Stop The Climate Stupidity

by David Archibald

29 January 2019

 

When I got involved in global warming over a decade ago, the promoters of that cult wanted Australia to reduce its coal consumption by 20%. It was easy enough to predict that doing that would damage our economy and reduce our standard of living.

Here we are today. The damage has been done, and is getting worse. State governments have gleefully blown up coal-fired power stations in fits of religious ecstasy.  As a consequence we have just had the summer blackouts that were also so easily predicted. One sign of an advanced civilization is a stable, cheap, and reliable electrical power. We used to have one of those. We now rely upon diesel generators in part, like most third world countries.

The cost of following the whacko religion of global warming isn’t just economic. It is also destroying lives, ending some before their time, and destroying businesses, hopes, and dreams.

It need not be this way of course. We can go back to having a first world power system, and we could choose the correct path to go from here. This is not a multiple choice exercise though. There is only one correct path.  If we don’t take that path we will be staring into the abyss, before we fall into it.

First of all, let’s understand how we got into the dreadful situation of having whackos in charge of our power supply.

Brazil had an election last year and the corrupt and incompetent socialists were thrown out and replaced by people who seem to understand how the world works. The first words out of the mouth of Brazil’s new foreign minister were that climate change is a Marxist plot.

Why would he say that? Actually he is only repeating what the Marxists doing the plotting have been saying.

Maurice Strong, organiser of the first UN climate summit, 1992:
“We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse.”

US Senator Tim Worth, 1992:
“We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Richard Benedick, US State Department, 1992:
“A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.”

Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, 1988:
“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”

Mikhail Gorbachev, former chief communist of the planet, 1996:
“The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.”

Jacques Chirac, former president of France, 2000:
“For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.”

The roots of the global warming plot go back to the 1980s but got a kick along with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990. Suddenly the left wing side of politics had no basis for existence. Socialism was discredited by its failure — so there was no need to rule the world, interfere in people’s lives, and take income from workers and give it to bludgers.

So the threat of global warming was conjured up on no evidence. Thus that last statement that a global warming treaty didn’t need evidence. That is, it didn’t need to be based in scientific fact. Science fiction will do the trick.

It wasn’t just high level bureaucrats making these statement about what the real motives for global warming are. Heads of state and ministers of state were and remain fully on board for the New World Order. This is the real reason for the global warm hysteria we have endured.

What about the climate officials and scientists? What do they think it is about? They are all on the same page. It is about taking from workers and giving the fruit of their labor to bludgers. And being in charge of the whole process. The scientists involved have realized that they are paid to lie in public, to mislead the public. And also that their voodoo science doesn’t have anything to do with what is really happening in climate.

Ottmar Edenhofer, IPCC official, 2010:
“…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.  Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”

Stephen Schneider, lead author of IPCC reports:
So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”

Kevin Trenberth, lead author of IPCC reports:
“None of the models used by the IPCC are initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed state.”

See that last statement — that none of the climate models even remotely correspond to the current state of the climate? That has been going on for at least 20 years.

Tom Wigley, National Center for Atmospheric Research, to Michael Mann:
“Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC …”

Tim Wills, Swansea University, 2007:
“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multi-decadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably…”

None of these people have died for what they have done – only little old ladies in Australia who can’t afford heating in winter.

The first quote above, from the Climategate emails, reflects the normal dishonesty and lying that goes on in official climate science. The second one sounds a note of alarm at this sort of behavior. He also raises the possibility that we could be experiencing just a normal climate cycle –- something that doesn’t have anything to do with carbon dioxide.

There was a story in Quadrant last year by a bloke who lost his mother to pneumonia. With the rapid rise in power prices she thought she couldn’t keep the heating on, and never recovered from catching a cold. Mortality does start rising as the temperature of a home falls below 17 degrees Celsius. Her story was told and documented. There are so many others that aren’t, their lives foreshortened by a whacko religion, dying in the cold and the dark.

Thanks to the global warming believers amongst us, each winter now comes with a bitter harvest of dead grannies. We can blame the global warmers for this situation — but if we don’t do what we can to stop this and set things to right then we share the blame for not acting. We are the responsible adults, with a grip on reality, and so the deaths of little old ladies in unheated homes and all the other attendant destruction that the global warming cult has wrought is also on our heads. We should know better, we can do better and we must not abide this.

The threat to Australia is also existential. Destroying our power supply weakens us economically, so we are also less able to defend ourselves. The ultimate goal of the global warmers is to subsume our country into a UN-run third world morass. We know that because people from the UN have said that is their plan — witness Ms Figueres above, as nasty a leftie as God has ever breathed life into.

So far we have established that the motives of the global warmers are impure. That global warming has nothing to do with carbon dioxide, saving the planet, or any other cause good and noble. It is just a con job, of repeating an outrageous lie so often that it starts to get traction.

Having established that, we could just set things to right, stop the waste of tens of billions of dollars and get on with our lives as we would like to live them.

But the one good thing that the global warming scare did was to concertina several decades’ worth of climate science into a few short years. We now know a lot more about what drives climate than we did a decade ago. So while we are here we might as well look at what is happening to our climate and what is going to happen. Without wanting to spoil the ending, it doesn’t involve global warming.

To put that story into perspective let’s start with the question “has the world warmed?”

