Elsewhere this week we sneer at a New York Times columnist for, among other things, babbling that “Ten years since the landmark Paris Agreement seemed to promise a whole new era for climate politics, the rich world has mostly abandoned warming as a matter of political concern”. A characteristically strange alarmist hallucination since, of course, most governments in the Western world are obsessed with climate even when they try not to be, which they rarely do. Thus for instance the Australian government just released a new National Climate Assessment that is a predictable pastiche of alarmist clichés and vague empty promises. And big bad modeling scenarios.
Roger Pielke Jr. was, dependably, on the case. And his assessment of the climate assessment included:
“the good news – that the NCRA leaves behind SSP5-8.5 – is canceled out by some bad news: The NCRA emphasizes an equally implausible scenario in SSP3-7.0…. The use of an extreme scenario to project impacts and an optimistic scenario for projecting costs is, charitably, a methodologically unsound approach to assessing science to inform policy. Less charitably, exaggerated impacts and low-balling costs is exactly the sort of approach you’d take if the goal was political advocacy rather than clear-eyed assessment.”
Yup. And so it is. Including that you just know you’ll get some good old liberal guilt about colonialism. And hence:
“The National Assessment provides new data and analyses assembled in a nationally consistent way that can be used by governments, communities, industries and businesses, as well as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, to drive adaption at national, regional and local scales.”
As it happens, an Australian court just dismissed a lawsuit by some Torre Strait Islands activists who said the seas are rising faster there than average and the weather is worse and they are all going to be washed away from what used to be Eden until the hideous white man unleashed storms. Which outraged the BBC to the point that it was unable to spare any mental effort for such tedium as checking the scientific facts. (As was the judge, who evidently bought the “devastating impact” of climate change before saying stinks to be you, huh?)
Pielke Jr. came back to the report in another “Honest Broker” item that pointed to more gaping holes. For instance:
“When Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment (NCRA) was released last week, headlines such as the above announced that ‘climate change could cost Australians $40 billion per year by 2050.’ It turns out that claim is demonstrably false.”
Why? Because it references “The Colvin Review (2024)” which did indeed think there might be roughly $40 billion in natural disaster costs by 2049-50. But, crucially:
“The 2049-50 cost of $40.3 billion considers the anticipated underlying growth in the impact of natural disasters due to factors including increased population, and number and average size of dwellings at risk. These cost estimates do not consider underlying impacts of climate change.”
Oh dear. And you said it was going to be climate change alone that did that damage. Pielke Jr. comments that “For a formal government assessment this is, at best, incredibly sloppy.”
We go further and say it’s like a clock striking 13, calling into question all that precedes it and all that follows. If they were that careless about something not just that obvious but that easy to check, what possible confidence can we have in anything more obscure or buried in a trail of footnotes?
And another thing. In abandoning warming as a matter of political concern, or so some at the New York Times would inexplicably have you believe, including some editors, the Australian government is mysteriously still insisting on EV mandates in the name of stopping the warming it supposedly no longer cares about:
“Half of all cars sold before 2035 will have to be electric to meet emission targets, according to the Climate Change Authority’s 2035 Targets Advice, despite the Albanese government preaching a light touch with any intervention in consumer habits.”
Oh, and they’ve set a target of a 62 to 70 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2035, a distant future shimmering paradise that is now just 10 hard grinding awkward years away. To make matters worse, in announcing this doubling down on fantasy failure, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said:
“This is a responsible target supported by science and a practical plan to get there, built on proven technology.”
And when politicians talk that way, you know there’s no science and no practical plan and they have no idea what technology exists. Does Albanese even know, for instance, what SSP-8.5 is? Or SSP3-7.0? Does he know that, as RPJ warned:
“SSP3-7.0 has a global population of more than 12 billion in 2100 which is coupled with a massive increase in global coal consumption, together resulting in massive emissions to 2100. SSP3-7.0 has less coal consumption than SSP5-8.5, but a much greater population, so it maintains a very high radiative forcing to 2100. Thus, when used as the basis for projecting future climate, it leads to extreme results.”
If he knew would he care? Does he know anything except the catch-phrases?
