Written by: Nigel Southway, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
A review of how we get to a more realistic policy set for the management of climate change, so that we better balance the sustainability of the planet with the prosperity of our citizens.
In the review of my new book Take Back Manufacturing by the news and technical media I explained that North America and other western nations must focus on national sustainability goals and act rapidly to set policies to undertake the reshoring and localization of our over-extended supply chains and support the ailing industrial and resource sectors. In this way they will avoid the growing geo-political risks and recapitalize on the opportunity to have a far more balanced economy of resources, manufacturing, and services, and so better support national prosperity for all their citizens.
I went on to explain that this national sustainability and prosperity journey can only be realistically and economically undertaken with the increased use of the existing fossil fuel technologies, and that our biggest impediment and distraction is climate alarmism that has forced the western nations to undertake NetZero targets that have led to failed, expensive, and futile efforts at CO2 mitigation and the suppression of fossil fuel use.
But, as we will explain, we now have recent scientific updates and facts that strongly suggest we STOP the NetZero journey, and continue the unimpeded use of fossil fuels, and only focus on selective climate adaption to a naturally warming planet.
Scientists are now saying… No climate emergency
For many years the international organizations such as the United Nations and most western national governments have insisted that the climate science is settled, and that NetZero policies are essential to combat a climate emergency.
The UN managed IPCC keeps defending the position of a climate emergency with scientific papers that try to prove dangerous CO2 causation on global temperature using over-stated climate models that keep getting proved wrong, or discredited hockey stick trend charts, or the politicalized summary documents from the IPCC with recommended policies that in most cases are not supported by the scientific backup documents.
For many the UN-IPCC has proved to be a political organization and only seeks to promote the doctrine of a climate emergency.
It’s become clear to many that the scientific position is far from “settled” on the Climate Emergency rhetoric, and now strongly suggests a need to revisit all sides of the scientific dialogue and re-evaluate the climate risks or benefits, and through strict scientific review seek the truth. This may mean resetting our policies to only undertake selective climate adaption with a re-focus on Climate Realism.
Recently many climate scientists have found the courage to speak up and declare Climate Realism that states that there in NO climate emergency and that CO2 mitigation and a NetZero approach is foolish and a danger to humanity.
These key climate scientists and some policy strategists that are pushing back on the NetZero rhetoric have organized into a series of coalitions.
Some examples of Climate realist coalitions are:
Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES) Environmental Science | CERES-Science
Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) Climate Intelligence (CLINTEL) climate change and climate policy
CO2 Coalition Home - CO2 Coalition
Recently more than 1600 International scientists have jointly signed and published a declaration via CLINTEL that dismisses the existence of a climate crisis and insists that carbon dioxide is on balance beneficial to both the planet and its inhabitants.
These climate scientists also explain in a recent article that the scientific community and most research institutions have been politically subjugated by the climate emergency groupthink with clear evidence of threats of funding withdraw, career termination and professional intimidation unless they comply with the misappropriation of science to generate a false consensus that we have a climate emergency. So, its clear that such a situation has also made any normal scientific peer review process and traditional scientific journal publishing meaningless.
Although true peer review process has been subjugated many articles and books have been authored by these climate scientists that supports the climate reality position presented here.
This escalating scientific discord demands a strong need for far more open dialogue on climate change and for a detailed review and probable change in national policies.
We don’t need Climate panic or alarmism or climate denial or skepticism or attacks on our existing energy providers … we need to strive for scientific truth and policies that can achieve Climate Realism.
The scientific facts
The following are scientific facts and positions supported by the various coalitions of No-NetZero scientists.
Human generated pollution, environmental and ecological impact in all forms on land, sea, and air, must be an ongoing focus, and we must strive for the balanced sustainability of our environment, our economies, and our societies.
Climate change must NOT be considered an emergency, and any action we take should be on local adaption, NOT global CO2 mitigation such as NetZero. In-fact for most areas of the planet we are enjoying a very good period for humankind.
Coalition Climate Scientists have published reports that declare that the global climate has always moved through many changes and is mainly controlled by the solar system and the position and orientation of our planet in relation to the sun in predictable cycles and is currently in a natural warming trend and our planet is emerging from a cyclical ice age.
