What we ought to be saying about Nett Zero

Scarcely a day passes without an article in the centrist press about the growing evidence that the Nett Zero project is incompatible with the preservation of the living standards that westerners have come to expect. Yet too much of this journalism confines itself to reciting the ineffectiveness of present attempts to achieve Nett Zero, without disputing the desirability of the goal. ‘We are all anxious to combat climate change’, they seem to say, ‘but this isn’t the way to do it’. As someone who isn’t the slightest bit interested in combatting climate change, I find this inexpressibly frustrating. If a stake is to be driven through the heart of Net Zero, we must correctly identify the heart, and its heart is the perverse theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming, not the welter of stupid ideas for ‘combatting’ it.

Take this excellent recent Daily Sceptic article by Tilak Doshi, chronicling the progressive collapse of the Net Zero project in Britain. As I wrote recently, Britain is a nose ahead of Australia in this process, but we will, it is to be hoped, soon follow in the UK’s footsteps, without needing to destroy quite so much wealth on the way. With the greatest respect to Dr Doshi, though, his piece suffers from the same shortcoming that besets most such commentary – it concentrates on the impracticalities of the ‘renewables’ to which we ‘must transition’, if we are to attain Nett Zero, but refrains from laying a glove on the ‘science’ of anthropogenic climate change. He writes:

The rising tide of empirical reality — the costs of intermittent renewables, the geopolitical consequences of energy insecurity and the sheer scale of power demand growth from artificial intelligence infrastructure — has swept away the carefully constructed narrative of inevitability around the so-called energy transition. Tilak Doshi

Dr Doshi sets out his stall with admirable clarity. But these are second-order objections. Of course we need to decarbonise, they seem to say, but this is a silly, ineffective way to go about it. They leave unrefuted the first-order argument upon which the whole sordid enterprise depends – the supposed ‘settled science’ which declares that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are altering the climate in ways that will become irreversible, rendering the planet uninhabitable.

The climate catastrophe narrative has dominated western discourse for so long that it has become received wisdom, To anyone who continues to believe it, the perverse logic of that belief dictates that the destruction of the economy, indeed the denial of first-world economic aspirations to the third world, are prices worth paying, if necessary, to preserve the planet. What’s more, the same people who persuaded them that CO2 was  a planet-killing pollutant have beguiled them with assurances that, far from destroying their economies, renewables promise a new age of cheap and plentiful energy (how they reconcile that with their incessant bleats for more and continued subsidies is a mystery, but not one I can tackle in this post).  Given that they have trusted ‘the experts’ in respect of the first-order proposition, why would they transfer their trust to a contrarian, or ‘denialist’, as the carbonista have it, when it comes to second-order propositions? If the whole sociopathic project is to be destroyed, the science of climate catastrophism itself must be challenged.

For a small core of true believers, the physics of radiative transfer leads indisputably to the destruction of the planet, and in any case the dismantling of Western civilisation, and its reversion to some sort of prelapsarian Arcady is an outcome earnestly to be desired. They are probably, therefore, impervious to reason. A second group, let’s call them the carpetbaggers, are by now dubious of the first-order premise, but have become so invested in the second-order premises – the innumerable ways that they have found to rob the little people to subsidise the renewables fantasy (anyone check the ABC pension fund lately, or for that matter, the BBC’s?) – that they’ll be damned if they’ll see their careers and portfolios ruined on account of a trifling matter of scientific veracity. These two groups, both in the UK and here in Australia, have between them managed to persuade a sizeable majority on both sides of the political divide to buy into their eschatology, and thereby to circumvent parliamentary scrutiny of their project.

These activists, however, could not have achieved such a coup, nor are they numerous enough to sustain it, without the acquiescence of a large cohort of the ‘I was only following orders trusting the experts’ brigade. Scientifically illiterate themselves, they have, for three decades or more, been inclined to trust the carbonistas’ prophecies of doom. That trust must be shattered. There  is evidence  that it is becoming markedly weaker, but for as long as scepticism of ‘the science’ remains the preserve of specialist sites like WUWT and Climate Etc, progress will be agonisingly slow, and more billions will be squandered  to line the carpetbaggers’ pockets.