As The Australian columnist Geoff Chambers retorted:
“Anthony Albanese, Chris Bowen and Jim Chalmers are pushing an undefinable, forever-growing, net-zero magic economic pudding, promising Australians a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”
And he’s right, because it’s not based on solid science, time-tested economics or proven technology. Instead:
“Treasury and Climate Change Authority advice says the renewables revolution will expand the economy by trillions of dollars over 25 years, reduce average household energy costs by between 10 and 20 per cent over the decade, create new well-paid jobs, improve health outcomes and make the country more resilient. For all of the big declarations and glossy reports that fail to put price tags on how much the transition and achieving targets will cost, voters are rightly sceptical of crystal-ball modelling assuming a lot over a long period of time.”
After all, he immediately adds:
“RepuTex modelling commissioned by Labor ahead of the 2022 election promised households a $275 power bill cut from 2025. Not only did that prediction not come true but power bills went up.”
Moreover, on the question whether these people have any idea how to do anything they promise:
“With just over 51 months to go, Albanese and Bowen are battling to achieve Labor’s existing 2030 targets, pledging to reduce emissions on 2005 levels by 43 per cent and increase renewables in the grid to 82 per cent.”
To help them out, a bit, Chambers calculated that:
“To hit an emissions-reduction target of about 62 per cent, current emissions levels will need to be slashed in half, the decarbonisation rate must more than double, wind capacity needs to quadruple, rooftop solar capacity must double and tougher rules need to be imposed on heavier polluters. Half of all light vehicles sold will need to be electric vehicles, and logging of old-growth forests must be ceased in addition to halving re-clearing rates.”
So instead of entering detox the politicians crank it up to 11 and beyond. As Chambers’ colleague Paul Kelly put it more dryly:
“Albanese called his vision ‘ambitious but achievable’, a description probably half right and half wrong.”
Indeed, since The Australian also reported that:
“Car suppliers say it will not be possible to reach the Climate Change Authority’s electric vehicle target without big subsidies, arguing that the ‘demand was not there’ for Australians to buy EVs at the rate required for the Albanese government to meet its 2035 emissions reduction target.”
But the BBC predictably propagandized:
“A landmark risk assessment commissioned by the government this week warned Australia faced a future of increasingly extreme weather conditions as a result of man-made climate change.”
Having quickly considered one side of the story and without knowing there’s another or caring. It blithered on:
“The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement saw world leaders agree to keep global temperatures from rising 1.5C above those of the late 19th Century, which is seen as crucial to preventing the most damaging impacts of climate change. Australia, like much of the world, has faced an increasing number of climate-related weather extremes in recent years including severe drought, historic bushfires and successive years of record-breaking floods.”
Is seen as. And if you’re looking for data confirming an increase in extreme weather in Australia, well, don’t ask a climate zealot. They’ve been hallucinating them for so long they’ve forgotten that any fools still want data. Thus:
“On Monday, a report into the impact of climate change – the first of its kind in the country – found Australia had already reached warming of above 1.5C and that no community would be immune from ‘cascading, compounding and concurrent’ climate risks.”
The three Cs of the apocalypse. We are all cooked, mate. Among other things:
“One and a half million Australians living in coastal areas are at risk from rising sea levels by 2050, a landmark climate report has warned.”
No they’re not. Seriously. The distant year 2050 is, strangely but truly, just 25 years away now. If the oceans were to rise 6 mm a year, which they are not going to do, the total increase would be (metric is easy) 15 centimetres which is (imperial being hard) sort of about under six inches. And you cannot show us, or the BBC, one and a half million Australians in peril from the water coming up less than a hand span.
Now since we at CDN believe in the old-fashioned kind of science where you test hypotheses against data by comparing what they predicted with what actually happened, rather than by what those same hypotheses model will happen or should have, we’d like to mention that in yet another in his series Roger Pielke Jr. reminds us that 14 years ago he rubbished Australia’s 2009 emissions targets and was vindicated when they got nowhere near them. Moreover, as he has also pointed out with regard to the United States, the gradual decrease in the “carbon intensity” of wealth creation in Australia has taken place at an almost constant rate since 1992 so:
“there is no evidence that Australia’s emissions reduction policies have done anything to meaningfully accelerate the rate of decarbonization over many decades.”
Since climate-crazed politicians do not believe in seeking truth from facts, or judging capacities by results, they don’t care. But we should.
Sorry, John, that's that obsolete definition of science. Modern green theocracies (the requisite ticket for the election of otherwise bland Jacobins and Bolsheviks) use the conservation biology method where all that's required is an appropriate hypothesis after which, all attempts at reinforcement are funded.