THE GLOBAL WARMING SCAM
Major factors affecting global temperatures in order of importance are:-
1. Variations in solar radiation reaching our planet, (not much we can do about that).
2. Relative concentrations of gases and particulates in our atmosphere due to natural causes. (volcanic eruptions; marsh gas; animals releasing bowel gas; plant photosynthesis etc etc. (not much we can do about that except perhaps restricting deforestation.
3. Human causative factors such as industrial pollution; release of cfc gases; burning coal etc.
The third category is so small compared with 1 and 2 that its effects on our climate are negligible. Anything we humans do is dwarfed by natural causes beyond our control. Also, note that the most powerful greenhouse gas is water vapour. Water vapour absorbs around 20 times the heat absorbed by carbon dioxide. Let's sit back and enjoy the warmer climate. If it continues we shall be able to grow red grapes and make good red wine, just as we did during the Roman occupation of these islands when average temperatures were warmer than the present.
THE COST OF BECOMING CARBON NEUTRAL
Carbon neutrality is estimated by the National Grid to cost the UK £3 trillion. (National Grid – Future Energy Scenarios 2020). That is £44,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. The Office for Budget Responsibility, (OBR), estimated the cost to be £1.4 trillion in July 2021. The same figure is used by the Government Committee on Climate Change, (CCC). Even this low estimate would cost every man woman and child in this country £20,000. We have patients waiting for hours on trolleys because we can't afford more hospital beds. We have people waiting 3 years and more for elective surgery because we can't afford to increase the number of doctors and nurses in training. We can't afford to give our elderly population the care home places they need. We can't afford to fix our streets or our public housing. The UK emits about 1% of global industrial CO2 so even the most avid climate change proponent would have to admit that our becoming carbon neutral will have no effect on the global climate. The justification is that it will encourage other nations to do the same. So it is a PR exercise. It seems we can afford to spend £3 trillion on a PR stunt. That figure does not include any grants we choose to make to encourage developing nations to embrace this madness. The global cost is likely to be in the range of £300 trillion. This, of course will have no effect on global temperatures. They will continue to change due to factors far more significant than the industrial emission of carbon dioxide. The sun will continue to vary its output of radiation. Thousands of volcanos, mostly under the sea will continue to spew out greenhouse gases and the oceans will either release or absorb carbon dioxide depending on their water temperatures. Water vapour in the atmosphere will continue to absorb more than 20 times the heat absorbed by CO2. An increase in the percentage of CO2 in our atmosphere will increase plant growth and help feed the world. This climate change nonsense is being promoted by the same socialist followers of Richard Kalergi with his plans for a global government by a political elite unencumbered by the ballot box. Hydrocarbon fuels gave us freedom from drudgery and enabled us to develop all the machines we now enjoy to do all the grunt work that humans and animals did before the industrial revolution. Hydrocarbon fuels gave us freedom. Take them away and we become dependents of a new order. We should be opposing this with every sinew. Spending £300 trillion on a worthless endeavour will impoverish everyone except the political elites and potentially usher in a global socialist supremacy. It has to be stopped.
BATTERIES:
It is reasonable to ask, 'what is a battery?' Tesla said it best when they called batteries Energy Storage Systems. That is important. They do not make electricity. They store electricity produced elsewhere, primarily by coal, uranium, natural gas-powered plants, or diesel-fuelled generators. So to say an electric vehicle is a zero-emission vehicle is not at all valid. Also, since thirty percent of the electricity generated in the U.K. is from natural gas fired plants, it follows that thirty percent of the EVs on the road in the U K are natural gas powered.
It takes the same amount of energy to move a 2 ton petrol driven car a mile as it does an electric one. The only question again is what produces the power? To reiterate, it does not come from the battery; the battery is only the storage device, like a petrol tank in a car.
There are two orders of batteries, rechargeable, and single-use. The most common single-use batteries are A, AA, AAA, C, D. 9V, and lantern types. Those dry-cell species use zinc, manganese, lithium, silver oxide, or zinc and carbon to store electricity chemically. They all contain toxic, heavy metals.