The place to begin is global sea ice area. This is measured by satellites that went up 40 years ago in 1979, on a daily basis. If the world was warming, ice would be melting. The global sea ice anomaly, the red line, is as flat as a biscuit. No global warming here.

The satellites also measure the temperature of the atmosphere. The average temperature of the Earth’s surface is close to 15°C. The chart above shows the departure of the lower atmosphere from the average of the 30 years from 1979 to 2010. As at last December, in 40 years of measurements, we are 0.25°C above that average. So there has been a little bit of warming but the trend is very weak.

What about Australia in particular? The range is wider but temperature were higher a couple of decades ago. Forty years of data and the only trend is sideways.

Graphs can be a bit scary, and a bit misleading, when the data displayed fills the whole space of the graph. So the graph above plots the world lower atmospheric temperature from the second last slide on the daily temperature range of 10°C predicted for Perth on 22^nd January this year. It would be a very sensitive person indeed who could detect the temperature range of the planet over the last 40 years. That is another way of saying that the climate has been very stable. Nothing has happened and there is no suggestion that anything is going to happen.

We’ve had a look at sea ice and the atmosphere. The last big thing to look at is the oceans. They have already started cooling. The graph above shows the temperature of the Gulf Stream on a transect in the North Atlantic. Cooling of the Gulf Stream started over a decade ago. If the oceans are cooling, the planet is cooling because the oceans have almost all the mass of the climate system.

This is another way of looking at that data on the Gulf Stream. This graph shows the temperature profile across that transect down to 800 metres. The 8°C water used to be held down to 600 metres below the surface. Now in winter there are spikes of that cold water up to the surface. Why would the oceans be ignoring global warming?

What has happened to our experience as Australians? Some records show warming in our lifetimes, as in the Cape Otway record above, but have only risen to the temperatures that prevailed at Federation.

Newcastle’s temperature record is nearly 160 years long and it shows much the same thing — cooling up to 1960 and then a rise equal to the fall. We are back to the temperatures our great grandparents experienced. And nothing more than that. The port of Newcastle exported 158.6 million tonnes of coal in 2018. If only some of that coal could be used in Australia to provide winter heating for our elderly. Foreigners get to use our coal while we miss out. The mental gymnastics involved in justifying that are beyond the scope of this lecture. But as a mental illness it ranks up there with gender dysphoria and I don’t need to tell you how bad that is.

Enough of concentrating on our own needs, our ability to provide for the indigent, the frail, the elderly, those of lesser means, our brothers and sisters in the twilight of their lives trying to self-sufficient and not being a burden to others. We will leave those narrow, selfish concerns aside for the moment and go back to worrying about the planet. The graph above shows the longest temperature record on the planet, the Central England Average Temperature from 1659.

There are a few interesting things on this graph. It captures the second half of the Maunder Minimum that started in 1645. This was a period of low solar activity that resulted in low temperatures. The decade centered on 1695 was the coldest decade in the last one thousand years. That cold killed off a third of the population of Finland.

By the 1730s things were back to normal. Then out of the blue came the cold event of 1740. This killed off 20% of the population of Ireland, about one hundred years before the more famous potato famine that started in 1845. Nobody knows what caused that one-off super cold year. There is nothing in the solar record that suggests a cause. That implies it could happen again any time.

The Dalton Minimum was due to two consecutive weak solar cycles at the start of the 19^th century.  The Thames froze over in central London as a consequence. The temperatures of the last 20 years weren’t much above those of the early 18^th century, 300 years before.

Now we reach back further in time. The graph above is a temperature reconstruction to the year of Christ’s birth. What it shows is that we have just got back to the temperatures of a thousand years ago when grapes grew in northern England, and a thousand years before that when grapes grew in northern England. It is starting to look like there are climatic cycles, the prospect of which got Tim Wills of Swansea University so concerned. And so he should be, as a self-confessed conspirator in a giant fraud.

We must not linger here. On to the Holocene, which is the name given to the interglacial period we are living in. Temperatures were a couple of degrees higher six thousand years ago and sea level was two metres higher. The global warmers would hate it, but the scientists who named this period called it the Holocene Optimum because climate was far more pleasant than it is at the moment. It is called an “optimum” because it was warmer than it is now. Since that best of times, temperature has been falling by 0.25°C per thousand years and water has become locked up in the ice sheets, causing sea level to fall. Which is what happens before we plunge into a glaciation.

What that means is shown on this graph. This is one of the scariest graphs ever produced. It is a continuous temperature record from a core hole drilled by the Russians on the Antarctic ice plateau. It shows four glaciations, about 100,000 years apart. The interglacial periods are only little interludes in the millions of years of grinding ice. Some might think that our current climate is normal. It’s not — it is a special, wonderful time in which a vast area of the planet can be put under the plough or otherwise bear great forests stretching thousands of kilometers. Normally ice sheets extend to below the Canadian border and across the north German plain.

How this came about was that Antarctica drifted over the South Pole 40 million years ago. It became a giant refrigerator for the planet. The oceans started cooling and ocean bottom temperatures dropped 10°C. Ice sheets started forming on Antarctica and the process became self-perpetuating. Sea level dropped 70 meters. Three million years ago glaciations started. They could go on for another 30 million years.

