My Lords, members of the House of Commons and distinguished guests of the Mother of Parliaments:
Global warming is no threat. However, the net zero policy that you have made in this place poses a strategic and even terminal threat to the economy and security of the UK, and of the wider West.
Parliament has founded its policy upon the naïve belief that there exists a “consensus” about global warming. Yet 2400 years ago Aristotle showed that argument from “consensus” conflates two logical fallacies: mere headcount and appeal to the supposed authority of imagined and, as will be shown, imaginary experts.
This paper of 2013, from Queensland, is why you believed, without checking, that there was a “consensus”. It said 97% of almost 12,000 climate science papers over 21 years had stated that global warming was chiefly manmade. Note that that “consensus” proposition does not say global warming will be dangerous.
Yet that did not stop Mr Obama, as well as Ministers in this place, from asserting, falsely, that 97% of climate scientists had agreed that global warming is or may become “dangerous”. There was and is no such agreement among the scientific community.
This correction paper shows that the authors of the original paper had themselves marked only 65 of their 12,000 papers as having said that global warming was mostly manmade. Of these, only 41, or just 0.3%, had actually said that. The “consensus” on which you have founded your net zero policy is not 97%. It is 0.3%.
A concerned citizen of Queensland complained to the police. They investigated and concluded that the original paper that had contrived the “consensus” had constituted a ‘deception’ . By then the lead author had found it expedient, for whatever reasons, to leave Australia.
You have founded your policy also upon the notion that worldwide warmer weather is an “existential threat.”
In reality, and for very good reason, it is proving and will continue to prove handsomely net-beneficial.
Though global population has quadrupled in the past century of global warming, since 1920 deaths worldwide by extreme weather have declined by 99%. Where is the “existential threat”?
In every region, cold kills ten times as many as heat (in Africa 40-50 times), as paper after paper in the medico-scientific journals attests. Warmer weather saves lives. Where is the “existential threat”?
Research even for the European Commission, God bless its little cotton socks, shows that, even with up to 5.4 degrees’ warming over the next 60 years (which will not happen), the greater the warming the greater the net lives saved in the EU. Cold, not heat, is the real killer. Where is the “existential threat”?
The world is also greening, literally. The total biomass of all trees and plants on Earth, the net primary productivity of flora, has increased by 15-30% in just 25 years. Chlorophyll fluorescence measured from space shows that more CO2 in the air is the direct cause of this greening. Where, then, is the “existential threat”?
Global acreage under cereals has not changed in 60 years, but the yield is now equivalent to the original yield from thrice that acreage – three planets’worth. There is a Planet B, and even a Planet C. The global harvest set a new record in 2023. Where is the “existential threat”?
There are seven times more cuddly polar bears than in the 1940s, and three times more than in the 1960s – hardly, as you may think, the profile of a species at imminent threat of extinction. Where is the “existential threat”?
Each successive IPCC report has had to cut predicted sealevel rise. This is an IPCC graph. Where is the “existential threat”? King Canute taught his courtiers 1000 years ago that even the divinely-anointed monarch could not influence sea level. Why, then, have you presumed to ignore that wise king’s wise lesson?
The West is almost alone in squandering trillions on net zero. You have set us at a dangerous terms-of-trade disadvantage against other nations. High prices here for fuel and power are driving our manufacturing industries out. Our last major steelworks is closing because it cannot afford to turn on the furnaces.
All those trillions you spend on net zero are achieving nothing. Man’s influence on temperature has increased in a straight line ever since IPCC’s first report in 1990. NB: The green band shows that the latest attack on a Western industry, this time on meat, has no scientific basis: methane’s influence on temperature is unchanged in 33 yr.
The human influence on temperature is increasing with global consumption of coal, oil and gas. But how come? Have we not shown “international climate leadership” by trashing our economies and wastefully shutting down our coal-fired power stations, the cheapest source of power, decades before the end of their lives?
Some 70% of primary-energy growth is either in developing nations exempt from any obligation, legal, moral or other, to cut emissions, or in the four Communist-led giants of the East, Russia and China, India and Pakistan, accounting for two-thirds of global emissions. These four exempt themselves from any such obligation.
India is increasing coal power by 60%, Pakistan by 300%. In 2023, China added 23 new 2 GW coal stations to its fleet of 1200, and aims to add more. Russia has virtually no wind and solar. Why? Because coal is cheap. Result: electricity prices here are 3x the US and 7x the East. Manufacturing & energy use are tumbling here, on your watch.
The Russian Academy of Sciences and the Chinese and Indian leaderships, as well as President Trump’s chief of staff, all sought briefings from S.T.A.G. on the scientific result that will now be outlined. Within one week of receiving a onepage brief on that result, Mr Trump took the US out of the Paris climate accords.
