The Lancet, once a respected medico-scientific journal and now just another me-too mouthpiece for theusual suspects, ran an editorial this week on climate change – on which subject it has neither expertise nor a missio canonica to pronounce. Here is a letter to the editor in response:
Sir, – Your notion of a “climate crisis” (editorial, December 2), though fashionable among the classe politique, is misplaced. That notion sprang from an elementary error of physics perpetrated in the 1980s by climate scientists who had borrowed feedback formulism from control theory, another branch of physics, without quite understanding it. Interdisciplinary compartmentalization delayed its identification until now.
After correcting the error, anthropogenic global warming will be only one-third of current midrange projections, well within natural variability and net-beneficial to life and health. CO2 fertilization (for CO2 is plant food) has assisted in steadily increasing crop yields – this year’s global harvest has set yet another record – and in improving drought resistance (Hao et al., 2014) and greening the planet.
Your suggestion that warmer worldwide weather has caused net loss of life, particularly among the world’s fast-declining population of poor people, is fashionable but misplaced. Cold is a bigger killer than warmth. Research conducted three years ago for the European Commission found that, for this reason, even if there were 5.4 C° global warming from 2020-2080, there would be 100,000 more Europeans than with no warming at all.
However, now that nearly all major banks – citing “global warming” as their pretext – refuse to lend to developing countries for coal-fired electricity (dates from which they decided to abandon the poor are below), a billion people lack the capacity to turn on a 60 W lightbulb for just four hours a day (the International Energy Agency’s scarcely generous definition of “access to electricity”).
According to the WHO, 4 million annually die of particulate pollution from smoke in cooking fires because they lack domestic electrical power and, for the same lack, 500,000 women die in childbirth. These are just two of the many causes of death from lack of access to electricity that kill tens of millions annually. The chief reason why so many cannot turn on a light is not global warming but misconceived policies intended to address what is in reality a non-problem.
More than 90% of all new greenhouse-gas emissions (BP Annual Review of Energy, 2019) are in nations exempt from the Paris agreement, which, after correction of the error of physics, is in any event supererogatory.
You have said China must do more, but China – though it has its own space programme and continues to occupy Tibet by military force – is exempt from Paris on the ground that it is a “developing country”. It is not required to forswear its sins of emission.
Your advocacy of “low-carbon diets” is fashionable but misplaced. Like it or not, we have evolved over 2 million years to eat meat, which can provide all necessary energy, nutrients and vitamins. Yet ill-informed official guidelines on both sides of the Atlantic recommend low-fat, high-carbohydrate diets. Those recommendations have demonstrably been the chief cause of the surge in obesity and diabetes in both the UK and the USA. They were abandoned by court order a decade ago in Sweden at the instance of a brave doctor whom the medical authorities had attempted to prosecute because she cured all her diabetes patients by ignoring the guidelines and recommending a high-fat, low-carb diet.
Your advocacy of “renewable” energy is fashionable but misplaced. Using 14th-century technology to address a 21st-century non-problem would be silly enough in itself. What is worse, however, is that “renewables” have not only quadrupled the price of electricity but have also added to CO2 emissions. The chief reason for this apparent paradox is that the more windmills and solar panels are connected to the grid the more grossly-inefficient, CO2-emitting spinning reserve must be maintained in the often vain hope of preventing blackouts when the wind stops or the night falls.
Besides, the trillions that have been squandered on fashionable but misguided attempts to abate greenhouse-gas emissions have made no difference at all. The radiative forcing from anthropogenic greenhouse gases has increased in a fashion very close to a straight line (the dotted line above) for 40 years.
With respect, The Lancet should study more science and economics, however unfashionable, and peddle less totalitarian politics, however fashionable and profitable – and deadly.
Yours faithfully,
1 comment:
Summed up perfectly and with just enough facts and graphs not to overwhelm the collective intelligence of the Lancet's brains trust, I assume.
Public organisations and big corporates are racing each other to develop their own response to the "climate emergency", which has nothing to do with practically averting climate change and is really all about making them acceptable to the political elite who currently hold sway and, through their fanatical social warriors, can make life very difficult for them.
This is all about preserving positions, careers, incomes and, most of all, profits. It's the equivalent of compulsory church attendance back in Puritan times, whether you believed or not. The punishment for non-attendance was public shaming and humiliation and exclusion from society - sound familiar? It's called "being cancelled" in our progressive times and amounts to the same thing.
How depressing that we have regressed 400 years in a matter of a few decades.
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