You may not be worried about what will happen 30 million years out. How about 3,000 years out? This is less time than we have had civilization — the first pyramids were built 5,000 years ago.  What is shown above is the interglacials from the previous graph superimposed and aligned on peak temperature. We are living in the Holocene which is the purple one. If the Holocene ends up like the Eemian, the previous interglacial, we have 3,000 years of good times left, at maximum. No interglacial has lasted longer than that. Then we plunge into the next glacial period.

Among other things, Australia will be subjected to fierce winds from the south. If you look at satellite imagery of northern Australia, there are sand dunes marching into King Sound from the last glacial period. Once the next one starts, most of Australia will become a cold and very dry desert. Until then we should enjoy what we have.

An anonymous academic produced the graph above. The red line is the glacial record and the coloured line is his model. The hindcast match is good. The deepest point of the next glaciation is 55,000 years away, and the next interglacial 80,000 years out.

That is climate sorted — where we have been and where we are going.

It’s time to move on to carbon dioxide, the friendly molecule that sustains all life.

The greenhouse gasses keep the planet 33°C warmer than it would otherwise be if they weren’t in the atmosphere. Thus the average temperature of the Earth’s surface is 15°C instead of -18°C. Of that 33°C, 80% of the effect is from water vapor, 10% from carbon dioxide, with methane and other things making up the balance.

So if the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide is 300 ppm and the carbon dioxide contribution is 3°C, you could be forgiven if you thought that the heating effect of carbon dioxide was 1°C per 100 ppm.  We are putting an extra 2 ppm of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year so that is 100 ppm every 50 years. At that rate we would fry.

But the heating effect of carbon dioxide is not arithmetic, it is logarithmic. As the graph above shows, the first 20 ppm accounts for half of the heating effect to date. By the time we get to the current level of 408 ppm each extra 100 ppm will cause 0.1°C of warming, not 1.0°C of warming. Carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. Its effect from here is inconsequential. It will do other good things but we can’t count on it to heat the planet much. In fact its effect will be lost in the noise of the climate system. It won’t even mitigate the cooling that is coming.

This graph takes the data from the previous graph and sums it up in one column. Half the heating effect comes from the first 20 ppm. The heating effect from the pre-industrial level is theoretical — there is no evidence for it in the climate record.

By the time we have dug up all the rocks we can burn, and burnt them, we might get to 600 ppm. Then the remorseless, 800 year turnover of the oceans will take most of that down into the Davy Deep and we won’t see it again. There is 50 times as much carbon dissolved in the oceans as carbon dioxide than there is in the atmosphere. There is very rapid exchange of carbon dioxide between the oceans and the atmosphere, but only with the top 100 meters or so of the ocean above the thermocline. The average half life of a carbon dioxide molecules in the atmosphere is only five years. The atmosphere is in equilibrium with the top 100 meters of the ocean but not with the rest of the 3,700 meter water column.

So after 800 years or so, the time it takes the ocean to turn over, 98% of the carbon we are putting into the atmosphere will dissolve into the oceans and the balance of 2% will be in the atmosphere.  When that happens it will be a very bad thing indeed.

We will get on to that but first let’s examine the global warmer belief system. We know that carbon dioxide’s heating effect is logarithmic and that it is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas, and we know that the global warmers know that too. So how do they produce their dire predictions of a 6°C rise in temperature, and some up to 10°C, for a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide when we are barely going to notice the warming that will happen?

What follows is the magic belief system that is the basis of global warming science. They take the little bit of heating from carbon dioxide and say that the slightly warmer atmosphere will hold a little bit more water. Water is a greenhouse gas so it in turns makes the atmosphere a bit warmer and so it can hold more water. And so on, ad infinitum until they get the warming they need to scare them. This relies upon the climate system being susceptible to a runaway effect instead of having negative feedbacks, as it does.

But the strangest thing about it is that the global warming belief system starts at exactly the pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide, not more, not less. Why doesn’t it start at 20 ppm, or 80 ppm or 120 ppm? Methinks that if there is a compounding water vapor effect then it will also be tuckered out by now too.

It is staggering that such an asinine belief system has held sway over our polity for over a decade now. In the meantime the dead bodies pile up.

The greenies and nasty lefties among us are a reliable contra-indicator. Whatever they say, the opposite is the correct position. That axiom holds for carbon dioxide. Increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is wholly beneficial.

As some of the previous slides have shown, the Earth is not long out of a glacial period. The coldest period of that glacial interval was only 15,000 years ago. As the title of the figure above says, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere became dangerously low. It was at starvation levels for plants, and since we eat plants, and things that eat plants, it was dangerously low for us too.

Luckily the Holocene came along, the oceans warmed a bit and coughed up a bit of carbon dioxide to share with the atmosphere. And potential disaster was averted. But one day the oceans will cool and want their carbon dioxide back, and then things will get grim again.

The effect of increasing levels of carbon dioxide on plant growth have been quantified in lots of studies, because it is an easy thing to do. Bear in mind that the plants we eat evolved when the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere was 1,200 ppm, three times what it is now. So plants are optimized for much higher carbon dioxide levels. For them we are still in starvation territory. Plants traps carbon dioxide by respiring water at the rate of 100 water molecules for each carbon dioxide molecule. So now they can grow a lot more for a given amount of water relative to 50 years ago.

