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To be fair, the transition to wind and solar, along with the relatively new HVDC large scale interconnector distribution systems, seem to be causing fairly minor regulation issues, which on this occasion cascaded into a major outage. But these problems seem to have been at least partially identified after the 2021 incident, and mitigation recommendations from the system regulation authorities hadn’t been implemented by the commercial operators. Neoliberalism strikes again, and the neoliberal media covers for it. What’s new?
We’ve had a few drive-by denialists posting off-topic on the main blog recently, but – despite multiple invitations – they’re just too bashful to make it here and actually argue their case instead of simply asserting it.
Dang, these denialists are shy!
Glenn NL
“We’re talking about human caused climate change, rather obviously. Oh yes, that would be climate change on our own planet Earth – just in case you need that clarified too.”
It wasn’t obvious from the thread title at all.
There are many believers in human-caused climate change who like to paint non-believers in human-caused climate change as if we don’t recognise that the climate is changing – in other words, as if we are nutters hell-bent on denying what’s going on right in front of our faces. Curiously those who use such a method of arguing have been known to insist that their opponents engage with them. My rule is not to.
Brian – a lot of people don’t deny what’s happening in front of our eyes. But it can be dismissed with “Climate always changes!” or “It’s cyclical. It was like this in the past.” Other alternatives are that it’s due to long term cycles of behaviour of the sun, or that we couldn’t really know what the past was like.
They all seem to be reasons to dismiss the fact that we pour tens of gigatons of CO2 into our surprisingly thin atmosphere every year, at an increasing rate, have cut down a huge proportion of the planet’s forests, or have billions of farm animals emitting methane, just as a few of our assaults on the Earth’s climate stability.
So I quite recognise that not all denialists pretend that the climate isn’t changing – they deny that we have anything to do with it.
I have noticed that many denialists come up with some well overblown characterisations to avoid any discussion about their positions.
Brian Red:
– “There are many believers in human-caused climate change who like to paint non-believers in human-caused climate change as if we don’t recognise that the climate is changing – in other words, as if we are nutters hell-bent on denying what’s going on right in front of our faces.”
That’s because you did for three decades, until your (slightly) more intelligent corporate influencers realised you were looking utterly deluded and had thereby become a hindrance.
– “My rule is not to [engage]”.
Shy. Understandable, as you know you’d lose the argument. Tip: the longer you leave it the more stupid you’ll look and the more sheepish you’ll feel. Best to get it over with as soon as possible.
You’re also worryingly behind; please update to current best practices. The recommended narrative for a couple of years has been that temperature increase is due to human activities, but it is indisputably a good thing because CO2 makes certain plants grow faster and more people die of cold than heat anyway. Suitable selected scientific citations can be found in the appendices. Pensioners are the recommended sympathy demographic. Please deploy standard amnesia of legacy narratives.
For anyone who might be interested, here’s the actual memo from Exxon discussing climate change as a result of CO2 buildup:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2805576-1982-Exxon-Memo-to-Management-About-CO2/
Fair play, they were pretty accurate in their predictions.
After that, they set about a disinformation campaign which is still being swallowed by denialists over four decades later.
This does not make for happy reading, but anyone interested in where we are, and where we are heading, would benefit from spending some time with it and its references:
The 2025 state of the climate report: a planet on the brink
I still marvel at the ability of denialists to wave it all away, declaring it to all be nonsense and BS, completely made up by greedy “scientists” after those enormously profitable research grants. So this cottage industry of charlatans are backing up each others lies, aided by governments, who want nothing more than to tax us for no reason on the pretence of solving a problem that doesn’t exist.
This denialism is maintained despite never actually disproving a single thing, or even bothering to discuss the subject – even angrily dismissing invitations to do so.
The extremely wealthy, with their income guaranteed by high energy and goods consumption and a “full steam ahead” approach by governments, must be delighted.
