Comments by "Old Scientist" (@OldScientist) on "Innovating to zero! | Bill Gates" video.

  1. It was b*ll*cks then, and it's b*ll*cks now. Getting to Net Zero by 2050 would cost $9.2 trillion a year globally (McKinsey). That's not going to be good value for money. That's nearly one-tenth of global GDP. That money would be better spent on a myriad of things including educating the fifth of humanity who are illiterate and represent a 7% annual loss to the world's economy. Any country that attempts it will be indebted or impoverished. Example: For the UK to reach net zero by electrification of its transport fleet and heating system, it will require a tripling (as a minimum) of its current electrical generation capacity among other things. This will essentially require the UK consuming all of the current global supply of copper and other rare metals for the next 25 years. The cost will be unaffordable and the skilled manpower levels unattainable. And that is just to eliminate the 1% of the global CO2 emissions that the UK is responsible for. So times that by 100 for the Earth. 10,000 child slaves in the cobalt mines of the Congo not enough for you? Make it a million. Imagine all the human suffering and environmental damage done from all that resource extraction! And for what? So someone can virtue signal by driving around in a Tesla. Maddeningly, there is no climate crisis. The Earth was warmer in the recent and distant past.
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  2. @eeeaten  Then I'll just have to go along with the data that scientists have collected. And remember this is global data. Globally the ACE index (accumulated cyclone energy) 1980-2021 shows no increasing trend. Global Hurricane Landfalls 1970-2021 (updated from Weinkle et al, 2012) shows no trend. Satellite data since 1980 shows a slight downward global trend for total hurricaine numbers with 2021 being a record low year. The IPCC reports in AR6, chapter 11, "The total global frequency of TC [tropical cyclone] formation will decrease or remain unchanged with increasing global warming (medium confidence)." Not that I really care about what the IPCC says. Multidecadal variability in Atlantic hurricaines is most probably related to the AMO (Vecchi et al, 2021). NOAA data 1851-2021 shows no trend in number of hurricaine landfalls with the record high being 1886. What the data from NOAA SPC shows about tornados: EF1-EF5 (1954-2022) no trend; EF3-EF5 (most destructive) (1954-2022) 50% decline. No EF5s in US since 2013 (a record absence). The Global Land Precipitation Anomaly from AR5 will disappoint with deviations from the average increasing by 0.2% per decade, but if you look at the actual data, it's just very variable over the decades. Drought appears to be decreasing globally (Watts et al, 2018) measured by SPI 1901-2017. For every million people on earth, annual deaths from climate-related causes (extreme temperature, drought, flood, storms, wildfires) declined 98%--from an average of 247 per year during the 1920s to 2.5 in per year during the 2010s. (EM-DAT, CRED / UCLouvain, Brussels,Belgium. ) Globally 2000-2019 there was a large decrease in cold-related deaths and a moderate increase in heat-related deaths (Zhao, 2021, Lancet). However, coldwaves are over 9 times more likely to kill than heatwaves, so the overall result is very beneficial. What else? Oh, deserts like the Sahara have shrunk considerably, which has retreated northwards dramatically since the 1980s and the Earth has greened by 15% or more in a human lifetime (NASA) due to the fertilising effect of that nasty pollutant CO2. On extinction the rate is very low: 900 known lost species for 2.1 million known species in 500 years. At that frequency it will take over 930,000 years to reach 80% extinction of species experienced at the K-T boundary that saw the extinction of the dinosaurs. There is no climate crisis.
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  3. @eeeaten  The Petm only resulted in a noticeable extinction of benthic foraminifera. There was a more general flourishing of life at that point, especially terrestrial. So if you're right we've got that to look forward to. The next largest extinction event, since the dinosaurs bit the big one, is the Eocene-Oligocene transition. This seems to have been connected with cooling, not warming. Oh dear. I noticed you repeatedly used "expect". Why such Great Expectations? The truth is the world is a far better place to live in than our grandparents experienced.
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  4. @eeeaten  Apart from the migration of ecosystems polewards and the foraminifera I mentioned I am unaware of a mass extinction event at the petm that you referred to. I would appreciate some referenced material to confirm your point. Otherwise I think we should assume it did not occur. However the E-O transition did and was connected to cooling. This vague 'period of imbalance' that you refer to and what you 'expect' to happen is countered by facts. The global climate facts I have already referred to, and the exposure of the unscientific way in which IPCC models failed to predict what has, and is happening. These models, I presume are where you get your expectations from. Please be aware that the IPCC's (Scenario A) modelled predictions are junk. Back in 1990 they predicted a warming of 0.30-0.34°C per decade. Of course we've only had 0.13°C per decade, which is well below the IPCC's lower bound of 0.20°. IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario was founded on the assumption that CO2 emissions would increase by 10-20% by 2025. The truth, however, is that global CO2 emissions are not 20% above their 1990 level but 60% above it! But there is still no crisis just an unexciting set of observations. The attribution of all warming to human activity by the IPCC is junk science as well. Take AR5: that says all observed warming (0.66°C) since 1950 is due solely to combined anthropogenic forcing (Fig. 10.5, IPCC core writing team, page 6). This relies upon modelling, or rather multi-modelling. In fact when you lift the curtain it relies on 15 models (Fig. 10.4, page 882). These models are all over the place. The models' results are not consistent with the assumption that there is a clear connection between GHGs and warming. GISS-EH-2 is particularly 'not well constrained' as the terminology goes. "Scaling factors" then have to be applied so things fit with the HadCRUT dataset. Some of the scaling factors are even negative!!! So many scientists/politicians may have reached a consensus, but the science on which that has been built shows no such agreement. That's the facts, not ignorance. And since when did an accumulation of factual information become wilful ignorance?
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