Massive Ozone Hole Over Antarctica Raises Doubts About Recovery Claims
In this newsletter:
1) Massive Ozone Hole Over Antarctica Raises Doubts About Recovery Claims
GWPF Observatory, 11 October 2020
Sky News, 11 October 2020
3) Ron Clutz: Hurricane Season Overview
Science Matters, 11 October 2020
4) Boris Johnson’s Pledge Of Wind Power For Every Home ‘Could Cost Consumers £27 Billion Each Year’
The Sunday Telegraph, 11 October 2020
Forbes, 10 October 2020
6) EU Leaders Set For Fight Over Climate Goal As Poland Seeks More Cash
Bloomberg, 10 October 2020
7) Richard Horton: Science Crisis And The Breakdown Of Trust
The Lancet, 3 October
The New Yorker, October 2020
9) Joel Kotkin: Will the Cultural Revolution Be Canceled?
City Journal, 11 October 2020
10) Fritz Vahrenholt & Sebastian Lüning: Unwanted Truths
Climategate, October 2020
Full details:
1) Massive Ozone Hole Over Antarctica Raises Doubts About Recovery Claims
GWPF Observatory, 11 October 2020
Recent claims that the hole in the ozone layer is recovering have received worldwide media attention. But the continuing decline of ozone concentrations in the stratosphere and the return of a huge ozone hole over Antarctica raises doubt about claims that it is ‘healing.’
In 1989, the so-called Montreal Protocol introduced a ban on ozone-depleting chlorinated and brominated hydrocarbons such as CFCs. These substances have been blamed for the ozone hole which scientists discovered in the second part of the 20th century.
In the years following the ban the loss of stratospheric ozone seemed to have stopped and in recent years the ozone hole was declared to be shrinking and ‘healing.’
In fact, scientists have been expecting that the global ozone layer would completely recover within decades.
However, researchers recently discovered that despite the ban on CFCs, the concentration of ozone in the lower part of the stratosphere has continued to decline at latitudes between 60 degree South and 60 degree North.
GWPF TV: Is the Ozone Hole Really Mending?
The return of a huge ozone hole over Antarctica is one of the largest and deepest this century.
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2020 Antarctic ozone hole is large and deep – WMO
The ozone layer is a part of the Earth’s atmosphere and acts as a shield, absorbing harmful ultraviolet radiation from the sun.
However, chemicals and substances created by humans have led to thinning in the layer, known as ozone holes.
Scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) have said the return of a large hole, following an “unusually small and short-lived” one in 2019, shows the need to enforce the global Montreal Protocol.
Full post
Sky News, 11 October 2020
Biologist Jennifer Marohasy says natural disasters such as Australia’s recent bushfires are not caused by land getting hotter or drier it’s because “we’ve changed how we manage the landscape”.
Ms Marohasy is the editor of ‘Climate Change: The Facts 2020’ which details the facts around climate change by dissecting the major myths propagated by climate alarmists.
The book features works from leading scientists including atmospheric physicists and chemists who discuss the technical side of climate change.
She told Sky News, the scientists and experts in the book “can’t see catastrophes, they see cycles”.
“They can’t see anything unusual about the current rate or magnitude of climate change.”
Sky News interview here
3) Hurricane Season Overview
Run Clutz, Science Matters, 11 October 2020
Your weather channel is airing charts like this to show how active is this year’s storm season impacting the Caribbean and US east coast. So far, there have been many more named storms, two more hurricanes than average, and one less major hurricane at this point in the season. Dr. Ryan Maue provides (here) a global context for understanding storm activity this year, updated October 11, 2020.
Meanwhile the Northern Hemisphere is running 69% of average and well behind last year. This is due to North Pacific having a quiet season offsetting North Atlantic activity. See the graph below from RealClimateScience
The historical summary of Tropical Hurricane ACE as of September 30, 2020:
Figure: Last 50-years+ of Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy: 24 month running sums. Note that the year indicated represents the value of ACE through the previous 24-months for the Northern Hemisphere (bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global (top line/blue boxes). The area in between represents the Southern Hemisphere total ACE.
