'Man-made' climate change: the world's multi-trillion dollar moral panic

One of my abiding memories relates to a flight with my family, departing Manila for London at 11.30 PM on 31 December 1999. The wide-bodied plane was only 10 per cent occupied because potential air travellers had been scared witless about potential Y2K-related mishaps. Anyhow, the plane did not fall out of the sky at midnight. Instead the flight was memorable because economy passengers could make a bed from a row of empty seats of their choosing. More broadly, as the first day of January 2000 dawned, it became apparent that the likely incidence of Y2K failure had been greatly exaggerated.

The Y2K scare was nevertheless a boon for consultants and IT specialists. It is estimated that US$300 billion (that's right, billion!) was spent worldwide (and $A12 billion in Australia) to audit and upgrade computers. A University of Queensland study concluded that most of this expenditure was "unproductive or at least misdirected". Some studies cited, even claimed that "the whole problem had been grossly overstated", and most of the money "wasted".

The "man-made" global warming scare has a lot in common with the Y2K incident, except that the scale of the scare is massively higher.

These scares or "moral panics" (fear spread that some evil threatens the well-being of society) have been promoted by "experts", who in some cases had a financial or ideological interest in measures to address the scare. Attitudes to "man-made" global warming ("the great moral challenge of our generation" requiring us to "save the planet") are, however, far more emotional. A recent ACF-sponsored survey even reported that "33.4 per cent of women aged under 30 were having second thoughts about starting or expanding a family because of (climate change) fears".

While the Y2K scare had no identified folk devil because the bug itself was an abstraction, the "man-made"global warming panic (mainly promoted by the green-left) does have tangible and named villains. The identified villains are "deniers", the coal industry, and non-renewable electricity providers.

Bloomberg NEF has estimated that (by mid 2018) US$2.3 trillion had been spent world-wide to deploy the wind and solar farms operating today. If the "man-made" global warming hypothesis turns out to be substantially untrue, or if most countries are unwilling to do much to solve the declared problem, a lot of money will have been wasted. For Germany alone, its transition to renewable energy is set to cost up to 1 trillion Euros (US$1.34 trillion) in the next two decades. In Australia, the rush a decade ago to spend over $10 billion on (subsequently largely unused) desalination plants was also part of the climate change scare.

The green-left lobby already has "form" as a (barely credible) moral entrepreneur. It has acted over many decades as a (self-identified morally superior) crusader demanding action on a range of perceived environmental and other problems, only some of which were real. Previous embarrassments included the Club of Rome scare of the early 1970s (that the world faced limits to growth because it wouldsoon run out of resources) and the later Peak Oil predictions. There has also been a campaign to recycle (at great cost) all manner of consumables (even materials that nobody wants or items that are uneconomic to recycle), as well as protests against almost every proposed resource or heavy industry project.

These scares and campaigns usually lost credibility because subsequent events failed to validate them, and many were seen as simply "anti-business". The green-left also runs a scare (based on arguable safety concerns) about nuclear power, which has been put completely off the agenda in Australia, despite being an obvious energy source that does not generate greenhouse emissions.

Climate change per se is not controversial. Historically, people have believed that climate and the weather are determined by Nature. There is also a lot of clear, observable, and recorded evidence of past climate change cycles (involving both far colder and much warmer weather than now), that clearly were natural phenomena. These natural influences have included changes in solar activity, the earth's orbit, volcanic eruptions, astronomic phenomena, and continental drift.

There is no issue in accepting the reality of climate change, including warming and reduced rainfall in southern Australia in recent decades. Blaming "man-made" global warming for most weather extremes or claiming that these are unprecedented is another matter.

The current drought is not unusual by Australian standards. The Federation drought early last century was far worse, and the first half of the twentieth century was much drier than the second half. There is also no evidence that cyclonic activity is getting more severe or that recent drought-related fish kills are unusual. [The (shallow) Menindee lakes in the past regularly dried out, and the Darling has always been an ephemeral river, drying to waterholes on no fewer than forty-five occasions between 1885 and 1960.]

