RUTHFULLY YOURS

Where would we be without climate science — or, more particularly, what of carbonphobic academics if the global warming scam were ever de-funded? Why, researchers who devote their energies to the planet-despoiling peril of pasta with meat sauce would need to find something productive to do!
Fight global warming by reducing CO2 emissions from your spaghetti bolognaise! This is the recommendation of two academics associated with Melbourne’s RMIT University whohave found that the farm-to-fork “Global Warming Potential” (GWP) of pasta with meat sauce can be significantly reduced by eliminating beef and substituting kangaroo. They recommend that for an even greater impact on global heat, rising seas, coral bleaching, tempests, bushfires and ocean acidification, you should dispense with the kangaroo too, and make your spagbol topping with lentils and kidney beans.

The Journal of Cleaner Production study, reprised at The Conversation, is by RMIT Principal Research Fellow Karli Verghese and Stephen Clune, senior lecturer in sustainable design, Lancaster University and formerly an RMIT Research Fellow. The authors say, “We hope that chefs, caterers and everyday foodies will use this information to cook meals without cooking the planet.”

A Conversation commenter, William Hollingsworth, self-identifying as “a Marxist monarchist”, suggests another planet-saving refinement to our favorite family fare. “Reduce the footprint for spaghetti bolognaise even further by cooking it in one pot, not by boiling the spaghetti separately which doubles the amount of energy needed for cooking and adds another pot to be washed up. Tastes just the same,” he says.

The true hero of RMIT’s spaghetti bolognaise-led crusade against global warming is not Skippy the Kangaroo but Oscar the Onion. The carbon footprint of onions, say the researchers, is so low it would take 50 medium onions (5.8kg) to generate 1kg of greenhouse gases. By contrast, a mere 44gm of premium beef spagbol topping generates a similar 1kg carbon footprint.

The authors, who are clearly not silly, stop short of recommending 50 medium onions for dinner. “Due to different culinary and dietary requirements,” they explain, “it is hard to argue that you can replace beef with onions.” (Insert flatulence jokes here.) A commenter, possibly a Scot[i], remarks that he would much rather eat 2.6kg of oats than 5.8kg of onions for the same greenhouse emissions.

From the paper, we discover that the five cloves of garlic in a spagbol recipe generate a mere 10 grams of harmful emissions, and the grated zucchini only 20 grams. There seems no need for either the Turnbull federal or Andrews state government to include garlic and zucchini emissions in their CO2 reduction targets. Nor do garlic and zucchini emissions bulk large in the global annual emissions tally of 42 billion tonnes.

Problem is, the Turnbull government hasn’t noticed that president-elect Trump is about to knock the well-funded wheels off the global alarmism industry, as his cabinet picks confirm. Instead, we’re told to lie back, think of Paris and make our own green rent-seekers so much richer.
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop illustrates the total lack of awareness of how the world has changed, having just reaffirmed Australia’s support for the disastrous Paris Climate Accord at the same time that US president-elect Donald Trump underlined his determination to destroy it by appointing Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt to run the EPA. Among the many accolades for this choice is the damning opposition of the left-leaning Politico website. Progressively, the Trump appointments are demonstrating how he intends to unwind the economy-stifling green excesses of the Obama and previous administrations.

In the climate field the next target is NASA. Who can forget how warmist pin-up scientist Brian Cox was allowed to show a NASA doctored temperature map in a Q&A gotcha moment designed to humiliate Senator Malcolm Roberts (presently in Washington at a meeting with Myron Ebell, who heads up Trump’s EPA transition team.) Gavin Schmidt, who has inherited the much-arrested catastropharian James Hansen in heading the climate-alarmist branch of NASA and has warned off Trump. Fat chance!

The action on the EPA adds to the targeting of NASA. Bob Walker, a former congressman and Trump’s space policy adviser, said he would like to shrink NASA’s Earth-monitoring programs. “We see NASA in an exploration role, in deep space research,” he said. “Earth-centric science is better placed at other agencies, where it is their prime mission.” An irony of history is that NASA acquired its responsibility for monitoring the atmosphere in 1985 under President Reagan.

One area of NASA that is unimpeachable is the global temperature satellite-based recordings of the UAH at Alabama by Dr Roy Spencer. These show a persistent undershooting (below) of the temperature compared to modellers’ forecasts.

moran chart 1Back in 1991, we only had 11 years of evidence from satellite measurements of the lower troposphere (the area where the warming picture would be most readily seen). At that stage a US friend, a professor of meteorology, commented to me: “Don’t knock this global warming crap! It allows me to travel the world in comfort and to double my salary while doing consultancy work. And year by year the satellite data will come in so that, about when I am considering retirement in a dozen years’ time, the myth will be utterly discredited.”

My American friend was, of course, right about the data discrediting the myth, but he misunderstood the impetus being unleashed from scientists, environmental activists and subsidy-seeking industrialists. Climate modellers refuse to learn from 37 years of data on climate outcomes, persisting with forecasts (amplified by their theoretical treatment of water vapour) that serve their own careers rather than scientific truth. In 1991, the issue was little more than a glint in the eye of the more science-oriented politicians — people like our own Science Minister Barry Jones.

One of the first items of business for the Trump administration will be to decide what to do with the Paris Agreement. In September, the Obama administration deposited with the United Nations general secretary an instrument accepting the Paris climate treaty without first asking the Senate for its advice and consent. As matters stand, the United States is now bound to the Obama administration’s target of reducing economy-wide greenhouse gas emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025. The domestic counterpart of the Paris Agreement is the EPA’s Clean Power Plan — also crafted to avoid congressional approval — which is how the Obama administration intends for the U.S. to achieve its Paris obligations.

During the presidential election, Donald Trump denounced one-sided trade deals for destroying American jobs. The Paris Agreement is the mother and father of one-sided deals. It requires the United States to keep cutting its emissions in perpetuity irrespective of what anyone else does. Unlike the 1997 Kyoto Protocol (which the Senate would have rejected had Bill Clinton sent it to the Senate), there are no escape hatches. It forces the U.S. to play by its own rules while letting everyone else play by their own. Short of repudiating the whole treaty, once on the escalator, there’s no way off.

It is the latest product of U.N. climate conferences that kicked off with the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Canadian Maurice Strong organized the Earth Summit. His genius was to see that government leaders and bureaucrats don’t like being left out. If you put negotiators from different countries in the same room, the pressure will be on them to find points of agreement. In that way, the U.N. created a climate-change process that acquired a momentum of its own. “The process is the policy,” Strong told an aide at the 1972 U.N. Stockholm conference on the environment, which Strong also organized. What appears important to delegates at the negotiating table are the detailed policy commitments, when what really matters is keeping the process going so that it sucks in more power, influence, and money.

Because the process develops a logic of its own, it ends up producing ridiculous positions that the nations of the world nonetheless sign on to. Article 2 of the Paris Agreement sets a new goal of limiting temperature increases to only 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. It had been cooked up by the Alliance of Small Island States. Along with polar bears, the small island states are featured as the prime victims in the climate-change morality tale: innocents on remote islands condemned to be swept away in a flood of biblical significance, to pay for the climate sins of the rich.