October 5, 2024 - 1:00pm
You might have expected that most green-inclined scientists and campaigners would have welcomed Friday’s announcement by the Government concerning carbon capture sites. Labour plans to invest almost £22 billion – of which £8 billion is to come from the private sector – to build two projects to “capture” carbon dioxide and bury it beneath the seabed, one based on Teesside, the other in Liverpool Bay.
If so, you would be wrong, for policy on carbon capture and storage (CCS) has become a fiercely contested battleground, and the outcome of this struggle will have big implications not just for Britain’s energy future, but the world’s. Also at stake are sums of money potentially much larger than £22 billion, for this is a battle that involves cash as well as ideology.
According to Doug Parr, policy director of Greenpeace UK, spending the promised sum to take 8.5 million tonnes of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year – just 2.2% of the UK’s total emissions in 2023 – is a poor policy choice, because carbon capture and storage (CCS) will “extend the life of planet-heating oil and gas production”. In his view, “there is a risk of locking ourselves into second-rate solutions.”
Lorenzo Sani, from the climate think tank Carbon Tracker, was also critical, saying the plan was “anchored in outdated and overly optimistic assumptions”, which risked “squandering taxpayer money” on projects that were “high risk”.
It is safe to assume that the 23 authors of a letter to Energy Secretary Ed Miliband last month will have been equally unhappy. Led by academics from universities such as Manchester and Imperial College, they urged him not to make a decision until the projects had been “properly evaluated”.
Like Parr, their chief concern was that funding CCS would “lock the UK into fossil fuel energy generation well past 2050”. This, they went on, would end up by “displacing genuinely zero or low carbon electricity generation”. Instead, the Government should “prioritise funding […] to enable a more rapid transition to renewables”.
In time, their letter concluded, the goal should be an energy system almost entirely reliant on wind and solar electricity. This has an obvious drawback: the fact that sometimes for days or even weeks, the wind does not blow nor the sun shine anything like enough to meet our energy needs. But according to the letter’s authors, “there is increasing evidence that energy security can be achieved from a grid that is almost 100% supplied by renewable energy with a range of storage technologies alongside demand reduction measures such as insulation and low energy heating.”
Professor Myles Allen — Oxford University’s head of atmospheric, oceanic and planetary physics, one of the world’s more eminent climate scientists and a long-time advocate of CCS — vehemently disagrees. One day, technologies such as nuclear fusion may mean oil and gas will be consigned to the past. But not yet: “People who pretend that we are going to be able to stop using fossil fuels altogether any time soon are in some kind of denial,” he told me. “And even if the UK were to do it, the rest of the world won’t.” Britain accounts for just 1% of global emissions.
His argument is supported by a recent Guardian interview with Fintan Slye, the head of the National Electricity System Operator, the body created by Miliband to deliver his goal of a Net Zero grid by 2030. To keep the lights on, he said, the country would have to retain “a significant amount” of gas-fuelled power plants, to be switched on when needed.
The opponents of CCS point to issues such as the leakage of methane (a potent greenhouse gas) caused by oil and gas extraction, to which Allen responds that when the industry is properly regulated, as in Norway and the UAE, this does not happen: “it’s fixable”. Moreover, a large part of the cost should be borne by fossil fuel companies.
Running through the statements by the critics of CCS is an unmistakeable ideological thread: a belief that fossil fuels, the enablers of advanced civilisation on which every modern comfort depends, are inherently bad, to be reviled and done away with, even if CO2 can be buried. Allen has no time for it: “It’s really much more sensible not to take an ideological approach. We are going to have to stop fossil fuels causing global warming long before the world stops using fossil fuels – and that means CCS.”
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They are all delusional idiots. Yet they have all managed to acquire real political power. How on earth has it come to this?
CCC is unserious and expensive. Under the very best scenario, you have automatically increased the cost of energy production by 20%, because that’s how much extra energy is needed to bury CO2. On top of that, you will need a whole series of infrastructure and pipelines to move the CO2 to the sites to be buried.
And where are these sites that can hold vast amounts of gas, and keep adding more for 20 years, or 50 years? Do we really know the environmental implications of burying CO2 in the ground?
The cost of building the Hinkley Point C project is now expected to be $40 billion – which is 500% more expensive per MW than in Korea – but at least you’re getting proven technology that can deliver 7% of the nation’s energy needs.