The effect is 0.3% per 1 ppm. We are putting 2 ppm of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year so grain yields are rising 0.6% per annum.

What the last figure shows is that growth effect superimposed on the carbon dioxide levels in Antarctic ice cores going back 800,000 years. At their worst, at the 180 ppm of 15,000 years ago, we would only be able to grow half of what we do now. And that was the best of times, unspoiled by the hand of Man? Something to be wished for? I don’t think the global warmers have thought through their fear of carbon dioxide completely.

What was illustrated in the last figure happens every day of the week in commercial greenhouses. When the Sun comes up the carbon dioxide level drops as the plants suck it down. Then growth stops when the level gets to 150 ppm odd, as their respiratory system can’t work against the partial pressure in their cells. As the ad says, add carbon dioxide to your greenhouse for substantially increased plant production. That goes for the whole planet too.

Global warming is wishful thinking at best:

1. It can’t happen in theory.
2. There is no evidence for it in the climate record.
3. All the evidence says that the more carbon dioxide
   in the atmosphere, the better.

There is no global warming, only natural cycles on various scales from one day to tens of thousands of years. That much maligned molecule, carbon dioxide, is innocent of all charges. In fact we are going to miss it when most of the carbon we assiduously dug up gets sucked down into the deep oceans and we will never see it again. Because grain production will fall away with the falling carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere and a lot of people are going to starve. That is a few centuries out.

There was a mild, pleasant and much appreciated slight warming of the atmosphere late last century. All things in climate have a cause, so what was the cause of that? It turns out that the Sun was more active in the second half of the 20^th century than it had been for the last 10,000 years. Energy from the Sun is what stops the Earth looking like Pluto, and the level of that energy does change slightly.

The most readily apparent change in solar activity is the solar cycles. This is an eleven year cycle in the number and area of sunspots on the Sun’s surface. We have good solar cycle records from 1749.  The current solar cycle, 24, is expected to end late this year. Indications are that the next solar cycle, 25, should be of a similar magnitude to 24. After 70 years of higher solar activity we will be going back to the 19^th century level of solar activity.

That is readily illustrated by the open solar flux, a data series maintained by the Dutch weather bureau, the KNMI. There is a lag between solar activity and Earth’s climate, due to the thermal mass of the oceans, so the cooling from going back to 19^th century levels of activity is yet to hit. Weather will become a lot more changeable in the mid-latitudes that grow most of our grain.

This graph plots solar activity back to 10,000 years ago. That 20^th century spike in activity was the biggest for at least 10,000 years.  It didn’t grow warm enough to grow grapes in northern England, as was done 1,000 years ago in the Medieval Warm Period or 2,000 years ago in the Roman Warm Period. The spike in solar activity we have lived through was just too short to do much warming.

The graph above is of the aa Index, effectively a measure of the Sun’s magnetic field strength. This is the longest record on the planet of electromagnetic activity. The aa Index begins in 1868, when stations in London and Melbourne started recording.

Years ago on the climate blog Watts Up With That, an anonymous comment said to the effect “You idiots. Changing climate is explained by the Sun’s magnetic field. Nothing else matters.” Certainly the Modern Warm Period is marked by a solar magnetic field that is 50% stronger than the level prevailing in the last years of the Little Ice Age.

How that works is that the Sun’s magnetic field, carried on the solar wind, pushes galactic cosmic rays away from the inner planets of the solar system. So there are fewer particle collisions in the upper atmosphere to cause showers of neutrons in the lower atmosphere where clouds form. Clouds reflect about 40% of light whereas the open ocean only reflects 5%. So if there are fewer clouds then more sunlight gets through to the Earth’s surface and heats things up. Where it all begins is in the solar magnetic field.

The aa Index helps us nail down the beginning and end of the Modern Warm Period to the year. There is nothing sloppy about our science.

The graph above shows the cumulative departure from the average of the 150 year record. The higher activity from 1933 is immediately apparent as is the turn around in 2006. We had 75 years of higher solar magnetic flux which got some people hot and bothered. The fact that this period coincided with increased atmospheric carbon dioxide was just that, a coincidence. That is why the planet is cooling now instead of warming even though the atmospheric carbon dioxide level continues rising. Because carbon dioxide had little to do with the warming.

This interpretation is corroborated by the Be¹⁰ record, shown above for the Dye 3 ice core in Antarctica. Be¹⁰ is formed in the upper atmosphere by high energy particles hitting oxygen and nitrogen atoms. So the production rate of Be¹⁰ reflects the solar magnetic field strength. The major climate events of the last 600 years show up in this record – the low levels of Be¹⁰ of the Modern Warm Period, the spike upwards at the end of the 19^th century, the Dalton Minimum and the big spike at the end of the 17^th century that killed so many people in the Baltics.

We can measure the neutron count at the Earth’s surface from the galactic cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere far above. The flux varies greatly over the solar cycle and thus the number of nucleation sites for cloud formation vary over the solar cycle. The neutron count has been measured from the 1960s. The 1970s cooling period shows up in this record. The peaks in the record are the solar minima. The peak for the solar cycle occurs one year after solar minimum, so we are about two years out to the next peak, likely to be a record high.

