King Canute and the climate emergency

This topic is topmost in peoples' minds at the moment, because it is summer in the northern hemisphere and the world is quite hot in places.?Surprisingly, the southern Hemisphere is quite cold and wet at the exact same time.

This is not a valid reason to say (about the current weather patterns) that "its very basic physics - humans are 100% to blame for the global trend in high temperatures".? This piece to camera on the BBC news channel was uttered by a Doctor working for Imperial College as a climate scientist.? I have trouble with this statement, becuase the 100% number is a dangerous one from a statistical point of view.?It is in effect saying 'I looked at all the evidence and I couldn't find any other causes at all for the observed changes'.?For me at least, this kind of statement falls into the same untrustworthy category of people that say that they are 110% sure of something - that is very sure indeed and nothing will convince them otherwise. This is not a scientific, evidence-led approach is it?

?The doctor of climate change has cheerfully ignored the effects that (predictable) elliptic solar and lunar orbits, volcanic and geologic activity, solar flare cycles, meteor and asteroid impacts and regular wild fires have on our climate, as well as historic precedents extending back before the evolution of modern (fire-starting) humans.

High temperatures in Death Valley, Saharan Africa and southern Europe are no more surprising than finding winter snow and ice at the poles.?Heavy rain in north America, Bangladesh, China, Korea and Somerset is not about climate - it is about weather.? Northern hemisphere forecasters do not currently look at the current level of CO2 to help in their forecasts for next week - they look at satellite data and the current position of the Jet Stream.?You don't need too much in the way of basic physics to understand this:?

• Jet stream south of the British Isles - causes wet, cold and windy weather because air mass is drawn down from northern latitudes
• Jet stream north of the British Isles - warm, humid, calm (often sandy) weather because air mass is drawn up from north Africa.
• Jet stream over the British Isles - unsettled and usually stormy weather as the warm and cold air masses slug it out over our heads.?We could be too hot, too cold or very wet depending on the eventual victor.

?I am over simplifying this of course, but the point is that anyone with a modicum of common sense can generally understand what is happening and not draw alarmist conclusions about a few puddles (or brown grass) in their back garden.

?So what is really happening??I don't know - I am not a doctor of climate change after all, but I won't be jumping to conclusions without solid evidence of a causal link between me starting my petrol-fuelled car and excess rainfall in Ulan Bator.?The reality for professors and ordinary humans alike is that it is impossible to establish this link, because there are too many statistical confounders that alter, mask or amplify the effects we are studying.

The nearly scientific bit

For example, we all live on a smallish rock in a binary lunar system with a largish moon hurtling around a fairly stable star at an average speed of?67,000mph!?This an average, because the Earth accelerates and decelerates depending on which quadrant of the elliptical orbit it is travelling on.?The planet is not homogenous in that there is currently a lot more ocean in the southern hemisphere than the northern; this is important because land tends to absorb a little more heat and is quicker to warm up or cool down than sea water (which retains heat for longer in comparison).?Throwing in the slightly variable tilt in the Earth's axis and magnetic poles and the cyclical changes of our orbit (caused by the gravitational effects of the major planets) and it should be no surprise that our climate and weather changes over time.?That definitely is basic physics.

New weather patterns or just old weather repurposed?

For comparison with today's anomalies in weather, we need to ask how radical have these changes been in our recent past??The systemic timing of a northern hemisphere winter coinciding with the furthest point in our elliptical orbit has evidently caused recurring ice ages (and warm periods in between) around the average temperatures that we evolved and adapted for.?Creatures recognisable as modern humans walked the Earth well before the last ice age.?Being (very nearly) genetically identical to us and even without the educational opportunities and access to the internet, they must have thought and reacted the same way as we do to uncontrollable weather events. They would probably have blamed themselves because they promoted the wrong witch-doctor, worshipped at the wrong henge or danced anti-clockwise around the wicker-man.?I assume that they had to cook and eat the witch-doctor when the ice-sheet reached Essex (as it did just 5,500 years before the Romans) as food would have been scarce at that point.