‘“there is increasing evidence that energy security can be achieved from a grid that is almost 100% supplied by renewable energy with a range of storage technologies alongside demand reduction measures such as insulation and low energy heating.”’
I looked at the evidence supplied in the letter that 100% renewable energy can cope with periods of low output from solar and wind power.
It says ‘use batteries’ and ‘use hydrogen’
But doesn’t say how much battery power or how much hydrogen will be needed or what cost.
It is an absolute joke.
It says ‘”A strategic energy reserve in the form of long-term and low-cost storage in chemical compounds may be the prime solution for balancing inter-annual resource variations, and detailed analyses should be able to deliver a quantification.”‘
This is magic beans thinking.
Unless , of course, by chemical compounds they mean ‘oil’, or ‘gas’….
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=9837910
The facts (oh no, not those tired old things) demonstrate that the prevailing net zero ideology is deranged, delusional and dangerous to the nations health.
UK national energy consumption 270 TWhrStorage requirement necessary to cope with nights, cloudy days, windless days, windless nights – 60% of consumption, equivalent to 162 TWhr. Dinorwig has 9.1GWhr so one would need around 18,000 Dinorwigs to provide the storage capacity.There are not enough mountains. There are not enough batteries. There is no “hydrogen” solution.
It literally takes 10 mins with a calculator and the data from gridwatch to work it out.
Your 270TWh value for night time storage is massively wrong.
As a country, we require about 30GW during the day. Source:National grid.
So your 270TWh value would supply 3 months continuous day time load with zero other production…..
Reliable sources are as follows.
Nuclear – 4W
Biomass – 2.2GW
Solar is reliable for a minimum load calculatable on hours of sunlight when maximum overcast. Approx 5%of peak potential. 0.1GW averaged over a day.
Hydroelectric – 0.5GW
So 7GW reliable for a daily average demand of 26GW.
So we need 19GWh storage per hour of no other sources.
Lets assume 48 hours of no fossil fuels, wind, interconnects etc…
So 1TWh rounded up of storage.
This drops to 0.6TWh when Hinckley C is fully running.
We are approaching 3% of that on the grid with 13% growth last year. Most of this is privately owned and costs the tax payer Zero in subsidies. They raise the night time price and lower the day time price primarily benefiting companies but also lowering fossil fuel emissions and generating revenue which is taxable.
The climate catastrophe industry is a global scam that would Ponzi himself blush with shame.
Carbon capture will only become important if cost of electricity falls by a factor of 10 or more. Then we can convert it directly to synthetic fuel, instead of dubiously burying it.
Thanks to the climate crisis industry, electricity is going to increase in cost and decrease in quality. Even if power costs did drop 10 fold, ccs would still ne stupid.
U.K. is responsible for0.000012 of CO2 in the atmosphere. Apart from the very dodgy models, we still don‘t have iron clad prove that CO2 is really the reason that The Climate is slightly warming for the last 150 years. The charts of severe weather events ( see R.Pielke Jr.) of the last 100 years show, that they are not getting worse as the politicians and MSM want us to believe. Actually because of the increase of wealth, achieved through fossil fuel, we have much better protection and adapted to these weather events and death tolls actually went hugely down (Bjorn Lomborg). Now clown Miliband and Starmer want to use £22 billion of our tax money to capture 2.2% of the UK’s CO2 output. It is beyond words to describe this utter waste. Why not just throw the money out of helicopters, flying across the country, at least some people might catch some notes and benefit from this.
The creation and use of AI in its many forms uses extravagant,over surplus,wildly high levels of both electricity and water,which is another concern. How dare they lecture us on switching our lights off or doing our laundry at midnight when THEY use prodigious amounts of resources for the Artificial Idiocy.
I comprehend their argument. By selling indulgences not to individuals but to local authorities,corporate bodies and such,ordinary people,the people who if asked would honestly say they care can still drive their cars,and live what since the 1950s for sure most of us think of as a normal basic lifestyle. But what that Green Lobby want is not to.”paper over the cracks”,they want the UK population to embrace a simpler,less “things” oriented lifestyle. The less we have,the less power we need to consume,the less we need to generate. I’m fully in accord with this idea and I’m already soaking nettles to rett for my hair shirt.
The Green lobby doesn’t care about the earth, they care about power. They are fundamentally anti-human, and have largely been captured by neo-Marxists who want to use Net-Zero as a tool to seize control of the economy.
