"Green" policies are destroying this country
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What's your evidence that summaries for policy makers have understated the severity of climate change? Wouldn't that be irresponsible? In fact, world leaders and media have utterly exaggerated the implications. It is a scandal that leaders like António Guterres have taken to outright lying about it. In his message for a report ironically entitled "United in Science", he claimed: "the number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years". That is an unmitigated lie, but par for the course for Guterres who has repeatedly made exaggerated and erroneous claims about climate.
These sorts of claims get recycled ad infinitum -- our own national Met Service has repeated this false claim. Whatever you might think about a decrepit socialist buffoon like Guterres, now you have a supposedly respectable weather organisation repeating the lies, although Met Éireann did at least acknowledge that deaths from climate disasters has decreased threefold over the same period. And curiously, the World Meteorological Organisation quoted Guterres in their own alarmist piece but stopped one sentence short of his bullshit claim.
The claim is completely false and depends upon presenting an increase in the reporting of disasters as an actual increase in disasters. The founder of the database on which the claim is based (Debarati Guha-Sapir, of the Centre for Research in the Epidemiology of Disasters at the Catholic University of Louvain) has pointed this out:
Years ago I stopped giving any credence to anything the media or non-specialists say about climate change. We know for a fact that the media profits by exaggerating claims of all sorts. The most powerful social media algorithms on the planet are explicitly based on this premise. The climate change debate is no different to the wider culture wars. People are whipped up into hysteria and hang out in echo chambers that amplify their preconceptions. We keep getting told that "the science is settled" by people who don't understand what the science is. Personally, I keep an eye on the actual science i.e. original academic papers.
That's completely wrong. Working out a simple temperature change would be an analytical equation. There would be no need for models. But there is, and there's a reason they are called General Circulation Models. They are based on the Navier-Stokes equations so, contrary to your assertion, chaotic fluid dynamics is exactly what they are trying to solve. Even so, they have not been very good at predicting actual climate change, i.e. the frequency and intensity of future weather events. That's why people like Guterres have to lie about them. It's also why we see the so-called "settled science" focusing on temperature increases, reducing the whole chaotic mess to a single datum.
Even temperature projections are based on factors which carry large uncertainties. One of the factors -- the projected human caused CO2 additions to the atmosphere -- is not even part of the physical sciences but depends on economic modelling. The main physical factor is the climate response to CO2. There, there are two different important measures: the transient climate response (the temperature anomaly at the time of a doubling of CO2 concentrations) and the equilibrium climate sensitivity (the eventual temperature when various delayed feedbacks have worked through the system after hundreds to thousands of years).
There are over a thousand models used by the IPCC, produced by various modeling centres. "Models from the same centre can have very dissimilar climate sensitivities and sensitivity can change drastically with only small adjustments to parameters" (quoted from a recent paper, cited below). When you see IPCC graphs showing the range of possible temperature increases out to 2100 with a "most probable" line drawn up the middle, this is not a measure of uncertainty in any traditional scientific sense. The variance in a data sample is based on an assumption that the sample is drawn at random from a population and is therefore representative of it. The mean of a set of samples is therefore expected to converge on the population mean. This clearly can't be the case with GCMs, which intentionally vary different physical parameters and therefore can't all be "real" in the conventional sampling sense.
Recent work has tried to narrow the range of transient climate response. Femke et al. performs a statistical analysis of CMIP models, with selection criteria that ought to be better than the approach of just lobbing all the models in a bag and averaging over them. 12 of 34 CMIP6 models have TCRs above 4.5 K which could suggest an upward revision to IPCC projections is needed. Femke uses an "emergent constraint" approach which removes less certain factors in observed warming such as pre-1975 aerosols to come up with a "likely range of TCR to 1.3–2.1 K, with a central estimate of 1.68 K".
So let's review:
- Climate models contain large uncertainties about even the most basic metric -- temperature increase. Recent work attempts to constrain the existing models by "hindcasting" over a more reliable warming period. A number of such recent studies are in agreement and we "have a confirmed emergent constraint on TCR, with consistency across generations and a sound theoretical framework".