The planet temperature has slowly increased by approximately one centigrade degree since the late 19th century, and this is well within estimates of fluctuations in the natural climate cycle and the inaccuracy of average global measurement methods.
The planet has through its long history been significantly warmer than now and has had CO2 levels far higher and life had flourished.
Although it appears at this time in earths history to be some correlation between increasing CO2 and increasing global temperatures, scientific historical facts do not support any conclusion that CO2, even though it is a greenhouse gas (GHG) has any significant causation to global temperature increase. CO2 does not control planet temperature, in-fact temperature controls CO2.
From a recent comparative analysis using reliable ice core and tree-leaf proxies it’s clear that CO2 increases are mostly natural, and that fossil fuels that produce CO2 are not a significant “climate changer” and may have only a 20% impact on overall CO2 increase which means that humans even with significant industrialization and the rampant global population growth continues to be a small bit-player in having any effect on climate changes.
All the climate scare tactics about biblical levels of extreme weather, hurricanes, floods, storms, droughts, fires, and sea level rise etc. are not supported by past trends or current facts.
In fact, some weather conditions over the long term have shown improvement trends, and so too has our ability to adapt or manage our civilization in such conditions.
The scare about sea level rise due to a warming planet is unfounded in fact some coastlines are expanding. Here is an explanation: Sea levels are Not a cause for concern.
So, we now have responsible data sources from scientists from many nations that show no adverse trends in the overall and average level of livability and adaptability for most humans on the planet with almost all climate change trends being mainly benign or even beneficial to our civilizations, with no significant overall changes in environmental issues.
This from the Norwegian government offices …Using theoretical arguments and statistical tests we find that the effect of man-made CO2 emissions does not appear to be strong enough to cause systematic changes in the temperature fluctuations during the last 200 years.
In fact, increased temperature, and the increase in historically low global levels of CO2 is generating a greener planet and longer growing seasons with improved crop yields. Climate Quiz - CO2 Coalition
Many climate alarmists have tried to suggest that the recent wildfires across the globe are a direct result of climate change, but many experts are informing that the main cause is local weather conditions and bad land management, and in some cases the misappropriation of funds on worthless green agendas that distracted from maintaining important infrastructures such as safe and reliable electrical power sources.
For example: The best scientific explanation for the recent Lahaina Hawaii fires is contained in this article.
Science needs to better educate the population that climate change plays a very small bit part in the fire’s floods and other adverse conditions we face with weather, and that any attempts at climate mitigation is foolish, and our best efforts should be on adaption and management of our local environment.
NetZero will be futile
As stated above, science is now declaring that CO2 is not the “climate control knob” and so mitigation of CO2 and fossil fuels is unnecessary. The current obsession in the western nations to follow a NetZero policy to reduce CO2 with significant forms of mitigation and associated economic constraints on traditional fossil fuel usage is impractical, unnecessary, futile, and a danger to our prosperity and in some cases will be a threat to life itself!
Even if the western nations foolishly decided to continue the NetZero journey It will be extremely futile, as the western nations will be an increasingly small player in global CO2 generation, with many of the emerging nations forced to use coal and other fossil fuels for decades to come to grow their economies with few viable alternatives available.
So, we need to set forth policies to accelerate our use of modern fossil fuel energy sources and encourage rather than demonize these energy providers so that the developing world can move away from the health issues of wood and dung and maybe coal, and as practical as possible move to cleaner uses of fossil fuels and electricity, but this will be a journey that will take them time.
Also, nuclear power must be a mid to longer term goal as it offers a strong even cleaner solution for the future.
So, going to Net-Zero and killing the prime energy source of fossil fuel will be life threatening for most of the global population and we must remember that fossil fuels have enabled billions of people to become free and prosperous.
So, fossil fuel providers must NOT be persecuted, but must be encouraged to provide much more capacity, and when economically practical offer cleaner energy solutions to support sustainability at a global level.
Adaptation not mitigation
Climate adaptation will be needed in some areas on the planet, and especially those that were already suffering from ecological instability,
Also, the adaptive approach will be far more affordable than the NetZero mitigation approach and will allow the global population to focus on improvements in prosperity and eradicating poverty.
