On the subject of facts versus arm-waving, consider the Guardian column headlined “Reform says we need to choose between climate and economy. It’s wrong” which in addition to peddling the Net-Zero-will-make-us-all-rich fantasy also depicts Britain as basically a charred wasteland even though this year’s fire season has been far less drastic than last year’s. Or whatever the crise du jour is, since the writer also says “the drought affecting most of England and Wales makes the strongest possible case for hastening the green transition”. If that’s the strongest possible case the debate is over. The UK could eliminate all its carbon emissions tomorrow and it would have no discernible impact on the weather there or anywhere or indeed on global human carbon emissions. The trouble is, climate alarmism is such an echo chamber that people regurgitate this kind of canned panic without bothering to examine even their own arguments, let alone those of their intellectual adversaries whom they pillory rather than debating.

Surely step one in arguing for dramatic reductions in Britain’s emissions, which have already declined considerably since the 1990s, and indeed per capita since the 1970s, is to see how big they are as a percentage of the total, since if they’re a lot it might matter if they go down whereas if they’re trivial it obviously won’t and this article should not be written or, if written, published. So we checked.

According to “Our World in Data”, “The United Kingdom has emitted 4.33% of global CO2 emissions since 1751.” Which is great for historical guilting of successful societies and cultures and perhaps someone should go and have a sharp word with William Gladstone, or Pitt the Elder, about leaving Britons in preindustrial poverty or Dickensian squalor instead of becoming rich. But if your time machine is on the same delayed-delivery schedule as the bountiful Green Energy Transition, consider that the current figure is “The United Kingdom emitted 0.81% of the world’s CO2 emissions in 2024.”

Or not. Actually this statement too is babble. It is possible that the UK is currently somewhere slightly under one percent of the world’s human CO2 emissions, though we at CDN frequently smell mathiness when the decimals start to parade, in this case because we don’t believe what’s coming out of various factories, farms and 4x4s globally is measured accurately at all, let alone precisely to that many decimal places. (Even the UK admits that it relies on “estimates” that combine guesswork with computer models and call it fact, and in Communist China we imagine they just make stuff up.) But in any case most of the carbon cycle is natural.

In ridiculing the notion of “Direct Air Capture” of CO2, Ian Clark writes in Chapter 9 of Canary in a Climate World Vol 3, “A Reality Check on Climate and Net Zero”, that:

“it is unfathomable that intelligent people spending billions to fix the climate would not know this. As discussed above, the atmosphere exchanges its 875 Gigatons of CO2 with the biosphere and oceans EVERY FOUR YEARS. This exchange is driven by climate temperature, and it dilutes our fossil fuel emissions into a far bigger carbon pool than just the atmosphere. So every year, about 25% or 190 gigatons of atmospheric CO2 has already been inhaled and exhaled by life, by Gaia, or living, breathing Mother Earth. So, the reservoir of carbon that Deep Sky and the many other DAC [Direct Air Capture] projects are trying to reduce is not 875 gigatons currently in the atmosphere, it is 3,500 gigatons in the active carbon cycle. As fast as DAC removes CO2 from the air, Gaia emits it right back up.”

Thus the obsession with human emissions seems misplaced. Still, we’re willing to meet them halfway in order to berate them as sloppy or worse. Because even if one were to grant that the wondrous harmonious balanced cycle-of-nature carbon cycle is in wondrous harmonious balance, absorbing every molecule of delicious Gaian CO2 and not one more or less, whereas the disgusting artificial CO2 we humans belch is rejected by plant and sea alike, the notion that a reduction of 0.81% of total global evil human carbon pollution would change the weather in Britain specifically within months, or even a couple of years, is impudent ignorance. And not just from our perspective.

No computer model would sustain this claim, not even the most tendentious and alarmist. It is true that if you cut real pollution locally, as Europe did especially with the genuinely toxic Soviet bloc industries after 1989, or Ohio with the Cuyahoga River after 1969, or indeed the UK with the Thames starting around 1850, you generally get real benefits locally and often faster than you had expected or even hoped. But to the extent that CO2 drives temperature and weather it does it globally, given the way the atmosphere crosses national borders (due among others to a thing called “wind” you’d expect columnists to have heard of), and so reducing British emissions only affects British weather by its impact on global emissions and hence global weather. Again, it is incomprehensible that intelligent people do not know it, or knowing it that they do not think about it while typing.

We note approvingly that the author of this bunkum, one Larry Elliott, “read history” at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge, and perhaps even graduated. Though it’s a pity he didn’t look at the past history of Earth’s climate including wildfires and droughts. But then we sneer that his many years as “economics editor” at the Guardian probably generated more heat than light if, as now with climate, he was so certain of his conclusions that he had long since abandoned any scrutiny of his premises. Moreover one of his trump cards is:

“a report by the German insurance company Allianz has exploded the myth that governments have a choice between growth and the environment. The study shows that extreme heat poses structural challenges to many rich countries because, as temperatures rise above 30C, workers struggle to do their jobs and their productivity suffers. The higher the thermometer rises, the greater the losses. For the most exposed countries – especially those in continental Europe – the hit to economic activity will be considerable: over a five-year period the impact of extreme heat could knock a cumulative 5-7% off GDP.”

Of course any idiot can see that draconian climate policies have already done a lot more harm than this menacing roughly 1% per year (and again it’s unclear whether he’s talking about reduced growth, 5-7% off where they’d otherwise be, or an actual decline, 5-7% off where they are now, the sort of distinction economics editors ought to grasp and explain instinctively; the report in question admittedly could be clearer but appears to represent the former, so Europe would just get richer a bit more slowly).

Since we at CDN do try to be fair, we should note that Elliott himself winds up by pointing out that Elliott’s article is nonsense. He shrieks:

“To be sure, Britain is responsible for only a small fraction of the world’s CO2 emissions, and there is a legitimate debate about how to achieve net zero. But the warning signs are flashing red. Now is not the time to go slow on tackling climate breakdown. The longer that action – global as well as domestic – is delayed, the greater the risk that the climate crisis will eventually wreck the economy.”

Got it? Britain’s not responsible, it’s not happening now and Britain can’t fix it.

Other than that, a fine piece of analysis.