4) Boris Johnson’s Pledge Of Wind Power For Every Home ‘Could Cost Consumers £27 Billion Each Year’
The Sunday Telegraph, 11 October 2020
Household electricity bills could double under Boris Johnson’s plans to power every home using offshore wind farms by 2030, experts have warned.
Professor Gordon Hughes, who has completed one of the largest ever studies on the economics of wind power, found that, contrary to promises from politicians and the industry, the cost is actually rising.
It is feared the huge, foreign-owned companies that build wind farms will seek huge taxpayer or consumer bail-outs when the true “financial consequences” become clear.
Mr Johnson’s pledge to quadruple offshore wind capacity to 40GW within the decade, made at the Conservative Party’s virtual conference last week, could result in a doubling of consumer bills.
Prof Hughes told The Telegraph: “Any ambitious target is going to be expensive, because the system cannot deliver very large increases in capacity in a short period of time. It is like building the Olympics or High Speed rail – the costs just go out of control.
“Nobody knows exactly how much it will add to bills, because we are yet to see the detail of how it will be paid for, but I find it very unlikely that it would mean less than a doubling in household bills.”
He said the promise had to be seen alongside other pledges, such as the electrification of vehicles and heating, which could see household demand rise by 50 to 100 percent.
His analysis has been rejected by the Government and the renewables industry, which insists the UK’s power system needs to be updated and wind is the cheapest way to do so.
Mr Johnson may be forced to push on with his plan, regardless of cost, in order to meet the targets set under the Paris agreement to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, set to be enshrined in the Brexit deal.
Dr John Constable, the director of Renewable Energy Foundation, a UK charity that will shortly publish Prof Hughes’ work, said: “The Prime Minister urgently needs an energy cost minimisation strategy to make a success of Brexit and to create an authentic economic recovery post-Covid.
“In his haste, he has seized the cost-maximising renewables industry by mistake. If Mr Johnson persists in this error, his successors, Labour or Conservative, will be clearing up the mess for decades.”
Prof Hughes, professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh, advised the World Bank on energy and environmental policy and has spent the last 18 months looking at the actual capital and operating costs for a large majority of the onshore and offshore wind farms built in the UK since 2002.
He found that, despite a fall in the wholesale price and almost universal claims that the cost is falling and will continue to do so, both the capital and operating costs have “increased significantly” in the last two decades.
For offshore wind farms, the average capital costs per MW of capacity have doubled since 2008, the analysis of accounts found, whilst the typical operating costs per MW have quadrupled between the same dates. As a result of increasing costs and lower yields as the turbines age, the revenues will be less than the operating costs.
The report compared the current offshore projects being built in north-western Europe to “speculative property development” which would require the wholesale price of power to increase by up to four times to enable lenders and investors to be repaid.
It warned: “This leads to the prospect of what is not so much a car crash as a motorway pile-up in the fog of ignorance. The looming crisis will require that those who finance wind power and its related ecosystem of companies are bailed out by either taxpayers or electricity consumers.”
Prof Hughes estimated that Mr Johnson’s pledge will come with a construction price tag of around £150 billion, including improving the network capacity of the grid, which will have to be paid for over the roughly 15-year lifespan of the project.
In addition, the operating costs and extra system and grid costs are estimated at up to £17 billion, costing taxpayers £27 billion a year in total.
Full story
Forbes, 10 October 2020
There is nothing theoretical about the unstoppable force of climate alarmism meeting the immoveable object of people’s attachment to their accustomed material standards of living.
Eleven million jobs at risk from EU Green Deal, trade unions warn
Suicide is viewed as a crime in many countries. In a court of law, it is a serious charge and the evidence needs to be conclusive for such an accusation to stand (e.g., did you actually see him attempt to jump off the bridge?). But when societies (or at least their leaders) attempt it, one can say that it safely falls under the rubric of the sovereign right to misrule. In the hallowed tradition of Western liberal democracy, so long as its political leaders are elected in free and fair elections, misrule leading to societal death by suicide is merely an unfortunate outcome of either gross negligence or culpable intention led by, say, a death-cult ideology. Nevertheless, let us proceed with the case for the prosecution.
