"Green" policies are destroying this country
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The only thing to consider with regard to the Lybian floods is...
Sounds like you're only interested in attribution. I don't think you dealt with the most important points at all. I'd rank them like this:
- Resilience
- Adaptation
- Modelling and prediction
- Mitigation
Resilience is the reason that deaths from natural disasters plummeted to almost nothing in the course of the 20th century. No matter what nature throws at you, you're better off with the right infrastructure, regular inspections, maintenance, emergency services, early warning systems, insurance, disaster relief etc. Rich countries are resilient countries. Poor and unstable countries are not. Read the most recent World Food Organisation report. Climate change gets a couple of passing references. Political instability and war are the overwhelming causes of food shortages. Poor and unstable countries want to be richer. They don't list climate change as their number one priority. One element of that is that the world needs vastly more cheap and reliable energy.
Adaptation is the most sensible course of action in many cases. The hundreds of millions of people living on the world's largest river deltas are vulnerable to innundation regardless of anthropogenic climate change. That's because sea level is rising regardless, and even if it wasn't their land is sinking because of land use changes and groundwater extraction. Those problems are all fixable and future ones avoidable. Lots of the world needs more air conditioning. That needs lots more energy.
Climate models are woefully inadequate. We can't afford to spend trillions of dollars annually on mitigation if resilience and adaptation are more effective. We need to know which is which. (And for god sake don't bring up the Stern report again). Adaptation has the advantage that it can be deployed unilaterally. Mitigation requires a level of cooperation never heretofore achieved. Unilateral mitigation simply isn't a thing, something that Green ideologues need to be constantly reminded of. Modelling is super-important but we need to realise that it may never reach the resolution required. Back in the 1990s a single GCM grid square was larger than Ireland ... the next generation wasn't vastly better:
For AR5 a grid square was still 5,000 sq. km:
Every twofold improvement in resolution needs about ten times the computing power. Even if the models were more precise they would not be complete. We simply don't know what the full set of inputs is. That's not to say we shouldn't try to improve them. But they are never going to provide a crystal ball. And that's before we get to the fact that IPCC scenarios are not all about physical inputs. They involve complex economic and demographic modelling as well. To me that is the big problem with the model outputs in the IPCC assessment reports. Anybody with scientific training looking at a graph that shows uncertainty in the outputs would tend to assume that these are down to uncertainties in the input and analysis. If the uncertainties are random and independent then the central prediction can be taken as representative according to the central limit theorem. So you see the AR6 output and think these are predictions, albeit with a lamentable level of uncertainty:
But that's not what the model outputs are in the ARs. They are the individual outputs of hundreds of different modeled scenarios. Here are AR5 and AR6 with about 1200 separate models each. You wouldn't guess from the previous diagram that there were hundreds of 1.5°C models in AR6 and a lot less high end ones compared to AR5:
And finally we come to mitigation. I'm all for it. As long as it lets us have vastly more cheap, reliable energy and is demonstrably more sensible than spending money on resilience and adaptation. Green policies have a long way to go before that is established, partly because they seem to back all the wrong technology horses. And never forget that if we get this wrong and do stupid things to the fossil-based economy before we're good and ready, EVERYBODY DIES. I'd love to take some of that propaganda money that is being spent on drumming the climate message into our school kids and devote some of it to teaching them why we are so dependent on energy. Every household has the equivalent of half a dozen electric servants at their disposal. A single barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 12.5 years of hard human labour. The world consumes energy equivalent to half a trillion extra human workers. That's why everyone in a developed country is incomparably better off than even royalty from three hundred years ago, when they had to depend on actual servants. But it goes further than that. Everything we own, everything we use, everything we eat ... is translatable into energy inputs. Energy is the currency of the physical world. I'm not sure the average person gets it, in fact I'm pretty sure they don't.
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