From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Net Zero is dead in the United States and the last rites have been administered in the devastating official report from the Department of Energy. Released earlier this week, the report cancels the decades-long censorship imposed by so-called ‘settled’ climate science. It is compiled by five eminent scientists and is a systematic take-down of the claims, methodologies and motivations driving activist scientists, politicians and opinion formers promoting the hard-Left Net Zero fantasy. Despite its ground-breaking importance, to date it has been largely ignored by mainstream media including the BBC and Guardian.

Computer models are said to offer “little guidance” on how much of the climate responds to higher levels of carbon dioxide, most extreme weather events are not increasing, sea levels in North America show no increasing trend while weather attribution claims are challenged by natural climate variation along with an admission that they were originally designed with ‘lawfare’ in mind. For Anthony Watts, who has spent decades challenging the ‘settled’ politicised science, the most important consideration is that the report, “directly confronts the exaggerated and politicised rhetoric that has dominated headlines for decades”.

Watts, who runs the Watts Up With That? (WUWT?) site that was responsible for publicising the infamous Climategate scandal, argues that the new report is unique in that it has both official status and author independence. It is not a think tank paper or an article in a ‘dissenting’ journal. “It’s rare to see scientists of this calibre (with backgrounds at NASA, IPCC and major universities) allowed to directly challenge prevailing policy narratives with government resources behind them”, he notes. The work is a “comprehensive critique” quoting extensively from peer-reviewed literature with clear explanations of scientific uncertainties and climate model error. 

For regular readers of WUWT? and other inquiring publications such as the Daily Sceptic, many of the issues discussed in the report will be familiar. In the last four years, your correspondent has written nearly 500 articles on climate science and Net Zero in an attempt to fill in the significant reporting gaps left by the narrative-driven mainstream media. Many of the papers quoted are familiar, not least in the section that deals with the sensational ‘greening’ of the planet caused by higher levels of CO₂. 

The report quotes from recent work that shows extensive plant and crop growth due to the atmospheric fertilisation that has enhanced photosynthesis and improved water use efficiency. Over the past 60+ years, the authors observe that there have been thousands of studies on the response of plants to rising CO₂ levels, and the overwhelming theme is that they benefit from the extra gas. In 2016, Zhu et al detected greening over 25%–50% of the planet. But there is a near official news blackout on the subject. A few mentions can be found in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports but overall, observe the authors, “the Policymakers Summaries, Technical Summaries and [IPCC] Synthesis reports of AR5 and ASR6 do not discuss the topic”.

Needless to say there are few kind words for the climate projections based on the notorious IPCC emission scenario known as RCP8.5. Most academic climate impact studies in recent years are based on this extreme scenario, “that is now considered implausible”. Why is this castigation important – because RCP8.5 litters the scientific clickbait literature and has a key role in promoting the Net Zero plan. Most stories in mainstream media debunked in recent years by the Daily Sceptic and others – from the future collapsing Gulf Stream to the disappearing coral – are based on this trash “business-as-usual” computer model pathway.

Climate models are noted to be the primary tool used to project future climate changes in response to higher levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases. It might be added that their outputs are the basis of 40 years of fear mongering designed to drive Net Zero and the destruction of the hydrocarbon industrial economy. “Of great concern”, continue the authors, “is the fact that after several decades of the climate modelling enterprise involving approximately three dozen models operated by research centres around the world, the range of future warming they produce in response to a hypothetical doubling of CO₂ extends over a factor of three”. This range of disagreement among models has not decreased for decades, they add.

Those inclined to use less charitable language might comment that climate models are useless for the purpose of providing genuine science upon which reasonable public policy can be determined – and always have been.

Much of the recent climate fear mongering surrounds ‘extreme’ weather events and the suggestion that something Nature has always thrown at life on Earth can now be directly attributed to the actions of humans. The most prominent in this field is the Green Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) run out of Imperial College in London and headed by BBC favourite, Dr Friederike Otto. “WWA’s extensive promotion of non-peer-reviewed findings, its open admission to shaping analyses to serve litigation, and its methodological challenges have sparked controversy”, it is noted. The biggest problem (apart from using computer models) is the lack of past data on extreme weather events. A few years of data allied to an unproven conviction that all current warming is caused by humans, cannot provide guidance for events that crop up as outliers. If paleoclimate reconstruction are considered, “it becomes very difficult for an event to pass thresholds of what is expected from natural variability”, it is concluded. 

US Department of Energy: A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the US Climate. Authors – John Christy Ph.D, Judith Curry Ph.D, Steven Koonin Ph.D, Ross McKitrick Ph.D, Roy Spencer Ph.D.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic Environment Editor. Follow him on X.