if the rest of the world doesn’t follow suit. And it is a fact that most of the rest of the world most certainly isn’t following suit.

We are told that Mr Tice said “Net zero will make zero difference to climate change, as confirmed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, that says if you get to net zero, it’ll make no difference to sea level rise for between 200 and 1,000 years.” I suspect that the IPCC is less sanguine than that, and I confess I haven’t checked. However, claiming something over a 200 to 1,000 year time frame is different to claiming that it won’t ever happen or that the IPCC says it won’t happen. And so Mr Evans’ rebuttal is not directly on point when he says “Second, far from saying that net zero makes no difference to sea level rise, the IPCC says the rise will be greater if emissions continue to increase.” The IPCC does say that, but pointing that out doesn’t meet head-on the focus of Mr Tice’s claim. As for the logic of adaptation ahead of mitigation, we are told:

Third, while adaptation is important, it cannot be the only response to global heating. The IPCC says there is a “rapidly closing window of opportunity” to secure a livable and sustainable future for all” by cutting emissions, and that many will be unable to adapt if this opportunity is missed.

Perfectly true, but again it neither demonstrates that Mr Tice is offering misleading facts, nor does it meet his argument. If the rapidly closing window of opportunity is about to shut, because the rest of the world is leaning on the window rather than keeping it open, then it is futile for the UK to fight them. And, selfish though it may be, if the UK can, unlike some countries, fairly readily adapt to climate change, then the fact that adaptation is a problem for others doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for UK politicians to put UK adaptation policies ahead of futile attempt to mitigate. Next we are told:

Finally, it is a fact that we humans are causing the climate crisis, not the sun or volcanoes as Tice implies. The IPCC says it is “unequivocal” that humans are responsible for heating the planet and that our emissions have caused 100% of recent warming.

Well now, what is a fact? Is it a fact that there is a climate crisis? For the likes of Mr Evans, that is unarguable, but it’s nevertheless only an opinion, however firmly held. If there isn’t a climate crisis, then humans aren’t causing something that isn’t happening. It’s true that the IPCC says it’s “unequivocal” that humanity’s emissions have caused 100% of recent warming, but that doesn’t make it a fact. It’s the considered opinion of a lot of scientists, and it’s not unreasonable to give due weight to their opinion. Nevertheless, opinion, however much based on science, is not fact. Scientists have been known to be wrong, and even scientific consensus can change. After all, isn’t that how science works?

Next Mr Evans moves on to attacking the section of the Reform Party’s manifesto dealing with energy and environment. He claims to have counted “30 false or misleading statements about the climate crisis and efforts to limit global heating” but is sadly a little coy with regard to identifying and dealing with them one by one. Instead he falls back on a link to an article in Skeptical Science, and the irrelevance of claims that CO2 is essential for photosynthesis and represents only 0.04% of the atmosphere. It’s true, I am happy to accept, that these points are irrelevant to the question of the UK’s energy policy, but they are not false or misleading. The same can be said about talking points such as the Roman Warm Period and vine-growing in the north of England in centuries gone by. Mr Evans dismisses this stuff, reasonably enough inasmuch as it is irrelevant to an adult discussion of energy policy, but his own claim that such warmth was only a regional phase and was quite different from “unparalleled” “global heating” today is itself not without controversy.

Next it becomes really interesting:

It falsely claims that climate action has “sent energy bills soaring”. In fact it is the UK’s heavy reliance on gas that is predominantly to blame.

There’s just one problem – it isn’t a false claim. His link to his own assertion on “X” and to another article he wrote at the Guardian linking to another piece of work he produced at Carbon Brief don’t change that. Please do refer once more to The Lies Have It to understand how Carbon Brief’s assertions about the relative prices of gas and of renewables must be taken with a large pinch of salt. You might consider the egregious basis on which such claims are made by reference to the Levelised Cost of Electricity while you’re at it.

Next we’re told that Reform is wrong to blame Net Zero for increasing inflation, because Mr Evans believes that the key drivers of inflation are fossil fuel price shocks and climate-induced food price rises. Linking to himself again on “X” and to a European Central Bank research bulletin whose authors argue for this point of view and urge that models should incorporate these assumptions, is not the same as proving that Reform’s claims are wrong. And we sceptics, unlike much of the populace from whom the costs have been well hidden, are very much aware of the high levels of subsidies paid to renewable energy providers and of the costs loaded on the suppliers of fossil fuels.

Moving now towards the end of the article we find this:

Reform says net zero will only be possible at a cost “estimated by the National Grid and others at some £2tn or more”. This is misleading by omission. In 2020, National Grid did indeed put the cost of a net zero energy system at around £3tn. The next line from the document by National Grid pointed out: “Scenarios where we hit net zero in 2050 … incur broadly the same costs as the scenario where we miss our net zero target.”

I found this paragraph to be contain one of the most bizarre lines of argument in the whole article. If a net zero energy system will cost around £3tn, then that represents a cost of well over £100,000 per UK household. To claim that this can be ignored because the costs would be broadly the same if the 2050 net zero target was missed is itself misleading by omission. The omission in question being what the cost would be if we didn’t have a net zero target.

It’s worth taking a look at the section of the website dealing with this on the part of National Grid ESO. I can find nothing in it that justifies a claim that not pursuing net zero (as opposed to pursuing it but failing to meet the 2050 target date) would be just as expensive. On the contrary, it contains a telling little sentence that Mr Evans didn’t share with his readers:

Importantly, our project doesn’t provide the total cost of meeting net zero to UK Plc and does not include costs related to energy demands from a number of areas such as aviation, shipping, rail, agriculture and industrial and commercial heat demand.

I still don’t know what are the 30 false or misleading statements contained in Reform’s manifesto relating to energy and environment, but I trust Mr Evans isn’t referring to this, because so far as I can see every word is true:

Net Zero sends our money abroad and damages critical industries like steel production. The government has turned Britain from being an exporter of oil and gas into a net importer. They have bet our future on unreliable wind and solar power and destroyed our energy security. It’s time for a common sense energy strategy.

As a postscript, I see that BBC Verify has weighed in with an article headed “Is Labour’s 2030 green energy goal realistic and how would it affect bills?”. It’s rather more even-handed than I’m used to seeing, possibly because the BBC top brass must be acutely aware that their every word will be scrutinised during the general election claim for any evidence of partiality. Sadly, although it is reasonably balanced, it also strikes me as being rather lightweight and lacking the in-depth analysis I would have preferred to see.

Still, at least the BBC is trying – for the duration of the election campaign – to avoid falling into one faction or the other so far as net zero and energy policy are concerned. Meanwhile, Mr Evans is in one faction and I am in the other. What is fact and what is fiction is, regrettably, in the eye of the beholder.