Nuclear is the order that will inevitably spring from the wind and solar chaos being played out across the West. Every country that’s dialled into the grand wind and solar ‘transition’ is suffering rocketing power prices and weather-related power rationing.

Once weather-dependent wind and sunshine and weather-dependent solar exceed more than about 20% of a grid’s total generation capacity the fun and games begin.

Europeans are already ahead of the game when it comes to backtracking from their wind and solar obsessions.

The Swedes have joined the Finns in a nuclear power renaissance driven by the understanding that attempting to run on sunshine and breezes can only end in economic disaster. Last year, the Swedes ditched their impossible-to-meet 100% renewable energy target. The plan is to build 10 large-scale nuclear plants, with plans to lift their ban on uranium mining giving it access its own fuel supply, independent of Russia.

The UK and France are quietly retreating from subsidised wind and solar, embracing new-age nuclear with a passion suggestive of necessity.

Meanwhile, Downunder chaos reigns supreme.

Half-witted bureaucrats (running on ideology) and opportunistic rent-seekers (running on subsidies) have all but destroyed Australia’s once affordable and reliable power delivery system, replacing it with something that can’t be described as a ‘system’, at all.

As The Australian’s Nick Cater points out below – alive to the fact that their grand wind and solar transition plans have no hope of coming to fruition – the crony capitalist class are terrified of the order promised by nuclear power. The always-on, ever-reliable power generation system that simply works, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, whatever the weather. No need for batteries. No need for back up. The very definition of order.

Nuclear power debate in Australia and transition to renewables is an omnishambles
The Australian
Nick Cater
25 May 2024

The Clean Energy Council describes itself as the peak body for the clean energy sector. It is not. It is a powerful, cashed-up lobby group promoting the interests of wind, water and hydro generators with a mission to kill nuclear energy stone dead in Australia.

Last month, the council launched a multimillion advertising campaign on animated digital billboards, airport lounges and lifts in prime Sydney and Melbourne locations with the message that the discussion about nuclear power was risking Australia’s future. It is merely a foretaste of a much larger campaign as the Coalition prepares to seek a mandate for removing the nuclear moratorium at the next federal election.

Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien has been at pains to frame any discussion about nuclear around its place in the energy mix. Intermittent, disbursed generation technology such as wind and solar would continue to contribute to the grid. Gas also would be a crucial part of the mix, principally because of its agility to ramp up or down, compensating for the vagaries of renewable energy sources.

Yet the renewables sector has bought none of it. It regards the election of a Coalition government as an existential threat that would devalue its portfolios overnight. Implicit and explicit subsidies would be phased out. It would hasten the realisation that there was a threshold beyond which the saturation of renewables in the grid became more of a nuisance than a help and that we might already be in that territory.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that the nuclear push is designed to bring the rollout of renewables to a halt – not just temporarily, but for good,” wrote Giles Parkinson, the editor of Renew Economy, the sector’s equivalent of the China Daily.

Giles says there are fears the nuclear push will create more uncertainty for a sector already battling with bottlenecks and roadblocks in planning decisions, network capacity, connection delays, social licence and market regulations that are struggling to keep up with the transition.

At the end of the week, the announcement that the NSW government would pay Origin up to $225m to keep the Eraring Power Station operating for two years beyond its planned 2025 retirement confirmed that renewable energy had failed to deliver on its promise to provide the capacity required to survive without coal. The Victorian government has been negotiating similar extensions with EnergyAustralia, the owner of Yallourn, and AGL, which operates Loy Yong A. Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen belatedly has recognised the need for more gas in the system. The theory that the grid can operate on renewables alone in the medium term is now unambiguously discredited.

The Australian Energy Market Operator presented a dismal picture of the pace of the transition in its forecast for energy supply in the next 10 years, named somewhat optimistically as the Statement of Opportunities. AEMO said it had been advised of “numerous delays to the development and commissioning of committed and anticipated wind and solar projects”, meaning the amount of energy in the system would be lower than predicted between 2025 and 2028.

This would increase the likelihood of unserved energy events, or blackouts as most people would call them. It gets worse. The new turbines and solar panels are rolling out at a fraction of the rate Bowen anticipated 18 months ago, and they need to get connected to the grid. Building 10,000km of new transmission lines has not been quite the walk in the park the minister seemed to have expected. Planning and construction delays and community resistance are putting transmission projects way behind schedule and over budget.