If the amount of cloud cover changes over the solar cycle then the amount of sunshine heating the oceans would also change over the solar cycle. We should be able to measure that in the rate at which sea level changes from year to year. And so we do. The graph above shows the correlation between the changing rate of sea level rise (blue line) and solar cycles (red line). Not surprisingly, the Sun is a big influence on climate.

One of the strongest correlations between solar activity and water level is Lake Victoria in East Africa, shown in the graph above. The relationship was immediately evident once lake levels started being recorded early last century. Then the relationship broke down from the beginning of the Modern Warm Period and resumed 40 years later in the 1970s. As the rains around Lake Victoria come mostly from the west then the cycle in the lake level most likely reflects the amount of cloud cover over the Congo.

We are told that sea level is rising rapidly and the rate is accelerating. We are told that rising sea level is going to wipe out the world as we know it. I have heard of people who have believed this official line and sold up their property on the coast at Bunbury to move up on the Darling scarp. The graph above shows the official sea level rise, as measured by satellites, from the early 1990s. It is a straight line move that you can extrapolate for years ahead and estimate the remorseless inundation that is in our future.

This graph doesn’t gel with people’s lived experiences of sea level. People who have used the same jetty for decades have not noticed any change in sea level. Nobody has seen 6 centimeters of sea level rise in the last 30 years. What’s correct — the official global warming graph of sea level rise or what people have seen for themselves?

As this graph shows, the official global warming graph of sea level rise was created by adjusting the data until it produced a result that allowed the scientists involved to keep their jobs. The lower line is the raw data from the satellites. The upper line is the adjusted result that the public gets to see. The scientists from the University of Colorado in charge of this project are mendacious liars, as are all the rest of the global warming scientists.

There are plenty of tide gauges around the planet that show what has really been happening. The graph above is of the tide gauge at Fort Denison in Sydney Harbour, from 1914. Most of the sea level rise of the last century, as measured at Sydney Harbour, happened in the late 1940s. It has been effectively flat since. You can make a trend from that data and the trend is 2 inches per century. And that is likely to turn around and reverse soon.

When all else fails the global warmers claim that increased carbon dioxide will make the seas acid and dissolve the shells off all the little sea creatures. The seas will never become acid. Theoretically they may become slightly less alkaline. In fact sea life will become more prolific with the increased carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.

Even extreme amounts of carbon dioxide doesn’t do any harm to sea creatures. The photo above is of coral growing over an area of volcanic vents that are producing streams of carbon dioxide bubbles. The corals are healthy and there are fish happily swimming around. As with the situation above the sea surface, increased carbon dioxide levels in the oceans are wholly beneficial.

Climate is not a random walk. If you can predict solar activity then you can predict climate. There have been a number of attempts at this but the quality is variable. One of the better ways of doing this is to pick out the cycles in long data series and then extrapolate them out. The graph above is the result from a Finnish tree ring study – a narrower annual ring means a colder year. Now the graph is quite interesting because it is predicting a big drop in temperature from 2025 to 2040 and then those cold temperatures will prevail until 2060. The drop in temperature predicted will be the larger than any in the last 500 years. If this does happen then many people will starve.

Similarly, the graph above projects solar activity for the next five hundred years. Our solar records from ice cores are thousands of years long so such long term prediction can be credible. What these solar scientists are predicting is a return on 19^th century levels of solar activity. That is not an outrageous prediction — and it will be cooler.

The growing season in the US lengthened in the second half of the 20^th century as climatic bands moved north. What goes up can come down. The last time there was a global cooling scare was in the 1970s, due to a weak Solar Cycle 20. The map above is from research done at the time on what would happen to the Corn Belt. It moves 144 kilometres with each 1°C change in temperature. Grain production would fall. Firstly from there being less heat to grow the crop but also because the Corn Belt is currently on perfectly flat ground produced by successive ice sheets with good soil while the area to the south has poorer soils that need a lot more fertilizer.

The Corn Belt shifting has happened before in the US and will keep shifting until the end of time. The map above shows the northern limit of corn growing in the Great Lakes region by Indians in the Medieval Warm period and during the Sporer Minimum that ended in 1550. The latter was more than 300 kilometers south of where it was a couple of hundred years earlier.

If the world was cooling as the level of solar activity says it should, then we should be seeing that in the weather we are experiencing on a day to day basis. And so we are. The slide above shows some newspaper headlines from early 2018 talking about record cold. And a year later the same sort of headlines also talking about new cold records. So the world is getting colder. The significance of the headline about the heaviest snow for 100 years means that the alpine glaciers will be accumulating mass and start advancing again.

The closest historic parallel to what Australia is doing to
itself is the 1856 cattle-killing frenzy of the Xhosa tribe in what
is now South Africa.

• A teenage girl named Nongqawuse and her friend Nombanda
  went to fetch water.
• Upon returning, she said that they had met the spirits of three of her ancestors who had told her that the Xhosa people should destroy their crops and kill their cattle.
• In return the spirits would sweep the British settlers into the sea. Then their granaries would fill again and their kraals would have more and better cattle.
• The cattle-killing frenzy that followed killed between 300,000 and 400,000 head of cattle.
• In the resulting famine, the population of the province dropped from 105,000 to fewer than 27,000.

