'Net-Zero': A Capital Mistake

In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sherlock Holmes say, “It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. ” Recent admissions by Britain’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) indicate they've done just that, relying on insufficient data to induce parliament to embrace net-zero. Without accurate data the net-zero plan must be suspended or repealed until further, more accurate assessment is made.

Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who headed a Royal Society study on future energy supply, is the man who pulled back the curtain on the Climate Change Committee’s sloppy, misleading work. Whether this was just incompetence or an intent to deceive, I leave it to readers to decide. Llewellyn Smith determined that the CCC grossly overestimated the potential number of days during which the U.K. could rely on wind and solar energy to reach a net-zero goal.

The CCC has admitted the error: through its chief executive, Chris Stark, it conceded its projections were based on “the hourly energy demand and real weather data from a low-wind year.” The CCC’s advice to ministers in 2019 projected “there would be only seven days in which wind turbines would produce less than ten percent of their potential output. That compared to 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018.”

Performance anxiety.

By using data from only one year, just as the CCC overestimated the energy output of these renewables it also underestimated the amount of storage capacity needed when relying on these “intermittent weather dependent energy sources.” The Royal Society report estimates that by 2050 one hundred terawatt hours (TWh) of storage will be needed to make up for the variations in wind and sunshine, an estimate not based on the CCC’s reliance on one year’s worth of data, but on 37 years of weather data.

It’s hard to imagine how such an optimistic forecast based on so little was not the product of deliberate misinformation, misinformation unquestioned by parliament or Theresa May when they enshrined the 2050 target into law. It’s even harder to imagine why, with the error admitted, parliament won’t suspend or repeal it.

In the process of critical examination of the data underpinning the Net-Zero law, parliament ought to also consider the words of John Clauser, winner of the 2022 Physics Nobel Prize:

I can very confidently assert, there is NO climate emergency.... atmospheric CO2 and methane have negligible effect on the climate. The policies government have been implementing are total unnecessary and should be eliminated. 

Clauser asserts that, as with the U.K.’s net-zero policy, the “climate emergency” policy is based on bad data—in this case the IPCC’s computer models which “have all misidentified the dominant process that controls the earth’s climate.” Neither is he alone in debunking the “climate emergency” claim. More than 1,600 climate science professionals have signed a declaration saying the same thing:

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Politicized the climate debate certainly is; with no consequences for producing bad data and inducing passage of laws based on it, fakery will continue until the charlatans who peddle such things face some consequences and voters wise up and demand change.