There is no good news for Bowen or the sector in the AEMO report. Project EnergyConnect, the interconnection between NSW and South Australia, was regarded as the most straightforward high-voltage transmission link since it passed through sparsely populated territory. Yet construction delays mean it will not operate at full capacity until July 2027 at the earliest. That will be too late to compensate for expected shortfalls once the Torrens Island B and Osborne power stations shut. In NSW, delays to battery projects mean supply will be even tighter than expected, and Victoria will feel the pinch from constraints on interstate transmission.

Even if we accept AEMO’s optimistic claim that there are plenty of projects in the pipeline, this is hardly the fast-track transition the government promised. In October 2022, Bowen told a gathering of business leaders that meeting the government’s 82 per cent clean electricity target by 2030 would require the installation of 22,000 solar panels a day, 62 million in total, by the end of the decade. It would require a 7-megawatt wind turbine to be commissioned every 18 hours, each as high as Crown’s One Barangaroo tower in Sydney. About 10,000km of new high-voltage transmission lines would be needed to link up the vastly expanded network.

Yet investment in renewable energy is happening at a snail’s pace. Only a handful of projects have reached financial completion since Labor came to power.

Which puts the renewables sector in a weak position as it launches its campaign to fight nuclear. It claims nuclear is a distraction and an expensive white elephant that won’t be needed once renewables are in place. Yet the renewables sector is reneging on its side of the deal to provide a viable alternative to nuclear energy. The government’s road map, devised by AEMO, abandons the centralised baseload principles on which the electricity grid has operated since its conception. Instead, it proposes a highly distributed system combining wind and solar with storage.

It is a novel concept based on untried assumptions. The only countries that have come close to living the renewables-only clean electricity dream are countries such as Norway that have an abundance of hydro-electricity and the ability to build onshore wind generators in and around the Arctic Circle where they can operate for more than 40 per cent of the time, compared with figures in the mid-20s for wind projects in much of Australia.

It means the heavy upfront investment in turbines, transformers, inverters and transmission produces close to double the return of similar investments in Australia once subsidies are discounted.

The consistent message from countries with grids already operating on carbon-free energy is that nuclear energy must be part of the mix. The accompanying map of Europe illustrates the point. The countries in green are those with electricity systems that have emitted less than 100 grams of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt hour of electricity consumed across the past year. Every one of them, except Iceland and Norway, uses nuclear power. Norway is powered almost entirely by hydro, with less than 3 per cent of the energy generated by biomass and wind. Iceland has the rare gift of accessible geothermal energy, contributing 28 per cent of the total mix. The rest came from hydro.

EU data shows retail electricity prices were consistently lower than the European average in these countries. For example, consumers in Sweden, Finland and Norway paid about half the cost of those in Germany, which abandoned nuclear power and invested heavily in wind and solar energy.

To counter this real-world evidence, the renewables sector leans heavily on the CSIRO’s controversial calculations in its GenCost report, which claims renewable energy is far cheaper than nuclear. GenCost’s chief limitation is that it compares the levelised cost of electricity at an individual project level, which inadequately accounts for system costs, including the costs of transmission and back-up.

This week, the CSIRO estimated that a large-scale nuclear power plant would cost at least $8.5bn to build in Australia. That figure seems credible based on the experience of Finland, where the Olkiluoto 3 reactor went online a year ago for $9.7bn.

The relevant question is not the size of the investment but whether it represents value for money and whether the owners (a private Finnish consortium) can expect a commensurate return across the life of the project.

The answer to both questions is unambiguously positive. Olkiluoto 3 can operate for 95 per cent of the time at a steady output of up to 1.6 gigawatts. It has a conservative lifetime of 60 years, but the owner is confident its life can be extended for at least 20 years beyond that and that there is a reasonable chance it will be operating at the turn of the century.

As a third-generation pressurised water reactor, it represents the first of its kind. The engineers overcame many challenges along the way, including the storage of nuclear waste, which will be packed in sealed copper capsules and buried 430m below the ground in stable rock 1.9 billion years old. Once complete, the containment tunnels will be filled with bentonite, the main ingredient in cat litter, and sealed with giant concrete plugs.

Having visited the site last week, I can confirm the tunnels are in place, testing is nearing completion, an elevator is installed and burial of waste is likely to begin in the European autumn.

Increasingly, the policy question is not whether Australia can clean the grid without it. For all its talk, the renewables sector is taking us nowhere fast.

How long can we afford to stick with a plan with uncertain potential that relies on numerous forms of new technology untested at scale? If the renewable energy sector is confident these things will work and can be delivered on budget and time, it will not fear nuclear as a competitor.