According to proponents of the "man-made" climate change thesis, however, "the debate is over". The argument is that "97 per cent" of scientists believe that recent climate change is human-induced. An international panel of hundreds of scientists (the IPCC) issued its fifth assessment of what scientists "now know". Its central conclusion was "certain and unequivocal, - human beings are altering the climate" (burning fossil fuels), with "only a handful of scientists who like to take slightly contrarian positions".

The problem in accepting this viewpoint is that there seem to be a lot more dissenters than the "handful" claimed, and many so-called "experts" can claim only very limited coverage of the field. To quote one Australian scientist, "in the scientific circles I mix in, there is an overwhelming scepticism about human-induced climate change. Many of my colleagues claim that the mantra of human-induced global warming is the biggest scientific fraud of all time and future generations will pay dearly.......In my 50-year scientific career, I have never seen a hypothesis where 97 per cent of scientists agree".

Non-experts (almost all of us) don't have the technical knowledge to reach a firm conclusion on whether recent global warming is largely man-made. There are reasons, however, to be sceptical:

• Carbon dioxide is a trace atmospheric gas that has only increased at a slow rate. Since our climate system is highly variable on its own, it seems unintuitive that such a minor gas is causing all the dire effects attributed to it.
• There are actually three major greenhouse gases (gases that absorb infrared radiation). Water vapour is by far the most important (by volume at 95%). Carbon dioxide only accounts for (4%), and methane (0.4%).
• There does not seem to be a good scientific understanding of where the oceans fit in (e.g. the nature of feedback mechanisms involving water vapour, clouds and temperature). These can dramatically change the climate's response to human and natural influences.
• The meteorological fraternity struggles to predict the weather more than a week ahead, so how confident can we be about climate change predictions spanning decades?
• In Australia our BOM controversially has been busy revising temperature measurements, giving rise to accusations that it is exaggerating the magnitude of global warming.
• There is good reason to distrust the green-left lobby and anyone else who seeks to shut down debate. The same people often make far-fetched claims about renewables.

It is regularly claimed, for example, that electricity from renewable sources is now much cheaper than that from coal power. Such a claim beggars belief because there seems to be a strong correlation between the use of wind and solar power, and higher electricity costs. Counties like China and India, which are currently building hundreds of coal fired power stations (often to be fuelled with Australian coal), clearly have done their homework and decided that coal is a low-cost option. One also wonders why governments in Australia need to massively subsidise renewable energy (e.g. the latest $1bn-plus Victorian subsidised solar panels scheme), when it is now supposedly much cheaper anyway.

The massive storage requirements of an electricity grid powered largely by wind and sun (and the huge associated capital costs) are regularly played down by promoters of green energy. An electricity grid dominated by wind and sun would require days of backup storage or spare capacity in other forms of energy (increasingly unlikely as coal-fired generators reach the end of their lives). Storage is already an issue, even though in 2017 only 17 per cent of Australia's electricity came from renewables.

Wind farms don't produce much power at low wind speeds, and have to be turned out of the wind during storms, while solar energy cannot be captured at night. The Tesla battery in SA cost around $90 million but only provides emergency power for a very short time (70MW of capacity to provide 10 minutes of grid stability or 30MW of output capacity for 3 to 4 hours of storage). Backup power (if it comes from other sources) needs to be quickly variable, meaning gas-fired or diesel generators are favoured in most cases. It was excess power from other states (as well restrictions on big power users) that minimised recent blackouts in Victoria and South Australia. Some estimates have put the cost of two days of blackouts this summer as high as $930 million due to high spot market prices alone.

Pumped hydro is far and away the most prevalent form of energy storage worldwide. (At an industrial scale, battery storage of wind and solar power does not currently exist.) Pumped hydro is only about 75 per cent efficient, and the major scheme proposed for Australia (Snowy Hydro 2.0) is expected to cost as much as $4.5 billion.

