Do we want a referendum on Net-zero?

Six people have voted against voting.

This is quite measured.

Sure - when you suspect some behaviour has an uncertain effect on the future, a behavioural hedge may have to take place.

The logical thing to do would be to make the hedge relatively painless. Examples - slowly moving over to nuke, gradually updating insulation in our housing stock, gradually increasing the minimum requirements for efficiency (MPG) in vehicles, reducing immigration.

Examples of bad hedges that look almost like sabotage or corruption - switching everyone to BEV's in a short timeframe, planting windmills everywhere, closing down half your agricultural sector and increasing immigration.

Pillock.

...we can state the Roman period was the warmest period of time of the last 2,000 years, and these conditions lasted for 500 years,’ said Professor Isabel Cacho at the Department of Earth and Ocean Dynamics, University of Barcelona.

www.netzerowatch.com/roman-warm-period-was-2c-warmer-than-today-new-study/

I've never denied that the current "warming" is to some extent man-made - probably to a considerable extent. I think it would be impossible to "repurpose" 75% of the Earth's surface (by building cities, infrastructure, deforestation, farming monocultures etc etc) without affecting climate. My argument has ALWAYS been that the attribution has not been done and that there's no proof of the comparatively modern theory that the predominant cause of warming is CO2. 

And I'm well aware that nearly all the stuff on the internet (and in the media) is fully on board with the CO2 warming theory. It's become a religion now. Even only a few years ago the BBC were airing "Horizon" documentaries on climate change that discussed the subject intelligently in a scientific way. I have a few on the video - but they would never be shown now. There would be complaints. What I was trying to do is make you think for yourself - rather than rely on the opinions of biased people.

I still can't find that first link which just had the basic raw data of global average temperatures from 1900-2020 - with no lines drawn through it which assume warming is correlated with CO2. So consider the two strongest global warming periods in the 20th century: 1925–1944 with a temperature increase of 0.37 C and 1978–1997 with a global mean temperature increase of 0.32 C. If you look at the raw data the shapes of the graphs are the same. The earlier warming period follows the same path of warming as the later period - basically identical. The only difference is that the early graph hits its peak in 1940 and subsequently starts coming down again.

Now imagine that you're back in 1940 and you subscribe to this global warming theory of CO2. You would do exactly what people are doing now. You'd draw a smooth line through the warming period (with filtering that assumes CO2 causes warming) and say "job done" - nice correlation with CO2 rise. But a few years later the temperature begins going down again - while CO2 is rising. The problem is that things that look very clear correlations on short time scale can become like a blip (or even nothing at all) when looked at on a longer time scale. So the Early warming period has been completely smoothed out in new graphs of warming. But would you like to bet that the same thing won't happen to the later warming period? They've already had to fiddle the data to get rid of the hiatus, but they can't keep doing that forever. Do you get the idea?

The other thing is that correlation proves nothing anyway. In science it just alerts you to a possible causal link, but there may be no link at all. You see the problem with CO2 - and one that makes it very dangerous to draw conclusions about its association with warming - is that CO2 can cause warming but warming can (and does) also cause rises in CO2. So if the Sun causes warming then the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will automatically rise also - but the warming is NOT caused by CO2. Look at the Vostok cores which show a nice correlation between CO2 and temperature but the driver of warming is the Sun. 

You always have to be careful in attributing effects to CO2 for many reasons. The simple fact is that the Earth is a buffered system. If you try to push it in one direction it has stabilisers that will push back - if it didn't have them it would have burnt up or frozen billions of years ago. So if you push CO2 into the air plants begin growing faster - and the faster they grow the more heat they absorb to drive photosynthesis which causes cooling by storing the Sun's energy in carbohydrates. The Earth can take a lot of abuse. However, if you remove its stabilisers (like vegetation) you can cause a catastrophic feedback loop. If we concrete over the whole land area to provide housing etc I'm absolutely sure that the planet will burn up. But I'm not so sure that CO2 is the problem that the politicians say it is. It's certainly never been shown to cause warming on the Earth (except in deserts and on ice caps). 

I do not think anyone is saying do nothing but what we are being expected to do currently is lopsided in the extreme. If carbon is the problem it behoves everyone to cut their emissions, not offset them, not trade them with others, if it is a problem we each have a ration and once any of us uses too much, and I mean anyone, then they are severely restricted. The flights of 400 private jets into cop 27 illustrates well the imbalance. One would expect those making the demands for sacrifices would at least set an example of leadership, but they don't so I will support action but not this action whereby Joe Bloggs will have his life curtailed  but others carry on as normal.

I knew it was pointless attempting to explain anything to you. You haven't got a clue. The long term correlation has never been proved - and even it if it had been it would prove nothing because warming (caused by any means) causes a rise in CO2 levels because CO2 comes out of solution in the ocean. BTW - that's a good thing because it makes the oceans less acidic.

And the "change" is also not proved. As i showed the previous warming event in the early part of the 20th century has already been "smoothed" out and is invisible on current graphs. In a few decades the current warming period will also disappear in the same way. In addition the data that is used to show warming is occurring has a built in tendency to show warming because the weather stations that are used to record temperatures are in areas that are increasingly becoming built up and urbanised. And one thing that is definitely known is that this causes higher temperature readings. And the satellite readings that now record ocean temperatures are known to return higher temperatures than historic methods. 

There's no point in spending vast amounts of money trying to cut CO2 when the main problem is population growth. And that's undeniable. And even the IPCC admit that if we stopped CO2 emissions immediately it would take up to 200 years to have any effect - even if CO2 were the problem.

The problem is that the standard methodology of science - when confronted with a problem where there are many factors involved - is to attempt to replicate the system in a lab. They then try to do control experiments where they eliminate factors one by one so that they can determine the "attribution" of the effect of each factor. Sadly that can't be done in the case of the Earth because it's the most complex system known to science. The next approach is to build a computer model and try to perform control experiments by varying the concentration of CO2 etc. Sadly there are too many factors for which we have no equations to model their behaviour. In fact one of the few that we can model is CO2 (John Tyndall) and warming. But we can't model the effect of CO2 on cooling - and there are a vast number of natural effects )which have much larger effects) that we don't understand, including the behaviour of the SUN. Which is the most important factor of all. 

Seems to me a no-brainer that cutting back on the use of finite and polluting fuels, and expanding the use of cleaner and renewable energy sources.

It's good for health, makes the environment more pleasant, and develops new employment and wealth creation opportunities...

It is unequivocal that the increase of CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere over the industrial era is the result of human activities and that human influence is the principal driver of many changes observed across the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere, and biosphere.
Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact.
www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/

The following page lists the nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations that hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action.
www.opr.ca.gov/facts/list-of-scientific-organizations.html