The ruling was handed down as the COP29 climate summit is staged in Azerbaijan, says Sky News. The absurd lawfare campaigns by climate alarm supporters, who like everyone else rely on oil and related products every day for fuel, heating and much more, won’t end here though.
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Shell has won its appeal against a climate court ruling that it must sharply reduce its carbon emissions, reports Sky News.

The oil and gas producer went to the Court of Appeal in the Netherlands following a decision in support of environmental campaign groups in the country, including Friends Of The Earth.

That ruling, in 2021, ordered Shell to cut its carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 compared to 2019 levels in order to protect Dutch citizens. [Talkshop comment – they can stop using Shell or equivalent products if they want].

The emissions curbs included those caused by the use of Shell’s products.

The judge in the appeal dismissed all the claims against Shell.

The company, which exited its dual headquarters structure in The Hague in 2022 to reside only in the UK, had argued that the original district court decision was flawed on many grounds.

They included that only nation states can set such sweeping demands and that such a cut to its business would only shift output towards its competitors without any benefit to the planet.

The ruling was handed down as the COP29 climate summit is staged in Azerbaijan and just months after Shell weakened a 2030 carbon reduction target and scrapped a 2035 objective, citing expectations for strong gas demand and uncertainty in the energy transition.

Tuesday’s judgment may not be the end of the matter.

Full report here.

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November 12, 2024 at 04:10AM

That is according to a new paper about the changes over the past 30 years. So the threat from sea on our coasts remains the same as it has always been. The coast still needs protecting and that is where we should be spending the money. Instead it is being wasted on a pointless quest for net zero which will have zero effect on the weather, climate or temperature.

 New Paper: Wave Height, Storm Surge Changes Over Past 30 Years Too Small For Measurable Impact!

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November 12, 2024 at 01:34AM

“What to expect from COP 29 in Baku come November? In the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: ‘It’s like déjà vu all over again’.”

Remember COP28? Forget about it. Most everybody else has. This is COP29, Nov. 11-24, 2024, the 29th annual international greenwashing gabfest about the world’s promised actions to deal with a climate being changed by man-made global warming. Most of those meetings have had little real impact, generating more heat, rancor, posturing, and light — and sometimes state-sponsored repression —  than measurable movement toward significant reductions in emissions of greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2).

The formal title of these highly-hyped, frequently ignored, sometimes entertaining gatherings is the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” with the inevitable acronym of UNFCC. The selection of Azerbaijan to host the meeting is significant. It is the third predominantly Muslim country and the third authoritarian regime to host the meeting: Egypt in 2022, the United Arab Emirates in 2023, and Azerbaijan in November.

Welcome to Baku, population 2 million, the capital of Azerbaijan, a country of 10 million. Azerbaijan is the second consecutive major oil producer to host a gathering that, at least rhetorically, is targeting fossil fuels as a key driver of increasing global temperatures.

Azerbaijan: Big Oil

The country is located with its east coast on the Caspian Sea: Russia and Georgia to the north, Armenia to the east (and containing territory claimed by both Armenia and Azerbaijan), and Iran to the south. The country is deeply tied to oil. According to International Energy Agency data, oil and gas accounts for 90% of the country’s export revenues and some 60% of the nation’s budget. The oil roots are deep. 

A birthplace of petroleum, oil production began around 1850 from dug wells and spread with the adoption of kerosene lamps and internal combustion engines. By the start of the 20th Century, Azerbaijan was the world’s leading oil state, producing over half of the world’s supply and known as the “Black Gold Capital.”

The Republic of Azerbaijan, a Soviet Union satellite from 1920 to 1991, is nominally a “semi-presidential republic,” meaning it has both an elected president and a parliamentary prime minister, but in practice is a hereditary monarchy since 1993, when Heydar Aliyev took power. His son Ilhan Aliyev now runs the country and hand-picked the host country team that will lead the conference.

The country has a bad record on human rights. According to a 2023 analysis by Human Rights Watch,

The government severely restricted freedoms of expression, assembly, and association. Despite some progress on a notorious torture case, torture and ill-treatment in police custody and places of detention persisted.

U.S. Senator Ben Cardin (D-Md.) earlier this month criticized the selection of Azerbaijan to host the conference. Cardin, who is retiring at the end of the current Congress, is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He said that “hosting a major international conference like COP29 should come with responsibilities and expectations that host countries allow frank discussion of information and issues, which requires recognizing freedoms of speech and assembly. Azerbaijan has not done so.”

