The post that got me shadow banned from reddit

This is the result of a 5-month long effort to shorten my previous essay by over 2/3 so it could fit into a reddit self-post, because that monstrosity is too long. I figured that if I had something worth saying, I could also say it in fewer words. I think it’s pretty good and I was shadow banned shortly after—a recurring problem for Realists on social media. I was originally planning to post this after my next essay, but it is not quite ready yet and I would like to have a non-archived version of to reference. I have made a few changes because I can’t not do that, but nothing substantial. Archived original version.

While the rhetoric has been quite adamant for years that 1.5C “future warming” will be “safe,” how can that possibly be accurate when according to the very “experts” making that claim, we are only at something like 1.2C today, yet shit is already fucked? More importantly, why are we still hearing it and why has there been no critical analysis of the most harmful piece of misinformation we have heard on the climate, that there has been a safe amount of anything (warming, emissions, other pollutants, species loss, environmental degradation, etc.) remaining these last few decades? Oh, there has been plenty written about the viability of that meaningless target, but little about what a terrible guess it was for safe or the groupthink of the so-called experts who have systematically downplayed both the severity and imminence of our present-day, full-blown, climate crisis and in doing so, prevented any meaningful climate action from occurring.

I fundamentally disagree with the idea that there is such a thing as an expert at predicting the future. That desire has been present throughout human history and while their precious models can get some things right, some of the time, so could the Oracle of Delphi. Central to the concept of science is experimentation, the testing of hypotheses, and that cannot be done for a prediction about the future—all you can do is wait and see if it comes true. Lacking the ability to test their predictions climate modellers, like many in academia, turn to the statistical practice of Null Hypothesis Significance Testing (NHST) in order to be able to perform a simulacrum of the scientific method. While criticisms have dogged NHST since its inception and in recent years many have come to blame it as the cause of their field's “replication crisis”, the practice persists despite growing calls to end it because it is the only link fields like economics, psychology, and all forms of computer modelling have to their claim that they are a science and the stronger authority that designation carries. The worst part is that NHST is typically taught so poorly to non-statisticians that it is often not done correctly. In his 2010 study Maarten Ambaum found:

We tested a recent, randomly selected issue of the Journal of Climate for at least one instance in each article of misusing a significance test to quantify the validity of some physical hypothesis. The Journal of Climate was not selected because it is prone to include such errors, but because it can safely be considered one of the top journals in climate science. In that particular issue, we observed misuse of significance tests in about three-quarters of the articles; a randomly selected issue published 10 years prior showed such misuses of significance tests in about half of the articles.

Which is common wherever NHST is (ab)used. In his 2021 paper, Theodore Shepherd drew upon a psychologist’s observation that that field treats NHST as a ‘statistical ritual’ to ask if it is any different in the climate “sciences”, writing:

Nicholls (2000) and Ambaum (2010) both provide detailed assessments showing widespread use of NHST in climate publications. This practice does not appear to have declined since the publication of those papers; indeed, my impression is that it has only increased, exacerbated by the growing dominance of the so-called ‘high-impact’ journals which enforce the statistical rituals with particular vigour, supposedly in an effort to achieve a high level of scientific rigour.

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I would add that Gigerenzer’s insightful comment about “identification with social groups” may also apply to climate scientists, in that statistical rituals become a working paradigm for certain journals and reviewers. I suspect that I am not alone in admitting that most of the statistical tests in my own papers are performed in order to satisfy these rituals, rather than as part of the scientific discovery process itself.

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Gigerenzer shows that NHST as described above, is a bastardized hybrid of Fisher’s null hypothesis testing and Neyman-Pearson decision theory and has no basis even in orthodox frequentist statistics. According to Fisher, a null hypothesis test should only be performed in the absence of any prior knowledge, and before one has even looked at the data, neither of which applies to the typical applications in climate science.

The more things change the more they stay the same and today’s pseudoscientific predictive computer modelling is merely the latest in a long line of attempts to do the impossible. Guessing at the future is not a science regardless of the confirmatory rituals performed! That the journals enforce the ritual so vigorously while in at least one randomly chosen instance a large majority of the articles didn’t even do it properly, would be absurd if it weren’t so expected.

