Climate: all is well, all will be well, by Jeremy Nieboer, paperback, 71 pages, ISBN 978-1-8380658-5-0, Bruges Group, 2021
This is a very fine, thought-provoking contribution to the debate about climate change. Jeremy Nieboer proves that there is no tenable scientific basis for the proposed vast spending on the folly of decarbonisation. The author, a retired lawyer, forensically examines many of the claims made about our alleged imminent extinction and refutes many of them.
He observes that "CO2 is essential to life on Earth terrestrial and marine. Increases in CO2 density are wholly beneficial since they result in the creation of surplus food, expansion of both vegetation and forestation."
As he points out, "The IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports stipulate that global warming increases should be limited to 20C from pre-industrial levels. Yet for most of the Holocene they were higher than this and each has resulted in periods of prosperity, expansion and well-being for humanity." (The Holocene, the current geological epoch, began some 11,650 years ago.)
The principal global temperature variations in the last 2,500 years have been the Roman Warming Period (250BC-400AD), the Dark Ages cold period (400-765), the Medieval Warming Period (950-1250), and the Little Ice Age (1300-1850). In each of these periods, CO2 atmospheric concentrations stayed within a range of 260-290 parts per million by volume.
Nieboer remarks that "Warming is not associated with extinctions. Nor is global CO2 density. There were no mass extinctions in the Holocene Maximum 6,500 years ago or the Minoan Warming Period 3,500 years ago or the Roman Warming Period or the Medieval Warming Period. In those periods temperature was between 10C-50Chigher than today and for thousands of years about 30Chotter. Geology shows that in all previous epochs in times of global warming there is expansion of life."
More recently, "CO2 density in the atmosphere has been increasing. For 10,000 years it has averaged between 260 and 280 ppm [parts per million by volume] until about 1850. It has risen since then to 410 ppm - an increase of 45% that is related to human activity. But global temperature has increased in that time by only 1.1%."
He notes that "The IPCC has not proved that the increase in global temperature since 1850 is caused by a rise in CO2 density and that it is not due to heightened solar activity as we emerge from the Little Ice Age."
Again, we had warming in 1910-40, with exceptionally high temperatures in the 1930s, then cooling in 1945-76, followed by a warming period in 1975-98. We had El Niño warming spikes in 1972-73, 1982-83, 1987-88, 1991-92, 1995 and 1997-98, then a cooler period, 1998-2014, followed by El Niño spikes in 2015-16 and 2019.
But despite all the evidence that trying to achieve 'net-zero' is unnecessary for our well-being - and actually that even trying to achieve it would have a disastrous effect on our living standards, "The Government is bound by statute to procure the elimination of fossil fuel emissions by 2050. The National Grid itself puts the cost of achieving this goal at £3,000,000,000,000 (£3 trillion). … According to Bloomberg New Energy Finance's New Energy Outlook report (22nd July 2021) the costs of reaching net-zero globally range between $92 trillion and $173 trillion over the next thirty years."