Yet the industry is well aware that the renewables-only path is precarious. The capital markets tell them so: private investors are unwilling to risk their money in renewable energy projects without compensation from the government. The Capacity Investment Scheme, in which the government guarantees a loan return, is a risk-shifting exercise, transferring uncertainty that the capital markets find intolerable to the taxpayers.

Real-time data from AEMO offers a sobering reality check. In the 24 hours that ended at 3.30pm on Thursday, the east coast grid (national electricity market) was running on 76 per cent fossil fuel and 24 per cent renewable energy, including 8 per cent hydro. If this represents an improvement on the mix when Labor came to power, it is too small to be visible to the naked eye.
The Australian

From Heartland Daily News

H. Sterling Burnett

YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE TO CLIMATE CHANGE WEEKLY.

IN THIS ISSUE:

• How the Mainstream Media Uses Misdirection to Mislead about Climate Change
• Video of the Week: The Planet is Getting Greener, and That’s a Good Thing
• Germany Turns Back to Coal to Keep the Lights On
• Animal DNA Suggests the Arctic Was Warmer in 7,000 B.C. than Today
• Research Suggests Cattle Raising May Reduce Emissions
• Podcast of the Week: Climate and Energy: the Case for Realism (Guest: David Legates, Ph.D.)
• Climate Comedy
• Recommended Sites

---

Watch ALL the Presentations by the ALL-STARS of Climate Realism at the Archive of Heartland’s 15 Climate Conferences

---

How the Mainstream Media Uses Misdirection to Mislead about Climate Change

Over the course of its operation, Climate Realism has posted more than 1,300 articles detailing the mainstream media’s malfeasance in asserting that all manner of natural and human disasters are being caused by climate change. We use real-world data to refute and rebut such claims every day and rebuke the media for acting as activists for a cause, rather than being journalists, checking facts about climate change and reporting them honestly.

Most of the articles Climate Realism has responded to make specific claims about the damaging impacts supposed human-caused climate change has or will cause based on specific studies. Sadly, more often than one might imagine, the connection between a specific weather disaster or environmental or societal problem and climate change is simply asserted, as if it was an established fact or common knowledge rather than being linked to a specific study or report.

As bad as it is having to refute articles referencing easily debunkable claims—claims that a middle schooler could fact check using the Internet, if he or she were so inclined, to show it to be false—there is a subset of articles Climate Realism responds to where climate change is basically a red herring. An article trumpets the fact that climate change is causing a particular problem in the headline, only to almost ignore it as a factor in the story. Climate change, to the extent it is mentioned at all as a problem, is only referred to  in passing, while other factors—usually direct causal factors for the problem—are discussed in detail; but you’d never know about these real problems or issues from the headline.

This issue was brought to the forefront for me in responding to an Al Jazeera article this week for Climate Realism. The story, headlined “‘Nothing left’: How climate change uprooted an Indigenous village,” is misleading from the beginning, in two respects. First, the village in question has not been uprooted, rather it still exists where is has for generations, although the native population is considering moving on. Second, climate change not only is playing no role in the problems facing the natives in question, it is barely discussed as a factor in the story itself, although from the title, one would be led to believe that it is the whole story.

Concerning climate change, the story references the World Bank’s claim that climate change is one factor among many facing indigenous people around the world, but doesn’t even try to tie climate change factually to problems wreaking havoc in the lives of San Miguel Centro Marankiari indigenous peoples of the Ashaninka village in the mountains of central Peru.

Rainfall and temperatures in Peru are not outside the country’s historic norms, there is no long-term climate signal. It turns out problems in Ashaninika are local and due to two factors, discussed at length in Al Jazeera’s piece: massive deforestation, which reduces local humidity, and the force driving said deforestation, “settlers from the high Andes escaping poverty, who are steadily absorbing territory occupied by the Ashaninka for generations.

“The incoming farmers have razed much of the humid rainforest near the village to plant groves of citrus, avocado, and coffee. That, in turn, has altered the local rain cycles, bringing extreme heat and drought to San Miguel Centro Marankiari,” Al Jazeera states. “The result has been the desiccation of his community’s cassava and plantain crops, Samaniego explains. Food and clean water have become scarce. And tensions with the neighboring landowners have soared.”

Deforestation and impoverished people from outside the community moving in to grow non-traditional commercial crops on in the Marankiari’s traditional lands are responsible for their current plight, not climate change, yet you’d never know that from reading the headline.