?The blame game (with some statistics found by Google or from Wikipedia)

It is human nature to blame someone or something for things that happen beyond their sphere of control - it is not in our nature as masters of the known universe to sit back and say 'there is nothing we can do to change this'. Can we blame ourselves for the current weather??Well certainly not 100% as 'splained by Doctor Imperial.? According to the U.S. Geological Survey, estimates of the global CO2 emissions for all land and submarine volcanos lie in a range from 13 to 44 trillion tons per year.?The US government estimates that human-driven emissions were 6.34 Trillion tons of CO? and equivalents in 2021.?You don't need to be a doctor or professor to see that 6.34 trillion is not 100% of 13-44 trillion.?Of course, this is not just about absolutes - many physical and chemical attributes of the planet are self-balancing, but could be subject to a tipping point.?The odd trillion of additional CO2 could tip us over into the sixth circle of hell, whilst a trillion less could turn the Thames into a glacier, as it was in Shakespeare's time.?Market gardeners know that feeding additional CO2 into a greenhouse boosts growth of a well-lit, well-watered crop - atmospheric carbon can be the limiting factor in plant growth.?This is a great example of self-balancing in nature - given enough of the other elements required for photo-synthesis and nutrition, additional atmospheric carbon is partly absorbed (locked away) in the plant, albeit temporarily, thereby redressing the balance.?The problem is that we don't have a clue where those tipping points are.?I am fairly sure that the lower tipping point for ice-ages is fairly close to the current norm, given that the Artic and Antarctic are both still covered in ice and glaciers are still retreating - the million dollar question is, would they still be retreating if man had not discovered fire??Given that the Earth has demonstrably not suffered a mass-extinction forest fire event for 66 million years, it is likely (but impossible to prove) that the tipping point for over cooking ourselves is much higher than we believe.

Why take a chance?

Because any money we waste chasing shadows could be better spent elsewhere. Climate change journalists (let's remember that they are entertainers - not scientists) often repeat the advice that this is not a risk worth taking, for our grandchildren's sake.?But, this is not a valid scientific argument - it is pure superstition.?The Druids and Egyptians may have erected henges and astronomically-aligned pyramids to appease long-forgotten weather gods, who they believed?controlled the coming of the seasons and the rising and the setting of the sun. We can be 100% sure that these nationally-funded projects had no discernible impact on the weather.?But they did have an observable economic cost - how many children / slaves / old people starved to death to help finance these massively expensive constructions?

Cost/benefit analysis

We face the same dilemma now.?Do we try to achieve net zero and bear the unimaginable costs for replacement technologies, infrastructure and above all the opportunity cost of so doing??Could we spend these trillions of dollars, pounds and Euros on something more beneficial to mankind??Building better flood defences and water-conservation schemes is a good bet.?The world has always had too much fresh water and food in one place and not enough in another, but I am not sure that any amount of money will fix that.?Preventing the uncontrolled discharge of long-life plastics into the environment is a much safer place for our money - we know for sure that a plastic bottle washed ashore in Alaska can only have been man made.?100% sure in fact.?

Bad science

This certainty is not evident in the case of money spent on the zero carbon initiative.?This is literally a bottomless pit and there is solid evidence that spending money on net zero coincides with an increase in atmospheric CO2?Spending this money could be having the opposite effect to one intended - we have spent a mountain of money 'decarbonising' over the last 30 years and measurements of atmospheric CO2 over the same period haven't registered the slightest reduction in rate of change as a result - if anything, the correlation is negative (the more money we spend, the greater the level of measurable CO2)!?Of course I am talking rubbish here, because there is no provable causal link between an increase in money spent on decarbonisation and the increase of the level of CO2?in the same time frame.?But the same rule applies to the current unusual weather - there is no provable causal link between these events.?Even if the direct causal evidence existed, we could never attribute so much rainfall or so many degrees of temperature to the coal-fired power stations in China or dairy cows farting in Devon - because there are too many inputs and outputs in the CO2/climate model to even begin to build a reliable model.?