Australia consumes about 200 terawatt hours of electricity annually, or about 3.84 terawatt hours a week. Snowy 2.0's size and scale (350 gigawatt hours) suggests that we may need more than ten pumped hydro storages of this size spread across the country (to ensure the stability and reliability of the system during prolonged wind or solar "droughts"), if we fully switch to renewable electricity. The cost of energy storage further blows out the cost of wind and solar.

A perverse effect of high grid-electricity prices is that in Australia they have pushed consumers into even more dependence on solar. In country areas high grid electricity prices, as well as the high cost of new connections, have led to more people installing off-grid solar power (usually backed up by petrol generators, gas cooking and wood heating). Subsidies and over-generous feed-in tariffs (heavily criticised by the ACCC) have also contributed to a surge of otherwise uneconomic rooftop solar by households.

Green left propaganda is proclaiming that the world will be "saved" by fully implementing (and going further down the track of) the Paris Agreement. Their aim is for a near-complete switch to renewable electricity, and a subsequent switch from petrol/diesel vehicles to electric (though there is currently little mention of ships and aeroplanes).

Instead, despite the Paris agreement, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and industry are not falling. Measurements show that they rose by more than 2% (range 1.8% to 3.7%) in 2018, the second consecutive year of increasing emissions since 2014 to 2016 (when emissions stabilised). In particular, 2018 saw return to growth in CO2 emissions from coal use after an apparent peak in 2013. Global fossil CO2 emissions in 2018 reached a record high of 37.1 billion tonnes, and are expected to grow further in 2019. Oil and natural gas emissions are also rising, being themselves on a long term growth trajectory.

In short, the Paris Agreement looks like a near complete failure in terms of reducing greenhouse emissions because the biggest emitters are not bound to emissions reductions, and others are not meeting their targets. Sourcing energy from renewable sources is simply proving too expensive for most consuming countries, and the public does not like looking at wind towers or solar farms. Only Nineteen countries (representing 20 per cent of global emissions), showed declining emissions trends in the decade 2008 to 2017.

Australia produces only 1.3 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases. It is the world's biggest coal exporter, and until a decade ago had amongst the cheapest electricity (predominantly produced from cheap coal). The Victorian Government closed the Hazelwood power station early despite it being amongst our lowest cost sources of power, and no new coal-fired generators are being built. Australian residential customers have ended up paying the highest electricity prices in the world- two to three times more than American households, while South Australia takes the crown for reportedly having the highest electricity prices of all.

Currently an absurd situation exists whereby countries like China, Japan, and India use Australian coal to fire key parts of their electricity network. At the same time, Australia, which can site its coal powered stations on or near major coalfields (at almost zero transport costs), is itself closing them down, and our most energy intensive industries are being forced overseas. Our domestic suppliers of coal effectively are being sacrificed to benefit Chinese suppliers of solar panels and Spanish manufacturers of wind power hardware.

What Australia needs to do in terms of energy policy is a "no-brainer".

We should minimise the cost of electricity by getting rid of all subsidies for renewables, and letting market forces determine future forms of new electricity generation capacity. The most likely outcome (governments permitting) would be a power system gradually switching mainly to new high-efficiency low-emissions (HELE) coal-fired plants.

The problem is that this will not happen anytime soon. The Morrison coalition government is hopelessly divided on energy policy and is expected to lose office. Bill Shorten has also said that Labor will use any mechanism, either one of its own or one it inherits, to drive 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030.

The likelihood is therefore that there will be a continuing orgy of spending on renewables, fuelled by ongoing massive government subsidies and further increases in electricity prices. Without matching big spending on energy storage, the electricity grid will also become increasingly instable.

We are thus guaranteed expensive electricity for decades. Eventually voters will rebel and turn on the "progressives" and Liberal "moderates" responsible for the mess, but that is unlikely before about 2025.