If this were a one-off problem, a single instance of media misdirection concerning the content of a story it would be bad enough, but it is not. Climate Realism has responded to dozens of mainstream media stories touting the supposed harms climate change is causing in their headlines, only to have the story mention climate change very little, instead focusing on other factors causing the damage at issue. For instance, a story about how desperate people are being tricked into human trafficking, and sometimes forced labor, was titled, “In Sierra Leone, climate change worsens human trafficking of the poor.” Yet the story discussed few climate factors leading to the desperation. Rather, it focused on the local conditions of poverty, local topography and geography, and short-term weather events—which it only half-heartedly attempted to link to climate change—as the cause of their current plight, and the ways human traffickers are taking advantage of the situation.

Then, there was a recent article pushing a particular scheme to reduce cities’ vulnerability to flooding, which in an offhand way tied flooding, which is a normal occurrence in the areas pointed to, as being exacerbated by climate change. Flooding was the problem, the contributing factors are many, but after a brief allusion to climate change—no facts, just assertions—the article moves on to that particular self-appointed planning czar’s plan for flood mitigation. Once again, climate change is nothing more than a hook to reel the reader into this guy’s plan for urban design.

One of the worst cases of climate change misdirection came in an article published by Bloomberg, “Climate Change Poses a Child Labor ‘Threat Multiplier,’” which claimed climate change was the motive force behind child labor in developing countries. My colleague Linnea Lueken’s response to this article pointed out that, contrary to the author’s assertion that climate change is causing poverty which is forcing children to work to keep their families afloat, not only does the data show poverty is not getting worse, but also no data support the claim extreme weather is worsening in the regions’ discussed.

By contrast, the story’s writer acknowledged in an almost throwaway paragraph, it is not climate change but rather the push for green technologies to “fight climate change,” for which child labor is being expanded and exploited in dangerous conditions.

Bloomberg’s author admits the materials vital for green energy technologies are built on child labor, writing, “an asset manager may be unaware of the true extent of child-labor risk for certain climate-transition commodities, such as tin used in solar panels, lithium for batteries or even sugarcane used for some forms of renewable energy.” There you have it: it is not climate change, but climate friendly technologies that are forcing small children into the mines, waste sites and slag heaps, and factories.

Why does the mainstream media so often use misleading headlines linking a problem to climate change when the story itself is really focused on other issues almost solely? Perhaps, because, as I’ve written before, so much of the reporting on climate matters is the equivalent of bought and paid for political advertising on behalf of big-dollar climate woke groups pushing the narrative: climate change causes everything bad.

When you are paid to write about climate change, you write about climate change. As Lueken suggested to me in conversation, maybe they are simply padding the numbers when they report to their climate patrons. The more stories with climate change in the headline, the more their past support, and increased support going forward, seems justified.

Maybe it’s just clicks they are seeking online with stories with “climate change” in the headlines garnering more hits and opens than stories about poverty or warlords or good crop production. Maybe, it’s a matter of the authors and their editors hoping that a headline linking a complex human-interest story to climate change will get readers to go beyond the headline and read the story in full, rather than ignoring it as a “not my problem” story.

Maybe it’s more nefarious. The media, having drunk the Kool-Aid on climate alarm, are trying to motivate strong fears of climate change among their generally un-scientifically informed audiences in an attempt to stampede them into calling for the climate policies the journalists support. They hope repetitive alarming headlines will, by themselves, generate fear and action among readers who don’t read the stories, or who don’t read them attentively or with a skeptical eye.

Regardless, all too often when you read beyond the alarming headlines about climate change causing this or that human or environmental disaster, the story itself paints a far different picture. Let’s hope most readers who get beyond the headlines recognize when climate change is nothing more than a red herring for a story entirely unconnected to that issue.

Source: Climate Realism

---

NEW: Get Climate at a Glance on your mobile device!

---

Video of the Week

Heartland Institute Research Fellow Linnea Lueken talks about how the Earth is greening, meaning plant life is increasing – it’s one of the benefits of climate change that is often ignored or dismissed.

---

Read the brutal truth about how battery production for electric vehicles cause immense environmental destruction and human tragedy.

---

Germany Turns Back to Coal to Keep the Lights On

Germany’s energy regulator announced in April that the country will be using more coal in the coming year(s), despite the government’s promise to cut carbon dioxide emissions in line with its Paris climate agreement commitments.

To lower carbon emissions, Germany prematurely shuttered reliable coal-fueled power plants, while building out large amounts of industrial wind. Then, in a gross overreaction to Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant breach, Germany even shut down its cleanest form of reliable energy, nuclear, closing its last three operating nuclear plants in 2023—despite them having no environmental difficulties and not emitting CO2.

To soften the economic blow to utilities, in 2020 the German government agreed to give more than 4 billion euros to utilities to end all coal use by 2030, and promised as much as 40 billion euros to regions where coal mining was the economic engine, reports the  Las Vegas Review Journal.

