Beschrijving
Climate cum energy policies have penetrated deeply into the fabric of our society, with disastrous consequences for our prosperity, due to an unprecedented rise in energy prices which triggered inflation and energy poverty for significant parts of the population. How did all that happen?
This book tries to answer that question.
It is a compilation of a number of articles that we have published in recent decades on climate and related topics, such as energy, both in The Netherlands and abroad. This volume addresses not only the climatic aspects of atmospheric warming, but also its political, economic and social implications. In other words, we have tried to shed light on the issue from different perspectives because we believe it can only be properly understood through a multidisciplinary approach.
While it is true that some authors have suggested some kind of conspiracy to promote the fear of global warming, most look for the cause in a confluence of overlapping interests, developments in society and ideas that are mutually reinforcing and have finally led to a firm belief in the claim that man-made CO2 emissions, through the use of fossil fuels, are a dominant source of atmospheric warming.
According to the proponents of the hypothesis of man-made global warming this would have catastrophic consequences such as a rise in sea level with increased flooding, weather extremes, higher land temperatures accompanied by greater droughts or extreme rainfall, resulting in negative impacts on agriculture, migration of harmful tropical insects to northern latitudes with negative impacts on human health, increased frequency and intensity of storms, massive waves of climate refugees etc.
In this book we have tried to prove that none of these fears is based on science.
Authors: Hans Labohm, Dick Thoenes and Jeroen Hetzler
Scepticu (bol.com) –
A nice compilation on sense and nonsense of the climate story. There is no evidence whatsoever that CO2 causes the earth to warm. What CO2 does do is delay heat transport from Earth to space (i.e. cooling), but it can never warm the Earth. The effect of CO2 and other greenhouse gases is best compared to the insulation of a house: the insulation there similarly slows the heat flux to the cold environment, but the insulation can never warm your house back up. If only that were true, perpetual motion would have been invented. CO2 also has a saturation effect: additional CO2 emissions have hardly any effect anymore. One can calculate that doubling the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere (i.e. from 400 to 800 ppm) would cause the earth to warm up by 0.71°C; more or less warming is due to other causes, mainly cosmic and geological causes, which we as humans do not have the slightest influence on.
A book that everyone should read, because the consequences of climate action are disastrous: energy becomes more expensive, as energy is used in every process, everything becomes more expensive; this makes it harder for our companies to compete with companies based in regions that do not believe in the climate story, causing these companies to move out of Europe and our years of accumulated prosperity to be destroyed in a few years.
NEMO2020 (bol.com) –
“Man has always been prone to hysteria, but it has never been as barren as it is today”. It is the title of a column by Rob Hoogland, one of the Telegraaf’s columnists. The text fits seamlessly with Hans Labohm et al’s book titled “Annals of Climate Hysteria”.
In my opinion, Hans Labohm and his co-authors have excellently succeeded in making a controversial topic, which moreover is not so easy, readable for a large audience, while maintaining their journalistic and scientific integrity.
The book is a compilation of a large number of articles, partly published before 2004. Almost everything was known by then.
After 2004, the situation would change. The science itself hardly changed but the tone became different, harsher, more personal. Scandals continually surfaced. “Annals of Climate Hysteria” describes some of them in detail. The authors do not mince words.
In a guest contribution, Ed Zuiderwijk takes us to the year 2100. In a retrospective, he marvels at how “a clique of ignorant fanatics, semi-educated researchers, political followers, and the necessary charlatans gained control of research in atmospheric science and its applications” .
Perhaps somewhat harshly worded but it gives an impression of the frustrations a sceptical scientist encounters in his working life. Against this background, it is amazing how tolerant and moderate Hans Labohm has remained. He has harsh judgements on institutions but never “plays on the man”.
“Annals” refers to a form of historiography in which events are described in chronological order. But when does the “climate hysteria” begin? To my mind, the IPCC reports up to and including the AR 5 of 2013 are one-sidedly alarmist but not hysterical. The founding fathers of alarmism, Bert Bolin, Stephan Schneider, James Hansen, Michael Mann, made broad, in my view too broad, use of the “double ethical bind”. They exaggerated, made selective use of statistical methods, censored their opponents but never became hysterical.
