Cop28 President Says There Is ‘No Science’ Behind Demands For Phase-Out Of Fossil Fuels Scientists Respond: "Liar! Liar! Climate Denier!"

It would be hilarious if it weren’t quite so serious and these ‘scientists’ did not hold virtually the entire western world in thrall to their pseudoscientific rantings re. a mythical ‘climate crisis’ which can be solved only by the insane Net Zero carbon agenda, a policy which is batshit crazy on every level you care to think of: socio-economic, technological, scientific, environmental, ethical, philosophical even. Net Zero fails the test of credibility in all major areas of human thought and endeavour - but still the climate crazies are pushing it, not just like there was no tomorrow, but that there is no tomorrow if we don’t sign up immediately to their Cloud Cuckoo Land fantasies and repent forthwith of our carbon sins.

The Guardian (of course) reports on the heretical utterances of Sultan Al Jaber, who is president of the Conference of the Parties IPCC annual jamboree currently taking place in Dubai, otherwise known as COP 28.

The president of Cop28, Sultan Al Jaber, has claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting can reveal.

Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”.

The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN secretary general, António Guterres.

Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on 21 November.

Robinson is one of those woke, white, middle class nutters who thinks that man-made climate change is misogynist, racist, patriarchal and bigoted and thus what is required is a ‘just’ energy transition:

Al Jaber spoke with Robinson at a She Changes Climate event. Robinson said: “We’re in an absolute crisis that is hurting women and children more than anyone … and it’s because we have not yet committed to phasing out fossil fuel. That is the one decision that Cop28 can take and in many ways, because you’re head of Adnoc, you could actually take it with more credibility.”

Understandably, Al Jaber found her idiotic comments to be exasperating:

Al Jaber said: “I accepted to come to this meeting to have a sober and mature conversation. I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”

Robinson challenged him further, saying: “I read that your company is investing in a lot more fossil fuel in the future.” Al Jaber responded: “You’re reading your own media, which is biased and wrong. I am telling you I am the man in charge.”

Al Jaber then said: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

“I don’t think [you] will be able to help solve the climate problem by pointing fingers or contributing to the polarisation and the divide that is already happening in the world. Show me the solutions. Stop the pointing of fingers. Stop it,” Al Jaber said.

Now the ‘scientists’ have weighed in:

Prof Sir David King, the chair of the Climate Crisis Advisory Group and a former UK chief scientific adviser, said: “It is incredibly concerning and surprising to hear the Cop28 president defend the use of fossil fuels. It is undeniable that to limit global warming to 1.5C we must all rapidly reduce carbon emissions and phase-out the use of fossil fuels by 2035 at the latest. The alternative is an unmanageable future for humanity.”

Dr Friederike Otto, of Imperial College London, UK, said: “The science of climate change has been clear for decades: we need to stop burning fossil fuels. A failure to phase out fossil fuels at Cop28 will put several millions more vulnerable people in the firing line of climate change. This would be a terrible legacy for Cop28.”

Otto also rejected the claim that fossil fuels were necessary for development in poorer countries, saying that the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “shows that the UN’s sustainable development goals are not achievable by continuing the current fossil-driven high emission economies. [There are] massive co-benefits that come with changing to a fossil-free world”.

So, is Al Jaber right that there is no science which supports the abandonment of fossil fuels to prevent us exceeding the limit of 1.5C? Almost. More correctly, there is only politically motivated ‘science’ underpinning the supposed 1.5C ‘dangerous threshold’ and its proposed avoidance by phasing out fossil fuels. It is certainly not as ‘clear’ or ‘undeniable’ as ‘experts’ like King and Otto would have us believe.

The basis of the ‘science’ of the 1.5C global warming limit was the 2018 IPCC SR15 report. Nic Lewis, writing at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc site, had something rather interesting to say about that ‘science’:

It seems fairly extraordinary to me that the AR5 post-2010 carbon budget for 1.5°C, which was only published four years ago, has in effect been now been increased by ~700 GtCO₂ – equal to 21st century emissions to date – despite SR15’s projections of future warming being based very largely on the transient climate response to cumulative emissions (TCRE) range exhibited by the models used in AR5.

So, the remaining carbon budget from 1 January 2011 for a 66% probability of keeping below 1.5°C has been increased by 460 GtCO₂, from 400 to 860 GtCO₂ – more than doubled. Deducting the estimated 290 GtCO₂ emissions during the 2011 to 2017 period,^[xii] the change from 1 January 2018 is from 110 GtCO₂ to 570 GtCO₂ – over five times as high.

In just a few years, the ‘science’ changed pretty drastically obviously, in order to accommodate the new 1.5C carbon budget. But how could it? More to the point, why would it? Nic provides us with a possible answer to the first question:

Why is there a huge discrepancy between the AR5 and the SR15 carbon budgets, when the TCRE range used in SR15 is almost the same as the TCRE range of the ESMs used to derive the AR5 carbon budgets?

SR15 claims that Figure 2.3 (a version of which is reproduced below as Figure 1) illustrates that ‘the change since AR5 is, in very large part, due to the application of a more recent observed baseline to the historic temperature change and cumulative emissions’.

SR15 states that the increase in carbon budgets is due ‘in very large part’ to the baseline change, indicating that it does not account for the whole of the increase. The cause of the remainder of the increase must logically be that SR15 projects lower warming relative to CO₂ emissions post 2010 than does AR5.