Climatologists borrowing math from control theory, in which they are not experts, made a grave error. They imaginedthat 1 degree of direct warming by doubled CO2 would become up to 4 degrees’ final warming after adding feedback response to more water vapor (itself a greenhouse gas) in air directly warmed by our emissions.
Their method left out the largest temperature signal in the climate by orders of magnitude: the sunshine or emission temperature. Therefore, based on data for the temperature equilibrium in 1850, they thought the midrange feedback multiplier would be about 3.5. However, in effect, they had forgotten the Sun is shining.
They should have added the 260 K sunshine temperature to the numerator and denominator of the feedback multiplier, which is not 3.5 but just 1.075. Then final warming by doubled CO2 is the product of 1 K direct warming by doubled CO2 and the true feedback multiplier 1.075. Thus, final warming by doubled CO2 is just 1.1 K.
Real-world measurement shows which method is right. The 3.5 units’ total manmade influence on temperature since 1850 is equal to that from doubling CO2 in the air. Thus, final warming by doubled CO2 equals the measured warming since 1850. That is 1.1 K, as the corrected method including the sunshine shows it should be.
What if the feedback multiplier has changed since 1850? By the corrected method, feedback multipliers of 1.08 and 1.09 would yield IPCC’s 2 K and 5 K final warmings by doubled CO2. Yet attainment of anything like so fine a precision as 0.01 is impossible. Feedback analysis, then, cannot be used in predicting global warming.
Nevertheless, IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report of 2021 mentions “feedback” >2500 times.Yet it is using an incorrect method, and using it incorrectly – a double error. Therefore, all of IPCC’s predictions, in all its reports, are no better than mere guesswork. They provide no basis for your policy-making whatsoever.
Some years ago, the deputy director of the Russian Academy of Sciences asked S.T.A.G. to explain this result to Russia’s chief climate modeller, who grasped it at once. He left immediately, saying he would reprogram the Russian model. As is visible here, he did so. Yet your net zero policy is based on other models’ over-predictions.
There is thus no need to do anything about the small, slow, harmless, net-beneficial warming, except to sit back and enjoy the sunshine that climate scientists forgot. In any event, even global net zero would make practically no difference to mean temperature by the target year, 2050, and even then only at disproportionate cost.
Even if all nations went straight from current emissions to net zero by 2050, only half the 0.9 units’ expected straight-line increase from 2024-2050 would be abated. That would cut warming by just 1/5 C; or 1/10 C after correcting climatologists’ error; or 1/30 C if only the West got to net zero, or 1/1000 C from UK net zero alone.
What, then, would be the cost of attaining net zero by 2050, and thus of cutting 1/1000 C in the UK, as part of just 1/10 C globally by that target year?
McKinseys have estimated the cost as half of global corporate profits. But even that enormous sum is a gross underestimate.
More realistically, the UK grid authority assesses the cost of preparing the grid for net zero as $3.8 trillion. But the grid accounts for only a quarter of total UK emissions, so UK-wide net zero would cost $15.2 trillion pro rata. Yet the Climate Change Committee admits to only $1.3 trillion, showing how little it knows about anything.
Global net zero would then cost $2 quadrillion pro rata. Thus, each $1 billion the world spent on attempting – futilely – to attain net zero would reduce global temperature by less than one 20-millionth of a degree –the worst value for money in the history of macroeconomics since the construction of the Great Wall of China.
Worse, a racialist immorality lurks at the very heart of your net-zero policy. Africa is desperate for electrical power. It has coal in plenty; coal-fired stations are cheap to build, efficient and easy to run and maintain; and their only significant emission is CO2, which, as we have seen, is proving net-beneficial.
However, importuned by a single Communist-led front group posing as an environmental lobby, bank after bank, and then even the British Government, has adopted a policy of not lending to African nations for the coal generation that powered our industrial revolution, and by which they fervently hope to power theirs.
S.T.A.G.’s satellite shows the result of your cruel policy. Africa remains, literally, the dark continent. Since the West will no longer help that continent to develop, you have driven its leaders into the arms of Russia and China. The unwisdom of your policy, as daft as it is cruel, becomes daily more self-evident.
Your voters are frightened of you, and of the cost to them, in freedom as well as in treasure, as you dismantle the free market in energy and in so many fields dependent upon it.
The sheer quantity of policies that urgently need changing shows how much economic freedom you have destroyed.
Here are still more of your policies that must be changed if Britain’s economy is to be allowed to recover from the terminal damage to the lives, health, well-being and fortunes of your electors that your net zero policy is pointlessly but expensively causing.
In good conscience, then, the Government can now abandon the dash towards economic hara-kiri and scrap net zero. If it acts now, its most seasoned strategist, consulted by S.T.A.G., says it will win the coming election “by a country mile”.
So, my Lords and Commons, think again.
