Zero carbon policy: fooling 97% of the people?

Contributed by Emiel Van Broekhoven, D. Phil.(Econ) Oxford, emeritus Universiteit Antwerpen © 2020 These are the opinions of the author.

SUMMARY: The zero carbon policy is a sure way to a depression. Five ice core analyses prove that warming leads CO₂ instead of the inverse. The climate is cooling. In the last 1000 years, natural climate change minima often happened to coincide with regime changes. The EU of Lagarde and Michel is on its way to a regime change. Al Gore (2007) may have been an honest believer but became an imposter. The EU zero carbon policy will have zero CO₂ effect on the Mauna Loa anyway. The EU should repeat with Bill Gates: “there is no substitute for how the modern economy runs today”. 20 March 2020

A pdf of the the original article is found in the download link below.

1. Zero carbon: a sure way to a depression after a recession.
   The EU says it wants to be climate neutral by 2050. And there are no 100 ways to attain an economy that outputs zero carbon. During the Brexit negotiations Cambridge University prepared an “Absolute Zero” report for PM Theresa May on how to achieve the zero-carbon goal, and this seems to have satisfied the EU. Did this become UK law to make a Brexit deal between the UK and the EU27 possible? The Guardian said, “In her last major act as Prime Minister, Theresa May amended UK climate change law to commit the UK to eliminating all greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.” You find this Absolute Zero report as https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/299414
   Timmermans’ Green Deal is announced in inoffensive general terms; investing in environmentally-friendly technologies: rolling out cleaner, cheaper and healthier forms of private and public transport, decarbonising the energy sector, ensuring buildings are more energy efficient,… These romantic generalities don’t say what needs to be done to obtain zero carbon output. In the Cambridge report the truth is at least less hidden: households are told to turn vegetarian, drive electric, to quit flying, to go on holiday by trains, etc.. And for industry, airports are to close, the cows and lambs to be slaughtered, only electric ships will be allowed in the ports, no more steel or cement will be used for building, oil refineries will be closed down and disassembled, etc..
   In neither report there are words about the effect on the incomes and jobs of European workers or on the trade and payments balances between the EU27 and the other world superpowers like the USA, China, Russia, Brazil, etc.. Not a word on the valuation of European companies on the stock markets. The green European nightmare policy will be avoided at all cost by these nations, who will stand ready as suppliers. The chancellor of the British treasury Hammond warned that this plan would cost £1,000 billion for the UK alone. But that was dismissed as irrelevant. In my home country Belgium nobody mentioned costs, but any objection was dismissed.
   So the Dutch Euro Commissioner Frans Timmermans is in the process of fulfilling the inner wish of Maurice Strong, at one time vice secretary general of the UN, appointed with the help of Mr.Gorbachev and Mr.Chou en Lai, and founder of the IPCC, who said: “Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”, quoted by Tim Ball,(Human Caused Global Warming, 2016), p.83. After the attack of the Corona virus will have led to a major recession of (hopefully) not more than a year, it will have weakened the cohesion of the Eurozone even more, with an almost certain financial aftermath of several years. Then the Green Zero Carbon deal, executed as planned, will easily lead to a 30-year long chaotic depression. For Timmermans the collapse of industrialized civilizations will be achieved. I do realise that long before all these dreadful things will come about, Mr. Timmermans and the present commission will be out of power. To whose benefit? Who and what will be next?
2. The zero carbon policy is based on a huge scientific mistake. Five ice core analyses prove that warming leads CO₂ instead of the inverse.
   Concluding the International South Pole expedition (1957-1984) from the Russian basis of VOSTOK, the French delegation especially believed that a phenomenal breakthrough had been discovered, regarding the impact of man on nature. An increase in the CO₂ content (measured in parts per million, ppm) in the ice-cores had been observed next to an increase in temperature. According to the first French claims, this was explained as an important influence of industrial development on climate, and bound to increase forever with industrialization. On Fig.1 left, one can see the projection of the assumed impact of such a continuing CO₂ rise, as I also understand it from the explanation of Prof. Lamb. Within the 21st century the temperature would be rising spectacularly. The blue line indicates the course of the averaged-out climate before the industrial revolution of 1850. The steeply upward red line after 1850 indicates the gigantic global warming explosion (between 2°C and + 5.5 °C) per century, that was supposed to be taking place from around 2000 to 2100, and the continuing over the centuries, instead of continuing an ever gradual long big slide into the next glacial period.