Many industrial scientists have declared that adapting, building and sustaining any human civilization can only be provided with stable and powerful energy sources and for most economies that will mean an INCREASE in the use of fossil fuels, and there is no viable alternative to modern fossil fuels for the foreseeable future and their use will be essential to support any necessary climate adaption as our planet naturally warms from a cold cycle.
The climate reality awakening
Many political experts suggest that the above journey to climate reality and the associated changes in current policies will certainly require a change in federal governments in most western nations, as the current governments have hard-hitched their policy saddles to the NetZero journey and will find it very difficult to undertake a significant reset.
This issue will probably be resolved in the next election cycles with opposition governments now gathering fresh input from a broader range of experts and facing up to climate and energy reality.
These fresh politicos we be reviewing much more realistic climate policies that are supported by solid scientific facts as they will be getting their votes in these next elections from a citizenship that will not be prepared to trade prosperity (or less) with the virtue signaling policies of NetZero that are now being shown to be both unrealistic and self-destructive.
Although public opinion has been heavily conditioned with the climate emergency groupthink, its now clear that many national citizens are seeking a better viewpoint. As an example, a recent Canadian poll shows 85% of Canadians are learning the facts and are turning away from the NetZero journey.
So, politicians, the media, and the many climate activists must show far more social responsibility and as a minimum pause to listen to the escalating scientific discord and stop driving NetZero policies that will destroy the sustainability of our civilization.
Some government professionals are now speaking out and showing courage…
We need much more open discussion and honesty by all involved to ensure a far better understanding of the scientific facts and develop more realistic polices and ensure they are correctly communicated to the general population, so that we can turn them from climate alarmists into climate realists, with a far better understanding of the climate changes and the importance of our traditional energy sources.
This will also require that all the subjugated scientists who have been cowed by the climate emergency politics to now put the scientific horse in front of the political cart and participate in reaching a better level of truth.
We must also “learn the lesson” and ensure we halt censorship and blocking of the scientific process to avoid the risk of groupthink that has fueled the very wasteful climate emergency activities.
Many nations have developed political thinking that may resist or minimalize their support for the Paris accord and the many other multilateral and global organizations that may have agendas that are not in the best interest of their citizens.
Business is wising-up
One of the most disappointing aspects of the climate emergency groupthink was the extent to which the business community had knuckled under to the moralistic agitation of institutional investors demanding extreme environmental objectives via pious social justice and corporate governance. But some business leaders are now reaching a conclusion that these NetZero policies pose a significant threat to modern capitalism that will in turn adversely affect wealth creation, employment, productivity, and prosperity.
Also, American oil companies that had been caving under to the NetZero goals of eliminating fossil fuels are now realizing the impracticality of this approach and are repositioning their goals with a reset back to the prime job of providing fossil fuel energy for the future and supporting consumer needs.
Renewables wont work
The current fixation with so called renewables such as wind, solar, and the panic to move to electric vehicles for propulsion even with heavy government handouts, is going to be problematical as a replacement for fossil fuel solutions.
Displacing the existing energy solutions will clearly be hard on the western citizens pocketbook as they make little sense both technologically and economically and are proving to be unreliable solutions that will do more harm than good to the natural environment.
They will create far worse environmental problems than our existing fossil fuel technologies due to underdeveloped supply-chains that will require extensive resources that will drive drastically expensive and dirty mining and refining projects for raw materials that are already in scarce supply.
Experts are concerned due to past experiences that renewable energy solutions will pose a significant threat to the electrical supply grid. This is based on their intermittent and unreliability disrupting the base load demand that will requires significant and incremental backup with Fossil fuel solutions.
We need to replace the myth that nuclear power is dangerous with the fact that its actually the safest fuel source for many uses and must be utilized much more into the future.
Nuclear power offers the highest energy density with the lowest pollution impact with an uninterrupted supply to the power grid. The abundance of power can also be utilized in off-peak periods to produce clean hydrogen for propulsion and industrial applications.
The climate crisis industrial complex
We have a significant number of the technical and scientific population that have built their careers around this NetZero mission, with a whole industry of experts, consultants, providers, and administrators to control them, all feeding off the public trough, that keeps getting filled up by complicit governments, and has also powered up and solidified the climate emergency group-think environment.