Ultimately, the debate over what is and isn’t a science is, like the field of climatology itself, purely academic. So long as the entirely fraudulent field of “climate-economics” is allowed to exist, let alone continue to dominate the top, policy “informing”, level of the discussion, nothing the climatologists do matters, although it's arguable the modelling never mattered since even perfectly accurate models would confer no actual ability to affect the course of the climate crisis we have inflicted on this planet and it was never necessary to guess at the future to know what we need to be doing today.

Founded by the charlatan William Nordhaus, “climate-economics” is bad, even by the wretched standards of the intellectually, academically, ethically, and morally bankrupt religion of economics. In researching his work, Steve Keen concluded that it, “can be characterized as ‘making up numbers to support a pre-existing belief’: specifically, that climate change could have only a trivial impact upon the economy.” In my opinion, the only thing that needs to happen at any future COPout is for all attendees to be forced to sit down and read Keen’s paper, The appallingly bad neoclassical economics of climate change, since they seem to be unfamiliar with it even though it is one of the most important ever written on the climate. It’s neither very long nor technical because it doesn’t need to be, which is something Keen mentions: He thought he was going to be writing a dry paper about discount rates and the suitability of modelling techniques, instead he discovered that Nordhaus’ work is so appallingly bad that it doesn’t pass any sort of smell test and yet it has served as the basis for the field that has “informed” everything we have done, or more accurately not done, on the climate.

The fact that the most pointed criticisms of the farce that is “climate-economics” came from one of the very few economists out there with a clue, rather than a climatologist, is alarming because Nordhaus’ “research” is founded on assumptions like 87% of the economy will be unaffected because it occurs indoors (something that made it into the IPCC’s AR5!) and that the weak, but “statistically significant”, correlation between average temperature and gross state product across the USA today can be used to predict the impact of global warming on the economy of the future. Did not a single climatologist look into his work before accepting it as valid? Hell, with him declaring that 4C warming is what would be optimal for the con-on-you-and-me in his acceptance lecture for the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in the Economic Theologies, you don't even need to dig into his “research” to know that he is clueless of both topics.

Which is a major problem because Nordhaus is the originator of today’s belief in one-point-five thanks to his “first intuition” in the ‘70s that 2C warming would be “safe”... for the economy. That remained the target for years, even being codified in 2010, and was only dialed back in Paris when a group of Exploited Nations that the predictions for sea-level rise said would be largely underwater at 2C warming objected and refused to sign anything that would see them cease to exist, even if we were successful. One-point-five basically didn’t exist in the literature before it was added to the political system in Paris (for example it is not even mentioned in the previously linked 2014 article on climate change’s “speed limit” of 2C) because no honest climatologist viewed it as even possible and while the studies performed subsequently would confirm that 1.5 is indeed a lower number than 2, both are terrible, unfounded, guesses at safe. That's it though, the opinions of a charlatan and the belief that global warming = sea-level rise... our “expert” risk assessment has all the depth and breadth as the one provided by that banker who went viral last year. No wonder they have failed so miserably.

One-point-five isn’t even the first estimation of what would be safe. That was an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 350 ppm which was an increase of 70 over the pre-industrial figure of 280. With hindsight, that was a much better guess at safe but we passed that threshold for the final time over three decades ago. That we frequently hear the “experts” babbling that there is a “carbon budget” remaining to us today, in the era of Faster Than Expected and the weekly “thousand-year” storm, is unforgivable. That wasn’t true thirty years ago, let alone when they invented the term after we had nearly succeeded in doubling-down on the emissions. They may be able to rationalize away their goalpost moving by saying “The Science” has changed since then, that just means that “The Science” and reality are going in opposite directions as the climate crisis is already worse today than any “serious” prediction for 2100.

There is an interesting quote in the Keen paper from a scientist responding to a Nordhaus survey question back in 1994, before the economists succeeded in hijacking the climate conversation and when Nordhaus was still including actual scientists in his surveys, rather than just other e-conmen as he did later on:

I must tell you that I marvel that economists are willing to make quantitative estimates of economic consequences of climate change where the only measures available are estimates of global surface average increases in temperature. As [one] who has spent his career worrying about the vagaries of the dynamics of the atmosphere, I marvel that they can translate a single global number, an extremely poor surrogate for a description of the climatic conditions, into quantitative impacts of global economic conditions.