The Circumstantial Evidence Of Societal Suicide
The first piece of evidence is an astonishing article published last week in the Boston Review by a professor of anthropology in Rutgers University . The good professor opined that Zimbabwe and Puerto Rico “provide models for what we might call ‘pause-full’ electricity”.
To be fair, the professor also noted that the Zimbabweans and Puerto Ricans did not choose to accept electricity rationing but were imposed upon by the gross negligence and corruption of their governments. The professor cannot be lightly dismissed, and the Boston Review shares its domicile with MIT and Harvard University, the temples of wisdom in modern Western civilization. And the Review has its share of kudos, at least for those of a particular persuasion: “When it comes to publishing fresh and generative ideas, Boston Review has no peer” says Robin D. G. Kelley, Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles and Naomi Klein, activist and New York Times best-selling author, opines that “Boston Review is so good right now.”
Let us move on to our second piece of evidence, this time from the other side of the “climate emergency” aisle. Professor Fritz Vahrenholt is a giant among environmental circles in Germany. (The country is well known as the world’s leading champion for all things environmental and for pushing Europe to “net zero emissions by 2050”.) Prof. Vahrenholt holds a doctorate in chemistry and started his professional career at the Federal Environmental Agency in Berlin (responsible for the chemical industry) before joining the Hessian Ministry of the Environment. From 1984 until 1990 he served as state secretary for environment, from 1991 till 1997 as minister for energy and environment in the state of Hamburg.
One day before the publication of the Boston Review article on October 5th, Prof Vahrenholt stated baldly in a German TV interview that climate science was “politicized”, “exaggerated”, and filled with “fantasy” and “fairy tales”. He pronounced that “The [Paris] Accord is already dead. Putin says it’s nonsense. […] The Americans are out. The Chinese don’t have to do anything. It’s all concentrated on a handful of European countries. The European Commission in massively on it. And I predict that they will reach the targets only if they destroy the European industries.”
He lambasted Germany as a country “in denial when it comes to the broader global debate taking place on climate science”. He went on to characterize Europe’s recent push for even stricter emissions reduction targets to madness akin to Soviet central planning that is doomed to fail spectacularly.
Full post
Bloomberg, 10 October 2020
The European Union’s shift to a stricter climate goal for the next decade requires more financial support for regions dependent on fossil fuels, Poland said.
Poland’s stance underscores the challenge in advancing talks during an economic crisis on a green overhaul that affects every area from transport to farming. EU leaders are set to discuss next week a deepening of the 2030 emissions-reduction target to at least 55% from 1990 levels. The current goal is a cut of 40%.
For coal-dependent Poland, it’s not only the size of EU financing for the green shift that’s inadequate. It also wants more data on how the stricter target will affect the economies of individual member states, a demand that risks delaying a final decision currently foreseen in December after a debate this month. EU leaders vote by unanimity.
“The October summit may be very important in terms of principles even though I don’t expect it to dot the I’s and cross the T’s,” Poland’s Climate Minister Michal Kurtyka said by phone on Friday. “Let’s ensure we reduce question marks to the minimum so that we understand where we’re headed.”
Under the tougher climate target for 2030, European automakers would need to adopt stricter pollution standards, with an additional 350 billion euros ($414 billion) per year required for investment in production and infrastructure. Farming will need to become greener and companies in the EU’s carbon market would have to cut emissions faster.
To become binding, a revised goal needs agreement between EU governments and the European Parliament after getting political endorsement from the bloc’s leaders. While a majority of member states backs the 55% target proposed by the Commission, some countries are in favor of an even deeper goal. The EU Parliament wants it to be increased to 60%.
