From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Ben Pile

A story in the Telegraph last week featured a report by Energy Systems Catapult (ESC) which recommended the Government commit to a £30 billion project to pull CO₂ from the air. According to the report, Direct Air Carbon Capture and Storage (DACCS) machines sited across the east coast could separate the greenhouse gas from air and pump it to underground storage facilities, thereby helping the U.K. to meet its ambitious 2050 Net Zero target. Not only is this extraordinarily expensive idea pointless in itself, it exposes the equally pointless and expensive constellation of publicly-funded lobbying organisations.

According to ESC, “carbon capture in its various forms is a critical component of a low-cost energy transition”, and “without it, at scale, we risk non-compliance with our Net Zero requirement”. And here is the thing that would, were such things subject to public debate, cause millions of people to scratch their heads. So what if the U.K. does not comply with its Government’s self-imposed target? What is the ‘risk’? And why should the public fork out billions of pounds merely for a daft machine that serves no function other than help a Government achieve its ambition that nobody else really cares about? 

Madder still, the ESC admits that DACCS “remains unproven at scale”. This raises two important problems.

First, if something has yet to be proven at such a gigantic scale, any estimate of its cost is both for the birds and in all probability, like all Government-backed projects such as HS2 and wind power, will exceed those estimates. Government vanity project HS2, for example, originally had a similar estimated cost of £37.5 billion in 2009 prices. But by 2020, estimates put the cost well north of £100 billion.

Second, it shows yet again that no government, no political party, no MP or peer, no think tank or its wonks, no academic at a lofty research outfit, no green lobbyist or campaigner, and no journalist has any idea how Net Zero will be achieved, but nonetheless nearly all of them fought for such targets to be imposed on us. 

It is a problem known as putting the cart before the horse. And it is a characteristic of all climate-related policies that they are driven by ambition, not reality. Not even ESC can explain what DACCS is, how it will work or how much it will cost. All they really know is that it will be required to remove 48 million tonnes of CO₂ from the air each year from 2050 – approximately a tenth of the U.K.’s current domestic annual emissions. 

Vanity and intransigence drives this irrational push for solutions to non-problems. Air capture of CO₂ serves no useful purpose whatsoever. It won’t make a dent in atmospheric CO₂ concentration. It won’t change the weather. It won’t make anyone’s life better. And it won’t stand up to any meaningful cost-benefit analysis. £30 billion, roughly equivalent to £500 per head of the population, could do vastly more good were it to be spent in countless other ways, from healthcare through to addressing genuine environmental issues such as water quality. Of course, not spending the money on such contraptions would likely do more good by leaving that much money in people’s pockets to spend how they see fit. 

The Telegraph spots the problem. DACCS plants “would need to be powered by wind, nuclear or solar energy so as not to generate as much CO₂ as they save”. A fleet of green generators would be working to power the DACCS plants, merely to hit targets. Recent studies show that existing DACCS technology is extremely inefficient, requiring a whopping 2,500 kilowatt hours to isolate just one tonne of CO2. To extract 48 million tonnes of CO₂ would therefore require power stations with a capacity of 14 gigawatts – that’s more than four times the capacity of Hinkley Point C. That nuclear power station itself, dubbed at the time “the most expensive power station in the world”, was initially estimated to cost £26 billion but more recent estimates are putting the cost closer to £46 billion. Thus the cost of a widespread DACCS project – with batteries included – is likely to be in the order of seven times greater than ECS claim. And we have not yet even considered the operating cost.

All this puts me in mind of those fun little clips of devices whose only function is to press a switch to turn themselves off. On Youtube, electronics hobbyists compete to build the most impressive ‘useless machine’. Here is one such contender.

But the problem of useless machinery goes far beyond the device itself. Not unlike white elephants such as wind turbines, Energy Systems Catapult is a strange outfit summoned up out of the blobbish technocracy required by the green agenda. ECS is part of an umbrella group of government-backed private companies called the Catapult Network, which itself seems to be part of Innovate U.K., which in turn is part of UK Research and Innovation – the successor public funding body to the erstwhile research councils. ESC and its sister organisations each benefit from millions of pounds of public funding, topped up by opaque philanthropic funding (i.e., green blob organisations), which as ESC claims, allows them to “support Central and Devolved Governments with the evidence, insights and innovations to incentivise Net Zero action”. 

The problem at its core is that publicly-funded organisations, though set up as ‘independent’ bodies run at arms-length from Government, are nonetheless wholly committed to political agendas. Seemingly intended to ‘drive prosperity’ through R&D, such a constellation of opaque agencies are tantamount to the Government picking ‘winners’, who invariably turn out to be abject losers, at vast public expense. There are no consequences for such wonks spaffing hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers money on pilots that come to nought, or glossy reports that might just as well be case studies from Narnia. Criticism of ideas such as CO₂ capture is excluded from academia and business because even if any critics were not already disinclined to apply for roles within the network, and were then not rejected for their obvious hostility to the dominant political culture of such bullshit factories, their politically inconvenient work would soon be shelved. 

