"Green" policies are destroying this country

Fossil fuels always had that potential energy just waiting to be released. Wind turbines and solar don't have anywhere near the same potential with current technology. We would be far better served spending even 10% of the 100's of billions being bandied about for wind / solar and invest in a Manhattan style project to develop that new technology that would actually help us.

I don't need to convince anyone. You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.

Current wind turbines don't and can't have the same calorific output as fossil fuel equivalents. It's just not technically feasible. That's not me saying that, it's basic engineering principles.

We are going to be emitting vast amounts of CO2 anyway just to produce all these PV panels and turbines.

Incorrect as always. It hasn't been shown that all our energy needs can be met by renewables, not even close.

Yes, I don't believe there is a pressing crisis beyond the manufactured hysteria. We should solve the problem without this mythical sword of damecles hanging over us. Unlike you, I don't believe the chicken littles running around telling me the sky is falling down.

Believing the IPCC assessment is one thing.

The question of whether the focus should be on adaption or mitigation is quite another and it is far from settled.

Do we, as a global society, spend many trillions of dollars speculatively, when the precise manifestation of local effects are fare from certain, or do we take that massive gambling stake and wait instead to apply it as matters arise....?

LOL. Said every inventor of the 99% of technologies that fail to scale. And we know about the scalability problems with renewables. Here's just one of them, repeated from the previous page since you obviously missed it:

From the FT (paywalled):

<copyrighted article deleted>

We are emitting negligible amounts of CO2.

What do you do when your government is a climate science denier? KNMI (Koninklijk Nederlands Meteorologisch Instituut, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute) is the Dutch national weather forecasting service and a division of the Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management. It has produced its National Climate Scenarios for the Netherlands 2023 report (PDF link).

Their selected scenario ranges are described in 1.3.4 on page 10:

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and the IPCC have long since abandoned the 8.5 scenarios (RCP 8.5 and SSP5-8.5) as implausible and say that the world is tracking below a SSP2-4.5 scenario. Why would the Dutch include it in their scenario planning? They gave their rationale in 1.2.1 on page 6:

Well that's flat out wrong. They are treating SSP5-8.5 as the business-as-usual scenario with no mitigation efforts. I thought we'd finally gotten over that oft-repeated mistake. That's not what the 8.5 scenarios are, nor ever have been. They model large population increase and dramatic increases in the use of coal and other fossil fuels. They don't represent any semblance of a plausible pathway let alone "business as usual".

It doesn't make sense as a precautionary principle either. It would be like my fire and theft car insurance charging me for protection against an asteroid strike. Sure, all sorts of bad things can go wrong, but you don't pick some other completely unrelated scenario to model them. You simply can't use that as a policy stress test.

They say the plausibility of SSP5-8.5 is debated but their referenced article -- Hausfather and Peters writing in Nature (PDF link) -- is literally titled: "Emissions – the ‘business as usual’ story is misleading". That article says:

The KNMI document then goes on to say:

This is particularly weird. Here they are actually plagiarising Hausfather and Peters from the aforementioned article. But they fail to include the immediate next words from it:

I've copied much of the above discussion from The Honest Broker substack. It concludes:

So why has the Dutch government decided to include this unrealistic scenario? The rationale they give doesn't make sense. Could it be they want to keep the public scared and compliant? Do they want to show off the horrible future that they, in their governmental awesomeness, are saving the public from? Who knows! But it's pretty bad form.

There is no cost effective strategy for adaption, it's a climate deniers wet dream.

The cost of mitigation is lower than the cost of adapting. Every climate change induced crisis drains away resources which would be far better used in mitigation. How many floods do you recover from before you are bankrupt.

It is because the executive director of the KNMI is part of a green 'thinktank' pushing the Green Agenda. Sometimes the truth is more simple than expected. I spotted his name on a list a while ago.

And for your information: at the time of Al Gore's 'an inconvenient truth' around 2006 the BBC held a mini conference about climate change. Their statutes states they need to be unbiased and give opponent views space on their platform. They invited (as i recall) some 30+ 'experts' after which the BBC concluded they no longer needed to give climate change 'deniers' space in their programs. But 97% of the experts were non science activists pushing for renewables, mostly from the renewable industry or part of the Green transition thinktank organisations.

Someone once said:" the commission can come to a completely independent conclusion without interference....as long as i can pick the commission members".

And that is how it works..

97% is a fair and unbiased proportion of climate scientist (those who actually understand climate) who accept the reality of anthropgenic climate change. It was on the basis of this overwhelming consenus that led media outlets to decide to not give equal space to the 3% who denied anthropogenic climate change is real and serious.

... and lets be clear - when I want an opinion on my heart I go to a cardiologist not a **** oil prospector. The same with climate science.

Science isn't and shouldn't be run on consensus. That's just an appeal to authority with no basis in science.

It's fair to say most academics agree that the earth is warming and that some of that is attributable to humans. There's is a small vocal cohort that keep banging the doomsday drum and are very good at getting their message out.

Now, away from questionable modelling and academic endeavour I have yet to see a coherent plan or strategy put forward by any energy expert(s) showing how it's feasible to fully transition from fossil fuels to renewables by 2040/2050.

That's your claim, to be substantiated. The thing is, the costs of adaptation are incurred as the need arises. You know you need to spend the money at the time you spend it. Mitigation is a completely different kettle of fish. Costs are incurred decades ahead of any fruit being borne. In fact, you have no way of telling if the costs had any positive impact.

And before you start quoting me the Stern report, you don't know the costs of mitigation. You don't even know if it's possible. Certainly current policies look set to price themselves out of existence with an energy commodities crunch that nobody seems to be planning for.

Every cent spent on mitigation drains resources that could be far more accurately targeted at adaptation. Or, at least, a combination of adaptation and development of energy technologies that can actually achieve a transition, unlike the current wind and solar-powered white elephant.

An unlimited number. Total spent on extreme weather events in the US last year was 0.6% of GDP. That was about one third of GDP growth, and even that was an outlier. Hurricane Ian on its own represented more than two thirds of the costs. Normalised annual increase in costs from all natural disasters (not just weather) globally was 1.3% in the fifty years from 1970 to 2020 (source: SwissRe). In other words, costs of disasters are increasing more slowly than GDP.

On the other hand, the cost of last year's Pakistan floods was up to 10% of that country's GDP. That's what happens in an impoverished and corrupt country that didn't spend the money on adaptation that had been flagged as necessary years in advance. Poor countries face a rocky road no matter what. We certainly can't save them with windmills.

As I said before your verbage isn't of interest to me