Rechargeable batteries only differ in their internal materials, usually lithium-ion, nickel-metal oxide, and nickel-cadmium.
The United States uses three billion of these two battery types a year, and as most are not recycled, they end up in landfills. California is the only state which requires all batteries to be recycled. If batteries are thrown in a rubbish bin this is what happens:
All batteries are self-discharging. That means even when not in use, they leak tiny amounts of energy. Most people will have ruined a torch or two from an old ruptured battery. When a battery runs down and can no longer power a toy or light, you think of it as dead. It is not. It continues to leak small amounts of electricity. As the chemicals inside it run out, pressure builds inside the battery's metal casing, and eventually, it cracks. The metals left inside then ooze out. The ooze in a ruined torch is toxic, and so is the ooze that will inevitably leak from every battery in a landfill. All batteries eventually rupture; it just takes rechargeable batteries longer to end up in the landfill.
In addition to dry cell batteries, there are also wet cell ones used in cars, boats, and motorcycles. The good thing about those is ninety percent of them are recycled. Unfortunately, we cannot yet recycle lithium ion batteries economically, or care to dispose of single-use ones properly.
But that is not the half of it. For those people excited about electric cars and a green revolution, perhaps they should take a closer look not only at batteries but also windmills and solar panels. These three technologies share what are called environmentally destructive embedded costs.
Everything manufactured has two costs associated with it, embedded costs and operating costs. Embedded costs can be explained using a tin of baked beans as the subject.
In this scenario, baked beans are in a sale, so people jump in their cars and drive to the supermarket. Sure enough, there they are on the shelf for £1 a tin. But what about the embedded cost in that tin of beans?
The first cost is the diesel fuel the farmer used to plough the field, till the ground and harvest the beans, and then transport them to the food processor. Not only is his diesel fuel an embedded cost, so are the costs to build the tractors, combines, and trucks. In addition, the farmer might use a nitrogen fertilizer made from natural gas.
Next are the energy costs of cooking the beans, heating the building, transporting the workers, and paying for the vast amounts of electricity used to run the plant. The steel can holding the beans is also an embedded cost. Making the steel can requires mining iron ore, shipping it by boat, extracting the iron, placing it in a coal-fired blast furnace, and adding carbon. Then it's back on another truck to take the beans to the supermarket. Finally, add in the cost of the petrol for customers' cars.
Another major embedded cost is the depreciation on the customer's 2 ton car used to bring that one pound tin of beans home!
However, a tin of beans is nothing compared to a battery. Batteries are hundreds of times more complicated. Their embedded costs not only come in the form of energy use; they come as environmental destruction, pollution, disease, child labour, and the inability to be recycled.
An electric car battery might weigh 1000 pounds and be about the size of a large suitcase. It might contain twenty-five pounds of lithium, sixty pounds of nickel, 44 pounds of manganese, 30 pounds of cobalt, 200 pounds of copper, and 400 pounds of aluminium, steel, and plastic. Inside are roughly 7000 individual lithium-ion cells.
All those toxic components come from mining. For instance, to manufacture each electric car battery requires the processing of 25,000 pounds of brine for the lithium, 30,000 pounds of ore for the cobalt, 5,000 pounds of ore for the nickel, and 25,000 pounds of ore for copper. All told, we dig up 500,000 pounds of the earth's crust for just one battery.
But what about disease and child labour? Sixty-eight percent of the world's cobalt, a significant part of a battery, comes from the Congo. Their mines have no pollution controls and they employ children who die from handling this toxic material. Should we factor in these diseased children as part of the cost of driving an electric car?
The main problem with solar arrays is the chemicals needed to process silicate into the silicon used in the panels. To make pure silicon requires processing it with hydrochloric acid, sulphuric acid, nitric acid, hydrogen fluoride, trichloroethane, and acetone. In addition, they also need gallium arsenide, copper-indium-gallium- diselenide, and cadmium-telluride, all of which are highly toxic. Silicon dust is a hazard to the workers, and the panels cannot be recycled.
