RUTHFULLY YOURS

German Chancellor Angela Merkel used the final press conference of the G-20 summit held in her hometown of Hamburg to once again denounce the Trump administration’s intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change. “You are familiar with the American position,” Chancellor Merkel said. “You know that, unfortunately — and I deplore this — the United States of America left the climate agreement, or rather announced their intention to do so.” She added that she was “gratified to note the other 19 members of G-20 say the Paris agreement is irreversible.”

President Trump did something that Chancellor Merkel and her fellow Paris Agreement boosters are not used to from an American president, after eight years of dealing with former President Barack Obama. President Trump was upfront in rejecting an agreement that unfairly penalized the workers of the country he was elected to serve.

Under the Paris Agreement, each country submitted legally non-binding plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with declared targets. Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry agreed to commit the U.S. to enact severe restrictions on the use of coal-fired power plants, among other initiatives. Such regulatory measures were viewed as key to meeting the Obama administration’s stated objective of cutting domestic greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. For all intents and purposes, “global citizen” Obama was willing to sacrifice American workers on the altar of the “global commons.”

President Trump saw the Obama plan as jeopardizing American jobs while other countries were making empty promises. He concluded that the Paris Agreement was little more than a feel-good document that would allow most countries of the world to pretend they are doing something beneficial for the environment. Meanwhile, the United States had ended up accepting a disproportionate share of the economic burden in lowering global carbon emissions.

Chancellor Merkel, for all her bluster about the imminent perils of climate change, made sure that her government is protecting the jobs of German workers in the coal industry. Germany’s “Climate Action Plan 2050” does not set a date for ending the country’s reliance on coal-fired plants.

“Coal remains central to Germany’s power system, providing 42 percent of gross power production in 2015 – 18 percent from hard coal and 24 percent from lignite,” according to a fact sheet issued by Clean Energy Wire on December 16, 2016. Lignite in particular is still mined fairly extensively, especially in the eastern part of Germany, where the coal miners are represented by a powerful union and are important constituents of the Social Democratic Party.

Alan Finkel’s otherworldly prognosis is bad enough. But toss in Malcolm Turnbull’s advocacy of renewables and then add an imported American chief regulator who would have been happier working for Hillary Clinton and where are you? The simple answer: thoroughly stuffed.

With Australian electricity prices now approaching world-beating highs, we have on Friday another meeting of the Council of Australian Government (CoAG) energy ministers who have created the current energy catastrophe.

They are to examine the Finkel report into electricity. Among the many counter-productive recommendations this report offered was an increase in the electricity market’s “governance”. This is a demand for even more of the political tinkering which, in the space of just 15 years, transformed the Australian electricity industry from the cheapest in the world to one of the dearest. Distortionary subsidies to renewable energy, which have also undermined reliability, are paramount in this.

Finkel decided that renewables are inevitable (which is why Malcolm Turnbull appointed him) and commissioned economic research to demonstrate that this is so. The modelling showed future lower prices from the substitution of wind/solar for lower cost coal. It did so by using two mechanisms.

First, it has the renewables subsidised and with priority access to the grid, meaning coal powered stations have either to run at a loss or close down. The optimists assume coal will run at a loss in an oversupplied market then close down in an ‘orderly’ manner.

In theory, this allows a second mechanism – forecast cost reductions of wind and solar – to swing in.

One shortcoming of this picture is that if the coal stations hit major expenditure needs at an inconvenient time, they will be forced to close down. This was the case with Hazelwood, which was operating in the face of Worksafe notices and requiring perhaps a billion dollars for new boilers. Finkel’s solution (adopted by politicians) of requiring three years notice of closure is absurd and unworkable.

Moreover, the fabled and imminent onset of cheap renewables will not occur, just as it has not ocurred through the past 30 years of similar erroneous predictions. Ah, but batteries will save the day, I hear some say. But no, they won’t. Batteries are simply a costly way of smoothing out the peaks of renewables’ intermittency.

Compared with the cost of coal at below $50 per MWh for new power stations and less than that for existing ones, wind is at least $90 plus the costs of storage ($14 according to the totally inadequate estimates published by Minister Josh Frydenberg) and requires aditional transmission expenditure.

With current policies having brought wholesale prices to around $100 per MWh, Finkel decided to airbrush from history the sub-$40 prices that prevailed until the renewable subsidies started to bite in 2016.

It is easy to forget the changes that the deregulation of energy created, before politics overturned its competitive nature.

The global warming fraud is based entirely on the practice of “adjusting” data. Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph was “adjusted” to “hide the decline,” most notably. But every prediction of catastrophe, every “hottest year ever” story, depends on adjusting the actual data of surface temperatures.