Despite being considered the most important metric in modern, economics dominated, climate “science”, average surface temperature is, in fact, “an extremely poor surrogate for a description of the climatic conditions,” as confirmed by the best piece of actual climate science we have seen in ages, Song et al. (2022). The authors of that study examined the trends in surface equivalent potential temperature (Thetae_sfc) which is a more comprehensive metric than just temperature alone because it also incorporates humidity. Their most interesting finding is that rather than the Arctic warming x-times faster than the rest of the planet as is commonly claimed (what's it up to now? 4x?), “In other words, the Earth is heated more uniformly when measured by Thetae_sfc.” That we could expect higher humidity which in turn would cause more extreme weather is, “one of the most robust findings of most if not all climate model studies,” and something the models actually got right, yet it is only at this late stage that someone finally got around to examining this and despite the paper being published in the prestigious journal PNAS & receiving decent media coverage at the time, it appears to have had no impact and already been forgotten as it does not conform to the field’s groupthink. Rather it calls into question what it is they’ve wasted their time on these past few decades since they aren’t even using the best available metric.

While the history of science is one of remarkable intellects making amazing discoveries, it is also a history of egomaniacs, charlatans, and pigheadedness which is why physicist Max Planck famously quipped “science advances one funeral at a time.” The bad actors only get weeded out with time and through free and open debate. Unfortunately, when it comes to the climate not only are we out of time, but the debate has been anything but free, open, or, frankly, reality-based. Censorship permeates everything they do, from our “gold standard” in climate “science,” the IPCC, which for years has censored all of the alarming parts from it’s own reports, down to the individual level where, outside of a few notable exceptions, the ones that have not repeated the lies often enough to believe in them self-censor to avoid the dreaded “alarmist” label.

There were 50,000 people in Paris and despite numerous reports of discontent, there was only one, Kevin Anderson, with the courage to speak out publicly against that failure. It will forever be to their shame that that death sentence for most complex life on this planet did not cause a schism in the field, so it is always worth listening to one of the few who has been honest with us, especially when he says things like:

I’ve only really become aware of the misleading and dangerous influence of some senior academics on their earlier career colleagues over the past two years. It was brought to my attention at one of the big climate negotiations (COPs) I was attending. Chatting to those without grey hair, it became increasingly clear many of them were being reprimanded for asking difficult questions by their senior colleagues and supervisors. I really found this hard to believe. But the more I asked about this the more I realized I’d been living in a naive bubble unaware of how vibrant academic debate driven by younger academic candidates is being deliberately stifled.

In a sane world, that interview would have spawned at least one government inquiry but when the field possesses, “a deep institutional systemic bias towards aligning [their] conclusions within the boundaries of the status quo,” why would it? They are already telling our governments what they want to hear and any real investigation would just reveal that the emperor has no clothes. Besides, that, “[they’ve] chosen to forgo [their] academic independence for the appeal of being relevant within a debate [their] own analysis tells [them] is irrelevant,” falls squarely on the so-called scientists.

Anderson also talks at length about something us outsiders have heard quite a bit, especially in recent years: That many of his colleagues are as alarmed as he is but the culture of censorship, intimidation, and ridicule has them too afraid to speak out, concluding that, “Typically it is more senior academics and others who hold these conflicting public and private positions.” For another example of this, Bill McGuire said in an interview last year:

I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start [!!!] to tackle the crisis.

I call it cowardice and wish the honest ones would start naming names. For one more example, it also made an appearance in this rare display of contrition from three climate scientists apologizing for their roles in promulgating the “net carbon zero” myth:

In private, scientists express significant scepticism about the Paris Agreement, BECCS, offsetting, geoengineering and net zero. Apart from some notable exceptions, in public we quietly go about our work, apply for funding, publish papers and teach. The path to disastrous climate change is paved with feasibility studies and impact assessments.

Rather than acknowledge the seriousness of our situation, we instead continue to participate in the fantasy of net zero. What will we do when reality bites? What will we say to our friends and loved ones about our failure to speak out now?

