Climate Conversation Group

Only in the USA

Carbon Emissions Projected to Remain Flat for Decades – Forbes.

So the good news is the alarmists might be slightly pleased and quieten down a bit.

The bad news is the price of slowing the pace of the Western industrial miracle that’s been relentlessly pulling the world out of poverty, ignorance, sickness, early death and misery for over two centuries.

Will the alarmists reflect on the poverty, lack of medical care, loss of education and general reduction in levels of happiness this will bring?

Anyway, this slow-down concerns emissions only from the US. Considering they emit less than China does, it can’t make much difference to the global climate.

Emissions of greenhouse gases are quoted everywhere to illustrate how humanity is sending the world to hell in a hand basket.

The articles make much of “emissions” from various countries, from the developed and the developing worlds. How many know that these vast, hugely important quantities are not even measured?

They’re only calculated from reported energy use — and they are far from reliable. That’s the first point. The second point is that emissions lead, presumably, to a global temperature increase. If they didn’t, there wouldn’t be a problem, would there?

But emissions don’t automatically mean higher temperatures. For a start, about 45% of human emissions — regardless how they increase — are absorbed somewhere in the gigantic natural system. Nobody knows where it all goes. It’s immensely complicated to track our puny emissions of carbon dioxide as they mix with the truly gargantuan streams out of and into forests and the oceans.

So most authors make no attempt to convert the net emissions into a temperature increase, but why not, actually?

The main reason would be that nobody — and I mean nobody, from the IPCC, NASA, the CRU at East Anglia and Al Gore all the way down to me — has the foggiest idea of the temperature that will result from these emissions.

Amazing, eh? There’s no knowledge or evidence of the inconvenient disaster we’re supposed to be creating with our selfish lifestyles. This gives rise to two questions:

• Why does nobody demand some evidence?
• What has persuaded everyone, without evidence, that there’s a problem?

The Associated Press, as reported in the Los Angeles Times, keep to their warmist line. Now they’re keen to highlight a steep increase in carbon dioxide emissions, without letting on that it hasn’t affected the temperature.

The global output of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped last year by the biggest amount on record, the U.S. Department of Energy calculated, a sign of how feeble the world’s efforts are at slowing man-made global warming.

The new figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst-case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.

In 2008, the annual increase was half of the year before. Now there’s a crisis?

It is a “monster” increase that is unheard of, said Gregg Marland, a professor of geology at Appalachian State University, who has helped calculate Department of Energy figures in the past.

Which just means it hasn’t happened before that we know of.

Now where should we start?

How confusing is this?

Climate Realists announce that new satellite data from Japanese scientists show carbon dioxide is emitted mostly by the third world, with much less coming from industry in the west. For those asleep in the back, that’s the reverse of our previous understanding (so it’s a confusing result). On the map, pink is where emissions are occurring, green is where absorption is occurring.

Hmm, New Zealand apparently doesn’t exist. Panic!

Life is now officially upside down — the giant northern hemisphere economies are not emitting CO2 after all, they’re absorbing the stuff! Read more… »