Climate scepticism needs to go mainstream. Enumerating the shortcomings of windmills, solar panels or EVs won’t cut it, if the person you’re enumerating to still believes in the fairy tale that brought them about. That’s particularly true when the pedlars of the pseudo-science of climate catastrophism have also peddled the notion that a transition to ‘clean’ energy will be painless – or at least that whatever it costs, someone else will do the paying. To someone who believes CO2 is a noxious pollutant that is killing the planet, the answer will always be ‘more, better and different of the same thing’. More windmills, better solar panels, and different EVs.

Point out, as many do, that Australia’s, or Britain’s CO2 emissions are statistically insignificant, and therefore cannot, even if they were  magically to disappear, make a scrap of difference to the climate, and the true believer will retort that with the planet’s very habitability at stake, every little must help! In any case these people genuinely believe that China is making all those solar panels, windmills and EVs not because it knows a gullible Westerner when it sees one, but because it shares their belief that the sky is falling, and will stop building coal-fired power stations and start going properly green any day now, just you wait and see…

Dr Doshi writes ‘…the world is burning more coal than ever, and global Net Zero goals are “slipping away”’. And so they are, but we seem to be forgetting that, way back when this was a ‘Global Warming’ crisis, the carbonistas were predicting that if we carried on burning fossil fuels as we had, let alone at the increased rate that Dr Doshi points to, the earth would suffer runaway warming, something even the truest believer in CAGW would agree hasn’t happened.

When those predictions were first made, those making them were confident that, there being only one earth, and therefore no opportunity to run a control, their hypothesis would never be put to the test. At best, CO2 emissions would be curbed in accordance with their wishes, and they could claim that the absence of accelerated warming was the consequence of that abatement, rather than just something that was happening anyway, and had little, or perhaps nothing, to do with CO2. Worst case, the passage of time would be sufficient to send it down the memory hole, particularly if it’s chased down that hole by an unending clamour of fresh, but similarly threatening promises, whether of rising sea levels, or increasingly frequent extreme weather events, or whatever else these charlatans can dream up.

Many of these prophecies of doom have now ‘matured’, and the hypotheses they represent have indeed been tested. If the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming had been correct, we would by now be burnt to a crisp/drowning in melted polar ice (take your pick of failed predictions – climate alarmism shapeshifts with impressive agility). 

Clearly, catastrophe has not, as promised, befallen the earth. On the contrary, it seems to be thriving on the CO2 we have liberated. Yet the ‘if’ conditions of the hypothesis have not just been met, but exceeded, without the predicted ‘then’ occurring. It follows that the theory used to formulate the hypothesis was incorrect. Observation trumps theory, every time, as Richard Feynman might have said. To put that in classical scientific terms, the experiment has been run, the hypothesis tested, and returned a null result. It is surely the job of we sceptics to retrieve these failed predictions from the memory hole, rub the catastrophists’ noses in them, and use them to show that the so-called ‘settled’ science is clearly in error, and certainly not fit for the purpose of informing public policy.

You can find a handy catalogue of  failed climate predictions here.

‘But I’m not a scientist – how can I go toe-to-toe with the experts?’

Science, at least as traditionally practiced, is a cruel mistress. It can take profound scholarship to conceive a theory, formulate a hypothesis and design an experiment that tests it. It takes little more than common sense to tell whether the experiment has confirmed the hypothesis, or disconfirmed it. Note – I am always careful to use the term ‘disconfirmed’, rather than ‘disproven’. I think Karl Popper would have approved. So would Albert Einstein, who said “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” The third-rate scientists who gave us Nett Zero have left a trail of experimental evidence of their own ignorance of how our climate works. If we really want to break the bipartisan hold that Nett Zero exerts on our parliaments, we need to use that evidence to demonstrate to an electorate that the ‘clean energy transition’ is not only far from the free ride they were promised, but also utterly pointless.

Harrumpf!

Tom Forrester-Paton 11/09/25