Prof. H. Lamb, of East Anglia University, for the UK, the most prominent climatologist in those days, did not believe this outright and asked for additional tests. Regretfully he died in 1997. As the results of new ice-core studies became gradually available it became clear that the original interpretation of the Vostok results was very mistaken.

Most countries recognize this now, and as a result most of the world does not live under a zero carbon or CO₂ scare, except the IPCC, French and gradually also German government circles and thru them the European Union.

It is important to realize that the view behind Fig.1 was quickly but strongly challenged. This is known from the preface by French Prime Minister Michel Rocard to the book by the expedition leader Jean-Robert Petit ‘Vostok’, (2012, p.9): » I leave it to the reader to understand how the Soviet pioneers of the extraction … became the champions of climate scepticism.». The Russians were the first in not believing the French interpretation and that position would remain so. The Russians are not alone. Unlike the IPCC that still predicts a temperature increase for all of the present century, the other forecasters that I found in Russia, China, Norway, Sweden, forecast falling temperatures, often using very different methods.
In 1984 already the British Prof. Lamb of East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit was not blown away by the French ideas either. He asked for more examples of abrupt changes in global temperatures, also warned that the transition of Fig.1 from a gradual solar-powered climate development to an abrupt departure for an entirely new model was very hard to conceive. Lamb died in 1997 before all data on new ice-cores were in, and before the behaviour of climate development after the last top was known.
Within the IPCC itself a major controversy arose, at the occasion of the preparation of its second assessment report, on the role of ‘natural’ versus ‘man-made’ climate change. Comments agreed by the authors of Chapter 8 that “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed (climate) changes to the specific cause of greenhouse gases… no study today has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes.”… were behind their back changed by the IPCC appointed lead author Santers into: ”There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols.. These results point toward a human influence on global climate. The body of statistical evidence in Chapter 8, … now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate.”
Scientifically, it has since the second IPCC report been proven by hard facts:
First, since the Vostok expedition, five new analyses of Antarctic ice cores have shown that an increase in CO₂-ppm in the ice does not cause warming, but that the relationship is the reverse. If the ice heats up, for example because the earth is getting closer to the sun, the CO₂ ppm will rise, albeit with a variable lag of a couple of centuries..!
These results and sources have been published in ‘Climate Science’ 2nd. Edition, Elsevier, 2016, edited by the American Professor Easterbrook (University of Western Washington), p.170)
“Measurements of CO₂ in air bubbles in ice of the Vostock core in Antarctica have been published by Petit e.a. (1999), Fischer e.a. (1999), Monnin e.a. (2001), Mudelsee (2001), Caillon e.a. (2003).
Petit e.a. (1999) measured CO₂ for 420,000 years of the Vostock ice core and found that as the climate cooled into an Ice Age, the decrease in atmospheric CO₂ lagged temperature by several thousand years. Fischer e.a. (1999) found that in going from an Ice Age into a warm interglacial, rise in CO₂ lagged warming by 600 ± 400 years. Monnin et al. (2001) showed that rise in CO₂ lagged warming by 800 ± 600 years in the Dome Concordia ice core in Antarctica. Mudelsee (2001) found that over the full 420,000 years of the Vostock core, CO₂ lagged warming by 1300 ± 1000 years. Caillon e.a. (2003) analysed the Vostock core data and found that CO₂ lagged warming by 800 ± 200 years. All five studies of the Antarctic ice cores showed that CO₂ always lagged warming and thus could not be the cause of the warming.”
“The conclusion is therefore that (natural) global warming leads to an increase in CO₂ with a variable delay of hundreds of years”. This is the case in each of the five studies of the ice cores mentioned above. Easterbrook concludes, “the rise in CO₂ cannot be the cause of global warming.” Experts all over the world share this view, but not the IPCC and neither apparently the EU27.
Secondly, everybody agrees that from 1977 to 1998-2000 the global temperature has been rising. Over the last century it has risen by ups and downs, tracing the sunspot movements, for a total of 0.74°C. On most databases global temperature has found a maximum around 2005. The IPCC still maintains to this day, that the global temperature is now increasing to at least 1.5°C by 2100, while some of their forecasts recently used 1.5°C by 2032 and around 2°C by 2100.
When Professor Lamb had warned that the normal solar cycle might well prevail after the next maximum in 2000, he was again right. As one can see on Fig.2. the solar cycle is now evolving towards a new Dalton-type development, as the NASA prediction on Fig. 2 unmistakably shows. Thus the relationship shown in Fig.1 is disproved by all non-IPCC forecasters that I know.