Poland argues that to increase its ambition, Europe must ensure a comprehensive green transition financing framework. It should be funded by revenue from the bloc’s Emissions Trading System, its economic recovery program, the next EU budget and a levy on imports of emissions-intensive products. The Just Transition Fund, which will support the clean shift in the most affected regions, should be boosted from the currently planned 17.5 billion euros, Kurtyka said.
Poland is the only EU country that declined to commit to reaching climate neutrality by 2050 at a national level. At a summit last December, it backed an EU-wide goal to reach net-zero emissions by the middle of the century, saying it needed more time for the transformation. Whether the government in Warsaw changes its stance remains an open question.
Full story
7) Richard Horton: Science Crisis And The Breakdown Of Trust
The Lancet, 3 October
The COVID-19 syndemic is entering its most dangerous phase. There is a mounting breakdown of trust. Not only between politicians and the public. But also among politicians and publics with science and scientists.
This breach of faith with science is far more threatening. For the public is slowly turning against those who have sought to guide the political response to COVID-19.
As countries face a resurgence of coronavirus transmission, scientific advisers are recommending further restrictions to our liberties. There is now a palpable public reaction against these mandates. Whereas in March people were ready to stay at home to protect their health and health systems, the growing economic emergency that has followed national lockdowns is leading politicians to resist similar measures being applied once again. And it is scientists who are targets for public opprobrium.
“Britain is in the grip of mad science”, wrote one commentator last week. A UK Government minister was quoted as saying that “[Boris] Johnson has been totally captured by [Chris] Whitty and [Patrick] Vallance”. “Boris is now a prisoner of the scientists”, ran a newspaper headline. Robert Dingwall, a professor of sociology, wrote “we have found ourselves in the hands of a scientific and medical elite with limited understanding of humanity and its needs”.
The reasons for this crisis in the science of COVID-19 are mostly self-inflicted. An early consensus about how to manage the spread of the virus has disintegrated. We see scientists splintering into factions. In the UK, the breach began with the formation of an independent Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE), chaired by a former Chief Scientific Adviser to the government.
Independent SAGE holds weekly press briefings and produces reports that frequently differ from advice given by the official SAGE. The rupture continued with increasingly personalised attacks. Oxford University's Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson wrote that “It is unfortunate that Mr Johnson is surrounded by mediocre scientific advisers”.
Heneghan, Jefferson, and others went on to publish an open letter to the Prime Minister arguing that his existing policies, based on the advice of the current Chief Medical Officer (Chris Whitty) and Chief Scientific Adviser (Patrick Vallance), were causing “significant harm across all age groups”. A counter-letter expressed strong support for the policy “to suppress the virus across the entire population”. The motives of government scientists are now being questioned in ways that are sure to erode public trust still further. Dingwall has suggested self-interest—“Laboratory scientists...need to justify their research funding”.
Another commentator has written that “the priority for the Government's army of boffins is to safeguard themselves”. And it seems that some scientists advising the government have substantial financial interests in diagnostics and pharmaceutical companies working on COVID-19. The Mail on Sunday's headline last week was “Government test tsar has £770k shares in firm that sold us £13m of ‘pointless’ kits”.
What are politicians and publics to do when they see scientists disagree? They will likely be perplexed that the evidence causing such catastrophic economic consequences seems so uncertain. That perplexity may quickly turn into mistrust when they hear scientists vigorously criticising one another or see scientific advisers with lucrative financial connections to industries likely to profit from the pandemic. For most scientific disagreements, time usually provides an answer as more evidence is accrued. But time is exactly what we don't have. What is the solution?
First, it is not constructive for scientists engaging in debate to vilify colleagues with whom they disagree. The scientists advising government are certainly not “mediocre”. Second, scientists with financial relationships to industries that are part of the COVID-19 response should consider either divesting those interests or removing themselves from their roles as advisers. And finally, when disputes about evidence do arise, scientists should do more to explain why those disagreements exist.
