The Reverse Green Energy Cargo Cult

San Francisco CA

Description

I couldn't help but notice a most curious phenomenon that has recently gripped Western Europe, which very much looks like a cargo cult, but in reverse. In a classic cargo cult, native tribes that have become inured to the indignity of regular airlifts providing them with humanitarian relief in the form of, say, beer and pizza, when deprived of this affront to their native dignity, take to building fake airstrips with fake control towers and bonfires for runway lights in the hopes of luring more transport planes laden with aforementioned beer and pizza. In a reverse cargo cult, native tribes, that have become inured to the indignity of regular airlifts providing humanitarian relief in the form of, say, beer and pizza, having suddenly become cognizant of the deleterious effect of beer and pizza on public health, Arctic permafrost or planetary alignment, take to barricading the landing strips and dismantling the control towers in the hopes of preventing the landing of more transport planes laden with aforementioned beer and pizza. The natives then remain hungry and sober until sanity returns and air traffic is restored. The latter scenario is what seems to be unfolding in the European Union of late, where the native tribes have made strenuous efforts to limit their access to Russian-supplied beer and pizza, instead switching to eating grass and drinking swamp water—figuratively speaking: by beer and pizza I mean natural gas and coal and by grass and swamp water I mean wind turbines and solar panels. And by blocking runways and dismantling control towers I mean blocking or delaying the construction of South Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, gambling with their own energy security by tying the pricing of long-term natural gas contracts to casino-like futures markets, and playing political games with pipelines that run through Poland and the Ukraine. Lastly, the assumed deleterious effect of beer and pizza on public health, Arctic permafrost or planetary alignment is analogous to the assumed planet-destroying effects of CO2 emissions from burning hydrocarbons. If you find such analogies outlandish, please let me explain. Right at the outset, let us dispense with a certain shibboleth, which is that it is possible to de-carbonize the global economy, driving it to net-zero carbon dioxide emissions. Net-zero is a political goal, like "a war to end all wars" or "clean coal" or "a balanced budget" and has nothing to do with reality. Various governments have pledged to pursue such a goal, based on some scientific research which we will get to in a bit, but then Bank of America has recently come out with a study [https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/one-bank-reveals-dismal-truth-about-150-trillion-crusade-against-climate-change] which examines the true cost of such an endeavor and demonstrates that it is utterly unrealistic. For the entire world to achieve net-zero in 30 years, they calculate, would require $150 trillion of investment, or $5 trillion a year. This exceeds all existing infrastructure investment for the entire world and there is no room in the budgets for more; therefore, this sum would need to be printed into existence. But doing so would trigger hyperinflation ("inflationary shock" is their preferred euphemism) after which point no further capital investment would be possible and no amount of money-printing would produce any result other than even more hyperinflation. A readily available alternative is to simply curtail the use of fossil fuels and let everyone freeze and starve in the dark. This happens to be Europe's strategy at the moment, pursued via the reverse cargo cult of blocking Russian energy imports. The "cargo" aspect is obvious: it consists of the various types of fossil fuel carried by bulk carriers, coal cars, liquefied natural gas tankers and natural gas pipelines. The "cult" aspect requires a more extensive explanation: the reason everyone must freeze and starve in the dark is because burning fossil fuels emits carbon dioxide. And the reason carbon dioxide is bad is that according to The Science, it is about to trigger climate catastrophe unless we stop burning fossil fuels, or it will be too late, with the "too late" point in time generally advancing in real time for decades now. This is a key feature of most apocalyptic cults: whenever the date on which the world is supposed to come to a calamitous conclusion passes without incident, it is simply moved forward while the cult leaders pretend that there is nothing to see here, everyone move along now. For example, Al Gore's 2008 prediction of an ice-free Arctic by 2013: that year came and went, there is now more ice in the Arctic than there was then, and yet Gore did not gouge out his eyes and go wander in the wilderness like Oedipus. This is rather typical of doomsday cults in general. It is a telltale sign of a cult that The Science may not be questioned. Any doubts you express will be met with an incredulous look, and if you persist, you will be labeled a "climate denialist" and chased down by maddened crowds shouting "Crucify him!" If any conversation with the cult's adherents is possible at all, it will hinge on the idea that catastrophic climate change due to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions happens to be the scientific consensus. It is not, but that doesn't matter, because in any case actual science (as opposed to The Science) does