Any real environmentalist that cared about people would be in favor of 1) Natural Gas exploration in the short to medium term to displace coal, wood, and dung as fuels. That would be a huge net benefit to the environment, and save hundreds of thousand of lives a year in Africa from respiratory disease. 2) Mass deployment of nuclear energy to eventually displace most fossil fuel usage for electricity generation. Nuclear is safe and carbon free. More people die installing solar and wind power each year than have died in the history of nuclear accidents in the West.
It’s the same as DEI. It’s proponents don’t care about equality, they care about gaining power. Again, neo-Marxists who have defined a new proletariat, in racial and sexual minorities, that they can ride to power.
I used to think the Green Movement got hijacked in the mid 1990s,and there were legitimate concerns that needed addressing and sensible laws were passed. But then some one,some cohort,some body of people saw how under cover of Green concern a lot of changes could be implemented. BUT I’ve since learned new facts that suggest to me that Green concerns were used much earlier to implement change to the benefit of one and detriment of another. What im saying is,in the 1950s due to the abundant use of DDT life in Africa for ordinary Africans was leaping forward. They could farm areas that were out of bounds before and their farming was productive with plentiful harvests to sell on the world market. Their babies were not dying. They could send their children to school.It was a new dawn for Africa. In fact by the late 1950s it looked like African economies would.topple USA off top place. D’you hear ALARM BELLS RING.Methinks the next step is that old Regime Change. So in 1960 a shy reclusive academic wrote the book ‘Silent Spring’ and the USA was so horrified they immediately ordered the United Nations,you know how it goes,you pay the piper,you call the tune,to BAN the use of DDT worldwide thus scuppering.Africa. The USA political administration threw several generations of Africans under the Express Train. With a Lie. Or rather with a malicious and unjust use of science.
What is the argument you are making here, given that the main discussion is about CCS. It seems to me you are saying that we should not trust environmental scientists at all, in any field. (So what if they are shy and reclusive?)
Are we to take it that private industry (oil & gas, and chemicals) are the ones really looking out for us?
Sure, scientists are fallible and are sometimes susceptible to ideology and it is right to call that out. CCS is probably a pragmatic solution while we are still dependent on fossil fuels. But a reactionary rejection of all academia in favour of those trying to maximise profits seems mad.
USA corporate Shill. That is what you are in my estimation. THEY flatter you by making you feel super intelligent because you UNDERSTAND the complex “science’. They are laughing at you and your ilk,as they order you around and you carry out their orders,not realizing you are Useful Idiots. I know,don’t say it (but you will) I am a use LESS idiot. But God gave me my life to enjoy and I owe the world NOTHING.
I’m not calling you anything. Just trying to engage in sensible debate and being open-minded to both sides.
Do you want people to understand your point of view? Or is it more satisfying to come up with elaborate insults and build up the rhetorical barricades? Whatever you might call me, I still get to vote.
Carbon capture installations are the 21st century equivalent of 18th century follies. Utterly useless and only good for keeping nitwits busy. What ever happened to the knowledge about fotosynthesis, short and long carbon cycle and the role of water vapour in the atmosphere?
All those things are inconvenient truths, and therefore candidate for censorship, and you for suppression of your wrongtgink. Doubleungood!
The Green Lobby doesn’t support Carbon Capture because if it works the white, middle class will be able to continue living comfortable lives instead of paying for all their sins through suffering.
It’s because they are in a religion, and to them carbon output is a sin. So you may as well be telling a Catholic priest that sinning is fine as long as the sinner goes to confession regularly.
It’s SO ironic that in the 19th century you had to be or successfully pretend to be sexually chaste and faithful but you could despoil vast tracts of land for industry and pack people disspossed from healthy country homes into truly appalling living conditions. Now if you are not boasting about your vigorous sexual adventures (and are not in jail) you make sure to emphasize your “lightness” of living. Your eco home,diet and lifestyle. Of course ordinary people have to be more circumspect,it costs a lot of money to keep up the serial shagger lifestyle but that won’t be your downfall (unless you’re the latest media chosen victim even if what you were doing was made LEGAL a couple of decades ago that won’t save you) the new Morality is pretending to be Green.
Would it not be cheaper just to plant trees
Yes, and also preserve/restore upland bogs and peatlands which act as natural carbon sinks.