The other half of Germany’s plan to ensure that 80 percent of its power would come from renewable sources by 2030 was a massive investment/expansion of industrial wind farms. But the German government quickly learned what any engineer, or even first grader, could have told it:  the wind doesn’t always blow and the sun doesn’t always shine, a fact which undermines the nation’s demand for reliable power. It would have understood this fact if it hadn’t been blinded by an obsessive commitment to cutting emissions and “magical thinking” about renewables’ virtues.

With nuclear gone and wind power flagging for extended periods of time, in 2022 Germany extended the lives of its few remaining coal plants, began reopening some coal plants that had been shuttered not so long ago, and opened new coal mines, while expanding others. Germany deployed 8.3 gigawatts of mainly coal-fired backup in 2022, an amount that grew in 2023.

Germany’s energy regulator now predicts the country will need twice as much coal-fueled power as back up by the 2026/2027 time period than it did last year.

Sources: TechXplore/Las Vegas Review-Journal;  CFACT

---

Animal DNA suggests That the Arctic Was Warmer in 7,000 BC Than at Present

Recent research by a group of Scandinavian researchers published in the journal Science Advances  found evidence, in the form of bones, that a number of animals currently native to warmer climates existed in the Arctic region 9,000 years ago, implying that temperatures there were as warm or warmer than they are at present.

The bones include some from African wildcats, dogs, frogs, and amberjacks—a fish species only found in temperate to tropical Pacific and Atlantic waters (Gulf of Mexico, Brazil). As the Daily Sceptic writes concerning the discovery:

The area in northern Norway is much further north than where these wild animals would survive today and indicates, yet again, that temperatures in what is known as the Holocene Thermal Maximum (HTM) were much warmer than today. And of course it makes a nonsense of climate alarmists’ claims that current temperatures are higher than periods going back thousands if not millions of years.

The team of 16 researchers from different fields of study at various universities in Norway and Romania examined the DNA contained in bone fragments found in a sealed cave system, Storsteinhola, north of the Arctic circle. The DNA tells a tale of long periods of inhabitation by species which couldn’t survive in the area now, indicating that despite much lower CO2 levels, temperatures in the region were warmer than now.

“Other scientists have also found proxy evidence that suggests temperatures may have risen around 5°C during this period to levels much higher than today,” reports The Daily Sceptic.  “The science blog No Tricks Zone recently noted scientific findings that suggested the early Holocene was so warm that 10,000 years ago, boreal forests expanded northwards to Arctic regions in places that are today too cold to support anything but tundra.”

The Scandinavian scientists noted that the area shows no evidence of human activity, so humans can’t have deposited the bones there over time. Rather, the numerous species existed “far outside their current geographic distribution,” which the scientists called “remarkable,” with the African wildcats’ remains representing the “highest latitude location for this species ever.”

The evidence suggests that after a period of extended warmth, a rapid onset (possibly as short as 100 days) of cold and heavy snow, ended the warm period, and brought about the extinction of those species outside of the geographic ranges where they currently exist.

The inconvenient nature of these findings for the climate crisis narrative has resulted in them largely being ignored by the mainstream media

Sources:  Science Advances;  The Daily Sceptic

---

Heartland’s Must-read Climate Sites

---

Research Suggests Cattle Raising May Reduce Emissions

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that livestock production causes 11.1 of global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, recommending people eat less meat to fight climate change.

Yet recent research suggests that under some climatic conditions or ecosystems, at least, cattle raising may actually result in lower emissions.

Alltech and Archbold examined the emissions from cattle raising in wetlands and ground that is regularly water laden. They found that although cattle accounted for 19 percent to 30 percent of emissions, the vast majority of the methane produced there was from the soil itself and the decomposing plant and animal life. As a result, they found, removing the cows actually produced a net increase in methane emissions.

Vaughn Holder, Ph.D., research project manager for beef nutrition at Alltech, who with Betsey Boughton, Ph.D., director of agroecology at Archbold, studied the impacts that cattle production has on the ecosystem on a wetlands pasture at Buck Island Ranch, about 150 miles northwest of Miami, Florida, notes that the production of agricultural emissions is more complex than simply ruminant eats plants = more methane emissions.

“There is a far more complex process in agriculture than it is in fossil fuel systems,” Holder told Just the News, which wrote:

Cattle are part of a carbon cycle. So if you just model the emissions coming from the animal, you’re missing the rest of the ecosystem, Holder said, which is absorbing carbon as a result of the animal being on the land.