That article also has this passage about the central role “climate-economics” has played:

It was around that time [1997] that the first computer models linking greenhouse gas emissions to impacts on different sectors of the economy were developed. These hybrid climate-economic models are known as Integrated Assessment Models. They allowed modellers to link economic activity to the climate by, for example, exploring how changes in investments and technology could lead to changes in greenhouse gas emissions.

They seemed like a miracle: you could try out policies on a computer screen before implementing them, saving humanity costly experimentation [WHAT DID THEY SAVE US?!?]. They rapidly emerged to become key guidance for climate policy. A primacy they maintain to this day.

Unfortunately, they also removed the need for deep critical thinking. Such models represent society as a web of idealised, emotionless buyers and sellers and thus ignore complex social and political realities, or even the impacts of climate change itself. Their implicit promise is that market-based approaches will always work. This meant that discussions about policies were limited to those most convenient to politicians: incremental changes to legislation and taxes.

Which is why, on the balance, I think it is a good article even if it contains blatant misinformation like: “Relying on untested carbon dioxide removal mechanisms to achieve the Paris targets when we have the technologies to transition away from fossil fuels today...” That is what Kevin Anderson was referring to when he said, “Worse still, [his colleagues] frequently point to idealised technical solutions, yet often with little understanding of either the technologies or their practical deliveries...” because there simply is no replacement for the fossil fuels and the belief that Green BAU is desirable, let alone even possible, is another of the harmful lies we have been fed by our so-called experts for the sole purpose of delaying real action.

That article also brings me back to a question I have wondered occasionally over the years: What even goes into the typical ‘climatology’ education? Do they have to spend so much time bringing students up to speed on the esoteric technobabble of climate modelling that they never get around to teaching them any real science? Because I would think you need a strong grounding in the three physical sciences yet they so often evince views that run afoul of them, most notably in their embracing of the “net carbon zero” myth. While it’s great that the authors of the article have come to the realization that it is a ‘dangerous trap,’ what took them so long? I have never been more demoralized in my life than the first time I came across the words “net carbon zero” as that is dependent on either impossible technology being invented or an impossible energy source being discovered that can power the existing technology. Otherwise, we do not have access to enough energy to make even a measurable difference in atmospheric CO2 content. While, like in virtually every other aspect, the conversation around carbon capture may be focused solely on the dollar amount per ton, removing CO2 from the atmosphere is an energetic process not a financial one and while money, as a figment of the human imagination is effectively infinite, energy is, and always will be, the constraining resource on all of humanity's ambitions. Unless the emissions are essentially zero, “net carbon zero” will never happen which is why present ‘direct air capture’ efforts don’t even remove 10 seconds worth of our annual emissions (0.01MT in 2022 so 0.01E6/36.8E9*365.25*24*60*60=8.57s). That’s not a “good first step,” that’s fucking hubris.

This flagrant disregard for the physical sciences can be seen quite clearly in the newest bullshit we are hearing from the people who have been wrong all along. I find it incredible that in an article titled “The Best Climate Science You’ve Never Heard Of” posted to his own website, climate crisis denier Michael E. Mann doesn’t even make an attempt at explaining this “science.” Just an appeal to the authority of “the experts” to claim there is no longer going to be a “warming lag” and a bunch of “blah blah blah.” I call it incredible because the Washington Post, apparently having higher standards, did require such an explanation, wanting though it may be, in the version they published meaning, left to his own devices our chief celebrity climate “scientist” and the media’s ‘go-to guy’ when they need to downplay doesn’t feel he has to explain himself, at all. I always try to give credit where credit is due though and that article isn’t a total loss as it does contain a claim that this “science,” “... underlies the widely-now used concept of a ‘carbon budget,’” which is good to know.

It doesn’t even require a scientific background to question this “science” when the explanations don't go any deeper than what was in the WaPo:

Yes, CO2 pushes temperatures higher, but carbon ‘sinks’, including forests and in particular the oceans, absorb almost half of the CO2 that is emitted, causing atmospheric CO2 levels to drop, offsetting the delayed warming effect.

