"We need courageous leaders who will withdraw from the Paris Agreement"

 

"The lead-up to the COP 28 climate conference ... had a consistent theme: previous COPs have done an okay job of restricting fossil fuels in the name of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but this one needs to restrict fossil fuel use far faster so as to reach net-zero by 2050.
    "This is 180° wrong.
    "COP 28’s net-zero agenda—i.e., rapid elimination of fossil fuels—is unnecessary, and pursuing it faster would be catastrophic because ...
"1. Fossil fuels are making us far safer from climate.

"One huge benefit we get from fossil fuels is the ability to master climate danger—e.g., fossil-fuelled cooling, heating, irrigation—which can potentially neutralise fossil fuels’ negative climate impacts. ...
    "Even though we obviously need to factor in both negative and positive impacts of rising CO2 with precision, most designated experts ignore big positives (e.g., global greening) while catastrophizing negatives (e.g., Gore portrays 20 feet sea level rise as imminent when extreme UN projections are 3 feet/100years)
    "Every report you hear about fossil fuels having made climate more dangerous commits at least one of 2 fallacies: ignoring the enormous climate mastery benefits of fossil fuels or wildly exaggerating negative climate side-effects of fossil fuels. ...
    "If we do factor in fossil fuels' enormous climate mastery benefits and carefully weigh their climate side-effects, we find that fossil fuels are a tremendous climate net-positive and will remain so in the future....

"2. Even barely implementing COP’s net-zero agenda has been disastrous. ...

"Net-zero policies have caused catastrophic energy shortages even with minuscule implementation. Just by slowing the growth of fossil fuel use, not even reducing it, they have caused global energy shortages advocates didn't warn us of....
    "The 'net-zero' movement, led by UN COPs, is the root cause of today's energy crisis because it has restricted
     1. fossil fuel investment
     2. fossil fuel production
     3. fossil fuel transport
    "This has artificially suppressed fossil fuel supply, leading to high prices and shortages. ... the “net-zero” movement has caused an energy crisis just by achieving a tiny fraction of its goals. While it has advocated rapidly reducing fossil fuel use, it has only succeeded globally at slowing the growth of fossil fuel use. And even that is catastrophic....

"Instead of focusing on rapidly eliminating fossil fuel use, we should focus on rapidly liberating energy production and use of all kinds of energy via energy freedom policies ... [that] protect the ability of producers to produce all forms of energy and consumers to use all forms of energy, so long as they don’t engage in reasonably preventable pollution or endangerment of others....
    "The obvious path forward for the world is energy freedom: the freedom to produce and use all cost-effective sources of energy—including, essentially, fossil fuels—which means rejecting all net-zero targets.
    "We need courageous leaders who will withdraw from the Paris Agreement."

~ Alex Epstein, from his post 'COP28 should be the last COP' [emphasis in the original]

 

COP28 Climate Summit President: "'no science' that says phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius"

"The president of the COP28 climate summit, Sultan Al Jaber, recently claimed there is 'no science' that says phasing out fossil fuels is necessary to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, in comments that have alarmed climate scientists and advocates.
    "The future role of fossil fuels is one of the most controversial issues countries are grappling with at the COP28 climate summit. While some are pushing for a 'phase-out,' others are calling for the weaker language of a 'phase-down.' Scientific reports have shown that fossil fuels must be rapidly slashed to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees — the goal of the Paris climate agreement, and a threshold above which scientists warn it will be more difficult for humans and ecosystems to adapt.
    "Al Jaber ... was asked by Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and current chair of the Elders Group, an independent group of global leaders, if he would lead on phasing out fossil fuels. In his response, Al Jaber told Robinson, “there is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5.” He said he had expected to come to the ... meeting to have a “sober and mature conversation” and was not “signing up to any discussion that is alarmist.”
    "He continued that the 1.5-degree goal was his 'north star,' and a phase-down and phase-out of fossil fuel was 'inevitable' but 'we need to be real, serious and pragmatic about it.
    "In an increasingly fractious series of responses to Robinson pushing him on the point, Al Jaber asked her 'please, help me, show me a roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuels that will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves'.”

~ CNN report 'Climate summit leader said there’s ‘no science’ behind need to phase out fossil fuels, alarming scientists'

Cartoon by Alex Gregory, New Yorker (2013)

"99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature" ... "The conclusion does not follow from the data”

"Case closed," trumpeted the Guardian back in 2021. "The scientific consensus that humans are altering the climate has passed 99.9%, according to research that strengthens the case for global action at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow."

And now, just before all the private planes and well-fed bureaucrats fly into Dubai for COP28, in a Battle of the Peer-Reviews, Climate magazine has published a study concluding, in their own words, that "the researchers much-ballyhooed conclusion conclusion "does not follow follow from the data."

In other words, that the science is not settled.

Turns out the claim for a 99% Consensus as as inane as the oft-repeated claim of a 97% consensus.  (What exactly do they agree about—do they agree there’s a 'climate crisis'? -- that is entirely anthropogenic, i.e., human-caused? -- that we should also factor in the benefits of fossil fuels?") 

And not just inane, but inaccurate. As inaccurate as much of the climate science, and possibly representative of it.

The author of that much-feted 2021 paper that made the 99% claim told the Guardian “It is really case closed. There is nobody of significance in the scientific community who doubts human-caused climate change.”  Case closed? Not really, say the authors of the new paper in Climate, more like "case not even made." In their paper, they say, 

we point out some major flaws in the methodology, analysis, and conclusions of the [2021] study. Using the data provided in the study, we show that the 99% consensus, as defined by the authors, is actually an upper limit evaluation because of the large number of “neutral” papers which were counted as pro-consensus in the paper and probably does not reflect the true situation. We further analyse these results by evaluating how so-called “skeptic” papers fit the consensus and find that biases in the literature, which were not accounted for in the aforementioned study, may place the consensus on the low side. Finally, we show that the rating method used in the study suffers from a subjective bias which is reflected in large variations between ratings of the same paper by different raters. All these lead to the conclusion that the conclusions of the study does not follow from the data.

In short, the evidence doesn't fit the claim, and the authors drew more into their net than they should have, misclassifying "neutral" papers and discarding sceptical one. To paraphrase, Noam Chomsky, it's a manufactured consensus.

One that delegates might ponder as they take their private jets and ample delegations to Dubai, to offer therewith their advice on how the rest of us should cut back.