Bonn Climate Change Conference

Truth, Lies and Catastrophe

Everybody lies: mostly to themselves.

The truth is out there, but it’s terrifying.

We all know that we are mortal and doomed to die. But every day we hide that truth from ourselves in order to see tomorrow. This habit, of hiding from tomorrow’s truth, is necessary for continued survival, but is now killing our planet.

I was going to include a mass of hyperlinks and references to the locations of where I’ve found the truth, but with the internet being available to nearly everyone, that is not necessary. And anyway, verification of truth is a necessary skill in the modern world. The internet is peppered with truth and lies. Distinguishing between them is difficult: but if we are to grow up and leave childhood’s “Trust Daddy” behind us, that’s a skill we must learn.

I like life, and want to see as much of it as possible. Intelligent life on our planet is unique in our galaxy. That’s the implication of the Fermi paradox. It could continue for another billion years if James Lovelock’s guesstimate is right. We are on a path that will eliminate all life from this planet within a few hundred years, but we can change direction if we look the truth of catastrophe squarely in the face.

How do I decide what’s true? Science helps me. As I write this I’ve a trail camera taking video clips of everything that visits the birdbath in my garden. I’ve been doing this every month for the past year and recording every visit in a spreadsheet. This is data that tells me not just which bird species visit but which just come for a drink and which actually bathe. Why do I do this? Well, as well as being a long time birdwatcher, I’m trained in using data scientifically.

People tend to think that science is fixed: full of facts set in concrete. But the great thing about science is that it’s always questioning old beliefs in order to find new truths.

Even great scientists like Einstein get things wrong. He believed that the universe had always existed and so added a fudge factor to his relativity equations to make it so. When the big bang beginning of the universe was discovered he said this was the biggest mistake of his life.

James Hansen is known for his vital testimony about climate change in 1988 and his activism for mitigating global warming. He is cited as claiming that if carbon dioxide levels are reduced to 350 ppm climate change will be stabilised. This would be returning levels to those of 1990. I checked this out by looking at the history of ice melting in Greenland, Antarctica and the Arctic. The graphs tell me that drastic melting started just before 1980, when levels were about 340 ppm. The graphs also tell me that true stability started breaking down after 1900 when levels rose from the pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm to 300 ppm. So where do our current levels above 420 ppm actually need to drop to? Who’s telling the truth?

Everywhere I look at climate change information I detect the fell hand of fossil fuel lobbying manipulation. Even the terms climate change and global warming have been chosen to seem unthreatening. Change could be good or bad. Warming seems harmless, even desirable in the cold northern climes where most decision makers live. If the more realistic terms of climate chaos and global overheating had been used would we now be acting differently? Or what if climate catastrophe and global burning were the terms in use? It is now known that fossil fuel lobbying even determined the very name of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Our current hope of containing climate change is invested solely in the Paris Agreement. We know that the driver of climate change is the burning of fossil fuels. Search the text of the Paris Agreement and the following words are missing; fossil, fuel, coal, oil and gas. The agreement only targets emissions, never extraction: which is inefficient, being too late in the process. No wonder there has been absolutely no change in the trend of increasing carbon dioxide and overheating.

Net Zero Carbon by 2050 is the target set by the UK. This is obviously the wrong target. If there is already too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and it keeps on increasing, we need Net Negative Carbon – and globally.

Denial, Distraction and Delay. Fossil fuel lobbyists have mostly given up denying that burning fossil fuels is causing climate change. But they are still doing what they can to delay the necessary changes that will limit their carbon throughput. It seems that the current strategy is to distract with misinformation and misdirection. Hence no mention of fossil fuels in the Paris Agreement and a Net Zero Carbon target instead of the Net Negative Carbon required. We also see schemes such as tree planting promoted, even though they have no hope of sequestering enough carbon to offset fossil fuels.

Why do fossil fuel companies keep on lobbying for measures that will destroy us? They are not necessarily evil or mad people bent on destruction: they have no choice. Directors have to maximise short-term profits and keep share prices high. When BP tried a Beyond Petroleum strategy of switching investment away from exploration for new fossil fuel reserves to investment in renewables the share price plummeted and they did a rapid U-turn. They are trapped by market forces on this road to destruction.

Methane is another increasing greenhouse gas hitting the headlines, but with misinformation about it being caused by cattle. At worst about a quarter of methane emissions are caused by agriculture, a lot of which is from cattle, but at least half of methane emissions are caused by fossil fuel extraction, either directly or by leakage.

How bad will it get? The true answer is that nobody knows for sure. The relationship between increasing carbon dioxide and increasing heat is well known and predictable because it is a linear relationship. The difficulty comes with trying to predict the effect of numerous feedbacks which are not linear. As an example: increasing temperatures melt more arctic ice which exposes more sea to warming, which melts more ice. This is an exponential relationship like all feedbacks and so is difficult to predict. And the elephant in the room that no one mentions is increasing atmospheric moisture forming clouds. Clouds are by far the biggest greenhouse factor: without them Earth would freeze solid, as would Venus. This is where the Venus effect becomes important. In the early days of our solar system both Mars and Venus were water worlds like Earth. Mars was too small to hold on to its atmosphere and so froze. Venus developed so much cloud that the greenhouse effect boiled all the water and has now created a lifeless planet with a surface temperature hot enough to melt lead. This is the path we are on if we continue unconstrained fossil fuel extraction: total extinction of all life on Earth and hence in our galaxy.

I don’t want catastrophe to happen. I’ve been a conservationist for ages. So how can we stop it happening? The obvious first step is to limit fossil fuel extraction. If that isn’t done, then the only other path to survival is geoengineering. Geoengineering is the desperation last hope.

Aren’t we already limiting fossil fuel extraction by limiting emissions? No, this is another lie. Fossil fuel extraction has continued virtually unchanged, and so have emissions. It might seem a logical thing concentrate on limiting emissions, and country by country, but it is bound to fail because it is too little, too late in the process. There are too many loopholes, such as exporting emissions to a different country. Only a global solution can fix our global problem, and only by focussing on the production of fossil fuels can we realistically control carbon. We’ve done it before under the Montreal Protocol to phase out the manufacture of CFCs and so we saved the ozone layer. That hole in the ozone layer is nearly mended already.

 

Do people check out facts to find the truth? Well I’ve included a deliberate falsehood above. Can you spot it?