Essay by Eric Worrall
Joëlle Gergis, who had an erroneous hockey stick climate paper spectacularly withdrawn in 2012, has accused Aussie politicians of using “trickery” to conceal climate policy failures.
Joëlle Gergis
Exposing net zero’s climate delusionsDenial is a funny thing. We have to find slippery ways of trying to live with high levels of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort we feel when faced with the reality that our thoughts and actions are contradictory. We must somehow rationalise the ways in which we fool ourselves. In the words of Seinfeld’s George Costanza: “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
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The truth is Australia is still not on track to meet its legislated target of a 43 per cent reduction in emissions from 2005 levels by 2030. Australian governments have a long history of relying heavily on the land sector to demonstrate progress towards reducing emissions while continuing to export enormous quantities of coal and gas to the rest of the world. The safeguard mechanism, Australia’s signature climate policy, allows the largest industrial polluters to buy carbon credits to balance out their impact on the environment, allowing them to achieve “net zero” emissions. Scientific and legal experts have criticised Australia’s carbon offset scheme as being very low integrity: people are receiving carbon credits for not clearing forests that were never going to be cleared, for growing trees that already exist and for growing forests in places that will never sustain them in the long term. Instead of requiring heavy polluters to actually reduce the huge volume of carbon they are dumping into the atmosphere for free, they can pay to offset their emissions by planting a few trees. Therein lies the fatal flaw in the net zero logic: no matter how the continued exploitation of fossil fuels is justified, real zero is the only way we can genuinely pull back from planetary disaster.
This trickery of using the land sector to mask the negligible reductions in total emissions has allowed the government to claim that Australia’s emissions have fallen 28.2 per cent per cent since 2005. Excluding land use from the latest data shows that total emissions, across industrial processes, transport, electricity and other sectors, have declined by just 1.8 per cent.
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Read more: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/09/28/exposing-net-zeros-climate-delusions#mtr
For once Gergis and I agree on something, at least about the land use trickery. There appear to be a number of questionable practices when it comes to using alleged enhancements to land’s ability to absorb CO2 to balance the books on emissions reduction claims, some of which have been exposed by WUWT.
Australia is especially prone to bushfires, so any attempt to accumulate carbon biomass in arid woodlands goes up in smoke whenever a fire sweeps the region. The apparent policy of allowing the accumulation of dry, flammable plant litter in poorly managed Aussie woodlands, instead of conducting regular low intensity burnoffs, makes the fires more ferocious when they do occur.
As for the rest of Gergis’ climate belief system, I believe a little healthy skepticism is in order. Just look at how she reacted when flaws were discovered in her scientific work.
Gergis’ 2012 paper (which eventually got withdrawn) got shredded pretty badly by Steve McIntyre. Instead of accepting she made a mistake by mis-describing and mishandling the data used in her analysis, she tried to argue it didn’t matter, and smeared people who objected to her methodological error as amateurs – “… Just to clarify, there was an error in the words describing the proxy selection method and not flaws in the entire analysis as suggested by amateur climate skeptic bloggers. …”.
It didn’t stop in 2012, Gergis returned with another paper in 2016, which was again eviscerated by Steve McIntyre, in McIntyre’s article Joelle Gergis, Data Torturer. McIntyre even suggests Gergis used a form of “Hide the decline”.
Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes big mistakes. The right thing to do in my opinion would have been to show a little grace and immediately accept she had stuffed up – this would have settled the matter quickly and cleanly. But to arrogantly dismiss people who pointed out the mistake as “amateurs”, to try to claim the “mistakes” were just an issue with wording, then to apparently make similar mistakes in a later paper, lets just say I’m not going to be losing any sleep over her climate warnings.
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