When cattle graze on land, the plants prioritize root growth over the plant matter above the surface. The deeper the roots, the more plants sequester carbon in the soil through the photosynthesis process.

Grazing also removes grasses from a pasture, which reduces the dead plant matter that falls to the soil and decomposes, which also produces greenhouse gasses.

At the Buck Island Ranch, Boughton and her team measured the amount of greenhouse gases emitted on a pasture that had no grazing and compared it to pasture that had grazing. The data suggested grazing livestock were a net carbon sink compared to no grazing.

Of course, what’s true of a wetland’s ecosystem may not translate into more arid lands were cattle are often grazed, so more research is needed in order to know how cattle impact emissions in other environments.

However, as Holder and Boughton point out, quite aside from reducing emissions from wetlands, cattle and other livestock also consume a lot of plants humans can’t eat, turning them into them into edible proteins humans can consume, increasing global food security while reducing the emissions from the decomposition of the plants when they otherwise naturally die. In addition, livestock also consume a lot of food byproducts that humans either can’t or prefer not to eat, like orange pulp used in orange juice production. Although such byproducts can be used in composting, Holder notes, “composting increases emissions five times more than feeding it to dairy cows and byproducts disposed of in landfills produced 50 times more emissions than if it is fed to dairy cows.”

The research suggests that when accounting for livestock emissions, one should do an all-things- considered comparison, accounting for not just the emissions from cattle and sheep, but also from the material they consume that otherwise would have produced emissions by other means.

Sources: Just the News;  Understanding the Carbon Cycle on a Cattle Ranch

---

Podcast of the Week

In his new co-authored anthology, Climate and Energy: The Case for Realism, climatologist David Legates gathers assembles some of the best scientists, economists and analysts on climate change today to stake out a middle ground between extreme climate alarm, and the other extreme of people claiming climate change is a hoax. Climate change is happening, people are having localized effects, but it poses no existential threat to civilization of existence.

Subscribe to the Environment & Climate News podcast on Apple Podcasts, iHeart, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And be sure to leave a positive review!

---

Climate Comedy

---

Recommended Sites

By Andy May

This discussion took place in the comments to Mallen Baker’s post of the discussion between Tom Nelson and Baker on Climate the Movie: The Cold Truth. The full discussion can be viewed here. My review of the movie can be read here, and an annotated bibliography for the movie can be seen here.

The following discussion is between a physicist who refers to himself as “chrisa.4937” or “Chris A.” and me. I found it interesting because we were able to dig a little deeper into the actual physics of the climate system as opposed to way the physics is programmed into the climate models, often called “GCMs” in the discussion. Don’t worry, there are no equations, the discussion is readable. I have edited the full discussion for brevity, spelling, and grammar.

Mallen,

This video shows you do not understand the scientific method. A proposal, such as “humans cause climate change,” is set up to be falsified in science. Then examples are found that falsify the statement, that is the scientific process. Tom provided examples; his movie provided examples. You can’t dismiss them out of hand, the scientific method requires that each bit of contrary evidence be explained or the whole hypothesis is rejected. Providing an alternative hypothesis is not required. You are just one of many alarmists I’ve observed who try to shift the burden of proof to those who are not convinced that “humans cause climate change.” That is unscientific in the extreme.

More specific hypotheses:

a) CO₂ slows down the heat loss of the surface of earth to space.

b) A rise of CO₂ concentration does magnify the effect of a) measurably.

c) The rise of CO₂ concentration is caused by humanity.

Please note that the hypothesis you suggested is not scientific.

 @chrisa.4937  Your points are based on CO₂ laboratory measurements. In the real world, we must rely on climate models to determine if the human enhanced greenhouse effect is a problem or will be a problem. Yet even the IPCC admits the models are wrong:

“Hence, we assess with medium confidence that CMIP5 and CMIP6 models continue to overestimate observed warming in the upper tropical troposphere over the 1979–2014 period by at least 0.1°C per decade, in part because of an overestimate of the tropical SST trend pattern over this period.“ (AR6 WGI, page 444).

The above quote just touches on the problems, even more serious is that the models get all the ocean oscillations (AMO, PDO, NAO, AO, etc., see Eade, 2022) wrong. Not to mention the pattern of ocean warming in the Pacific (IPCC AR6, page 990).