3. Natural climate change minima happen to have coincided with regime changes in the past 1000 years.
To prevent further questions about the dominant role of natural variability which I will show you here, the IPCC’s Michael Mann invented a Hockey Stick, which was supposed to show that any period before 1850 was not worth studying.
Limiting yourself to 1850-2000 as data means limiting your analysis to one upward leg of millennia-old cyclical climate fluctuations. The latter are known to be dictated by the sun, the planets and the cosmos. Hence, everybody who continued to study the entirety of the available evidence, was called a denier.
It must be understood that as an economist I am interested both in Natural and Anthropogenic sources of climate fluctuations. From this study I concluded with the Chinese, that man-made CO₂ is of minor and passing relevance if at all, and that the main variations are natural. The data in the Table 2.1 that go herewith -from my forthcoming book- show you the warm and cold phases of the cycles since 800AD, with a reference for each segment to possible changes in the Chinese and/or French regime. In 9 out of 11 segments on my table there have been 9 regime changes.
By limiting itself to man-made changes the IPCC certainly did not build a credible climate view.

Fig. 3 Data from Parker Geoffrey, Global Crisis, war, climate, change and catastrophe in the 17th century, Yale University Press, 2013, p.136. It gives East-Asian temperatures, measured by tree-ring width, 1000-1800AD. The rescaled data at right are taken from D.V.Hoyt and K.Schatten, The role of the Sun in Climate Change, Oxford University Press,1997, p.196. The temperature data are obtained from independent studies from Groveman e.a and Hansen e.a. The model irradiances (TSI) are overlain to show their fit. Only a slight divergence of the two curves exist for the last decades. The middle aged warm period runs until around 1400, the little ice age from 1400 to 1760, the modern warm period starts then. The black squares indicate the collapse of the 5 Chinese dynasties in periods of climate minima. The European regime changes are, the French revolution, and another Bonaparte, Napoleon III, on the next table. You may want to add Charles de Gaulle (1968) to join the regime change between Mao and Deng

Natural variations of Climate (800-2000) and changing regimes. (source: book in preparation by the author)

This is a Table from my unpublished analysis of the joined Parker and Hoyt&Schatten data. Out of the 11 significant natural climate episodes that this analysis reveals, 7 also were the occasion of dynastic or regime changes. 6 in China and 2 or 3 in France (omitting de Gaulle or not.) After the grand maximum of 2000, the question is whether Europe with its denial of a natural climate turning point, starting a zero carbon policy, and the present Corona Crisis, and a Euro in trouble, will avoid a change of regime.

According to the NASA analysis shown in Fig.2, (NASA was not among the forecasters mentioned above) we are now progressing towards a Dalton-like minimum by 2030-2065. The temperature is declining. The fact that data for weather forecasters for mainly TV stations near big cities may show some warming, and using ‘homogenized’ series (propping up warming after the facts to show higher warming), is not relevant for global warming.