That doesn’t sound like undeniable settled science to me. But it actually gets worse. Nic says:

Despite these close links between the SR15 and AR5 bases for deriving carbon emission budgets, the SR15 remaining carbon budgets are far higher than those in AR5. The budget for a 50% probability of meeting the 1.5°C target is 510 GtCO₂ larger. SR15 says that this increase is very largely due to the updating to 2005–2016 of the early historical period observational baseline for temperature and cumulative carbon emissions. While the explanation SR15 gives for the increase in the carbon budgets since AR5 may be literally correct, it obscures the true influence of the various factors involved. The re-baselining of cumulative carbon emissions actually results in a 210 GtCO₂ reduction in the remaining carbon budget, due to an upwards re-estimation of pre-2010 CO₂ emissions. Therefore, changes relating to temperature account for a 720 GtCO₂ increase in the SR15 50% probability 1.5°C budget over the corresponding AR5 budget. Noting SR15’s finding that the observed warming matches warming simulated by the full set of AR5 CMIP5 models when calculated on the same basis, I deduce that this 720 GtCO₂ increase can be divided into:

• approximately 180 GtCO₂ due to lower projected post-2010 warming relative to post-2010 cumulative CO₂ The lower projected warming appears to be due partly to AR5 having used a subset of ESMs with atypically high TCREs to derive its budgets and partly to SR15 estimating lower non-CO₂ warming (and possibly also to other, unidentified, factors);

• a balance of 540 GtCO₂ relating to changing the measure of warming up to 2010 from a model-simulation basis to an observational basis, which may be allocated approximately

  • half (270 GtCO₂) to the models used for the AR5 budgets warming more by 2010 than do the full set of AR5 CMIP5 models, and

  • half (270 GtCO₂) to changing the measure of past warming from globally-complete near-surface air temperature to a blend of SAT over land and SST over ocean, as measured, on a globally-incomplete basis, by the average of four observational temperature records.

What’s the betting that the new SR15 carbon budgets will also turn out to be unrealistically low?

In summary, the ‘experts’ adjusted their carbon budget for IPCC SR15 1.5C global warming by a huge amount relative to the IPCC AR5 report published just a few years earlier because their projected warming failed to match the observed warming and then they adjusted their future projected warming to account for this. That’s ‘clear, settled, undeniable science’ for you!

But what was the impetus (the ‘why’) for the IPCC SR15 special report on 1.5C global warming anyway? Was it an irresistible urge by the experts to demonstrate in greater detail the ‘settled science’ to the public, thus informing us further of the need to reduce our planet destroying emissions of GHGs? No, it wasn’t. The motivation behind SR15 was purely political:

So you see, it was the politicians who pushed for the report on the 1.5C threshold and up until then, there existed no ‘science’ which differentiated the alleged impacts of a 1.5C warmer world and a 2C warmer world; in particular there was no ‘science’ which outlined the extreme weather impacts which could be expected at 1.5C and beyond. That was all made up in retrospect, on the hop, by the ‘experts’, no doubt with the assistance of very generous research grants and offers of prestigious new appointments. So Al Jaber is basically right: there was no science; the experts invented the science only after the politicians pushed them to do so. Many of them were more than willing to be pushed, I’ll wager.

Finally, Mike Hulme of Manchester University, has been very critical of the 1.5C target and associated carbon budget:

The publication of the IPCC Special Report on global warming of 1.5 oC paved the way for the rise of the political rhetoric of setting a fixed deadline for decisive actions on climate change. However, the dangers of such deadline rhetoric suggest the need for the IPCC to take responsibility for its report and openly challenge the credibility of such a deadline. In October 2018, the IPCC released its Special Report on global warming of 1.5 °C (SR15), which concluded that global temperature is likely to reach 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels between 2030 and 2052 if the current rate of warming continues1. Sensational news headlines interpreting this as a 12-year deadline for the world to avoid catastrophic climate change2 sparked widespread calls for urgent radical actions, ranging from the Green New Deal proposal in the United States to the youth activism of climate school strikes around the world, civil disobedience by the Extinction Rebellion group and the declaration of a climate emergency by the UK parliament. The world suddenly seems to have limited time in which to act decisively on climate change — and, if not, to be resigned to our climate fate. This rise of ‘climate deadline-ism’ is, in some ways, a product of long-standing scientific (and political) endeavours to quantify what is ‘dangerous’ climate change. First articulated as a peak temperature target, this was then converted to a finite carbon budget and is now expressed as a fixed deadline after which policy interventions are deemed to be ‘too late’. This discursive translation of danger may help to increase a sense of urgency, as evidenced by the recent emergence of a youth climate movement. However, it also creates the condition in which a climate emergency is being rashly declared, a move that could lead to politically dangerous consequences.

Hulme asks the question:

Insomuch as the rhetoric of a 2030 deadline arises from political (mis)use of science in setting an artificial deadline, this poses a crucial question to scientists, and specifically to the scientists in the IPCC. What is a responsible response to the politics of deadline-ism for the IPCC as the authoritative voice of climate science?

King and Otto and others have given their answer: the science is settled, clear, undeniable and any questioning of the scientific legitimacy of the 1.5C limit and the urgent need to drastically reduce emissions to avoid breaching it is “verging on climate denial” and “incredibly concerning”. So there. Behave yourself Sultan.