Cardin called on the Heydar government to “release those unjustly imprisoned by his government, including Armenian detainees, and community activists who peacefully demonstrated against poor labor practices and harmful environmental impacts of the Chovdar gold mine operation.”

Agenda 29

When the world’s policy waffle-chefs arrive in Baku in November, the formal and informal agendas will be familiar: advancing their government favored technologies and energy sources, portraying their patrons as environmental saints, and avoiding the embarrassing question of how to aid those poor countries who may suffer from a changed climate but did little compared to the world’s wealthy countries, who created the problem.

For the majority of the formal delegates representing established and entrenched industries and countries, Job 1 will be damage control. As reported by the Financial Times (September 13):

Oil-rich nations are making a concerted effort to slow progress on a landmark agreement to end the use of fossil fuels, according to western nations taking part in global climate change talks.

At COP 28 (remember that?) the confab agreed to “transition” away from fossil fuels by 2050 (a date far enough into the future to have little immediate consequence) and triple renewable energy by 2030. A side agreement, not part of the official conference, led by nuclear nations, called for a worldwide tripling of nuclear power generating capacity by 2030, an unachievable goal.

The FT identified Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Bolivia as among the group of oil producers looking to prevent any momentum developing for the fossil phase-out. The world’s largest oil producer, the United States, will likely bob-and-weave and produce word salad press releases. Azerbaijan is likely to tap dance around the topic as it presides.

Compensation Gymnastics

Another long-running issue is what, how much, how, and when the rich will come up with compensation for the poor victims. Scotland’s The National reported, “Finance is expected to dominate COP29 in Azerbaijan from November 11 to 22, with countries still deadlocked on how to deliver more funds to help vulnerable countries adapt to climate change.”

Earlier COP conventions agreed to create a $100 billion-per-year compensation fund, without any specifics such as how it would be run, how much it would distribute, and other necessary details. COP28 agreed to “operationalization” of such a fund, whatever that specifically means and, no surprises here, nothing has been done. The U.S. committed to provide $100 million, but that commitment is meaningless without the administrative mechanisms and transfer of funds. 

Looking at the Dubai agreement on compensation, a critic commented that it “contains no specifics on scale, financial targets or how it will be funded. Instead, the decision merely ‘invites’ developed nations to ‘take the lead’ in providing finance and support and encourages commitments from other parties.

It also fails to detail which countries will be eligible to receive funding and vaguely states it would be for ‘economic and non-economic loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, including extreme weather events and slow onset events.’ So far, pledges have been underwhelming.”

At a pre-conference technical meeting in Baku in mid-month, the FT reported, “African governments called for more than [$1.3 trillion] a year in climate finance.”

Conclusion

COP 29 continues down a path outlined by the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. James Hansen, the father of the modern climate activism, commented at the time that Paris

is a fraud really, a fake. It’s just bullshit… There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.

What to expect from COP 29 in Baku come November? In the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

—————–

Kennedy Maize blogs at The Quad Report, from which this post was adapted. Maize has been a Washington-based journalist covering energy and environmental topics for more than 40 years.

The post COP29 Preview: Hot Talk vs. Reality appeared first on Master Resource.

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November 12, 2024 at 01:02AM

“[T]he contribution of CO2 to the greenhouse effect is 4% – 5%. Human CO2 emissions represent 4% of the total, which means that the total human contribution to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect is 0.16% to 0.20% – a negligible effect.” – Dr. Demetris Koutsoyiannis (2024)

New research exposes the vacuousness of the “imaginary world” models proclaiming CO2 the dominant regulator of the Earth’s climate.

A CO2-less or CO2-only atmosphere…an imaginary-world thought experiment

An oft-heard claim is that, due to the prominence of CO2 as the Earth’s climate “control knob” (see Lacis et al., 2010), the greenhouse effect could not exist – indeed, it would collapse – if there was no CO2 in the atmosphere.

Image Source: Lacis et al., 2010 and Schmidt et al., 2006

However, it should go without saying that this CO2-less atmospheric condition itself is an imaginary-world conceptualization. Thus, fantasizing about what would happen if the atmosphere was comprised 0 ppm CO2, 1,000,000 ppm CO2, 0 ppm water vapor…are all just untestable, never-observable thought experiments. They cannot be subjected to the scientific method. Thus, they are unfalsifiable.

CO2’s climate effects are undetectable

Of course, this very unfalsifiable thought experiment is what believers in the CO2-is-the-climate-control-knob narrative rest their case on. But even if we do use this imaginary-world premise, the existing models (MODTRAN, HITRAN) that allegedly support the CO2-controls-climate orthodoxy actually undermine it.