The evolution of the sunspots since 1990 indicate a decrease in the Earth’s temperature measured through the Total Solar Irradiation TSI. For example the Russian Pulkovo Institute in 2009 predicted a decline from +0.6°C to -0.6°C by 2100 . Chinese researchers expect a drop from + 0.6 ° C to 0 ° C by 2040-60, followed by a warming later in the last part of the 21st century.
According to the Russian forecast, made before the end of Solar Cycle 23, the climate outlook was Maunder-like, that means longer and harsher than the Chinese who are forecasting a much shorter and shallower Dalton-like decline. The Fig.2 NASA prediction above shows it is also Dalton like. We are talking here about three nations on earth with the largest climate responsibility on their territory.
With Lagarde pumping money at the helm at the ECB, the level of Non Performing Loans around 900bn, and Timmermans directing the Zero Carbon project, all of Europe in a recession, heading for a depression, the EU27 looks on its way to the 10th regime change in 12 segments.

4. Al Gore (2007) who was an honest believer but became an imposter.
In his acceptance speech of the Nobel Prize in Oslo, on 10 December 2007 Al Gore warned the world that (verbatim) “… as the Northern Hemisphere tilted away from the sun … the North Polar ice cap is “falling off a cliff” .. (in) one study estimated that it (i.e. the ice cap) could be completely gone during summer in less than 22 years, (and in) .. another new study, to be presented by U.S. Navy …. it could happen in as little as 7 years.. (Ominously) he finished: “Seven years from now. »
I accept that Al Gore was an honest believer in the narrative of Fig.1. In that belief anthropogenic CO2 is indeed incredibly powerful! Now, that we are more than 12 years beyond the day of the Nobel Lecture, there is not the slightest sign of a permanent increase in water levels on inert points in the Northern Hemisphere, and -as I understand- no other than the known cyclical warming of the poles. That must serve as another tangible proof of the veracity, of the scientific findings mentioned in point 2. As a believer Al Gore has made a fool of himself, but in typical IPCC behaviour he will not change his narrative.

5. The EU zero carbon policy will have zero CO₂ effect on the Mauna Loa
The EU27 will not be able ever to report any progress on the CO₂ front. People learned from the IPCC how bad CO₂ growth is for its warming effect. Again and again they are shown the growing level of CO₂ on the Mauna Loa. But what they are doing in the zero carbon project will have no effect whatsoever.
If total man-made (or ‘anthropogenic’) CO₂ in the atmosphere is 100, then we know that the man-made part is at most 5% of that whole. Measured by population the European contribution to the man-made part is 7%.
Having reduced the European contribution to zero means a reduction of total CO₂ in the world (measured on the Mauna Loa) is equal to 0.05%*0.07% = 0,0035 ~0.0%.
For reducing CO₂ the whole European effort is pointless. The European narrative doesn’t hang together.

Mr. Timmermans and the European Commission are pursuing a lie, and the Members of the European parliament, and the European governments, should know it.

6. Let us stick with Bill Gates: “there is no substitute for how the modern economy runs today”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1EB1zsxW0k
The coronavirus crisis shows that European governments have no clue on how to protect our lives, even while the Chinese example unfolded four months ahead before their very eyes. It is obvious enough from the persistent unemployment figures that they don’t know how to realize full employment with a balance budget. Let alone how to handle the 20% unemployment that will hit us soon, due to the Corona crisis by itself.

Conclusion on zero carbon: From what I have come to study as an economist, I have no belief whatsoever that the EU Commission will know how to retool the European economy for the better. Hands off the economy and let us repeat: “there is no substitute for how the modern economy runs today.”

Emiel Van Broekhoven, (D.Phil. (Econ) Oxford) was a lifelong professor of economics of the University of Antwerp. For the past three years, he has studied climate theory, including also the Vostok experiment, for understanding its economic impact.

Under Lagarde and Michel the EU is on its way to the regime change in the present climate cold period 2000-2050, With their zero carbon policy the EU27 will be joining Al Gore, warming policy