I’m VERY suspicious of the amount of FENCING OFF of publicly accessible land in AONBs and SSSIs now in the devoutly pious,all pray,name of REWILDING. What couldn’t be achieved for centuries due to public objections is now just going ahead without anyone even caring. Yes,a bit media event like a mass trespass on Dartmoor on a sunny Bank Holiday gets lots of media attention but this fencing off is going on,almost unremarked all over the place. The strong high fences are neccesary to prevent Deer eating all the regrowth but if our wild deer were properly managed and killed to keep numbers low and feed people this fencing would not be needed. And does fenced land ever get unfenced?.Sometimes,but often not.
I Agree with your comments. However, in the UK, many people object to the necessary management of the deer population. Bambi syndrome. Not the same in rural France where I live.
Bring back the Lynx and the Wolf? Too many people would be concerned about their pets being savaged!
Surely “management of the deer population” can include us eating them. They are quite tasty.
That would make a country ramble lively!
Planting trees is not always appropriate for every landscape. It is an ecological disaster for short turf down lands for example.
Climate change is a nonsense and a grift ( see patrick moores fake catastrophes and threats of doom for example). It would liteeally be better if the government burned the 22 billion on s nice charcoal barbeque as it wouldnt waste peoples time building these ridiculous ” technologies”.
Developing carbon capture v sensible.
And refreshing to see so much support for Ed Miliband, who’s pushed the investment, for once, esp here on Unherd. Who’d have thought.
The focus on CO2 as the cause of global warming is simply wrong-headed. The science is seriously confused, with some reputable studies showing that CO2 is a trailing indicator of warming; in other words, the warming happens first, for other reasons, and then the CO2 goes up.
Furthermore, since the end of the Ice Age, the time of greatest human flourishing on Earth, the climate has often been significantly warmer than today. Long before there was a fossil fuel industry.
In the human experience the seas have risen and fallen, lush fields have turned to desert and than back to green again. Vast forests have burned, for months on end, and than something similar or completely different grew to replace them. It’s called natural variability.
So maybe we should aim for some sanity in our discussions about the topic of “global warming”.
Spending billions on speculative carbon capture projects is not what I would call sanity.
All of those assertions are mistaken. There is no confusion among scientists; it’s an overwhelming consensus.
You can update your understanding by watching Dr. Katharine Hayhoe’s informative YouTube series called “Global Weirding.” Dr. Hayhoe, a leading climate scientist, addresses the most common misconceptions and explains the reality.
You personally may not watch. I understand that. But there is value in my replying regardless, as it’s an opportunity to let others know of this resource.
A hint as to why those assertions are mistaken. It’s a very common reason:
The omission of context. Which is how propaganda works, making it seem reasonable.
The concept of “an overwhelming consensus” is silly. Science doesn’t work like that. Dr. Hayhoe presents her conclusions which are contradicted by other scientists’ conclusions. And on and on. Consensus can not be declared; it must be won. Check back in twenty years.
Your sense of certainty suggests to me that you’ve just been skimming the data and not looking into data that contradicts this received consensus.
That is another clear, precise exhibition of how propaganda works. This latest example is “muddying the waters.” Make a point that there are (unlinked) studies which deny human-caused climate change, and you can lend the impression that upon peer review they were not found lacking. You can lend the impression of balance, not by force of numbers but by force of supposed rigour. (See below for how those contrarian papers have actually fared upon peer review.)
You may not be aware of it, but this line of reasoning has been borrowed by Big Oil public relations directly from Big Tobacco public relations’ playbook, back when Big Tobacco was trying to muddy the waters on the scientific consensus that inhaling cigarette smoke led to a high risk of cancer. “Wait 20 years” indeed. Just as Big Tobacco’s scientists admitted the truth about cancer in internal documents, so too have Big Oil’s scientists admitted in internal documents the truth about the effects of burning fossil fuels .
It important to keep in mind that scientists love to debate, to disagree among themselves. Which is a good reason in itself why scientific consensus about climate change has merit.
Regarding consensus, you’ve asserted a common misconception, the idea that it means a majority of scientists who all happen to agree on the truth of something. Instead, consensus is a majority of scientific studies that happen to agree, replicating results, and end up providing further support for each other. Scientists’ agreement is, to borrow your phrase, a “trailing indicator” of the consistency of evidence.
You imply that you value scientific studies by referencing supposed studies that counter the overwhelming consensus, yet you won’t watch Dr. Hayhoe’s video series that explains the misconceptions about such things as post-Ice Age warming, which have to do with missing context. If you do truly value scientific evidence, it is odd that you would refuse to confront the data Dr. Hayhoe presents, even in her short videos.
