by David Wojick, CFACT, ©2021
(Jun. 15, 2021) — A recent Dutch Court decision is getting international attention because it commands climate action. The case itself is like angels on a pinhead, so of little interest. Shell Oil proposed to cut CO2 emissions by 40% and the Court made it 45%, both targets being stupid.
The real concern is the precedent of Courts making climate policy, so this decision is worth looking at. Turns out the Court’s version of the science is amazingly bad.
The Court’s decision document includes a long science section titled “Climate change and its Consequences“. There are a series of fundamental errors, glaring omissions and questionable claims, each of which supports the alarmist decision. Some of the worst are first quoted then analyzed in turn below.
The Court says: “Mankind has been using energy, primarily produced by burning fossil fuels (coals, oil and gas), on a massive scale since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Carbon dioxide is released in this process. ….Some of the released CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere, where it lingers for hundreds of years, or even longer.”
Wrong! Roughly 25% of the atmospheric CO2 is replaced every year because of the vast natural “carbon flux”, as it is called. This replacement includes our emitted CO2. Thus almost all of every year’s emissions is gone in 5 to 6 years. The exact figure is the subject of a large ongoing scientific literature. Clearly the Court was not informed of this fundamental fact. On the contrary they have been seriously misled. The same is true for what follows.
“CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas which, together with other greenhouse gases, traps the heat emitted by the earth in the atmosphere. This is known as the greenhouse effect, which intensifies as more CO2 ends up in the atmosphere. This in turn increasingly warms the earth.”
Wrong again! Water vapor is by far the primary greenhouse gas. CO2 accounts for a relatively small fraction of the natural greenhouse effect. The exact amount is still controversial but it may be just a few percent. Water vapor and clouds are the dominant causes.
Nor do GHGs “trap heat”. All they do is slightly increase the time that some solar energy stays in the Earth system before leaving into space.
Note too that while the greenhouse effect is predicted to increase with increasing CO2 (all else being equal, which it never is), this increase in effect diminishes rapidly with increasing CO2 concentration. Recent research indicates that at today’s concentration each new molecule of CO2 adds only a few ten thousandths of the potency added when concentrations are very low. In short the ability of increasing CO2 to increase the greenhouse effect is almost gone. Thus the word “intensifies” is misleading at best.
“The climate system has a delayed response to the greenhouse gas emissions: the warming effect of greenhouse gases which are emitted today will only become apparent in thirty to forty years’ time. Other greenhouse gases are, inter alia, methane, nitrous oxide and fluorinated gases.”
The potential effect of a new greenhouse gas molecule begins the moment that molecule enters the atmosphere. Nor does it increase over time. I have no idea where this idea of a delayed response comes from, probably a conjectural computer model looking at large scale energy flows or some such. If so then this statement is at best misleading. Perhaps it is there to help explain the lack of significant recent warming.
Note also that the list of other greenhouse gases still does not include water vapor, by far the leading GHG. In fact all that is mentioned are those GHGs that we emit is significant quantities. As a result the huge role of nature is simply left out, a glaring omission indeed!
“There is a direct, linear link between man-made greenhouse gas emissions, in part caused by the burning of fossil fuels, and global warming.”
There may (or may not) be a link between our GHG emissions and some unspecified amount of global warming, but it is not direct and certainly not linear. Temperature change varies greatly from one year to the next, while the CO2 increase is much steadier.
What role the CO2 increase plays in these temperature changes is simply unknown, with a wide range of opinions. The range of published estimates of the impact of a doubling the CO2 concentration on global temperatures is huge. This impact is known as “CO2 sensitivity” and we have no idea what it is, as estimates range from less than 1 degree to more than 5 degrees. Clearly from this huge range we simply do not know how CO2 and global warming are connected.
This strange claim of a “direct, linear link” between our GHG emissions and global warming appears to be the Court’s summary of the science of warming, because they then switch to the issue of cutting our emissions. As outlined above, this strange claim is based on a number of fundamental errors, glaring omissions and a generally distorted view of the science of warming.
Things get even stranger as the Court slides into the fantasy issue of stopping the warming. They begin with this nonsensical claim:
“In climate science – the area of science that studies the climate and climate change – and in the international community there has been consensus for quite some time that the average temperature on earth should not increase by more than 2ºC relative to the average temperature in the pre-industrial era.”
There is nothing in climate science saying that the global temperature “should not increase” by any specific amount. That is a policy issue, not a scientific one. Climate science does not deal with “shoulds”.
Moreover, to the extent this policy question is discussed in the context of the science, there is certainly no consensus that 2 degrees is some sort of magic limit. In fact there is a large literature on the arbitrary nature of this 2 degree number. Its roundness makes it politically attractive and that is all. There is no science to it.
Read the rest here.
David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/ Available for confidential research and consulting.
I’m surprised that that Dutch Court didn’t issue a “Cease and Desist” order against Milankovitch Cycles, Sun Spots, Tectonic Plate shifts, Earthquakes and Volcanoes — the natural causes of cyclic global climate change responsible for Ice Ages (cold periods) and Interglacials (warm periods) occurring every 100,000 years or so beginning about 1,000,000 years ago. During those periods the Earth’s average global temperature has cooled or warmed 5 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Earth has been in an Interglacial (warm) period for about the past 20,000 years, the global climate constantly warming without any meaningful human-caused contribution until shortly after the beginning of the 20th Century — when proponents of anthropogenic (human caused) global warming claim the increased use of fossil fuels worldwide began effecting global warming.
However, back in the mid-1970’s many of today’s proponents of anthropogenic global warming were proponents of anthropogenic global cooling — to the extent of predicting the Earth would be covered in ice by the year 2000.
Pardon me for believing in mother nature because she has no skin in the game, and not believing proponents of anthropogenic global warming because they do.