- "models with high ECS (>4.5 K) and high TCR (>2.5 K) do not appear to be consistent with observed global warming since 1975" (Femke).
- "emergent constraints on TCR and ECS suggest narrower likely ranges for TCR (1.3–2.1 K) and ECS (1.9–3.4 K)" (Femke).
Yet the Washington Post (an alarmist rag at least on a par with the Guardian) said as recently as 2021 that a doubling of CO2 would lead to a "three-degree or greater warming of the planet" (range 2.3 to 4.5 K). They also don't mention that this is the ECS, not TCR, and is therefore not the immediate warming they imply, but is hundreds of years away.
Alarmist reporting has been the single greatest source of climate disinformation. The media (and some scientists) have pushed the narrative that the planet is heading toward being "unlivable". For years, only the most pessimistic (RCP 8.5) pathways have been reported. Nowadays, patently false claims about the increasing frequency of extreme weather events go completely unchallenged. Claims are made about tipping points which "can't be ruled out" (meaning that the public is supposed to mentally rule them in) in contradiction of published IPCC science. Utterly wacky claims are made about hundreds of millions of climate migrants.
It is perfectly consistent to say that man made warming is real, and is serious, but the hysteria about it is broadly unwarranted. So when people are making accusations about denying "settled science", what they usually mean is that you're not allowed disagree with their preferred policy response. "What do you mean you don't want to spend 10x the price for electricity ... don't you know the world is going to burst into flames next Tuesday week?". It is even more ludicrous in Ireland, where the policy response is to commit ourselves to untested technologies at unknown cost in a giant social experiment that will make precisely zero degrees of difference to global warming.
There are far worse things than two degrees of warming. One of them is crashing the economies that provide our best hope of climate resilience and adaptation. If you have an extreme climate event, would you prefer to be in Haiti or Hamburg? If the craziest of the Greens got their way, Hamburg would be no more resilient than Haiti. The vast majority of human misery from extreme weather events is not primarily due to changing climate, but to war and poverty. Poverty cannot be alleviated without increased energy use. There is a wholly straightforward correlation between affluence and energy use. Climate "solutions" that ignore that are not workable.
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Which project is that, Codling? I don't know what 2gb means but will assume you meant €2 billion. Also, how do you multiply 2 billion by 20 and get 45 billion? And how are you extrapolating from shallow bottom-fixed turbines in 10 metres of water to 30 GW of floating offshore wind in the Atlantic?
All those questions aside, what would you expect will be the cost of electricity from such a project? A back of an envelope calculation yields €38/MWh. That's assuming a 40% capacity factor with the money borrowed at 7% over 25 years and a handsome 20% profit for the operator. It's also consistent with the other poster who keeps claiming the price of UK offshore wind has fallen to £37/MWh.
As I asked the other poster, do you have any way of squaring such a calculation with the fact that Irish onshore wind cost two and a half times that amount just last June? Will you change your tune when ORESS-1 results come in next June, if the strike price is a similar or greater multiple?
While we're at it, half the 30 GW is designated for hydrogen production. Nobody is giving us a cost for that. Electrolysis from wind energy was cited as the second most expensive way of producing hydrogen (after solar thermolysis) in a recent book:
Ch. 3 -- Hydrogen Production from "Solar Hydrogen Production: Processes, Systems and Technologies", Kayfeci et al. 2019, Academic Press.
That $6/kg for hydrogen from wind translates into $200/MWh. The report published last month by the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee on "The role of hydrogen on achieving net zero" is not encouraging. They say:
To make a large contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the UK, the production of hydrogen requires significant advances in the economic deployment of CCUS and/or the development of a renewable-to-hydrogen capacity. The timing of these is uncertain, and it would be unwise to assume that hydrogen can make a very large contribution to reducing UK greenhouse gas emissions in the short- to medium-term.
... we do not believe that [hydrogen] will be the panacea to our problems that might sometimes be inferred from the hopes placed on it. Essential questions remain to be answered as to how in future large quantities of hydrogen can be produced, distributed, and used in ways that are compatible with Net Zero and cost efficiency.
Would you say it makes sense for Ireland to be basing all its future plans on expensive untested technology?
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