For example, as Dr. Koutsoyiannis points out in his extensively-referenced paper, the MODTRAN data show that the Earth’s temperature remains at the default greenhouse-effect value if the water vapor scale is adjusted upwards slightly, by just 30%. The greenhouse effect does not “collapse” as claimed by Lacis et al. disciples – the control-knob believers.

The HITRAN database also indicates the imaginary-world condition of doubling CO2 from 400 to 800 ppm would only alter the radiation flux at the top of the atmosphere by -1.1%, a hypothetical realization that could not even be detected in future macroscopic measurements (if the atmosphere ever were to reach a CO2 concentration of 800 ppm).

MODTRAN models further affirm that (1) there is only a 1% temperature difference between either doubling (800 ppm) or halving (200 ppm) the atmospheric CO2 concentration, and (2) the change in the downwelling radiation resulting from an increase from 300 ppm (1900) to 420 ppm (2023) is only 0.5%. These tiny changes “could not be discerned by observations.”

Image Source: Koutsoyiannis, 2024

CO2 has not been detectably reducing the outgoing longwave radiation

As a “control knob” for the climate, CO2 is believed to be the principal reason why the Earth’s outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) should be reducing (Dewitte and Clerbaux, 2018).

“…the increase of Greenhouse Gasses (GHG) primarily CO2 reduces the OLR”

However, despite the increase in CO2 concentration in recent decades, OLR has been increasing. Any reduction in OLR from the CO2 effect is not detectable.

Image Source: Dewitte and Clerbaux, 2018

Likewise, the MODTRAN clear-sky results (i.e., an atmosphere where no clouds exist and CO2 and water vapor are the main greenhouse effect agents) show OLR has increased by +0.38 to +0.60 W/m² from 2001 to 2022, consistent with the increase in temperature.

According to the data reviewed by Dr. Koutsoyiannis, any record of decrease in OLR “can hardly be attributed to increased CO2, but it can be related to water vapor and cloud profiles,” as the “effect of CO2 is trumped by the effect of clouds, which is consistent with the major role of water on climate and the minor one of CO2.”

95% of the greenhouse effect (downwelling radiation) is from water vapor, clouds

Per the MODTRAN calculations, CO2’s contribution to the planetary greenhouse effect is only 4% to 5%, and the contribution from water vapor and clouds is 87% (outgoing radiation) to 95% (downwelling radiation). The CO2 contribution to greenhouse effect changes over the last century, as CO2 increased from 300 ppm to 420 ppm, is only about 0.5%. This quantified percentage is “below any threshold to make it observable.”

Worse, when we consider that human CO2 emissions are only 4% of Earth’s total CO2 emissions, and that the CO2 contribution to the greenhouse effect is just 4% to 5%, “the total human contribution to the enhancement of the greenhouse effect is 0.16% to 0.20%.”

Image Source: Koutsoyiannis, 2024

Supporting evidence for CO2’s negligible role

Another set of sources supporting the contention that CO2’s greenhouse effect contribution is only 4% to 5% comes from the notorious Trenberth radiation budget charts. First, notice the 333 W/m² value identified for downwelling radiation from greenhouse gases (lower right).

Image Source: Trenberth and Fasullo, 2011

Now consider the estimated greenhouse effect (downwelling radiation) contribution from CO2 alone as shown in  Schmithüsen et al., 2015.

Notice it ranges from about 0 W/m² (or less) near the poles, about 10-15 W/m² at mid-high latitudes, and about 25 W/m² around the tropics. Averaged over the globe, it would appear the total mean CO2 greenhouse effect contribution is about 13 to 15 W/m². If CO2 indeed accounts for ~14 W/m² of the 333 W/m² downwelling radiation from greenhouse gases, its contribution is 4.2%. The other ~95%, or ~320 W/m², is necessarily from water vapor and cloud.

Image Source: Schmithüsen et al., 2015

As shown in the Koutsoyiannis review of results from HITRAN database, a doubling of CO2 from 400 to 800 ppm only produces a ~1.1% perturbation to the radiative flux at the top of the atmosphere (3 W/m²), which is not discernible. This is consistent with Chen et al. (2024), who assess that a doubling of CO2 produces a negative top-of-atmosphere (TOA) forcing (-1 W/m²), and a positive TOA forcing of just +2-3 W/m² in the mid-high latitudes and tropics.

These papers further establish the negligible role of CO2 in the Earth’s greenhouse effect.

Image Source: Chen et al., 2024

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November 12, 2024 at 12:17AM