That is more than “skimming the evidence.” It is denial of evidence. The reason for that will not have anything to do with science.
For those who prefer text to a video series, here is Dr. Hayhoe’s recent thread, on Threads:
div > p:nth-of-type(13) > a”>https://www.threads.net/@katharinehayhoe/post/C4hAExsMKb4?hl=en
On those 3% contrarian papers. They don’t stand up to scrutiny by peers:
https://amp.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/aug/25/heres-what-happens-when-you-try-to-replicate-climate-contrarian-papers
The ways they’ve contradicted themselves and each other for many years is consistent. Here’s an outline:
div > p:nth-of-type(31) > a”>https://skepticalscience.com/skeptic-contradictions.html
But when friendly debate among “scientists” is presented to us as “consensus” and our lifestyle and behaviour subjected to new laws based on that supposed consensus then it is a legitimate concern to us and a reason to call it out.
I’ve seen a number of Dr. Hayhoe’s videos. She dismisses other theories instead of engaging with them. Not very convincing.
That makes no sense, Laurence. She clearly doesn’t simply dismiss those alternative theories, but shows how they don’t stand up to scrutiny, and thereby shows why they deserve to be dismissed. That is, she doesn’t simply state a conclusion (“dismiss”) as you believe, she shows how that conclusion was arrived at by scientists. Because of that, I think it’s more likely that you bring a predisposition for disengagement and offhand dismissal to the viewings. They don’t stand much chance in that case.
Nine out of Ten cats believe….
Hayhoe is a token religious scientist. She parrots climate alarmist nonsense for a nice paycheck. She is not a particularly good source of reliable information.
If you had anything — a single thing — to counter what she says, there’s no question that you would have presented it. You would of course be very motivated to do that. If you had anything.
The fact that you mustered only a couple of smears and a denial reveals that your complaint is factually groundless, and instead springs from an emotional source that has nothing very much to do with Dr. Hayhoe or climate science.
Andrew, her pool analogy is just another bit in her traveling grift. The data doesn’t dupport her claims. Her predictions about Texas, where she is based, failed. They applied some of her climate predictions into water management with adverse results. Like in Australia, when the dam managers incorporated climate hype into dam management,
the predictions were so bad they made things worse, not better. Again:hHayhoe’s role is to present the gospel of climate hype as more overtly religious. Her husband, last I hothered to check, runs the NGO she moves her clmate money through. That you quote her as if you were quoting religious text says more than you seem to realize.
I provide links and references so people can read and if they like ask more questions or offer critiques. I’m willing to take that risk, to be open about my sources and so be vulnerable to criticism. Why aren’t you?
Please provide links to your claims. It’s impossible to judge their merits without accessing the sources.
A link which shows that “the data doesn’t support her claims.”
A link that shows her predictions about Texas failed.
A link that explains what you mean by “climate hype” in your example and how “predictions were so bad they made things worse” for dam management.
A link that explains your reference to an NGO Dr. Hayhoe “runs her clmate money through”
I reference and quote Dr. Hayhoe because she is one of the more articulate and down-to-earth climate scientists. She makes climate science accessible, a valuable skill for an expert in any arena to have.
Your claim that I “quote her as if…quoting religious text” is a description of how you perceive it, through a negative lens. The “as if” reflects your disposition toward the material.
You even imply that she’s a swindler. That is, you value following the money when it comes to this individual scientist, but you don’t value that credo when it comes to Big Oil, which has a definite financial stake. You ignore its public relations reach, an example of which I documented above.
You don’t like what this scientist says, and my quoting her, so you associate all that with religion, which in your view taints both source and messenger, allowing you to simply wave away information you don’t like.
I am aware that Dr. Hayhoe is a religious person. She has lamented, and criticized, the failure of many Christians to follow their own teachings about caring about others. She speaks all over the world to a great many people, all with different backgrounds, orientations, ideologies, ages, etc. She’ll present facts, correct misunderstandings, offer sources for further investigation, but that is not the key to her ability to relate to disparate groups. She is a good communicator because she prioritizes relating to people in terms of universal values rather than arguing facts.
