This Time I Disagree with Bjorn Lomborg

But only a little bit. Lomborg (among other things, Copenhagen Consensus President), in his Tuesday Wall Street Journal op-ed, writes absolutely correctly about the need for climatistas (my term, as is “doomsayers” below) to consider much more than their simple claim of climate change and the imminent destruction from their claimed change. Lomborg, though, concentrated on the economic destruction the doomsayers’ policies would inflict even as those worthies ignore technological advances that would mitigate their claims’ outcome, even were their claims in any way accurate.

Where I disagree is in the lack of discussion of the larger, and more important, context within which today’s alleged climate disaster is supposedly developing.

Biden Administration’s Monthly Job Numbers

Peter Earle, American Institute for Economic Research Senior Research Fellow, has the tale.

In 28 years, I’ve never seen 11 of 12 months where job numbers came out looking very strong, and then they were revised downwards.

Which raises the question in my pea brain: are Progressive-Democrat President Joe Biden and his economic staff and his bureaucrats at the Labor Department really that incompetent, or are they manipulating the initial numbers for their political benefit?

These aren’t rounding errors that happen to be overstatements rather than understatements or balancing out over the months, either. According to the Daily Caller:

Whose Record?

The European Union’s Copernicus claims

Earth’s temperature was more than 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than the preindustrial era in the 12 months ending January, the first time temperatures averaged over a yearlong period have breached this key threshold in international climate diplomacy.
[T]he average temperature from February 2023 to January 2024 was 1.52 degrees Celsius above the average temperature from 1850 to 1900, the period generally considered to be preindustrial by climate scientists. This January was 1.66 degrees warmer than the preindustrial average, making it the warmest January on record….

Of Course He Did

The Washington Policy Center says that Washington’s Progressive-Democrat Governor Jay Inslee has known all along that his carbon tax would significantly increase gas prices in the State.

In a Thursday morning blog post, WPC Environmental Director Todd Myers notes that reports from Inslee’s 2014 Carbon Emissions Reduction Task Force, or CERT, showed a carbon tax could result in a significant hike in the price at the pump.
In fact, Inslee’s then-chief policy advisor Matt Steuerwalt, based on an analysis created for the task force, told the Senate Environment, Energy & Technology Committee that a carbon dioxide price of $52 per metric ton—almost identical to the state’s current carbon dioxide price—would increase prices by 44 cents per gallon.

CO2 Fans

An atmospheric CO2 removal technology is gaining interest.

In western Texas, a major carbon removal plant that is under construction also recently got a $550 million investment from BlackRock. Once it is up and running in 2025, the plant will use fan-like devices roughly the size of tennis courts to pull carbon from the air and bury it underground, a process known as direct-air capture.

To the extent that this is a good idea—and I’m not convinced that it is—such direct-air capture facilities would be better placed in targeted locations, rather than being randomly situated. And few places are more random than the wide-open spaces of West Texas. That location may be OK for a proof of concept run, but….

“Just Another Use of Fossil Fuels”

There’s a move afoot to produce hydrogen as an energy source by fracturing natural gas into its hydrogen and carbon and oxygen components, the latter two typically as CO2 (and then capturing the CO2 and sequestering it). The foolishness of trying to use hydrogen as an energy source is for another day. What interests me here is the beef from the Global Warming Know Betters who see [fracturing natural gas] as just another use of fossil fuels.

Those august persons, then, must object to our several materials industries, in which natural gas, oil, and coal are major inputs to plastics.

They Don’t Know What They’re Doing?

Or is that they’re just riding the Climate Funding Industry Hobby Horse?

East Coast wind projects are in jeopardy after a decision by New York regulators Thursday to deny requests from renewable energy developers to charge customers billions of dollars more.
Offshore wind developers say they have been struggling against record inflation, supply chain issues, and interest rate hikes. Facing these pressures, Orsted, BP, and Equinor and other renewable developers requested that contracts for four offshore projects and 86 land-based projects be renegotiated, according to Reuters.
The offshore developers asked the New York Public Service Commission to alter its long term contracts and raise purchase prices to a level that would have let them collect an additional $38 billion from ratepayers.

Continuing His Father’s Virtue-Signaling

Prince William is royally frustrated with the pace of “climate” solutions and wants them developed and executed faster.

For now, we’re quite keen on the scale…when we scale up [solutions], how can we have the biggest change? For me, that’s something I haven’t quite cracked yet, is “how do we scale faster?”
I’m impatient with all this. You guys provide the product…the inspiration, the solution, my role is to get you as big, as fast, and as scalable as possible…. We’ve still got some work to do on that.

The Cowardice of Dishonesty

An all too typical example is provided by climatista Patrick Brown, Johns Hopkins University lecturer and “doctor” of “earth and climate sciences.” He has confessed, now that his damage has been done, that he

“left out the full truth” about climate change, blaming it primarily on human causes, to get his study published in a prestigious science journal.

His rationalization for his lie by omission:

And the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society[.]

Global Warming

The Average Temperature Anomaly is a measure used by many in the Global Warming Funding Industry™ to assess the degree of deviation, above or below, from some baseline temperature by some claimed cause of global warming. The most commonly claimed cause these days is the amount of atmospheric CO2. The most commonly used baseline temperature is the period from around 1856, the nominal start of the Industrial Age and its associated increase in man-caused atmospheric CO2.

This graph, via NOAA, is that Average Temperature Anomaly since 1896, when the Industrial Age was well underway. ClimDiv is an NOAA-developed climate database, and USCRN is a network of NOAA climate stations.