Anybody who has been paying attention should question how much of a role forests are going to play in sequestering carbon in the future when all of the largest ones have been net emitters for years. While human deforestation efforts are undoubtedly a major contributor to that, where is the evidence that is going to slow down, let alone stop? Not only will few accept going ‘cold and hungry’ while there is still material around to burn, wood chips are a necessary ingredient in the smelting of metallurgical silicon, so the Bright Green Dream requires not only on a massive expansion of mining, but deforestation as well.

But it is the idea that “in particular the oceans” will continue to be a significant carbon sink that is truly troubling because that is not what the physical chemistry says. While the oceans do take in a good portion of our emissions that’s all they do: Take in a portion of our emissions. The amount of CO2 that remains dissolved in the surface ocean is directly proportional to its partial pressure in the atmosphere in accordance with Henry’s Law.

While the oceans are undeniably complex & not well understood even today, and the real-world doesn’t play out exactly as the ideal gas laws would indicate, there is no reason to believe the oceans would continue to take in a significant amount of CO2 in a “net carbon zero” scenario, let alone one where the atmospheric concentration is decreasing. In the unlikely event that aliens show up to save us from ourselves using technology that is indistinguishable from magic, the oceans should be expected to emit CO2. The thermohaline circulation sees carbon-rich surface water replaced with deep water that is comparatively unsaturated, but that process takes hundreds-to-thousands of years to complete while the air-sea gas exchange is believed to equilibrate in under one. It also appears to be so trivial an effect that I have never even been able to find an estimation of how much CO2 is believed to be “sequestered” in this fashion. It certainly doesn't appear anywhere in this “science” and, unfortunately, nowadays the search results are flooded with hare-brained schemes to dump shit into the oceans to try to utilize the effect because, as it occurs naturally, it is inconsequential. It’s worth noting that with satire being dead and all, Mann’s own research indicates the thermohaline circulation is slowing down as the oceans warm, further weakening that sink.

Additionally, Henry’s Law is temperature dependent and warmer liquids are less capable of holding dissolved gases which is why the full old “warming lag” theory went:

As both land and oceans start to warm up, they both release large amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, from melting permafrost and from warming ocean water, since CO2 solubility in water is greater in cold conditions. That release enhances the greenhouse effect, amplifying the warming trend and leading to yet more CO2 being degassed. In other words, increasing CO2 levels become both the cause and effect of further warming. Once started, it's a vicious, self-reinforcing cycle - an excellent example of what science refers to as a positive climate feedback.

Meaning this “science” directly contradicts the old theory with no explanation given for why that should be the case. Now, obviously it is a bad idea to base your scientific understanding off of an MSM article, but even going up one level, the most frequently referenced pop-sci article on the topic is this “explainer” from climate crisis denier Zeke Hausfather at Carbon Brief. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly coming from the climate user who brought us such nonsense as, ‘ackshually, the models have been quite accurate,’ and, ‘ackshually, the models are running too hot,’ it doesn’t provide any better explanation, which is too bad because the comment section offered a great opportunity to clear up many of the valid concerns people have about this “science” but, even with a comment directly calling out the lack of response, no answers were provided.

Going up to the final level, the paper that seems to be referenced the most is MacDougall et al (2020), which, despite being the source for Hausfather’s claim that, “By chance, these two factors cancel each other out,” is a meta study that found “Models exhibit a wide variety of behaviours after emissions cease...” I am not sure how it is they determined given, “a wide variety of behaviours,” that the “zero emission commitment” would therefore be zero—I guess it could be buried somewhere in the technobabble—but I feel there is enough plain English to make a determination about the validity of this “science”:

In CANESM5 and CNRM the terrestrial carbon sink dominates the reduction in radiative forcing, while in ACCESS, IAPRAS, MESM, P. GENIE, and UVic, the ocean carbon uptake dominates the reduction in radiative forcing.

...

Given that the behaviour of the terrestrial carbon cycle varies strongly between models and that many models lack feedbacks related to nutrient limitation and permafrost carbon pools, the strong dependence of ZEC50 on terrestrial carbon uptake is concerning for the robustness of ZEC50 estimates. Notably the three ESMs with the weakest terrestrial carbon sink response include terrestrial nutrient limitation.