 @andymay52  You seem to think my statement has something to do with models. It is about the most basic physics, far below the level of modelling. We are far far away from discussing models. We are on the level of “Are the laws of thermodynamics valid?“

 @chrisa.4937  On come on! I’m a petrophysicist and I can assure you that there is nothing in basic physics or thermodynamics that says that adding CO₂ to the atmosphere is dangerous. You can’t even show that adding CO₂ will cause warming, although I will admit that in my humble opinion, I think adding CO₂ will probably cause some warming, but it is likely small and benign. The only way you can show it might be a problem in the future is via climate models, and even the IPCC admits they are wrong and predict too much warming based on comparisons to observations (AR6 WGI, page 444).

 @andymay52  I‘m a physicist myself and am baffled by the claims you make here: Of course nothing in physics ever says something is „dangerous“, for this is not a scientific category at all. Science doesn‘t say it is „dangerous“ to pee on a high voltage line. It says „urine is an excellent conductor“.

But the most stunning statement is this: “You can’t even show that adding CO₂ will cause warming[…]“ You cannot even show that, it is an essential consequence of the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics (which explain the radiation activity of CO₂). CO₂ with its radiative properties slows down the export of energy from surface to space while heating by the sun is held constant. In such a setup physics gives no way that adding more CO₂ will not accumulate additional energy in the system.

And NO, this is not shown via models, but on a far more basic level via hypothesis and experiment. The predictions made by basic physics and quantified by Schwarzschild‘s equation were and are tested since the early 1980s and found to be correct ever since. Models are setup ON those findings, not predicting those findings without testing them. The literature documenting this literally takes metres of bookshelves in scientific libraries. The physics of it is in standard textbooks schooling students since decades. And now you come casually claiming this to be not there? Baffling, as I said.

 @chrisa.4937  The point I made was that while CO₂ can be shown to absorb some wavelengths in a laboratory and warm as a result, the Holocene record shows that CO₂ and temperature do not correlate (Liu, et al., 2014) and (Kaufman & Broadman, 2023). The instrumental record shows that temperatures fell from 1944 to 1978 while CO₂ went up (see Figure 7 here).

Second, Schwarzschild‘s equation is a vast oversimplification of the atmosphere; it does not include the effect of changing TPW [water vapor] and clouds. Both change independently of temperature, as I’ve previously shown (see here and here).

As Feynman said, if your beautiful model doesn’t match observations, it is wrong.

 @chrisa.4937  OK, to your points, quoted below:

“a) CO₂ slows down the heat loss of the surface of earth to space.

b) A rise of CO₂ concentration does magnify the effect of a) measurably.

c) The rise of CO₂ concentration is caused by humanity.”

Comments

a) Not true everywhere, in polar winters the atmosphere is warmer than the surface, so additional CO₂ cools the surface. This is important because the polar winters are major heat sinks, especially the North Pole.

b) Measurements do not support this, for example the Holocene Temperature Conundrum (Liu, 2014) and 1944-1978. Kaufman, 2023 tries to explain away the Holocene Temperature Conundrum, but fails and his paper is inconclusive. Data shows that CO₂ is a very minor factor in global warming, other factors “overshadow” it as Kaufman, 2023 admits.

c) This is true.

 @andymay52  You are the first to answer my points. Thx. However, I disagree for more than one reason: You are right that a) is not true everywhere every time. But it is true for the whole globe at all times. Otherwise, the laws of thermodynamics would be broken. You cannot fill a system with energy at speed c, have it export energy at speed c – x (which is true for the surface, where x is the deceleration of radiative energy export due to radiative active gases in the atmosphere) and end up with no higher steady state temperature. This is forbidden by thermodynamics.

To b): Your answer refers to historical measurements scrutinized for correlations. This is in no way a test for the hypothesis. To test the hypothesis, you must measure IR spectra from the ground and from high above simultaneously – which was done for decades and is done still. Millionfold in the meantime. I highly recommend A First Course in Atmospheric Radiation by Grant W. Petty

 @chrisa.4937  WRT (a) well over half of the total radiation Earth receives is in the tropics, yet tropical temperatures hardly change over time. Global warming (or the silly name “climate change” if you prefer) occurs at the poles. The South Pole, like the tropics, is hardly changing, so we are talking about the North Pole at this point in geological history.

Long term Northern Hemisphere weather is a function of meridional transport, the transfer of energy from the tropics to the North Pole, where it is radiated to space due to the small greenhouse effect at the North Pole, especially in winter. The speed of that transport controls the rate of warming or cooling of Earth in this time.

You are trying to treat the Earth as a black body, it isn’t. It is a very active gray body. The atmosphere and the oceans contain more thermal energy than Venus‘ surface, but our surface has a much larger heat capacity. Again, you are oversimplifying the climate system and how it warms and cools.