Computer modelling, AI and other urban myths

All of the current and future climate models are man-made and therefore influenced by various prejudices of the designers and developers.? You can't say 'it must be right because we put the numbers into a programme and the result was Armageddon', because a human wrote that programme in the first place.?I don't trust?economic, climatic or health modelling any more than I trust online gaming sites.?All it takes is to substitute a 6 for a 7 in one of the main parameters and we will be frying tonight, dying tomorrow or adding a million to this month's gross profit.?That is not science - that is 'machine says "no"'?science.

What else can we waste our money on?

What are the alternatives for the do-good dollar??As a lifelong asthmatic, I love the idea of electric vehicles.?No-one standing on London's Kew Bridge during the rush hour will doubt that the diesel engine is not clean or good for children's health - we do need to improve air quality in our cities. Thanks to a mis-guided chancellor who believed that the reduced carbon emissions from diesel engines would save the planet, I can no longer take a walk in London because of the irritating particulates and nitrogen dioxide exhaled by 'clean' diesel engines.?Thanks Gordon.?This is a great example of the knee-jerk response that we should be so careful of right now.?Gordon didn't question his 'experts' closely enough or ask about the unintended consequences.?Diesel only appears to be more efficient than petrol because it has more mass - a litre of petrol weighs less than a litre of diesel fuel, so yields fewer miles per gallon.?

?Beware the unintended consequences

When Gordon tried to raise more company car tax by imposing excessive benefits in kind taxes based on CO2 output, we don't know if he was more interested in the revenue or helping the environment.?I do know that the law of unintended consequences kicked in though.?Almost half of drivers had a newish company cars at the time, which percentage has dwindled to almost nothing.?These newish cars would naturally have been the cleanest and most efficient on the road, due to the inexorable technological progress made by the automotive industry.?Like many others, I objected to paying for the car twice in its 4-year lifetime (once in taxes and again in salary sacrifice) and just bought my own.?Which I kept for 10 years because it was a Honda.

In that time Honda and others introduced cleaner and cleaner engines and cars, which would have drastically reduced the overall tonnage of CO2?had the company car drivers used them, which they didn't because Gordon (other chancellors are available) didn't think more than 10 minutes into the future.?So the provable unintended consequence of a tax change intended to reduce CO2 emissions was to increase CO2 emissions - and ramp up sales of diesels (which we keep longer and run into the ground because they are more expensive to buy).

?Do the maths - pay the tax

Here is the rub - would a universal switch to EV's by 2030 help anybody??Currently, we don't have a plant to build the batteries in the UK (the last one went bust before ground was broken!) so jobs will be exported and we will have to ship in the batteries from coal-fired factories in the far east on diesel-driven container ships.? There are plans to build a plant at Bridgwater requiring government grants so large that the governemnt won't tell us how much they are paying - so you can bet it is an obsecene amount of our money. In any case, we can't yet generate the electricity to replace 20 million internal combustion engines (we would need about 90 new Hinkley Point reactors to do that) and we can't distribute that amount of electricity anyway - the whole national grid would have to be beefed up by about 500%.? At the moment, there are news reports that new wind farms coming on line may have to wait up to 3 years for a national grid connection, so good luck with that renewal programme.?Here is my prediction - 2030 will become 2040 and so on.? One final word of warning -?later chancellors (there are too many to mention) may have forgotten how much fossil fuel taxes took from the economy in 2012/2 - about ￡25.9 billion.?When they wake up to this, the treasury will have to replace fuel duty with a tax on electricity used in EVs.?Dividing the lost fuel tax by the 28.2 million households in the UK (2021/2 census) means that HMRC would have to find a way to recover ￡1,000 per household per year.? I think I can understand why I am being persuaded to install a smart meter capable of detecting high-amperage battery charging?