not function on the basis of opinion or consensus, scientific or otherwise. In the phrase "the vast majority of scientists agree that" you can replace "scientists" with "English majors" and the significance, or lack thereof, of the sentence would not change a bit. "The vast majority of English majors agree that because of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions they like to move it move it." Fine, let that be as it may. I spent a decade working as an engineer on various high-profile science experiments and drank many a beer with various scientists. This has given me a good perspective on the scientific endeavor. One noticeable aspect of it is the high degree of specialization: scientists tend to know a lot about their own discipline and much less about all the others. An ornithologist and a herpetologist might hold forth on plate tectonics but quiet right the hell down as soon as a geophysicist walks into the room. But what all scientists must be clear on, and agree on, in order to be scientists, are some basic rules. A hypothesis is a proposition whose truth value can only be determined by experiment or observation. Once tested against reality and found to be valid, it is promoted to a theory which can then be used to make further predictions. All hypotheses have a right to exist but only some are chosen to be tested experimentally because resources are limited, and the determination is based on available evidence, hunches, gut feelings and, last but not least, politics. If a theory's predictions turn out to be too inaccurate to be of practical use, or if a better theory is found, it is discarded. A scientific theory is a tool—not an object of public adulation or a litmus test for political party membership. The idea that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will cause catastrophic global warming is not a theory—it is a hypothesis, since all that has been observed so far are some climate fluctuations and a minor average global temperature increase since the very end of the pre-industrial era, whereas temporary warm-ups of a similar order of magnitude have occurred during the pre-industrial era itself. In order to be promoted to the status of a theory, this hypothesis has to be confirmed by observation. This is rather tricky, because even if catastrophic global warming were to be observed during the rather short expected lifetime of human civilization, it would still have to be proven, somehow, that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions are its primary cause. It seems like a remarkably bad idea to misspend trillions of dollars of public funds on an untested hypothesis. "But then it would be too late!" cult members might cry out in anguish. Too late for what? For making even more unfounded predictions of looming climate catastrophe and then moving along quietly when they fail to be fulfilled? Thank heavens for that! There was a similarly unproven hypothesis used as a basis of international policy before: the one used as the rationale for the Montreal Protocol of 1987. According to that hypothesis, chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants were destroying the ozone layer which blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation and threatening us with skin cancer and cataracts. As evidence of this effect, data was shown of expanding holes in the ozone layer over the north pole during the arctic winter and the south pole over the antarctic winter. An alternative hypothesis is that unstable ozone (O3) molecules are formed temporarily out of stable oxygen (O2) molecules by the effect of solar radiation, and that holes over the poles form during their respective winters because it's dark there. Data in favor of this hypothesis include the fact that an ozone hole over Antarctica was observed decades before that time, when CFCs were not yet invented, and that banning CFCs has not made it any smaller. It has then become clear that the Montreal Protocol was a clever ruse to provide transnational chemical companies with an unfair competitive advantage, although you'd be hard-pressed to find information on this in English because of internet censorship. [https://regnum.ru/news/innovatio/2225258.html] When formulating hypotheses to test experimentally, there is an obvious need to focus on the more promising ones because of limited resources. But no such pressure should exist when it comes to hypotheses with regard to climate, which cannot be tested experimentally and can only be evaluated based on measurements that will take many centuries to collect—unless that pressure is political. Politics aside, there is a perfectly good reason to consider the hypothesis that increased atmospheric CO2 will cause global cooling rather than global warming. The proposed mechanism is as follows. Increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations will absorb increasing amounts of solar infrared radiation (within a narrow range), preventing it from reaching the surface and warming it. They will also prevent some amount of infrared radiation reradiated by the surface from directly escaping to space, but that's a minor effect, since most of the surface heat loss is through convection (warm air rises) and evaporation (phase transition of H2O from liquid to gas), not through radiation. If you want to test this hypothesis, you can run the following very cheap experiment. Take a piece of glass, which blocks some of the solar radiation, and suspend it in full mid-day sunlight