Windmills are the ultimate in embedded costs and environmental destruction. Each weighs about 1688 tons (the equivalent of 23 houses) and contains 1300 tons of concrete, 295 tons of steel, 48 tons of iron, 24 tons of fiberglass, and the hard to extract rare earths neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium. Each blade weighs 81,000 pounds and will last 15 to 20 years, at which time it must be replaced. We cannot recycle used blades. Sadly, both solar arrays and windmills kill birds, bats, sea life, and migratory insects.
There may be a place for these technologies, but people must look beyond the myth of zero emissions.
THE FRIGHTENING REALITY
The next step on the road to a socialist paradise run by an unelected political elite is the global warming scam. How convenient that a Swedish schoolgirl millionaire named Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg has become the de facto leader of an entire global youth movement to encourage us to believe we have to spend £300 trillion to reduce CO2 emissions. This will have no noticeable effect on our climate. It will however result in the impoverishment of most of the global population leaving them dependent on the coming New World Order. The Bruges Group has recognised this for what it is. For a better understanding of the realities of climate change read Professor Steve Koonin's book "Unsettled" available from Amazon. Steve studied quantum physics under Richard Feynman at Caltech. He obtained his PhD at MIT. He was chief scientific energy adviser to the Obama administration and is now a professor at New York University. A very smart man indeed. Wake Up and smell the coffee! It is already very late.
CO2 CONCENTRATIONS AND THEIR CAUSES
The climate is changing. It always has and probably always will. There have been significantly hotter periods in the past when there was no industrial activity. CO2 concentrations can be corelated with surface temperature changes over the recent past, (although not throughout geological time), but changes in CO2 concentrations lag behind temperature changes. This suggests that higher temperatures cause increases in CO2 concentrations, not the other way around. Is there a positive feedback causing temperatures to rise further due to increasing CO2 concentrations? Yes, there is probably a very small positive feedback but CO2 has a very small infra red absorption cross section compared with water vapour which is by far the most significant greenhouse gas. It is generally agreed that CO2 concentrations were about 280 parts per million in 1900 and they increased to around 420 ppm in 2020. It is also generally agreed that industrial activity accounts for about 17% of CO2 emissions. The other 83% comes from natural sources such as volcanic activity; ocean outgassing and similar. However the 280ppm figure comes from work by Callendar and is one of the lowest values from a variety of sources at the time. The current measurements of CO2 concentrations are taken from an observatory on Mauna Loa in the Hawaiian islands. Mauna Loa is an active volcano! Nevertheless let's assume these figures are valid. Then CO2 levels have increased by 140ppm since 1900 and industrial emissions of CO2 account for 140 x 17% = 24ppm. So if there had been no industrial activity since 1900 the CO2 concentration would have been about 116 + 280 = 396ppm. Does anyone seriously believe the extra 24ppm of CO2 is having a disastrous impact on our climate? The UK emits around 1% of global industrial CO2 so we have contributed about 0.24ppm to this total. But we seem to think we should spend around £3 trillion to achieve net zero CO2 emissions and save that 0.24ppm. Even the USA only contributes about 13% of global industrial CO2 or just over 3ppm of the total! Water vapour accounts for about 95% of the greenhouse gas effect yet we are happy to send millions of tons of water vapour into the stratosphere in the form of con trails from jet aircraft.
So what do I believe?
The climate is changing. It always has. Currently temperatures are increasing from the lower temperatures that we experienced in the late 1940s. Temperatures rose during the Roman occupation and during the medieval warming period when there was very little industrial activity. Global temperatures were about 5 degrees C higher than today's levels in the interglacial periods from 400,000 years ago when there was no industrial activity at all. The highest temperature ever recorded and rigorously verified by the World Meteorological Organisation was 56.7 degrees C on July 10th 1913 in Death Valley California. If temperatures are rising due to industrial emissions of CO2 why has this record temperature not been exceeded? The lowest temperature recorded on Earth was -89.2 degrees C on 21st July 1983 in Antarctica. If temperatures are rising due to industrial emissions of CO2 why is the lowest recorded temperature so recent?