Don't believe everything you hear and read in the Daily Mail (or the Times, or the Guardian or the BBC..)

The point is not about identifying the better fuel, the ideal level of CO2 in the atmosphere or which climate change professor to believe.?It is about questioning known-truths and vested opinions and not just swallowing someone else's opinion because they speak in an authoritative voice.?I love watching nature programmes overdubbed by Sir David Attenborough, because he still has that post-war RP accent that soothes the soul and makes you want to believe everything he utters.?He is a consummate entertainer.?But be careful - if you looked at his census entry twenty years ago, his occupation would have been noted as something like TV presenter or journalist - not scientist.? I now find myself reaching for the remote in the last 5 minutes of every episode of Planet Earth / Blue Planet / Life on Earth / Frozen planet, which is his regular guilt-trip lecture slot.? Does he know better than you do because he spent 20 years crawling around the jungles of Borneo, Madagascar etc - I am Sir David is a nice bloke and means well and almost had a diesel-engined boat named after him, but what are his credentials and where does he publish his evidence??

Does reading in the dark hurt your eyes??Does the MMR vaccine cause autism??Does driving at 1MPH over the posted speed limit cause 1,000 excess deaths a year??I don't know and neither do you - until you see the unbiased evidence with your own eyes - preferably before the University of East Anglia has normalised it.

Basic physics or basic science-plaining

Harking back to the original BBC piece to camera that sparked this article, I also have trouble with the "it's basic physics" hook.?I think I have a good layman's grasp of the basic physics explained by Newton and Einstein, who are surprisingly silent on the topic of climate change.?The Cambridgeshire weather was probably warmer than now in Newton's time - Oliver Cromwell died in 1658 from malaria caught in the UK or Ireland, which is transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito.?This insect (now unknown in the UK) prefers an optimal temperature of 29c - temperatures below 15c will kill the host and the plasmodium parasite.?Although this infection was well before Newton's time, he or Cromwell might well recognise the weather patterns of today as cooler than their normal.

As a general principle, if we are told that something is basic physics, this is like being told 'just shut up and take my word for it' (implying that you are somehow inferior in intellect).?Rather like the resurrection, it is a matter of faith.?If it looks wrong, sounds wrong and smells wrong it may be wrong, but it may also be counter-intuitive. We shouldn't accept opinions and entrenched positions that defy actual evidence. Saying it is basic physics so just take my word for it is a bullying tactic expected of an internet fraudster - not a salaried academic.?

Pyramids or water.?Stonehenges or food.?Windfarms or plastic recycling plants - we can't afford all or both.

Which brings us around to good King Canute (or Knut as they say in Cheshire).? He was told (by a doctor presumably, or maybe was it a confessor) that he ruled by divine appointment and therefore he and god could halt the tide in some sort of joint-venture project.? Needless to say he nearly drowned in the attempt.?So far as I can tell, sea levels and the tides haven't changed unexpectedly in my 50-odd years of car ownership.? An absolute monarch from 1,100 years ago knew nothing about climate change, weather patterns, global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain, PCBs, beached whales, radioactive sheep or any of the other media-fuelled environmental scandals of recent decades.

A tide gauge marker post visible at the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour appears to show the same numbers and depths that I read off whe passing in a sailing dinghy in 1973.?Canute's commands, Gordon's taxes, Elon's Teslas and Greenpeace protests don't appear to have made much difference either way.? This is just life on planet Earth and we have to accept that we have as much influence on climatic conditions as an ant has on the garden it lives in. Like Canute, are we in danger of drowning ourselves figuratively by blowing all disposable income on carbon credits and undeliverable vanity projects, when we could be feeding the poor and cleaning up the oceans instead?? What would you choose - pyramids or water management schemes, windfarms or NHS dentists - think carefully before answering.