The task with the new climate realism policies will be to redeploy these key resources so that they are better focused on more important projects to aid prosperity.
The Climate emergency activists and alarmists
The global institutions like the UN-IPCC have communicated a clear politized agenda that has fabricated a false scientific consensus of climate emergency.
Western society has always had extremist style environmentalists who quickly latched on to the climate emergency rhetoric. Then, aided by a supportive media generated a strong activism that pressured western governments to participate and support the unnecessary and dangerous Net Zero journey with national policies that clearly puts the policy cart way ahead of the scientific horse.
As already mentioned, any dissenting scientists were silenced or canceled by the political group think that acted to censor, shun, and cancel information that did not fit the climate emergency agenda.
And so, we end up where we are today with most of the western population in fear and panic due to the unfounded but well communicated climate change emergency rhetoric.
It has also fostered a climate activist mentality with almost religious fanaticism that has developed into the polarization of positions from climate alarmists to climate deniers that has shut down any productive civil conversation on the subject.
It's obvious that this social dysfunction and deranged situation cannot continue. We need a significant knowledge reset on the climate topic, but it will take unwavering leadership and due process and time and significant bravery by those of us that strive to seek the truth, and it will require clear facts to move everyone toward a new reality.
The best course of action
In summary, we need everyone to agree that they are opposed to pollution and accept that the climate is changing and that we must continue to study it. But we must come to terms through a discussion of the facts that it’s most unlikely that we have a climate emergency that needs national policies outside of an adaptive approach.
Climate activists and complicit governments must wake up and understand that we need far less uniformed activist and religious fervor, and much more scientific debate and updated and much more realistic policies.
It’s clear that the scientific community needs to start a much more open peer review process that recognizes and addresses the rank polarization of conclusions within the scientific community.
This will require significant dialogue between the conflicting scientific camps to construct agreed action plans for further scientific analysis and conclusions. In other words, to use the terminology. …the science is NOT settled… It needs far more work.
Recently requests have been made to start such a discussion process across the spectrum of scientific dissension. Request to Dr. James Skea of the IPCC - Clintel
What we urgently need is a well facilitated forum of scientific and policy experts from both sides of the climate change argument to better expose the truth, and then assist national governments set realistic policies and then educate their voting citizenship on these real future policy options before they vote in any more democratic elections.
We owe it to our citizens in the western nations to get it right about the climate change action into the future, so we can also focus on the all-important quest to recover our prosperity for our national citizens.
We have transitioned from a period of post-war affluence in the west, to a bad period of what some would call foolish participation in a global free trade journey. This has exposed the western nations to massive wealth transfer from the west to the rest. This was mostly caused by the untethering of capital from its symbiotic balance with labor within a national economic structure. This lowered national productivity and the overall sustainability of our western nations due to de-industrialization.
My new book addresses this destruction of our industrial sectors in our western societies, with significant loss of productivity and national prosperity, and why the imperative for western economies must be to recover our industrial society while managing the many other significant challenges we face such as global supply chain waste, geo-political instability, immigration, technological change, energy independence, social-economic health issues and the impact on population decline and citizen well-being.
It's certain we must reset and re-focus on what many are now calling Climate Realism before we can effectively address these many important challenges.
Written by Nigel Southway 1st October 2023
More at: Nigel Southway Author Website.
More information on Climate Reality at: Climate Reality Database 1 Oct 2023
Read more from Nigel!
Nigel Southway, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Nigel Southway is based in Toronto Canada and is an independent business consultant and the author of Take Back Manufacturing: An Imperative for Western Economies, and also Cycle Time Management: The Fast Track to Time-Based Productivity Improvement, an early LEAN thinking textbook. He consults and educates worldwide on Business Productivity Improvement, LEAN business practices, Advanced Manufacturing Engineering, Future Supply Chain Management, Industry 4.0, National Sustainability, Global technology transfer projects and joint ventures and more. He is a past chair of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers and the leading advocate and spokesperson for the Take Back Manufacturing Forum, and the North American Reshoring initiative in Canada.