In other words, the green agenda has produced a useless machine whose only function is to produce designs for useless machines. The parent idea of DACCS, Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS), in which CO₂ is taken from power stations, compressed and then stuffed under the sea, was an idea that attracted attention following the Climate Change Act. But despite the government offering a billion pounds in funding competitions to prove the concept, the project failed and today remains economically unproven. The even crazier idea of pulling CO₂ – which is still a trace gas at just 400 parts per million – from the air and then burying it underground faces a similar future. Meanwhile, the U.K.’s climate agenda will run on, as usual, built on extremely expensive pie-in-the-sky fantasies. Nobody has any idea how to achieve Net Zero without destroying ourselves.

Subscribe to Ben Pile’s The Net Zero Scandal Substack here.

Originally posted at ClimateREALISM

By Anthony Watts

A recent article in the South Florida Sun Sentinel (SFSS) newspaper, titled “Florida in 50 years: Study says land conservation can buffer destructive force of climate change,” makes some catastrophic claims about what Florida’s climate will be like in 50 years. The article relies heavily on climate model projections, that are undermined by real world evidence and by the fact that the climate models in question have been shown to create “implausibly hot forecasts of future warming.”

As outlined in Climate at A Glance: Climate Model Fallibility peer reviewed science has shown that climate forecasts like the one cited by the SFSS have no basis in reality because comparisons of actual measured atmospheric temperature data to model forecasts show up to a 200% discrepancy between model temperature outputs and observed temperatures.

Because the temperature forecasts are wildly implausible, the claimed disastrous impacts that are forecast to result from those unbelievably high temperatures also lack credibility.

The article starts off by asserting as a fact that, “Climate change is making temperatures and sea levels rise.”

The SFSS cites a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) graph showing increased average temperatures for the state of Florida, seen below:

It is important to note that average temperatures really didn’t start to significantly increase until around 1990, not coincidentally as the state’s population began to rise rapidly. Plus, average temperatures are just half of the picture. If you look at NOAA’s minimum temperatures for Florida, it is easy to see that it makes up the bulk of the increase in average temperatures since 1990:

An increase in overnight low temperatures is a clear indicator of an increased Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). Florida’s population has doubled from about 10 million in 1990 to over 20 million now. This more than doubling of the state’s population is reflected clearly in UHI data compiled by Dr. Roy Spencer as seen in the graph below. Note the huge temperature effects for Florida’s rapidly growing coastal cities.

Concerning the SFSS’s sea level rise claims, Miami is often used as an example of supposed sea level rise due to occasional street flooding there. Miami’s real problem isn’t rising seas as much as land subsidence. Much of Miami was built on reclaimed swamp land, and then built up with modern infrastructure. That extra weight causes a sinking of the land, known as subsidence, allowing seawater to seep in when the surfaces sink to near sea-level. It also means that during strong rainfall events, and hurricane storm surge, areas that have subsided don’t drain as they did years before.

This is clearly covered in the scientific paper Land subsidence contribution to coastal flooding hazard in southeast Florida, published in Proceedings of IAHS in 2020. The paper clearly states:

Preliminary results reveal that subsidence occurs in localized patches (< 0.02 km²) with magnitude of up to 3 mm yr⁻¹, in urban areas built on reclaimed marshland. These results suggest that contribution of local land subsidence affect[s] only small areas along the southeast Florida coast, but in those areas coastal flooding hazard is significantly higher compared to non-subsiding areas.

https://piahs.copernicus.org/articles/382/207/2020/

Subsidence is also driven by freshwater withdrawals from the region’s groundwater reservoirs to satisfy the Miami metro area’s growing population.

Clearly, sea level rise in Florida has more to do with subsidence and land management than climate change induced rise. Plus, Miami’s flat terrain, just a few feet above sea level, lacks natural drainage routes for rainwater to flow away from urban areas.

As discussed in numerous Climate Realism articles, here and here, for instance, there is no evidence whatsoever seas are rising at an usually rapid rate. As shown in Climate at a Glance: Sea Level Rise, there is approximately the same pace of sea-level rise today that has occurred since at least the mid-1800s, disproving claims of recent climate change worsening it.

SFSS goes on to outline a trifecta of additional climate threats, saying:

There are three main climate change threats in Florida, said Polsky: More intense rain events, which leads to greater flooding; more coastal flooding — both from storm surge and high tides; and more heat and wildfire risk.

https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2024/04/30/florida-in-50-years-study-says-land-conservation-can-buffer-destructive-force-of-climate-change/

Let’s examine rainfall. Actual monthly rainfall data since 1895 from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration NOAA shows no upward trend in rainfall for the state, nor does it show excessive monthly spikes in the present.

As for coastal flooding, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows no indication that climate change is causing increased coastal flooding, as is show in Table 12.12 | on Page 90 – Chapter 12 of the UN IPCC Sixth Assessment Report. Emergence of Climate Impact Drivers (CIDs) in time periods, shows no correlation. The color corresponds to the confidence of the region with the highest confidence: white colors indicate where evidence of a climate change signal is lacking or the signal is not present, leading to overall low confidence of an emerging signal. The section is highlighted in yellow. Neither sea-level nor coastal flooding has been an observed element of climate change.

