Climate Alarmists, just how full of S#!$ are they? Let’s get into it!

Live as long as I have and one thing that you may recognise is that just about every decade there has been some sort of global emergency or crisis. Back in 1960, the Club of Rome declared that all of the petroleum would be used up and food resources would be gone by the year 2000, and yet here we are still driving petrol cars and eating steak.

In the 1970s, it was a threat of an impending ice age that we got scared about, Then, in the 1980s it was the ozone layer that would lead us all to get skin cancer and die, yet you will still see me outside on a sunny day. In the 1990s it was big tech and the Y2K problem that would see all of the computers that control our world stop functioning leading to a global breakdown, yet nothing happened. 

In the noughties we get scared by an imminent melting of the icecaps and the impending flooding of coastlines, yet those like Obama and Kerry who were some of the greatest climate alarmists still went out and bought beach front properties a mere metre above sea level. 

None of these things happened, yet we are still expected to believe them when they tell us that global warming is real and we can no longer drive our car to the store to buy groceries. 

In the UK and most of Europe, emissions actually peaked in 1970 and have been fallen rapidly since.  Global CO2 emissions have been flat for the past ten years but since 2005 have actually dropped by 22%—yet global temperatures continue to rise. 

A couple of important facts to remember: China is building coal fired electric plants with wild abandon so that they can power the factories that make all of the components for your electric car. 

Also the worlds container ships, some of which transport the raw materials for you EVs and then the finished product to market, as they ply the oceans, emit more CO2 than all the cars in the UK. If you think not taking your car to grocery shop is going to save the world you are truly deluded.  

But is there global warming? Well yes of course. The better question would be, is it really bad for us and what should we do about it? There is no easy response to that question, however I am sure the answer is not as easy as converting all the cars to EVs and the real cause is something that we can do very little about.

The world has got warmer since records started sometime in the 1870’s but then the world had just experienced a mini-ice age. Looking at ice core data from Greenland it would appear that a mere two thousand years ago when the Romans ruled most of the ‘known’ world global temperatures were at least 3-4 degrees hotter, when there was no coal fired power plants or gas guzzling super cars.

By why has CO2 got such a bad rap? Isn’t it the gas of life? There is but 0.04% CO2 in our atmosphere, less than 400 ppm. It is what plants need on to survive, if the level falls below 200ppm then plants can no longer grow. 

In 1875 the level was about 278, so getting perilously close to disaster. With higher CO2 plants grow more, crop yields go up we should call it the gas of life. 

Yet politicians and NGO’s and hemp trouser wearing hippies still want to demonise it. 

More Co2 equals bigger plants

In actual fact, world temperatures are more controlled by the Milankovitch Cycle than the stuff that comes out of the tail pipe of your car or even from under the tail of a cow. But should we allow the very same politicians that got it wrong since the 1960s to experiment with global weather engineering when they cannot even fix simple things like the homeless problem and universal health care?

So EVs are going to save us!  Not on your Nelly. To put it simply, they are nowhere near as green or carbon neutral as they would have us believe. Most grids that supply the factories that produce the materials for the construction of them are coal fired. 

This gives a carbon-breakeven time for the vehicles of between 5 and 10 years, and let us not forget that most battery packs only last for 7 to 8 years.

But here is the rub. To go 100% EV we need to produce twice as much copper, four times as much chrome and nickel, ten times as much lithium and there isn’t enough cobalt in the world to go around.  Never in human history has it been possible to double the amount of mainline material production in a decade but that is what is asked of today’s miners.

As global populations peak and start to fall by the middle of the century the world will heal itself, but in the mean time innovation is the key, to produce leaner and greener cars that go further for less. Stop the destruction of carbon sinks like the rain forests will also help but by the time any of this happens I will be long dead so I am not truly sure that I care.

One last thought, bad news sells; below is a graph generated by NASA, looks like the media can only sell bad news.