This was also true of the IPCC as a whole until 2013. But in 2015, there was a chairmanship change at the IPCC-the incumbent chairman was fired-and the Paris Accords were concluded at the UN. Everything changed. The Accords called for zero CO2 emissions by 2050, a herculean task that would require draconian measures. Thousands of billions would have to be diverted from healthcare, public housing, education, agriculture, elderly care and the like. To make this possible, citizens had to be scared, terrified, of climate change. After 2015, the IPCC talks only, almost only, about greenhouse gases, especially CO2, as the cause of all warming since 1950. The evidence is weak. A hysterical girl lectures everyone.
And way up there we find someone unabashedly telling an extreme story. Guterres, the UN secretary-general, sees the earth burning, the oceans boiling. “The era of global boiling has arrived” he said recently. It’s big nonsense but no one protested. Incomprehensible. With a nod to Tolkien, I would like to change that statement to: “The age of reason has ended. The age of hysteria has just begun”.
And I see that as the Annals’ greatest value”. It refers to a future that may not come and invites one to think for oneself. To see the roots of something we don’t want to happen. But then we have to do something. Reading the “Annals of Climate Hysteria” is a good start.
Verzetsman (bol.com) –
Is the climate debate tilting? Are the climate ‘deniers’ of a while back now salonable in the climate debate? Significantly, the Social Cultural Planning Bureau calls for dissenters on climate to be taken seriously too. Critical citizens also belong to the Netherlands.
But a real turnaround is yet to come.
For thinking about climate change, Annals of Climate Hysteria can be a stone that may shift the flow of the river. Lead authors Hans Labohm, Dick Thoenes and Jeroen Hetzler use their climate realist articles to show a time view of the climate change debate over the last 20 years.
This is not only about the climatic aspects of atmospheric warming, such as the role of clouds and the influence of CO2, but also highlights the social context: the political implications, the economic consequences, the impact on citizens’ purses and the role of the media.
We get to see Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg who, like a sort of Pieter Omtzigt, is rattling the gates of the scientific climate order.
In the volume, we see a large number of articles included by Prof Dick Thoenes who shines his light on numerous topics. In a simple, clear manner, he refutes the IPCC’s findings and speaks of “assumptions as absolute truths”. Estimates are nothing more than guesses and the attached probabilities, according to him, lack any scientific basis and are therefore misleading. He also denounces ’the trade’ in CO2 and the exaggerated attribution of CO2 as a humane warmer.
Ir. Jeroen Hetzler, the forest economist and man of numbers, gets into an argument with Peter Kuipers Munneke about critical security of supply of wind and solar energy, especially at hospitals. He also cottoned on to Arctic traveller and climate journalist Bernice Notenboom about alleged lack of ice in the Arctic in the near future.
Although the volume features a number of graphs, including the accursed hockey stick, it is also a book about people who posit climate realism as a rational counterpoint.
Like Sonja Boehmer Christiansen, the climate realist of the first hour who recognises as early as the 1980s that climate science is not neutral at all but has its own importance: even faith, in her view, can be an important factor in alarmism. We also see Margaret Thatcher in that setting of the time and as a PhD scholar putting ‘global warming’ on the international agenda, not because she knows much about it, but to raise her own profile. The Iron Lady wants to kill two birds with one stone: rationalise coal mining and prioritise nuclear power. It all works out differently.
We get to see Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg who, like a sort of Pieter Omtzigt, rattles the gates of the scientific climate order. The fear of environmental disasters is unfounded, he proves in a book with 2930 footnotes and a 70-page bibliography. He receives fierce attacks on his work, is not allowed to have a rebuttal in scientific journals and people want to dismiss him from his post as director of his institute of environmental assessment. Job elsewhere…Lomborg was allowed to lecture at the climate-alarmist TU Delft this year, albeit again under protest. Students just want to hear his story.
Climate sceptic Labohm himself, incidentally, also has to give way under pressure. His outspoken views on climate change are not chewed at his employer Clingendael. And suddenly there is a very long arm determining that ‘Labohm has to leave there.’
Good thing there are now annals of it: ‘Chronicles of Climate Hysteria’.