Even in 2050 and 2100 the IPCC does not forecast any climate change impact on coastal flooding. Also, the possible predicted effect on sea level rise that the IPCC suggests might occur in 2050 and beyond stems from the organization’s use of the RCP8.5 scenario “high emissions” scenario that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and many climate scientists have by now explicitly disavowed, as being wildly implausible if not impossible.  Climate Realism has discussed problems with the RCP8.5 scenario repeatedly, here and here, for example.

As for SFSS’s wildfire claims, while Florida had a single bad year in 2017 due to warmer local weather conditions, lightning, and arsonists, there is no overall upwards trend in the number of wildfires for the state over the last decade:

According to a summary by Alchera, which produced the Florida wildfires graph above, climate change is not a factor:

Florida’s unique combination of flat terrain, abundant vegetation, and frequent lightning strikes makes the state prone to wildfires. The flat landscape allows fires to spread quickly, while the dense vegetation provides ample fuel for them to grow in intensity. Lightning strikes, particularly during the stormy summer months, can ignite dry vegetation and lead to rapidly spreading wildfires. Human activities, such as arson, debris burning, and equipment use, are also significant factors in causing wildfires in Florida.

https://alchera.ai/en/meet-alchera/blog/ai-cameras-for-wildfire-prevention-in-the-us

The SFSS story claiming climate change is causing rapidly rising temperatures and increased flooding and wildfires in Florida has no basis in fact. Rather than presenting news, the SFSS’s story is consistent with a pattern Climate Realism has exposed time and again hyping the dogmatic narrative that climate change is causing virtually everything bad. Almost daily, climate alarmists and the media are painting a dire future due to climate change, even when the facts refute their claims. Such stories may make for good disaster fiction, but they are not fact-based news reporting, and thus are not worthy of being published by a supposedly journalistic enterprise.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.

By Lee Gerhard

Climate scientists would be less likely to issue dire warnings of planetary doom if they gave more credence to the geological history of the past several million years. Instead, they rely on computer models that are biased by the preconceptions of their manipulators and incapable of accounting for the myriad factors influencing global temperatures.

Minuscule recent warming, whatever the cause, is inconsequential in light of the long record of data found in Antarctica ice cores that go back 800,000 years. The bottom line is that Earth is colder by nearly 3 degrees Celsius than it was 3,000 years ago and is just now climbing out of its longest cold spell of the last 10,000 years. Blaring headlines about record heat waves of the past 100 years are meaningless, hysterical blather.

A deeper dive into geologic history — based partly on the record stored over millions of years in deep-ocean sediments — shows that today’s carbon dioxide concentrations of 420 parts per million are a fraction of past levels that reached 5,000 ppm and more. Carbon dioxide is nearly at its lowest level ever since plant life began so many millions of years ago and well below the optimum amount for the health of most vegetation.

In fact, the 280-ppm concentration of the mid-19th century is uncomfortably close to the point at which plant life dies — below 150 ppm. Given that all life depends on adequate amounts of this gas, proposals to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide are nothing less than reckless.

Any global increase in carbon dioxide will be beneficial and have nearly no impact on future temperature. In contrast, demonstrated in the “bible” of human history and climate change compiled by the late professor Hubert Lamb at the University of East Anglia, cold kills.

During the Little Ice Age in parts of England, the “yearly number of burials exceeded the births from the 1660’s until about 1730,” he reported.

Why, then, are so many demonizing fossil fuels? The wealth enabled by coal, oil and natural gas has provided the leisure — and funding — for numerous researchers to focus on climate change instead of struggling to stay alive. Global society is absolutely dependent upon cheap and plentiful energy for its survival. Why would some demand that civilization retreat from useful energy sources to bring back mass starvation, poverty and horse-drawn buggies?

To dream of a utopian world is perhaps admirable, but to inflict suffering upon society through ignorance of science is deplorable.

Humanity is deprived of precious learning when so many favor the ideology and fearmongering of climate alarmists over the meticulous research of eminent physical scientists such as Richard Alley, professor of geoscience at Pennsylvania State University, who pioneered studies of ice cores, and Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who explored the incredible complexity of atmospheric physics.

We could easily name dozens of others similarly credentialed, who are largely unknown outside the scientific community.

The public is “protected” from empirical data by legacy and social media censors who eagerly broadcast the supposed need to restrict global warming to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius — artificial constructs with no scientific basis.

We thus suffer the consequences of unwarranted regulatory intrusions into daily life, be they restrictions on heating, air conditioning, dishwashers and stoves or the increased price and reduced availability of electricity. The effects of these range from annoying to life-threatening.

There is no global climate emergency. There is, however, a widespread knowledge crisis.

This commentary was first published at The Washington Times on May 1, 2024.

Lee Gerhard is a senior scientist emeritus at the University of Kansas, past director of the Kansas Geological Survey, member of the CO2 Coalition, retired Getty Professor of Geological Engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, and co-author of “Geological Perspectives of Global Climate Change.” He has a doctorate in geology.