Just this morning I was reading a rather robust study that suggested the obvious: cloud cover (water vapor) is far more responsible for temperature variation than CO2. Very small changes in sea surface temps can add very large amounts of H2O to the atmosphere. Creating a self-regulating variability just like what we call “the weather”. (Ocean warming leads to increased cloud cover which leads to wide spread cooling.)
Laurence, it looks like you’ve confused weather with climate.
You also didn’t link to the study you read just that morning. I take the risk of critical exposure by naming my sources and linking to them. Why don’t you do the same?
Dr. Hayhoe addresses natural cycle alternative theories in the video linked below. At 3:30 minutes she discusses why natural cycles internal to the climate system can’t be responsible for causing the entire system to warm:
div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k5_zpjerQFo
You just, ironically, demonstrated *your* issue.
It is a long recognized truth in philosophy that just because 99 of 100 people believe something that does not stop them all being wrong and the 1 being right. Who pays the wages of those.”scientists”,the piper has to play the tune.called by the one who pays him.
By putting the word “scientists” in quotation marks, you imply that they are not genuine scientists because they are professionals, that is, people who receive pay for their skilled work, and that accordingly they have falsified results under pressure from employers. Over 100 years of climate studies, falsified, for the sake of money. That’s really something!
I know a more relevant saying in this case than “paying the Piper.” It goes something like this: If one person tells you you’re drunk, you might not be. But if 99 people tell you you’re drunk, you probably are.
That’s especially relevant when we take into account that the few studies which purport to supply alternative causes have serious flaws in methodology, and have not stood up to peer review. In other words, that 1 person in 100 who says you’re not drunk has proven to be an unreliable witness.
Carl Sagan was a scientist, and a good communicator himself. He had his own relevant saying, which became famous: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” You made an extraordinary claim, namely the implication that thousands of climate scientists are dishonest. Which means you need to provide extraordinary evidence to back up that implication or it can’t be taken seriously. Can you meet that standard, or will you make excuses?
Well ignoring the scientific process, which thee climate consensus does, earns those pushing he consensus “scientist”.
Speaking of ignoring, you won’t provide links to your claims. If they had any substance you’d obviously have done that already because you’d want me to confront those sources.
A key part of the “scientific process” entails providing evidence so that others can review it to see if it supports conclusions. If, as you imply, you genuinely value that process, you would not ignore the need to provide links to sources which support your claims. You would not ignore the reasonable request that you do so.
If there’s no factual evidence to support your claims, they must be based on blind faith.
1. Evidence that the “climate consensus”… ignores the scientific process.
2. Evidence that “the data doesn’t support Dr. Hayhoe’s claims.”
3. Evidence that Dr. Hayhoe’s predictions about Texas failed.
4. Evidence that explains what you mean by “climate hype” in your example and how “predictions were so bad they made things worse” for dam management.
5. Evidence that explains your reference to an NGO Dr. Hayhoe “runs her clmate money through.”
You said it falsified results for money. And those 99 people don’t know you have a neurological condition. You have not had a drop.
I restated your own claim that “it falsified results for money.” It’s not my claim. If you’re going to claim that over 100 years of climate science has been falsified for money, it’s up to you to provide evidence or there’s no reason to accept that claim.
That’s why I mentioned Carl Sagan’s saying that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
When you say that the person accused of being drunk has a neurological condition and hasn’t had a drop, that means the one person out of 100 had provided the extraordinary evidence for their extraordinary claim, in keeping with Sagan’s maxim. That person would have provided evidence of a neurological condition and zero blood-alcohol concentration.
You are in the position of that one person out of a hundred. You have to do what they did: provide extraordinary evidence for your extraordinary claims.
Once you’re willing and able to do that, we can then judge if those claims have merit. Until then we have nothing to go on, so it’s only reasonable to set those claims aside.
The thinking around climate, particularly the call to end fossil fuel production yesterday, is at panic level, a natural consequence of the years-long campaign demanding unwavering faith in layer after layer of lies.
Yous think the Greens would be anti immigration in order to keep our emissions as low as possible. But they welcome open borders. Which shows you they are just in it for the money they can blag off the taxpayer.
Fossil fuels led to the rapid growth of capitalism. Therefore fossil fuels are evil. Ideological? Of course not! Purely scientific!
climate change has really become mostly a business – money spinner for some.
We should be far more worried about loss of biodiversity: from inside our gut to the animals in the wild and bacteria that live in the clouds. This is a much bigger threat to our future health and wellbeing. Restoring biodiversity will also has a regulation effect on the planet’s weather.. but this goes against making money….
