My critics here are (of course) ignoring the facts I referred to:
1) The big greenhouse gas emitters (companies and states, especially big oil, China and the US) are systematically lying about their emissions, meaning they systematically underreport them:
https://e360.yale.edu/features/undercounted-emissions-un-climate-change .
“They are supposed to be the climate-savers’ gold standard — the key data on which the world relies in its efforts to lower greenhouse gas emissions and hold global warming in check. But the national inventories of emissions supplied to the United Nations climate convention (UNFCCC) by most countries are anything but reliable, according to a growing body of research.
The data supplied to the UNFCCC, and published on its website, are typically out of date, inconsistent, and incomplete. For most countries, “I would not put much value, if any, on the submissions,” says Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate Research in Norway, a longtime analyst of emissions trends.
The data from large emitters is as much open to questions as that from smaller and less industrialised nations. In China, the uncertainties around its carbon dioxide emissions from burning coal are larger than the total emissions of many major industrial countries. And companies preparing data for its carbon-trading system have been accused of widespread data fraud.
In the United States, an analysis published this month of the air over the country’s oil and natural gas fields found that they emit three times more methane — a gas responsible for a third of current warming — than the government has reported.”
Has the IPCC in any way protested against all this blatant lying? If so they have hidden it completely from the public. What is the result if someone for more than thirty years mumbles that there there maybe is a growing fire threat, at last, after thirty years of empty talks, dithering, delay and no action, says somewhat louder that now it’s closing in (but always being surprized by it’s advancing consequences), and then engages with the arsonists in talks about outsourcing the remaining fire service to them?
Will the public take this as a confirmation that the warnings are correct? Really? Your proof being Trump’s popularity?
Why has Biden done nothing about his government’s grotesque lying about methane emissions? Don’t tell me that Trump would do exactly the same, as if that makes Biden’s lying less dangerous.
In fact, it’s the other way around: Why is AGW still in doubt among many people? Why is the use of fossil fuels still relentlessly growing? Is it mainly because of the open and absurd lying about the facts from Trump, Putin, the saudi murderer in chief (Salman) etc.? Because of Trump saying nonsense like “there is no climate, it’s called the weather, it changes all the time” etc.?
Historical experience will tell you, that around the 25 pct. of any population are always diverse kinds of ignorants, believing absurd and often barbaric nonsense one way or the other. The percentage of americans voting is seldom higher than around 50 pct. Since Trump like his ideological and denialist predecessors – Bush the second, Reagan etc. inevitably get around 50 pct. of the votes, the conclusion is obvious: their support comes mainly from the abovementioned around 25 pct. inevitably ignorant people. If anything is going to change in american politics, it’ll have to come from the other 75 pct. of americans, the huge not actively and obsessively ignorant majority. Why isn’t that happening?
The short answer is that the american political duopoly makes real change impossible. In fact it works as a much smarter version of an open one-party dictatorship, because the leaders of the “progressive” part of the duopoly will almost always (there has been no Roosevelt since he died, and *he was exceptional by not surrendering to the inevitable republican slur of being a covert devilish bolshevik*) be saying that they have to get votes from the reactionary idiots to win – because they wouldn’t dream of mobilizing the 50 pct. who aren’t voting, on the contrary: they fear the poor people.
They wouldn’t even dream of changing the absurd electoral system which belongs in the dustbin of history. Clinton thought he won because he was “the better” reaganist etc.: the result was Bush II, absurd lies, climate ignorance de luxe, and more fatal wars for oil, culminating in the subprime financial collapse. Obama lied about “change” and (together with the hyper-arrogant Clinton II and her gossiping court ), talked and talked his empty talk from the golf course, gave all the money to the hyper-rich, did zero about fossil fuel rise – and led to Trump. The legacy of Obama was the Paris “agreement”, which James Hansen correctly characterized as “pure bullshit” (november 2015). It has led to exactly nothing but fossil business as extremely usual hidden behind false promises and blatant lies about greenhouse gas emissions.
