[Ramrod]

2016 Annual GWPF Lecture

And here is the maddest thing of all. Current policy is not even achieving decarbonisation. Whatever your views on the urgency of reducing emissions, the policy of subsidizing renewable energy is not achieving it.

Switching to biodiesel or ethanol actually increases emissions. So does burning wood in power stations. So does solar power in cloudy Germany. So do wind farms because they prevent the replacement of coal by gas or nuclear.

In 2012 Bjorn Lomborg calculated that 20 years of climate policy had reduced global emissions by less than 1 percent. During that time the world had spent more than a trillion dollars to subsidise wind and solar power, yet between them they had still not achieved 1% of world energy provision. In this country, they have just passed 2%.

In Germany, a 20% increase in renewables between 1999 and 2014 has resulted in no change in emissions at all.

Testifying to Congress in 2014, Professor Judith Curry, chair of Earth Sciences at Georgia Tech University said:

“Motivated by the precautionary principle to avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, attempts to modify the climate through reducing CO2 emissions may turn out to be futile.”

Why do I think the risk from global warming is being exaggerated? For four principal reasons.

1. All environmental predictions of doom always are;
2. the models have been consistently wrong for more than 30 years;
3. the best evidence indicates that climate sensitivity is relatively low;
4. the climate science establishment has a vested interest in alarm.