...

The analysis here has shown that across models decadal-scale ZEC is poorly correlated to other metrics of climate warming, such as TCR and ECS, though relationships may exist in model frameworks. However, the three factors that drive ZEC, ocean heat uptake, ocean carbon uptake, and net land carbon flux correlate relatively well to their states before emissions cease.

With the final passage seeming to confirm that this “science” does indeed violate the physical chemistry of the situation and that this will happen is nothing more than an assumption necessary for this, particularly GIGO-brand of, modelling to work. It really feels like it is not a matter of, “by chance,” but rather, “by design.” Why even consider the models that lack basic elements like ‘terrestrial nutrient limitations’?

Finally, this “science” just fails conceptually being entirely predicated on humanity reaching a more extreme version of the physically impossible state of “net carbon zero” than exists in any of our “plans” which already account for a good portion of the “land” carbon sink. It also requires the aerosol masking effect and the positive feedbacks to not exist as well as for the ongoing Mass Extinction to reverse course even though our Bright Green Dreams call for an intensification of our all-out assault on the rest of our biosphere. The simple fact is that almost all of the CO2 we are unleashing today was originally fixed by living things over the course of millions of years. To believe it will happen faster this time around, especially given present conditions, is just delusional.

It’s not surprising that we would see something like this though. While it was one thing to discuss the idea that we have to stop burning fossil fuels long before things ‘get bad’ when that was only a problem for the distant future to worry about, it’s an entirely different thing today when shit is absolutely fucked and our “leaders” are still desperately trying to ramp up the rate of extraction. That’s alarmism and violates the field’s dictum of “we mustn’t be alarmist.” As long as that dictum remains in effect though, climate modelling will continue to be incredibly biased against our alarming reality. Any model that accurately predicted our present conditions a decade ago would have been dismissed for being “too alarmist” and had the creator persisted, their career would have been destroyed. It’s quite bothersome to hear it said that “the experts” warned us this was coming because while anyone talking 2020 was called many names, they were all antonyms of “expert.” The so-called experts, on the other hand, were blathering about 2050 this and 2100 that.

They were also warning almost exclusively about sea-level rise which is why David Wallace-Wells felt it necessary to open his infamous 2017 The Uninhabitable Earth article with the line “If your anxiety about global warming is dominated by fears of sea-level rise, you are barely scratching the surface of what terrors are possible...” I thought, with “the science saying” that we could expect higher humidity which would cause more extreme weather, that Hurricane Katrina was a good time to begin transitioning the conversation about the climate away from just global warming = sea-level rise because while that is an existential threat for many, it is not for humanity as a whole the way the extremes and catastrophes are and focusing on it has always been a way to downplay and trivialize: “So what? We will just build sea walls.” The so-called experts not only disagreed with that assessment, they denounced it and not just for Katrina. For many years in every single article after every single one of the increasingly frequent climate catastrophes there was an “expert” disavowing any connection between our noticeably changed climate and the noticeable increase in extreme weather, much like the 1.5C hopium that accompanies virtually all mainstream writing on the climate today. Song et al. (2022) cite a 2017 statement from the American Meteorological Society that read “We’re experiencing new weather, because we’ve made a new climate” as one of the earliest examples of the attribution finally being made.

While the climate has changed quite dramatically since we crossed the original safe threshold over thirty years ago, almost all of that has occurred in the last five as we went from a position of official denialism to, and I apologize for getting technical again, shit being absolutely fucked and even though the “science” that “informed” the Paris Agreement predicted none of this, we aren’t seeing a frantic re-evaluation of our “plans.” No their minimum timeline is still nearly double the length over which we have seen such a frightening intensification and we are still being subjected to the same old delusions, denialism, and dishonest downplaying.

It was seeing them all repeat the nonsense that it was ‘necessary’ to downplay in order to ‘get anything done’ that was the first major turn-off for me. Not just because it was always predicated on an appeal to the authority of “the psychologists”; not even because it was always going to fail to “spur us into action,” allowing instead for the spread of the monstrous sentiment, “Why should I care? It won't get bad until after I am dead”; but because dishonesty is inherent to it and there is no worse way to get people on board with something than by lying to them about it. I can’t be the only one who bristles at being told that I must simply accept the clearly wrong opinions of admitted liars, can I? That they keep mindlessly repeating it to this day, when we have decades of real-world evidence that downplaying doesn’t do anything but breed complacency, is just another example of how difficult it is for reality to intrude upon their groupthink.