As Carter said 2004: the US is an oligarchy (I would call it oiligarchy together with Russia and the other feudal oil fiefdoms who are now in complete control of the COP “process” towards hothouse earth) with it’s super-PACs (a plutocratic institution created by Clinton I), it’s gerrymandering, it’s corrupt non-parliamentary system: the president is a kind of “elected” half-baked dictator – what would you say if say the germans had a president whith this amount of power and being called “the commander in chief” in german? Wait – didn’t they have that once? His name was Paul von Hindenburg, he was corrupt and because of that he paved the way for Hitler in january 1933. Think about it. The senate is a roman copy, an antidemocratic club of multibillionaires (soon to be trillionaires). The supreme court is a corrupt club of appointees of the half-baked dictator presidents, and *that* is ridiculously presented as a “balance of powers”… If that’s a balance, Stalin was a democrat. The US constitution belongs in the late 18th century, it’s the inherited illusion of democracy created by slaveowners and since changed only superficially, because it’s being worshipped as if it came from God himself and not from humans, now being published by Trump together with the presbyterian Bible… while Biden sends still more military equipment to Netanyahu’s mass murder in Gaza, and has still less to Ukraine? You find that a proof of wisdom from the Democrat elite? As the former soviet foreign minister Litvinov wrote in his secret diary about the Stalin-Hitler treaty 1939: “If this is diplomacy, what is idiocy?”
“Renewables Growth Did Not Dent Fossil Fuel Dominance in 2022, Report Says, Reuters, June 26, 2023
Global energy demand rose 1{2add217ad2235d262e63a186eb2903fa1b3aade4b9d8db7a510444e5d82aac71} last year and record renewables growth did nothing to shift the dominance of fossil fuels, which still accounted for 82{2add217ad2235d262e63a186eb2903fa1b3aade4b9d8db7a510444e5d82aac71} of supply, the industry’s Statistical Review of World Energy report said on Monday.
Last year was marked by turmoil in the energy markets after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which helped to boost gas and coal prices to record levels in Europe and Asia.
The stubborn lead of oil, gas and coal products in covering most energy demand cemented itself in 2022 despite the largest ever increase in renewables capacity at a combined 266 gigawatts, with solar leading wind power growth, the report said.
“Despite further strong growth in wind and solar in the power sector, overall global energy-related greenhouse gas emissions increased again,” said the president of the UK-based global industry body Energy Institute, Juliet Davenport.
“We are still heading in the opposite direction to that required by the Paris Agreement.”
The annual report, a benchmark for the industry, was published for the first time by the Energy Institute together with consultancies KPMG and Kearny after they took it over from BP (BP.L), which had authored the report since the 1950s.”
In 1975 global fossil fuel consumption amounted to 75 pct. of the global total. Now it’s hovering above 82 pct.
There is no “green energy change”, “green new deal” etc. There is only a thinning propaganda of empty green symbolism being spread in order to hide the relentlessly rising fossil fuel consumption and the accelerating climatic destabilization. Do you really think this vague greenwashing of fossil business as extremely usual convinces anyone that the scientific warnings are being heard and taken seriously? By Biden? By any leading politicians?
What did Einstein say again about people doing the same mistakes again and again and every time still expecting a different outcome?
3) “A mere 57 oil, gas, coal and cement producers are directly linked to 80{2add217ad2235d262e63a186eb2903fa1b3aade4b9d8db7a510444e5d82aac71} of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions since the 2016 Paris climate agreement, a study has shown.
This powerful cohort of state-controlled corporations and shareholder-owned multinationals are the leading drivers of the climate crisis, according to the Carbon Majors Database, which is compiled by world-renowned researchers.