As for (b), if you are saying that we have no way to tell what the impact of CO₂ is on climate, I agree. There is more evidence that it is small than large, however. The IPCC AR6 conclusion that all the warming since 1750 is due to CO₂ and other GHGs has no support whatever.

 @chrisa.4937  I might add that while it is true that when more energy is leaving Earth’s atmosphere than entering it, the globe cools, and vice versa, to say that is all that matters with respect to “climate change” is wrong. Further we cannot measure incoming versus outgoing radiation accurately enough to know whether net radiation is increasing or decreasing, or (more importantly) where it is increasing or decreasing. Check the problems discussed in Loeb, et al., 2022.

 @andymay52  You are moving the goalposts. My initial three points were pointing to the energy balance sheet of earth. How energy is moved around within the system does not affect the average numbers of in vs. out in W/m².

And as for b): No, I‘m not saying we have no way of telling the impact of CO₂ on climate. In fact, we have a very sound way of telling the impact of CO₂ on global warming, which is highly relevant for overall climate. And this way is given by basic physics, not historical data. This basic physics was researched for more than a century and was and is very well measured and documented in thousands of papers and standard textbooks. Please note that the early predicted consequences of the rise of CO₂ have been measured nearly spot on, e. g. the cooling of the stratosphere, which gave the noble prize to Manabe recently.

You can start by reading his original paper to gain more insight in the physics used for calculating warming ( Manabe & Wetherald 1967 ). This would be a good start for it looks like you have gotten the entire concept of the GHE wrong. To make it clear: GHE has little to do with the radiation budget at the surface but is about the radiation budget up in the atmosphere, where the LWR at the frequencies of CO₂ can leave to space without further absorption. I do not find this concept being reflected in your comments, to be honest.

 @chrisa.4937  I don’t think we are communicating well, this statement from your comment is clearly incorrect:

“How energy is moved around within the system does not affect the average numbers of in vs. out in W/m².”

The GHE is huge in the tropics, it is negative in the polar winter. If you move thermal energy from the tropics to the North Pole quickly the increase in energy out is huge, if not it is small.

The energy-in over the same timeframe stays almost exactly the same. Your assumption that moving energy around the planet has no effect is the largest and most obvious mistake of modern climatology.

I’ve already read Manabe’s 1967 paper. While solar changes are small, the changes in GHE around the Earth are huge and variable and the climate model predictions of them do not match reality. Another problem, cloud cover changes, as a function of hemispheric weather. This also changes the GHE dramatically, and again the models do not match observed cloud cover. Most definitely, how energy is moved in the system DOES affect the average numbers.

 @andymay52  The average number (in power/area) is a requirement given by the 2nd law of thermodynamics.  This law clearly states, that the earth as a whole will always seek the very state in which power(in) = power(out), where power(in) is the income of solar radiation and power(out) is the radiation that earth sends into space. Given that the geometry of Earth does not significantly change, this simply means the power/area output of earth is a value that you cannot change by moving heat around within the atmosphere / on the surface – otherwise you would break the 2nd law.

Your statement reads as if you imply the opposite to be true. In this case there is nothing to discuss, because I won‘t discuss under the premise that the 2nd law doesn‘t hold. What you might have meant instead is the fact that the power of radiative emission of the surface depends on the temperature distribution on this surface. That is correct, but on the other hand known to every climatologist and taken into account by the field.

 @chrisa.4937 The second law of thermodynamics is fine. The problem is your application of it to Earth’s climate system. Because the Earth is not a black body where (energy-in) – (energy-out) is always the same, we must account for energy residence time in the system, a quantity that varies significantly. Related to this, is the constantly changing albedo due to constantly changing cloud cover, but that is a separate issue. Clouds change as the climate system changes, which is why it is related.

Energy residence time is a function of the global circulation system. We don’t understand what drives the global circulation system, but we can observe the changes in the ocean oscillations, the jet streams, the movements of the ITCZ, and in atmospheric circulation patterns (see Wyatt and Curry, 2013, “Role for Eurasian Arctic …” and related papers).

It is important to understand that the critical ocean oscillations (AMO, PDO, NAO, AO, ENSO, etc.) were all discovered after the CO₂ driven GCMs were invented and their basic assumption that CO₂ drives climate change was locked in. Because the critical oscillations cannot be reproduced by the GCMs, they are critically flawed. For a discussion of the problems see Eade, et al., 2022, “Quantifying the rarity of extreme multi-decadal…”).

Sometimes it is more interesting to see the critical issues debated, rather than reading the dry academic material. Climate The Movie sure has sparked some interesting discussions. I leave it to the reader to decide whether Chris or I are correct.