some arbitrary distance above a patch of ground (say, 1m). After waiting a while, measure the temperature of the ground in the shadow of the glass and right outside it. Observe that the temperature of the ground in the shadow of the glass is lower, not higher, than the temperature of the ground that is in direct sunlight. "But that's no way to build a greenhouse!" a precocious schoolchild might exclaim at this point. "Where are its walls?" And the schoolchild would of course be quite right: this would be a faulty greenhouse, and "the greenhouse effect" is a faulty metaphor. Greenhouses do not function by blocking infrared radiation reradiated by the ground from escaping to space; they work by blocking warm air from escaping the volume of the greenhouse by virtue of having an airtight roof and airtight walls. If you poke a bunch of large holes in the roof a greenhouse, the temperature inside it will fall below that of the outside. From this you might conclude, using your own native mental faculties, that not all is as unequivocal with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis as some would like you to believe, and also that my children are more likely than most to be sent to the principal's office for declaring that "global warming is bullshit." Of course, I would prefer them to instead say that "the hypothesis that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions cause catastrophic global warming has not been verified and is suspect to begin with because it appears to be politically motivated," but that's a bit of a mouthful for a child, so "bullshit" remains, for now, an acceptable approximation. Although most reasonable people can be persuaded to concede that the above hypothesis has not been proven since the events it predicts haven't transpired yet, they may point to computer climate models that predict them and claim that this is sufficient to warrant immediate action. Alas, computer models cannot be trusted unless they have been validated through experiment or observation. For instance, computer simulations are used, and trusted to be reasonably accurate, in the design of all sorts of critical infrastructure, but that is only because they have been thoroughly validated through lab testing on actual physical components and are applied within domains where all variables can be maintained within predetermined limits. Earth's climate is not such a domain and climate models have not been validated against it over meaningfully long periods of time. One also sometimes hears the claim that if climate models can model the climate's past, they can also be trusted to predict the climate's future. People who make this claim should perhaps first attempt to demonstrate its validity it on a system that is much smaller and simpler than the planetary climate—such as the stock market. Doing so would have the positive side effect of making stock brokers and investors laugh really hard; laughter triggers the release of endorphins which can temporarily relieve the pain of severe financial losses. This brings us back to the climate scientists (and/or English majors who want to move it move it because of carbon dioxide), 99.9% of whom agree that, to quote their champion Greta Thunberg, "blah-blah-blah." Are they real scientists, or are they political fakes? Real scientists are a diverse bunch. Many of them toil in obscurity on areas of research that are only of interest to themselves, driven by scientific curiosity: to them, something is worth studying simply because it isn't properly understood yet. Some periodically hit upon something that medics or engineers find tremendously useful, but this is rare. Some call themselves scientists but work on such problems as making alkaline substances in toothpaste not taste quite so nasty. A few do work that is actually evil, such as making coronaviruses more infectious and more lethal. And then there are those scientists who use scientific terminology and techniques to pursue a political agenda or to gain a commercial advantage through unfair competition. It would be most useful if they had some physical distinguishing characteristics such as grotesquely elongated noses or trousers permanently ablaze, but unfortunately they look much like all the others. However, they do have two distinguishing characteristics: they are often found accompanied by politicians and industry lobbyists; and their research tends to be lavishly funded and its product, facetiously called "The Science," is breathlessly reported in the press. To understand why made-to-order climate science is being so lavishly funded and so loudly trumpeted, all we need to do is to ask and answer the usual question: Quo bono?—Who benefits? It is being funded and trumpeted mostly by Western countries, which are united in being profligate users of fossil fuels while being resource-poor and import-dependent. They have formerly also been united in having lots of money to throw at renewable energy subsidies, which they could print at will, not so much to replace their fossil fuel consumption (that wouldn't work) but to signal to the whole world how virtuous they are in saving the planet from a made-up climate catastrophe. Faced with the prospective of having to pay more and more for ever-dwindling energy imports, they hatched a clever plan: to place tariffs on all imports based on their assumed carbon footprint: the amount of carbon dioxide emitted in the course of their production. And since the West, having invested in wind turbines an