One reader at nakedcapitalism asked about recommended “books for understanding the global energy and especially oil and gas markets”. I would second that inquiry and forward it to the knowing commentariat here.
p.s. glenn´s great Exxon hint led me to the extensive Wiki page – it looked legit to me – despite being Wiki and all…(but I assume on these subjects the Wiki-naivité is just the right attitude.)
ExxonMobil climate change denial
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_denialOn the fight between Chevron and lawyer Steve Donziger this INTERCEPT from 2020
https://theintercept.com/2020/01/29/chevron-ecuador-lawsuit-steven-donziger/and this interview transcript from Jan. 2025
Lawyer Who Won $9.5B Case Against Chevron Spent 993 Days Under House Arrest
https://www.actvism.org/en/latest/oelkonzern-bahnbrechenden-fall/There is still an unproduced screenplay about Donziger´s story, written by Jay Carson who also did THE MORNING SHOW, and THE FRONT RUNNER and co-produced HOUSE OF CARDS (USA).
But I think I already mentioned that around here…
Thanks AG – Fact checking always welcome (and strongly encouraged!), although this jives very well with versions of it I’ve heard quoted in the past, and discussed by its authors on outlets like Al Jazeera and the BBC. (Also see “Doubt is their product” and “Merchants of doubt”)
BBC: How they made us doubt everything
XCCD has come up with another graphic illustration of how relatively small changes of temperature can have huge effects throughout our history (albeit much of it unwritten, of course).
For people who like to dismiss such apparently small changes as trivial (“We like going abroad because it’s a few degrees warmer there, and people aren’t dropping dead!”), bear in mind these are global averages – not just seasonal changes in one part of one country, or even on one continent.
Philip Frankopan discusses the effect of temperature on the human race superbly in his book “The Earth Transfomed”, which (imho) is essential reading.
Coral reefs repeatedly come up in this discussion.
“On a remote coral reef near Papua New Guinea, endless streams of bubbles rise from cracks in the seabed into the shallow water, fed by an underground volcanic system. For scientists, this natural phenomenon has become a kind of crystal ball, revealing how our changing oceans will shape the marine life within them.”
https://newatlas.com/biology/mysterious-volcanic-bubbles/The article is based on a study from Australian Institute of Marine Science which is linked at the end of it.
Basically, the CO2 bubbles give an idea how acidification affects the local marine biology/biological diversity as a proxy for how global ocean acidification might also affect marine environments. They can track the pH changes due to the CO2 bubbles and track in real time the changes to the local species (of coral/fish etc) over time.No ‘green’ solution?
“The problem with both visions of the future – and the spectrum of views between them – is a fundamental misunderstanding of the collapse which has begun to break over us. This is that each assumes the continuation of that part of industrial civilisation which is required to make their version of the future possible, even as the coming collapse wipes away ALL aspects of industrial civilisation. Most obviously, nobody had developed even an embryonic version of the renewable energy supply chain which is the essential first step to turning non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) into the envisioned “renewables” upon which the promised techno-psychotic future is to be built. That is, until it is possible to mine the minerals, build the components, manufacture and transport the technologies without the use of fossil fuels at any stage in the process, then there is no such thing as “renewable energy” in the sense which the term is currently promoted. “https://consciousnessofsheep.co.uk/2023/07/19/our-predicament-re-stated
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[ MOD: Above link sanitised ]Climate has changed before?
“ . . . it is these ocean state changes that are
1:02:28 correlated with the great disasters of the past impact can cause extinction but
1:02:35 it did so in our past only wants[once] that we can tell whereas this has happened over
1:02:40 and over and over again we have fifteen evidences times of mass extinction in the past 500 million years
1:02:48 so the implications for the implications the implications of the carbon dioxide is really dangerous if you heat your
1:02:55 planet sufficiently to cause your Arctic to melt if you cause the temperature
1:03:01 gradient between your tropics and your Arctic to be reduced you risk going back
1:03:07 to a state that produces these hydrogen sulfide pulses . . . “?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ako03Bjxv70