We are often amused by the antics of simple-minded primitive peoples who don’t understand how things work. One of the more amusing cults of our time is the cargo cult in New Guinea, in which natives constructed fake airfields and planes in order to attract real planes to land and disgorge cargo. That particular belief is harmless enough. But from time to time primitive peoples can be gripped by messianic visions that do a lot of harm, to the extent of wiping our their tribes. One of the best documented of this kind of destructive cults was the cattle killing frenzy of the Xhosa tribe in 1856 in South Africa. Most of the tribe starved to death and some resorted to cannibalism.

We can laugh or weep at such mindless stupidity but we are no different today. In their fits of religious ecstasy, the Labor governments in South Australia and Victoria destroyed coal-fired power stations before their time was up. At the moment the worst results of those religious paroxysms are that people are being impoverished by their power bills, there have been job losses, and the bitter harvest of dead grannies each winter due to lack of heating. But the threat is far greater than that. If we weaken ourselves economically through high power prices then we are less able to withstand economic shocks and external threats. The Xhosa were almost wiped out by a similar vision in the 19^th century. We are headed down a similar path.

Conclusions on Climate:

1. Yes the world has warmed and this was mostly due to the
   highest level of solar activity for 10,000 years. Most likely outcome is that we return to the climate of the 19th century.
2. Carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas and its effect from here is minuscule.
3. The level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere got dangerously low during the last ice age and the higher we can take it, the safer the world will be.
4. There is no scientific reason to switch away from coal and other fossil fuels.
5. Anyone who believes in global warming is either evil or stupid.

Before we go on to discuss what we should be doing instead of worshiping global warming and building wind turbines and solar panels as temples to that false god, let’s sum up what we know now. The world is now getting colder not warmer, carbon dioxide is wholly good and not evil, and there is no scientific reason to not burn our endowment of coal. The situation is a bit more complicated than that though. Fossil fuels aren’t going to last forever and in the meantime we should conserve to convert and prepare for the world that comes after fossil fuels.

Another thing we can say is that people who believe in global warming are either evil or stupid. They are quite happily destroying our standard of living on the flimsiest of notions, on a notion no better than witchcraft or spirit worship.

Who are remorseless killers of our little old ladies who can’t heat their homes in winter?

It all started with John Winston Howard:

1. In the 1960s young Winston travelled across Sydney to sit at the knee of Sir Phillip Baxter, who told him of the wonders of nuclear power. Howard became a one man sleeper cell of nuclear advocacy.
2. As Prime Minister, Howard knows Australians won’t vote for nuclear so he decides to force it on us by upping the cost of coal-based power via a carbon tax.
3. Howard’s last dark deed was the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act of October 2007. This is the auditing basis of the carbon tax.
4. Gillard promises no carbon tax in the 2010 election but reneges.
5. Abbott wins the 2013 election on the promise of repealing the carbon tax, but three days after the election announces that the auditing basis of the tax won’t be repealed.
6. So the carbon tax has come back in another form, and renewables legislation is killing the economy and little old ladies.

Who will rid us of the menace of global warming hysteria?

All the institutions that should have kept us safe from the global warmers have abrogated their responsibility. The universities, the CSIRO, the Australian Academy of Science, the Institute of Engineers and others have actively conspired against the Australian public and nation. Others might have had good intentions in their own mind but ended up just being more useful fools for the Marxist plotters.

Chief among these is John Howard. He wanted Australia to start building nuclear power plants, but knew that Australians wouldn’t vote for that. So the second rate Machiavelli decided to force that outcome by making coal-fired power generation more expensive. His last dark deed in government was the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act of October 2007. That act is the auditing basis of the carbon tax. Howard’s plan was to get the auditing system bedded down and then start taxing. In private Howard was known to be scathing of global warming as a big fraud. But he proceeded to bring in a carbon tax anyway.

The global warming monster should have been killed in its crib. Howard could have and should have done that by commissioning a report saying it was nonsense. He decided to be a smart-arse instead. As in all science fiction stories, the global warming monster has grown up to turn on its creators.

Of course, Labor are fully on board with the carbon tax because it is the chosen path to Marxist wealth redistribution on a planetary scale, on-world government, and so on. No surprise there, and we expect nothing less of them than selling the country down the river.

Abbott won the 2013 election on a promise to end the carbon tax but the simpleton announced three days after that election that he wasn’t going to repeal the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act. Why stop the tax and keep its auditing system? That’s just stupid. And so of course the carbon tax just shape-shifted and we still have it, suppressing economic activity.

If the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act is repealed then the whole rotten house of cards comes tumbling down.

So what are the consequences in detail of distorting our power supply, to worship the false god of global warming? This graph is from a presentation by the Chief Financial Officer of the den of the self-interested known as AGL. It is all about gaming the system to maximize the extortion of the power consumer.

We see on the left hand side of the graph that black and brown coal are the cheapest sources of power. Wind, solar and natural gas are all much the same and three to four times the cost of coal-sourced power. AGL’s problem, as Mr Redman explained in his presentation, was that there was no need for new renewables to be built because the existing, much cheaper power plants were going to last a long time. The solution was to kill off existing plants before they were worn out.

This graph shows how our power prices started rising a decade ago, soon after Rudd gained office, as those expensive windmills etc. were legislated into the power grid. We are paying two to three times what the price would be if we had just let nature take its course.