Therefore it is reasonable to conclude that mankind has a tiny impact on the global climate and our impact pales into insignificance compared with changes in solar activity; natural effects such as volcanic eruptions; marsh gas; cloud formations and so on. Increasing levels of CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere have a negligible impact on the greenhouse effect. Indeed we are already fairly close to the point where adding more CO2 to the atmosphere will not affect temperatures at all because the absorption of the infra red spectral frequency lines for which CO2 is responsible will have been used up. (Think of a window with black paint on it. After a couple of coats of paint adding more coats won't change the transparency of the window. No light will get through. The same is true when adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. After a certain concentration is reached they have no further absorptive effect. CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere have almost saturated their ability to absorb infra-red energy. Further increases in CO2 concentrations will have an ever smaller ability to absorb heat and quite soon we could reach the point where increasing CO2 levels will have no effect on Earth's temperatures at all. However, if CO2 levels ever exceed 1000ppm we might all start to feel a bit drowsy! Mankind's arrogance in assuming that he has a significant impact on the global climate is breath taking. His stupidity in being willing to spend hundreds of trillions of pounds to stop emitting CO2 is almost beyond comprehension. Since the 1960's we have been repeatedly told by the "climate experts" that we have 10 years to solve the climate crisis. Otherwise there will be catastrophic and unstoppable runaway climate change. In 1969 Senator Daniel Moynihan said, "It is pretty clearly agreed upon that CO2 content will rise by 25% by 2000. This could increase the average temperature near the Earth's surface by 7 degrees Fahrenheit This in turn could raise the level of the sea by 10 feet. Goodbye New York. Goodbye Washington ". CO2 content did increase by almost exactly 25% to reach 400ppm in 2000. Temperatures probably rose a little but any such increase was within the uncertainty levels of the measurement methods. Sea levels rose by about half an inch and New York and Washington were unaffected. In 1990, Michael Oppenheimer, climate scientist and Albert G Millbank Professor of Geosciences and International affairs at Princeton University wrote, "By 1995, the greenhouse effect would be desolating the heartlands of America and Eurasia with horrific droughts causing crop failures and food riots. By 1996 the Platte River in Nebraska would be dry while a continent wide black blizzard of topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers" Hmmm. So much for that expert's forecasts and predictions. Today we are still told that we have 10 years to solve this non-existent crisis. We somehow believe the use of biomass as a heating fuel will reduce our CO2 emissions. I had a biomass heating system. Trees that absorb CO2 are felled with petrol driven chain saws. They are transported to a mill in diesel fuelled trucks. The mill uses fossil fuel generated electricity to turn the timber into biomass pellets. The pellets are taken to docks in diesel powered trucks and shipped across the ocean in heavy sulphurous oil burning ships. They are then transported to my home in diesel powered trucks. I burn the pellets and emit CO2. This CO2 is captured by trees over about 80 years when the trees can be cut and made into more pellets. This is an 80 year cycle and yet we have only 10 years to save the planet! Duh!!
The UK emits about 330 million tonnes of fossil fuel related CO2 per year according to UK National Statistics March 2023. On average every person on the planet breathes out about 1 kilogramme of carbon dioxide every day. Multiply that by the global population and we have over 8 million tonnes of CO2 being breathed out every day or around 3 billion tonnes a year. That is just the human population. Add all the animals on the planet and CO2 emissions just from breathing are close to 20 times the CO2 emissions from heating, transport and all other industrial processes in the UK How would our Greenie enthusiasts like to deal with that. Euthanasia?
Enjoy the climate. Nothing we do will have a measurable impact on it. The smart thing to do is to adapt to climate change. Any attempt to control the climate is futile.
