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

By Brendan O'Reilly - posted Friday, 22 February 2019


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.
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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.

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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.

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About the Author

Brendan O’Reilly is a retired commonwealth public servant with a background in economics and accounting. He is currently pursuing private business interests.

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