Tzvetan Todorov, in his book In Defence of the Enlightenment (2006), was surely right that “debate rather than consensus” characterises our modern era. We should not be afraid of disagreement. “Humanity”, he wrote, “is condemned to seek truth rather than possess it”. But Todorov also warned that “Too much criticism kills criticism.” And worse, “Indiscriminate scepticism and systematic mockery have only an appearance of wisdom.”
The New Yorker, October 2020
Michael Strevens argues that “shallow explanation” can be singularly powerful.
[...] In “The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science” (Liveright), Michael Strevens, a philosopher at New York University, aims to identify that special something. Strevens is a philosopher of science—a scholar charged with analyzing how scientific knowledge is generated. Philosophers of science tend to irritate practicing scientists, to whom science already makes complete sense. It doesn’t make sense to Strevens.
“Science is an alien thought form,” he writes; that’s why so many civilizations rose and fell before it was invented. In his view, we downplay its weirdness, perhaps because its success is so fundamental to our continued existence. He promises to serve as “the P. T. Barnum of the laboratory, unveiling the monstrosity that lies at the heart of modern science.”
In school, one learns about “the scientific method”—usually a straightforward set of steps, along the lines of “ask a question, propose a hypothesis, perform an experiment, analyze the results.” That method works in the classroom, where students are basically told what questions to pursue. But real scientists must come up with their own questions, finding new routes through a much vaster landscape.
Since science began, there has been disagreement about how those routes are charted. Two twentieth-century philosophers of science, Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn, are widely held to have offered the best accounts of this process. Popper maintained that scientists proceed by “falsifying” scientific claims—by trying to prove theories wrong. Kuhn, on the other hand, believed that scientists work to prove theories right, exploring and extending them until further progress becomes impossible. These two accounts rest on divergent visions of the scientific temperament. For Popper, Strevens writes, “scientific inquiry is essentially a process of disproof, and scientists are the disprovers, the debunkers, the destroyers.”
Kuhn’s scientists, by contrast, are faddish true believers who promulgate received wisdom until they are forced to attempt a “paradigm shift”—a painful rethinking of their basic assumptions.
Working scientists tend to prefer Popper to Kuhn. But Strevens thinks that both theorists failed to capture what makes science historically distinctive and singularly effective.
Full essay
9) Joel Kotkin: Will the Cultural Revolution Be Canceled?
City Journal, 11 October 2020
The challenge to our civilization is real, but most Americans aren’t sympathetic to social radicalism.
It’s an article of faith among many conservatives, and some liberals, that we’re being swept by a Maoist cultural revolution destined to transform American society into a woke collective. Yet before surrendering basics like equality of opportunity, social order, and free speech to leftist authoritarians, we should consider whether they’re the ones who will wind up getting canceled.
Most Americans don’t favor defunding police or instituting race quotas; they are wary of the costs connected with the Green New Deal and of allowing Washington to control local zoning. Many are already voting with their feet, fleeing places that promote these ideas and seeking out areas aligned with more recognizable American values.
Over the past 20 years, virtually all the most progressive large states—New York, New Jersey, Illinois, and California—have suffered massive outmigration, while red or purplish states like Florida, Texas, the Carolinas, or Arizona welcome more and more Americans to resettle there. On the metropolitan level, even before Covid-19 accelerated the trend, a steady, largely unacknowledged, movement from the deep-blue core to the less progressive suburbs or exurbs has been underway.
Political correctness—the secular religion of elite liberal society—turns out to be enormously unpopular, something President Trump has exploited politically. Some 80 percent of Americans, notes one recent survey, including most millennials and minorities, see political correctness as “a problem,” not a solution for the future.
Progressive social activists, a survey by the liberal research organization more in Common found, account for barely 8 percent of the adult population, less than a third of the number who identify as traditional conservatives.
The fact that most Americans—Democrat and Republican—fall between these two categories suggests that social attitudes may be far less polarized, and less susceptible to political correctness, than has been widely assumed. As seen in the reaction to the George Floyd case, most Americans generally back the police but also embrace the notion of police reform; they are increasingly hostile, however, to the wave of violence that has accompanied some of the protests. Rather than support growing attempts to limit free speech, almost four in five Americans, according to Pew, support protecting it. These attitudes extend well beyond the base of Trumpian conservatives to include most Americans, regardless of ethnic background.