This graph shows the share of the power supply by source from 1990. In the good old days it was mostly coal. Then the messianic hatred of carbon dioxide took off from early last decade and the natural gas share rose. That is a terrible waste of something you can use to power cars. It is also priced like oil in terms of energy content, so burning natural gas is just as stupid as burning oil for our power generation.

But the price of power didn’t start rising dramatically until the renewables burden took off in a big way from 10 years ago.

It gets worse. The slide above shows the title of a policy document on taking the carbon atom out of the methane molecules in our natural gas supply, throwing away most of the energy in the process. These people are so divorced from reality that they would entertain such a notion. Some might try to excuse it as virtue signalling. but it is also extremely stupid. The people who commissioned that document are in charge of a big chunk of the economy, while being as stupid as cargo cult believers.

As this graph shows, as the coal share of power generation went down (blue line) then the cost of power went up a lot (orange line). The detail behind that is shown in the next graph:

Wind and solar require enormous subsidies –- in effect transferring money from poor people paying their power bills to people who own wind farms, rooftop solar, and photovoltaic farms. This is wrong and should be stopped.

 

The pain and stupidity are planned to get just worse and worse. This graph shows the planned closures of coal-fired generation out to 2030. If the power shortfall that causes is to be replaced by whirligigs then power is going to become very expensive indeed.

AGL have told us in detail how they are going to exploit the spiky, unreliable power grid they had a hand in creating. The wind blows and stops in fits and spurts, creating sudden shortfalls in supply. To take advantage of that, they have installed banks of diesel generator sets that can be booted up to full power in under ten minutes. This is faster than gas turbines. As the graph says, it is all about capturing high prices — the high prices that they are a part of creating.

Relying upon diesel generator sets for your power supply is something the third world does. So we are going completely third world in terms of power price, supply reliability and how it is generated. It need not be like this. The stupidity can be stopped. Things can be set to right.

This graph shows the AEMO data dashboard for the east coast power market, as at five minutes to six pm on 24^th January, 2019. This data is updated every five minutes. The states that blew up coal-fired power stations in fits of religious ecstasy were paying about 100 times the cost for spot power, compared to the states that hadn’t fully started down that path.  This is just the beginning.  There is a whole lot more stupidity planned.  How bad it might get is shown by the following slide.

The cost of power in Europe is directly proportional to the amount of wind and solar power in the grid. Labor wants to take our power grid to 50% renewables by 2030. They are quite happy to destroy the economy in the process. The Liberals are almost as bad of course. With either set of loonies in charge, the country will go backwards at a great rate.

Conclusions on Power Prices

1. Closing coal-fired power stations and tilting the competitive
   playing field away from coal is increasing costs for no benefit.
2. Australia is throwing away its big competitive advantage for no benefit.
3. Increasing costs unnecessarily destroys jobs.
4. What is the point of exporting coal and not using it ourselves?
5. The sooner this global-warming based idiocy is stopped, the sooner we will be safer, more secure and have a rising standard of living.
6. Don’t tinker at the margins, just reverse all the stupidity of the last 20 years.

Cheap coal-fired power is a competitive advantage that Australia should have. We have thrown that away for no good reason. And of course, selling our coal to foreigners but not burning it ourselves is just deranged. The rationale for all this needless pain and suffering is global warming. But global warming is a fraud, just another Marxist plot. We can stop the stupidity any time we want to. The parallel is the Puritans who took over England in religious fervor. Eventually people got sick of it, puritanism burnt itself out, and the Royalists returned to power in 1660. The Royalists dug up Cromwell’s corpse, hung it in chains and beheaded it.

Worshiping global warming by distorting our power system won’t just result in more dead grannies each winter. A lot of other people will be affected –- most of us actually. And at the margin people will lose their jobs, become despondent and start taking their lives.

The graph above is of deaths per 100,000 people in the age group 50 to 54, in the period 1989 to 2014. It is from a paper by Case and Deaton in 2017 entitled Mortality and Morbidity in the 21^st Century. FRA is France, GER is Germany, SWE is Sweden. AUS is Australia. It seems that we were happiest in the Howard years even though he was plotting against us.

The red line is whites in the United States. The United States was a happy place, about as happy as Australia is now, up to 2000 and the shift of manufacturing to China. So the newly unemployed Americans started taking their lives at an increasing rate.

As this graph shows, all that increase in the death rate has been in white people with a high school education or less.

Some are driven to alcoholism and ending their lives that way.

And others are ending the pain by topping themselves.  This is what is going to happen in Australia if we keep hollowing out our industrial base with high power prices.

The lesson from what has happened in the
United States is this:

If you destroy the jobs of working people
you destroy their lives.

Australia’s global warming/renewable energy/
carbon-hating policies are destroying Australian
jobs. They will also destroy Australian lives.

The people behind these policies couldn’t care less.

All this is known. It is common sense. But the people running the country, both Labor and Liberal, all hold global warming to be divine truth. The lives of so many will be sacrificed on the altar of that simplistic religion.

Solar PV is cheap only because fossil fuels are cheap.

Some mines in WA have installed solar PV that provides
power at $0.12/kWh for eight hours per day to supplement
diesel at $0.22/kWh.

But the solar panels are made using power at $0.05/kWh.

If you use power at $0.12/kWh to make solar panels then the
solar power will cost $0.30/kWh.

If you use $0.30/kWh power to make solar panels then the
solar power will cost $0.72/kWh and so on.