Although governments pledged in Paris to cut greenhouse gases, the analysis reveals that most mega-producers increased their output of fossil fuels and related emissions in the seven years after that climate agreement, compared with the seven years before.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/04/just-57-companies-linked-to-80-of-greenhouse-gas-emissions-since-2016
Why is this happening? Any suggestions? Is it – forgive my bluntness – connected with the american-global oiligarchy, the american constitution and the american way of life? Could it be that this is why Trump is on course to win again in november, because it’s impossible for american voters to chose anything but the same old shit, and not even in new wrapping? Why is Biden against James Hansen’s idea: carbon fee and dividend? Could it be because Biden and his lame duck “altenative” is being sponsored mainly by the same oiligarchs as Trump? Because no politician ever speaks the truth about the driving social and economic forces behind fossil fuel “economics”?
“Senior executives from the UAE’s national oil company are working with the Cop28 team as the country ramps up its PR campaign ahead of the major UN climate summit later this year, leaked internal records show.
Two PR professionals from the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) are identified as providing “additional support” to the team running the summit, according to a Cop28 communications strategy document obtained by the Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR) and the Guardian. It adds to growing evidence of blurred lines between the UAE’s Cop28 team and its fossil fuel industry (…)
“The meeting at the UN will “set the tone, inform the climate agenda and *shape the climate narrative* (my exclamation marks, KJ) in the lead up to Cop28”, the document states.” https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/22/uae-oil-company-executives-working-with-cop28-team-leak-reveals
Good morning my bare ass, as we say in Norway.
5) A newly released NOAA report noted that CO2 levels are: (1) 50{2add217ad2235d262e63a186eb2903fa1b3aade4b9d8db7a510444e5d82aac71} higher than pre-industrial (2) the highest in the modern atmospheric record (3) the highest in the paleoclimate records over the past 800,000 years.
You often read statements like this one from the NOAA about paleoclimatic CO2 levels. But this only what you get from the airbubbles in the deepest ice-cores from Antarctica. There are other paleoclimate records going much further back into the deep past.
Why does the NOAA, IPCC etc. never mention this?
In fact *present CO2 levels are probably higher than anytime in at least 23 million years*, according to this research:
https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article/48/9/888/586769/A-23-m-y-record-of-low-atmospheric-CO2
“Across the past 23 m.y., CO2 likely ranged between ∼230 ppmv and 350 ppmv (68{2add217ad2235d262e63a186eb2903fa1b3aade4b9d8db7a510444e5d82aac71} confidence interval: ∼170–540 ppm). CO2 was found to be highest during the early and middle Miocene and likely below present-day levels during the middle Pliocene (84th percentile: ∼400 ppmv). These data suggest present-day CO2 (412 ppmv) exceeds the highest levels that Earth experienced at least since the Miocene, further highlighting the present-day disruption of long-established CO2 trends within Earth’s atmosphere”, “A 23 m.y. record of low atmospheric CO2”, Cui et al. 2020.
This deserves much more attention than it gets.
Furthermore, *the present rise in CO2-levels is probably at least ten times faster than anytime before in the known geological record*. Could this be the reason for the climate modelling being unable to grasp the looming dangers? The calibration of the models is probably based on unrealistic assumptions, not taking into consideration that they are supposed to model something that has never happened before in the known geological history? That the optimistic bias of a smooth development is simply wrong? You don’t have to go further back in time than to the Younger Dryas to detect that even very slow gradual natural global warming can lead to sudden jolts in the climate system:
“The last two abrupt warmings at the onset of our present warm interglacial period, interrupted by the Younger Dryas cooling event, were investigated at high temporal resolution from the North Greenland Ice Core Project ice core. The deuterium excess, a proxy of Greenland precipitation moisture source, switched mode within 1 to 3 years over these transitions and initiated a more gradual change (over 50 years) of the Greenland air temperature, as recorded by stable water isotopes. The onsets of both abrupt Greenland warmings were slightly preceded by decreasing Greenland dust deposition, reflecting the wetting of Asian deserts. A northern shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone could be the trigger of these abrupt shifts of Northern Hemisphere atmospheric circulation, resulting in changes of 2 to 4 kelvin in Greenland moisture source temperature from one year to the next.” https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1157707
As Wally Broecker said: “The climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with sticks”.