Much has been written about the farce taking place in Baku, A place literally built on the supply of fossil fuels for energy production, hosting the world’s longest-running campaign for transferring wealth from poor people in rich countries to rich people in poor countries is indeed a risible spectacle. Sceptical comment tends to dwell on the dishonesty of the claims by the carbonista elites that transitioning to renewables will reduce the cost of energy to householders while increasing the ‘stability’ of energy supply. Both these claims are, of course, diametrically opposed to the truth. Still, at least for the first decade or so in which serious attempts were made in the West to abate emissions, CO2 emissions did indeed come down – in the West. However, since much of the industrial activity which had been ceased to achieve this was simply gifted to China, and since China was increasing its ‘home-grown’ industry as fast as it could, and powering it all with coal, plus a token ‘renewables’ contribution, the net effect of all this self-castigating virtue-signalling has been to increase global emissions. Again, sceptical commentators are quick to remark on this, and to conclude that the immense cost of Net Zero is an exercise in cruel futility. But they report the persistence of emissions in a way that suggests that it may be a matter for regret.

While it’s encouraging to hear the crescendo of voices discrediting the misanthropic Net Zero madness, it’s a shame that they are not, or at least not yet, ready to add the further conclusion to drawn from the evidence they report, that the continued rise in emissions has failed to produce the outcomes the alarmists have repeatedly predicted. Throughout this sorry saga, we have been assured by the alarmists that such-and-such a year is a deadline – if global emissions continued rising as they were, that year would see a tipping-point reached, beyond which the earth’s climate would spiral out of control, leading to an uninhabitable earth. These warnings began in the 70s, almost as soon as the ‘global cooling’ hypothesis (remember that?) was abandoned. Since then, they have been made with a regularity that threatens to numb the mind.

Certainly, since the first COP in 1995, they have had an annual airing. Each of these warnings, though it might not be couched in the lapidary terms that Ernest Rutherford might have used, is in fact a statement of a hypothesis – ‘if X, then Y’ – and can be tested against observations.

So let’s do that – what are those observations?

1. Global emissions have continued to rise – the conditions described in X have been satisfied, and so the hypothesis has been experimentally tested. What about Y?
2. The global temperature trajectory remains stubbornly indistinguishable from that of a planet emerging, with what ought to be gratitude, from the Little Ice Age. No tipping points, no runaway warming. Just a mild, and far from monotonic rise in temperature. We are still far from the Roman Warm Period, when wine grapes were grown in the English midlands.

In summary, the theoretical basis of climate-bothering alarmism has been experimentally tested, not once, but many times, and has been shown to be faulty. The ‘scientists’ making these predictions have done so informed by an understanding of how the climate works that has been repeatedly disconfirmed.

It is – or rather it ought to be – no use those scientists saying that they’ve improved their models, and this time we really will see Thermageddon if we don’t all go out and buy an EV, powered by wind and pixie dust. In classical scientific terms, their hypothesis has failed, and should not be driving public policy.

This simple observation, with its ineluctable conclusion, is notably absent from the rhetoric of all but the most trenchant critics of Net Zero. Perhaps they are tactically wise, in that the Overton Window has yet to shift sufficiently for such outright scepticism to escape being dismissed as heretical. But until it does, and the sceptics feel confident enough not simply to attack the execution of Net Zero, but also to assert that there is no scientific case for reducing CO2 emissions at all, we will not be done with this stupid, exorbitantly expensive, and, frankly, wicked scam.