The media epitomize the gap between the public and the nation’s dominant institutions. Subjectivity, notes a recent Rand study, has replaced the world of shared facts with approaches that lead to “truth decay.” Reporters once believed that their mission was to inform the public, but now many journalism schools, including Columbia, embrace progressive groupthink, openly advancing a leftist social-justice agenda in which reporters are advocates. Even Teen Vogue has taken a neo-Marxist tack. “Moral clarity” replaces objectivity. Free speech is somehow linked to white privilege.
These partisan attitudes have dramatically eroded trust in media, according to a new Knight Foundation study. Public trust in most large media has declined steadily over the past four years, with the biggest drops among Republicans; the New York Times, the publisher of the 1619 Project takedown of American history, is trusted by less than half of the public, compared with almost 60 percent in 2016. Gallup reports that, since the pandemic, the news media has suffered the lowest ratings of any major institution, performing even worse than Congress or President Trump.
Certainly, the shift leftward has not helped the progressive-dominated newspaper business. Between 2001 and 2017, the publishing industry (books, newspapers, magazines) lost 290,000 jobs, a decline of 40 percent. Endless partisan sniping and countless crises have boosted CNN, but the network lags well behind right-wing Fox. NPR has seen its ratings drop as many listeners gravitate to less predictable, livelier voices like Joe Rogan.
The new media also suffer from a credibility crisis. Controllers like those at Facebook, Google, Apple, and Twitter are increasingly determined to curate “quality content” on their sites, or even eliminate views they find objectionable, which tend to be conservative, according to employees.
The idea that managers of huge social-media platforms aim to control content is more than conservative paranoia. Over 70 percent of Americans, according to a recent Pew study, believe that such platforms—as demonstrated in the case of Reddit, Facebook, and Google—“censor political views.” In California, the center of Big Tech, people express more trust in the marijuana industry than they do in social media, according to a 2019 survey.
Full essay
10) Fritz Vahrenholt & Sebastian Lüning: Unwanted Truth
Climategate, October 2020
It is always astonishing that people seem to forget that CO2 is the building material of life and that despite all possible negative effects, food yields, such as wheat and rice, have increased by about 15% due to increased levels of CO2.
Who can tell the students of ' Fridays for Future ' that without the increase in CO2, we would certainly have had too little food to feed the world? Just 15% less rice, wheat and soy would be unbearable for the world's population in the long run...
There is no doubt that in the course of this century the global community will have to respond and reduce CO2 emissions. However, the primitive climate models should not be used as a basis for this. In these models, a 50% higher temperature rise is calculated compared to reality. That means that we have twice as much time. Not in 2050, but by 2100 we will have to say goodbye to most fossil fuels.
In any case, low-carbon technologies must be developed. Germany plays a bad role in this. Everything that could satisfy the global hunger for renewable energy, besides wind and solar energy, is not taking place. Every year the Greens submit a motion in the Committee on Budgets to end funding for nuclear fusion research, research into inherently safe nuclear power plants in Germany is banned, power plants with Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) are also banned.
After the destruction of the German auto industry, the goal is to replace CO2 in industry, steel mills, cement mills and refineries as well...
Electricity demand in Germany would more than triple. And this must be met through the insane plan to meet our energy and hydrocarbon needs solely through the use of nature-destroying wind power plants and inefficient solar roofs in Germany. It would therefore be extremely foolish to go down this path and rule out other options a priori.
If the climate response to CO2 at a climate sensitivity (the warming when the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere doubles) is about 1.5°C , then by 2100 the warming will certainly not exceed a warming of 2°C. We then have until 2100 to reach pre-industrial emissions levels. In any case, it makes no difference whether Germany and Europe reach net zero in 2050 or 2100. The decisive factor is: what is the world doing and especially what is China doing?
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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