A recent scientific study of global average surface temperature reports and the CO2 endangerment finding has produced a remarkable graph that says it all, very clearly.

James Delingpole of Breitbart spotted it and explains:

The peer-reviewed study by two scientists and a veteran statistician looked at the global average temperature datasets (GAST) which are used by climate alarmists to argue that recent years have been “the hottest evah” and that the warming of the last 120 years has been dramatic and unprecedented.

What they found is that these readings are “totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

That is, the adjusted data used by alarmist organizations like NASA, NOAA, and the UK Met Office differs so markedly from the original raw data that it cannot be trusted.

This chart gives you a good idea of the direction of the adjustments.

The blue bars show where the raw temperature data has been adjusted downwards to make it cooler; the red bars show where the raw temperature data has been adjusted upwards to make it warmer.

Note how most of the downward adjustments take place in the early twentieth century and most of the upward take place in the late twentieth century.

It’s awfully incriminating.

The methodology of John Cook’s infamous paper purporting to demonstrate global warming must be real because almost all scientists believe in it has long since been demolished. But there is another flaw hitherto overlooked: the extent to which humans are thought responsible.

The Cook et al paper ‘Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature’ has been the top-ranking paper in terms of press citations, with Barack Obama using it to justify his efforts in Paris to lead the world in the war on CO2.

A typical press report on the study, reproduced in full below, advises in the first paragraph that ninety-seven percent of scientists say global warming is mainly man-made and the study found an overwhelming view among scientists that “human activity, led by the use of fossil fuels”, was the main cause of rising temperatures in recent decades. That looks like strong support for action on fossil fuels, but what does the paper itself tell us? Does it tell us anything more than that there is an overwhelming consensus on a human contribution to warming? Is that exciting news? Can you find anyone among the so-called deniers who denies that there has been warming since the industrial revolution? Do any of the “deniers” dispute a human contribution, if only in the heat-island effect of cities and towns?

What does the paper tell us about the agreement on amount of warming, the need to be alarmed about warming, the size of the human contribution and the role of CO2? As far as I can see, after reading the paper several times:

The consensus in the paper does not refer to any particular amount of warming.
There is nothing about a need to be alarmed.
There is agreement that humans have contributed, but there is nothing about how much humans have contributed.
There is no mention of the contribution of CO2.

I will not dwell on the way the Cook study was conducted, other than to note the method has been subjected to a great deal of criticism. Rather, my focus is on the published results and what they say, and do not say, about questions which matter if you have concerns about the trillions of dollars being sunk around the world in the suppression of CO2 emissions.

Turning to the paper, it is clear from the way the paper is organized that they wanted to say

x% of scientists believe in warming
y% think humans contribute and
z% consider that human activity is the major driver.

They got what they wanted for x and y, namely 97+%, but z is missing. Of course the authors obtained a value because Table 1 shows how the data were classified to find it. However it is not in the paper. It is possible that the number is small to sustain the case for alarm about CO2. The research was clearly designed to provide a number for three levels of endorsement of the consensus.

First “explicit endorsement (of humans as the primary cause of recent warming) with quantification”.
Second “explicit endorsement without quantification”.
Third “implicit endorsement”.

In the results (Table 2) the three categories are collapsed into one. Presumably if a significant number had turned up in the category which identified humans as the primary cause of warming it would have been reported because it is the figure that matters when you consider whether there is any need to address CO2 emissions. So the three levels of endorsement are collapsed into a figure of 97.1 for those who endorsed the “scientific consensus”.

It is clear from the way the authors talk that, for them, the consensus is not just warming but alarming warming with humans as the major cause. But that is not the consensus revealed in their own figures.

The results support (1) the proposition that there has been warming which is not in dispute and (2) the proposition that human activity makes a contribution, which by itself is hardly controversial. The paper makes no apparent contribution to the key issues, namely the amount of warming, whether we need to worry about it, how much humans contribute and, most important, the role of CO2.

In her closing G-20 speech on Saturday, Merkel noted that the summit’s final declaration reveals clear disagreement with the U.S. on climate issues. She says she’s not optimistic that Washington will return to the Paris climate agreement.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel didn’t mince words on Saturday when talking about the results of the G-20 summit in Hamburg. While she said that participants agree that markets must remain open and protectionism resisted, she was much less sanguine about the climate passages in the summit’s closing declaration. She said that the disagreement with the U.S. was clearly stated in the declaration.

She also said she doesn’t share the belief of some that the U.S. will ultimately return to the Paris climate agreement. “I don’t share that optimism,” she said in her closing speech, adding that the closing declaration clearly enunciates the dissent between the U.S. and the other 19 members of the G-20. “On this issue, it has become very clear that we were unable to find a consensus.” This disagreement should not be “covered up.”