Solar power uses a steady supply of low cost power from
Chinese coal to make an intermittent supply of high cost
power.

It is not sustainable.

Some might rationalize renewables by saying that it is the coming thing. But renewables are only as cheap as they are because Chinese coal is cheap, making the steel, the silicon and the other bits and pieces. An economy built on renewables will fail because you can’t afford to make windmills and solar panels with power from windmills and solar panels.

So if you want to understand where the cost of PV is going from here we should look at the outlook for Chinese coal production. The graph above is from a paper by some Chinese academics on projected fossil fuel production in China. For coal production their preferred case is the red line in the chart. They have production peaking at about 4,000 million tonnes per annum in 2020, going sideways after that to 2028 and then falling away. China’s coal production has the energy equivalent of 50 million barrels per day of oil. To put that in perspective, world oil consumption is currently 100 million barrels per day.

When Chinese coal production starts falling then everything they produce will become more expensive, including solar panels. Solar panels and wind turbines are just gimmicks, indulgences made possible at a moment in time by cheap coal. Solar panels and wind turbines don’t produce enough power to replace themselves and sustain society at any standard of living.

The more important Paris treaty

Turnbull signed us up to the Paris climate treaty on 23rd April, 2016. If we stay in it, it will make us a lot poorer for no good reason.

We signed the far more important International Energy Agency agreement in 1979. This requires the 28 member countries to hold 90 days of stocks of fuel imports. We have been non-compliant since 2012 and currently have 49 days of stocks.

Only two other countries have ever been non-compliant: Luxembourg (89 days in 2009) and Turkey (86 days in 2018).

To add 50 days worth of stocks will cost us $6 billion for the fuel and another $4 billion for the tankage. We should double that to take the whole cost to $20 billion.

It would be amusing if it wasn’t terribly tragic. One of the reasons the contemptible Julia Gillard as prime minister wanted Australia to sign up to climate treaties was because we should make ourselves a guiding light to all nations. Set an example for others to follow.

At the same time she was in charge we weren’t honoring our commitment to a far more important treaty, which requires the signatories to hold fuel stocks that can be shared in an emergency. We are the only country that is delinquent. Once again, you get the feeling that the people running the country couldn’t care less.

Conserve to Convert

Many stupid things have been done in Australia in the name of global warming.

Natural gas is 13% of the national power supply, 50% in WA. When the world tips over into long term oil supply decline, natural gas will be priced as oil in energy content terms. So using natural gas for power supply will be like burning oil in terms of cost. Then in turn we will burn more coal.

But coal has an alternative use as a liquid fuel feedstock and will be
priced like oil less the conversion cost. The only long term solution that has a chance of providing us with a high standard of living is nuclear power.

Reactors using the existing dominant nuclear technology — U235-burning light water reactors — are inherently unstable. The sooner we develop and inherently safe breeder technology, the better. This is likely to be the Dual Fluid Lead-cooled Reactor.

One day oil will run out, followed by natural gas, followed by coal. There will be a future that doesn’t use fossil fuels. That may seem a long way off, but consider that when oil becomes expensive then coal consumption will also go up — either to make the power for charging electric cars, or in liquefying the coal to make diesel and petrol. Currently the energy content of the oil and coal used on the planet are equivalent. So when coal replaces oil then the coal consumption rate will double. What was 200 years of reserves will become 100 years of reserves — within a human lifetime.

Currently 4% of oil consumption goes to making plastics. We are still going to use plastics when the oil runs out, so where will the feedstock come from? It will come from wheat chaff, forest waste and newspaper waste. We will scrape up carbon wherever we can find it and combine that with hydrogen produced from electrolysis of water. The power for that will come from nuclear reactors. No other technology will give us a standard of living worth having. The sooner we prepare for that future the safer we will be.

There is only one path.

1. Coal and oil were the fossil fuels given to us to take
   civilisation to a high level.
2. U235 was the fissile isotope given to us as the match to start
   the nuclear fire which will maintain civilisation at a high
   level for all eternity.
3. Departing from this will only end in tears and death.
4. There is no role for renewable energy because it is not
   sustainable.

There is only one true path. This is dictated by physics, chemistry, and economics. It is this path, or we condemn Australians as yet ungotten and unborn to the abyss of nothingness. Death because at the moment food is cheap only because fossil fuels are cheap — diesel for the tractors, natural gas for the fertilizer. Natural gas on the east coast is now too expensive to make fertilizer so we import it. That is not wise. So when the natural gas and then the coal run out, where will nitrogenous fertilizer come from? It won’t be from power produced by solar panels or whirligigs.

In conclusion:

1. In the next federal election vote for the party which credibly will stop the climate stupidity and repeal all climate and renewables legislation.
2. Honour the Paris agreement we signed in 1979 and put in at least 100 million barrels of fuel stocks.
3. Start developing the coal-to-liquids technology we will need long term.
4. Develop the right nuclear technology so that the generations who follow us will have the highest standard of living possible.

Australia is being dragged backwards by leaders who know nothing and couldn’t care less. Both Labor and Liberal are committed to destroying our economy through renewables. Vote for someone else.

 

david.archibald@westnet.com.au

 

My last two books:

 

 

The views above are those of the author, and not necessarily those of the Wentworth Report.