Liberal Forum

Some time ago, I sent Professor Richard Lindzen an estimate of how much warming a straight-line progress to net zero emissions by all nations on Earth would achieve. He was intrigued. Now – with the stellar team of Professors Happer and van Wiijngaarden – he has prepared a short paper, now published by our friends at the CO2 Coalition, that offers a scientific answer to that question

:https://co2coalition.org/publications/n ... e-increase

By chance, on receiving news of the new paper, I was putting the finishing touches for a paper by my own team that covers the same subject matter. Our paper is intended for publication in an economics journal, where, like all papers presenting a serious and scientifically credible challenge to the official catastrophe narrative, it will probably be rejected out of hand, not because it is wrong but because it is right.This article will briefly describe the two methodologies for answering the question “How much warming would net zero by 2050 prevent?”Both approaches start by assuming that all nations (not just the West, against which the international climate accords are selectively targeted) move linearly together from their current emissions to net zero, achieving it by 2050.First, here is the abstract from the professors’ paper

–Net Zero Averted Temperature Increase

Using feedback-free estimates of the warming by increased atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and observed rates of increase, we estimate that if the United States (U.S.) eliminated net CO2 emissions by the year 2050, this would avert a warming of 0.0084 C (0.015 F), which is below our ability to accurately measure. If the entire world forced net zero CO2 emissions by the year 2050, a warming of only 0.070 C (0.13 F) would be averted. If one assumes that the warming is a factor of 4 larger because of positive feedbacks, as asserted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the warming averted by a net zero U.S. policy would still be very small, 0.034 C (0.061 F). For worldwide net zero emissions by 2050 and the 4-times larger IPCC climate sensitivity, the averted warming would be 0.28 C (0.50 F).The professors start by assuming that direct warming by an anthropogenic forcing equivalent to doubling the CO2 in the air compared with 1850, before adding any feedback response, will be about 0.75 C, while IPCC’s midrange final warming, after adding feedback response, is four times greater, at 3 C.The professors take today’s CO2 concentration as 427 ppmv, which, on current trends, would rise by 64 ppmv to 491 ppmv by 2050, the official target date for net zero. Since the CO2 forcing is an approximately logarithmic function of concentration, the direct warming from now to 2050 on business as usual would be 1 C x log2(491 / 427), or about 0.15 C.They then estimate that one-eighth of the 64 ppmv increase in concentration from now to 2050 – i.e., 8 ppmv, of which about half, or 4 ppmv, would be abated if the US alone attained net zero by 2050, reducing the 491 ppmv otherwise-projected CO2 concentration in 2050 to 487 ppmv.Then, if the rest of the world went on emitting as at present, the economic sacrifice of the U.S. in alone attaining net zero would reduce the 0.15 C warming by 2050 by just 0.01 C to 0.14 C. Even if one assumed, as IPCC does, that feedback response would triple or quadruple the 0.75 C direct warming by doubled CO2, U.S. net zero would decrease global temperature by only 1/30th C by 2050, while global net zero would reduce it by little more than 1/4 C.Our own approach is even simpler than that of the professors. First, here is our abstract –

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https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/06/13/ ... 0-prevent/

 
 

Our analysis goes a little further than that of the Professors. We look at the global cost of attaining net zero emissions. We begin with one of the few genuine cost figures available, since there has been a concerted effort to conceal the true cost from the public.

The global cost of attaining net zero, extrapolated pro rata from the estimated $3.8 trillion cost of net-zeroing the UK power grid, which accounts for just 25% of all UK emissions, which in turn represent only 0.8% of all global emissions, might reach $2 quadrillion:

Each $1 billion spent might prevent only one 20-millionth of a degree of global warming by 2050. Even if value for money were ten times better than that (which it is not), expenditure on emissions abatement would have no rational justification:

If everybody rode horses and built campfires for warmth, how would that effect the climate.