Agreed. The most important issue should be the protection and preservation of the world’s tropical rainforests, which are still being destroyed at alarming rates. As well as being the most bio-diverse areas on the planet, they are, quite literally, the lungs of the earth.
The Amazon basin is not actually that old, according to the most recent data. It was apparently a savanna only thousands of years ago. I used to believe the lungs thing, but oceans provide over 50%. Our geo-biological system is incredibly redundant, robust, and long term sustainable. We flatter ourselves far too often.
There are intriguing hints and rumours that the first Spanish explorers in the Amazon basin found a very different place to what it was just a few years later but those tropical plants and trees grow quick I.guess. That’s how the tale of El Dorado got widespread. It seems something happened in the span of time between the very first European eyes and the first serious expeditions. In his novel Candide the author Voltaire has his hero visit one of these pre Amazon jungle cities where everything is made of gold.
Climate change activists will happily and unthinkingly toss their McD wrappers and their.Cola can aside. Yet litter and detritus is a much more damaging environment factor. They dont think it though maybe? Or being clean and tidy is dull and bourgeois?
Restoring biodiversity, particularly forests, is a major and consistent emphasis of scientists and organizations such as the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It’s all interconnected. It would be ineffective to “be far more worried” about one major element while underestimating the importance of the rest. You can’t save and restore biodiversity without including climate change as a major influence.
It only stands to reason that minimizing or even ignoring climate change will cost a lot more money (not to mention non-monetary essentials) than the cost of doing everything possible to mitigate it.
Carbon capture and storage [CC&S] is a really daft idea. Contrary to the climate alarmist propaganda, the level of CO2 in the atmosphere is still dangerously low, despite the boost from burning fossil fuel. Low CO2 especially limits the range of plants in semi-arid regions. If you want to green the planet and maintain plant diversity, you need to increase atmospheric CO2 not reduce it.
In addition [CC&S] is wastes a lot of energy – another reason not to do it.
The Greens don’t support CCS because they are nihilists and don’t want a solution. They just want money. Which is the wrong reason to reject CCS. The better reason is to reject CCS is that CCS will never work. The best reason is the CCS is a waste of time and money and will never make one bit of difference to the climate.
How long will the carbon remain buried? Permanently?
Along with the Emperors new clothes. Sir Kerching is donating those.
The article outlines competing opinions on CCS, but it helps to know more context in order to understand the issue better.
Dr. Katharine Hayhoe:
div > p:nth-of-type(5) > a”> div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”> div > p:nth-of-type(3) > a”>https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2024/01/every-decision-is-a-climate-decision-here-s-why/
Another resource:
div > p:nth-of-type(9) > a”> div > p:nth-of-type(7) > a”> div > p:nth-of-type(5) > a”>https://coveringclimatenow.org/event/understanding-carbon-dioxide-removal-before-cop28/
“Man-made CDR technologies, such as direct air capture, must be dramatically improved if they are to be part of the solution…
“4. The fossil fuel industry loves the status quo.
McKinsey is working behind the scenesto help corporations, just like Germany, Japan, and every other nation that cares about reality and its people to find a way out of the anti-scientific crap the climate extremists have maneuvered too much of the world into signing up for.
“McKinsey is working behind the scenes to help corporations”
At least that part is true. Progress!
Typical loser misquotes others to parse out what they like and quotes entire passages of circular verse from their favorite prophet to pretend they are wise.
Believing in CCS is like believing in unicorns or the Holy Grail. Neither unicorns, CCS or the Holy Grail are something someone claiming to be a scientist should believe in.
To be a scientist all you need is a white coat and an “ology’. The title (that started off as a mocking joke,like the term Christian) is meaningless. At most it just means ‘observer”
Well, no. To be a scientist you need years of rigorous post-secondary education in a specialization, field experience, mentorship, and so on. You can’t be an effective observer without that extent of education and practical training.
According to you and your prophet, all one needs is to agree with the consensus she supports, along with fools to follow her…
They’re Luddites. They envisage a world of horse-drawn transport and self-sufficiency.
They will, of course, be allowed to fly to climate conferences and use the internet and buy quinoa and ethically sourced coffee.
Of course, because it’s all a quasi-religion and a vector for Marxisium. Any tenable solution to the practical problem of climate change is irrelevant unless it brings with it the Marxist Utopia… These extremists are so painfully transparent…