Essay by Eric Worrall
Joëlle Gergis, the author of the flawed hockey stick climate paper that was widely retracted in 2012, accused Australian politicians of using “deception” to hide climate policy failures.
Joëlle Gergis
Exposing the net zero climate delusionRejection is a funny thing. We have to find a slippery way to try to live with high-level cognitive dissonance: the discomfort we feel when faced with the fact that our thoughts and actions are contradictory. We have to somehow rationalize the way we fool ourselves. In the words of SeinfeldGeorge Costanza: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
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The reality is that Australia still can’t meet the target set in the legislation to reduce emissions by 43 percent from 2005 levels to 2030. The Australian government has a long history of relying on the land sector to show progress in reducing emissions while continuing to export large quantities of coal and gas. big to another world. The safeguard mechanism, Australia’s signature climate policy, allows the biggest industrial polluters to buy carbon credits to offset their impact on the environment, in order to achieve “net zero” emissions. Scientific and legal experts have criticized Australia’s carbon offset scheme as having too little integrity: people receive carbon credits for not cutting down forests that will not be cut down, for growing existing trees and growing forests in places that will not be used. in the long run. Instead of requiring heavy pollution to correct reduce the huge volume of carbon they throw into the free atmosphere, they can pay to offset the emissions by planting some trees. Therein lies the fatal flaw in the logic of net zero: no matter how we continue to exploit fossil fuels, net zero is the only way we can step back from planetary catastrophe.
This trick of using the land sector to cover up the negligible reduction in total emissions allows the government to state that Australia’s emissions have fallen by 28.2 percent since 2005. Excluding land use from the latest data shows that total emissions, in industrial processes. transportation, electricity and other sectors, has declined only 1.8 percent.
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Read more: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/09/28/exposing-net-zeros-climate-delusions#mtr
For once Gergis and I agreed, at least about the land use trick. There appears to be some questionable practice in using the supposed increase in the ability of land to absorb CO2 to balance the books on emissions reduction claims, some of which have been demonstrated by the WUWT.
Australia is particularly prone to bushfires, so any attempt to store carbon biomass in dry forests goes up in smoke when a fire sweeps through the region. The apparent wisdom of allowing the accumulation of dry, flammable plant litter in poorly managed Aussie forests, rather than conducting regular low-intensity burning, makes fires more violent when they do occur.
As for the rest of the Gergis climate belief systemI believe a little healthy skepticism is in order. See how he reacts when there are flaws in his scientific work.
Gergis’s 2012 paper (which was eventually retracted) was severely debunked by Steve McIntyre. Instead of accepting that he made a mistake by misinterpreting and mishandling the data used in his analysis, he tried to argue that it does not matter, and smeared those who objected to methodological errors as amateurs – “… Just to clarify, there is. error in the word describing the method of proxy selection and there is no flaw in the entire analysis as suggested by the amateur climate skeptic blogger. “.
It did not stop in 2012, Gergis returned with another paper in 2016, which was again eviscerated by Steve McIntyre, in the article McIntyre Joelle Gergis, Data Torturer. McIntyre even suggested Gergis use the “Hide the decline” form.
Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes big mistakes. The right thing to do in my opinion would have been to show a little mercy and immediately accept that he has been stuffed up – this would have settled the matter quickly and cleanly. But to arrogantly dismiss the person who pointed out the error as “amateur”, to try to claim the “error” is just a matter of words, and then apparently make the same mistake in a later paper, let’s just say I’m not going to lose sleep over the climate warning.
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