Three decades of talks have yet to produce a single tangible result. If anything, the conversation is even further removed from reality today as the “net carbon zero” myth did not exist back then. With COPout-Fest 2022 having been sponsored by Coca-Cola, it’s like they go out of their way to discredit themselves. How, exactly, does a “climate” conference end up partnering with one of the worst polluters on the planet? It is beyond indefensible for the scientific community to still be supporting and legitimizing the charade, especially since we have been hearing for years that actual scientists are just sidelined and ignored. Can it really be called a “climate conference” if it is just a bunch of politicos and economists circle-jerking about economic growth? It’s a damn shame they learned no lessons from their most productive year yet, 2020, because their Carbon Indulgences do not, in fact, undo any of the very real harm inflicted on our biosphere as a result of those wastes of time, energy, and resources.

I don’t think we would be any worse off had the IPCC not been formed and had they not began COPping-out. I just can’t see how we would have acted any differently when the last 30 years have been spent the same the as the prior 240: Burning through the fossil fuels as quickly and recklessly as we possibly can, all while boasting about how incredibly clever we are for doing so. That the physical limits of our planet are preventing us from continuing today is to the majority, and a very large one at that, the greatest injustice of all. As long as maintaining present living standards and the biosphere-wrecking industrial system necessary to provide them remains the sole goal of our “climate” (really economic) action plans, we will continue acting single-mindedly towards making a bad situation even worse. The only thing the IPCC and COPout crowds have to show for over three decades of “efforts” is increasingly unhinged rationalizations to justify further emissions and ecocide. We aren't even at the stage where we are able to discuss the banning of absolute frivolities like cruise ships!

While the Mystics of the Markets may declare that there are no Limits to Growth, that belief comes from a position of ignorance and nothing more. That none other than William fucking Nordhaus was involved in the deboonking of that famously accurate study is why I view him as the greatest villain in all of human history because nobody else will even come close to his body count. The reality is we slammed into those limits years ago and it’s tragic really: If there is indeed still time left for us to avert our own extinction, then with the global industrial economy in its death throes and clearly not working out for the vast majority anymore, there is a great opportunity for the ‘paradigm shift’ to the ecological understanding of the world put forth as a necessary first step by William R. Catton Jr. in his remarkably prescient 1980 book Overshoot: The Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change. But, with modern “environmental” activism having been fully co-opted by industrial interests, we seem even further from that understanding today. Seriously, when was the last time you heard about the need to be teaching the children “ecological literacy”? Ever? Now compare that to all the prattle about “financial literacy.” Only one of those concepts has a physical basis in reality and it’s not the one the current zeitgeist is focused on.

I guess this is the part where I am supposed to provide a hit of hopium that all is not lost, instead here is a thought experiment to help contextualize where we are in terms of “climate action”:

Imagine a world in which we were deserving of the name we gave our species and the wise apes outnumbered the silly ones 100,000,000-to-1 rather than the opposite. Realizing that their desired way of living was having disastrous consequences on their only habitat, the wise apes took the necessary and appropriate steps to reach their, non-silly, version of “net carbon zero by 2050” and in their first year of fully post-industrial living they experienced the same climate catastrophes we are suffering today. Would they consider themselves successful?

As long as the ecocidal nightmare that is the Bright Green Dream is the extent of our “plans,” then we aren't even at the ‘realizing’ stage. The vehicle speeding towards the climate cliff is already airborne and our so-called experts have convinced themselves that can be fixed by painting the accelerator green. We are in desperate need of new leadership and it is well past time to stop listening to the people who have participated in the downplaying and myth-making, but with the disgusting way everyone else was treated, they would be entirely justified giving us the ol' Ray Patterson. Luckily, they are better people than our dear “experts.”

Drastic change needs to be a thing of the past before we start talking about hope for the future.