A Worried Look at Global Climate Change

by Glenn N Holliman

Terry Field, a retired business man and out-of-the-box thinker, writes the following anguished cry from the Cunard ship, Queen Victoria in the mid Atlantic.  He reflects with despairing concern on the Paris Climate Change Conference....and the future of the planet.

As with his writing, his political sense of humor is robust as his American cap so demonstrates....

"I thought that I would pen a short note after the conclusion of the Paris climate change conference and public communiqué. 

The impression given to the world is that there is a universal agreement to act to restrict climate change to 2 degrees, and try to achieve 1.5 degrees C.  It would be good to start a conversation about this matter on the blog.

The latest, most tested science would indicate that the Earth's climate is more sensitive to CO2 than has been previously accepted. In addition, the most informed scientists seem to agree that the carbon load in the atmosphere and the configuration of the global economy makes limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees C a practical impossibility. This is not given significant 'air-time'.

The Paris agreement has no enforcement powers, is not a treaty, and is a set of intentions expressed purely in general political terms.

The context here is the point. For three hundred years, the growth in the world's economic activity has driven and sustained the growth in human population. At the same time, the world has given up its resources to an economic system that is blind to anything other than the myriad of individual opportunities that we call 'capitalism'. It has been spectacularly effective as a generator of wealth, with powerful vested interests in the shape the system has taken on today.

This system is at its essence undirected. The shapes it takes on are not predictable; but its consumption of gigantic and ever increasing energy inputs is a common, enduring and unending reality.

The directed economy experiment - whereby a political framework could define the end results, and the productive systems could be made subservient to this 'social objective' architecture, has been tried. It started in 1917, in Russia. In the 1980s, that approach collapsed in utter, ruinous failure.

Yet Paris tries to do this again, but on a much, much larger scale.

Paris tells the blind, deaf, dumb capitalist economy that all its refinements that generate the kaleidoscope of undreamed-off outputs are at an end. Paris tells the world economies that their primary drivers, where it derives its energy sources, where they are deployed, what their technical and cost nature must be, and who in society will gain and who will lose ( to the most profound extent imaginable) is to be coerced into a shape and framework that the capitalist economy would otherwise not replicate voluntarily.

So from where will the forces of change come?

Will the investor community, responsible for many trillions of dollars of asset allocation every month decide that romantic notions of favouring wind vanes, solar-cells, electric-vehicles, fuel cells, hydro-stations, combined energy technologies etc over the - now - abundant, well understood, powerful, cheap and understood easy-to-manage hydrocarbon technologies?

WHY WOULD IT DO THIS?????

If it does not, what price distortions can be applied by governments to force these changes? How much impoverishment will the old, western societies accept in this process?  Economists blithely talk about subtle changes required to effect the changes. That is a fantasy; energy price manipulation is a sledgehammer that changes every aspect of a modern productive economic system.

Will India Brazil, China, Indonesia etc scrap the thousands of newly installed and planned coal fired power stations?

If there is a willingness to switch technologies, what of the proffered alternatives? Wind vanes by the million? Hundreds of millions of square miles of solar panels? Hydrogen storage from these ephemeral and certainly not base-load systems.

What it comes down to, in the end, is - are the alternative systems of power generation even viable?????

How do the new alternatives supply base-load (continuous) power? Example - what happens when the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow????

Why is nuclear being closed down by 'greens'? What possible justification is there for this? After fifteen years of 'greening' the economy, and closing down nuclear, the Germans have barely touched the total CO2 load they emit.

The French are keen on concepts; the French government is dirigiste-socialist (directed by the state). It likes talking.

I am reminded, after the Paris conference, when listening to the far-too-smooth-of-his-own-good French foreign minister 'announcing the agreement' of Margaret Thatcher's comment on modern politics. She observed that politicians tend to think that because they have discussed a subject and reached an agreement that something has happened.

When in fact, nothing has happened at all.

Which brings us back to the hard physical reality, that is subject to physics, and not to marketing nuances.

The world is on track for probably - a range from 3 to 6 degrees of warming by 2100. 

The interactive graphs published by the Financial Times recently that shows what needs to be done to reduce this as a probability clearly states that, now, there is the ABSOLUTE requirement for ALL THE MAJOR POWER BLOCKS to reduce their net carbon output to ZERO by 2035 to even stand a chance of reducing the 2100 temperature to 4 degrees plus.

Yet we have just agreed to a series of pious hopes. Nothing more.

With escape clauses, with nothing binding, with no agreements about border sharing over and above the 65 billion transfer. Universally agreed as being pitifully inadequate.

I would submit that there are no adequate technologies either in existence, more on the drawing board, which can begin to generate the required result to avoid the death of what could be up to 80 percent of the human population, and the removal mammalian life from the belt from Capricorn to Cancer.  Not to mention massive desertification, the loss of the Levant, North Africa, Southern Europe, much of the Amazon, much of Africa, much of the west and centre of the United States.  A globe destroyed by super-storms, wildfires the size of countries, the loss of most coastal plains where the bulk of food is produced, and unlivable cauldron cities.

The continuation of ordered civilisation is in question if this scenario is not avoided.

And remember, the IPCC has been conservative in understating the real heating and CO2 output trajectory, and its models take no account of reinforcing 'feedback' effects (eg methane release, albedo effect, etc) since they cannot be known and estimated at present.

I am personally surprised at the complete silence from all the media on the subject.

I assume that this is because nobody has adequately assessed the shortfall Paris represents over the requirements that are mandatory in order to avoid utter catastrophe and the probable premature end of the lives of most of our grandchildren and their children-to-be.

I think that this subject deserves conversation on your blog in addition to the other matters that we have recently discussed.

The matter has been politicised along left / right lines; a testament to the dysfunctional stupidity of our societies?" - Terry Field

A frightening  polemic written by our friend who tends a garden of over 3,000 tulips, apple trees and lavenders and stores fine Bordeaux in his wine cellar....comment anyone? - GNH