Essay by Eric Worrall
Joëlle Gergis, who spectacularly had a flawed hockey stick climate paper retracted in 2012, has accused Australian politicians of using “tricks” to hide failings in climate policy.
Joelle Gergis
Exposing the climate delusions of net zero
Denial is a funny thing. We must find slippery ways to live with high levels of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort we feel when confronted with the reality that our thoughts and actions are contradictory. We need to somehow rationalize the way 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 that Australia is still not on track to meet its statutory target of reducing emissions by 43 percent from 2005 levels by 2030. Australian governments have long relied heavily on the land sector to demonstrate progress in reducing emissions and continue to export huge amounts of coal and gas to the rest of the world. The protection mechanism, Australia's signature climate policy, allows the biggest industrial polluters to buy carbon credits to offset their impact on the environment, achieving “net zero” emissions. Scientific and legal experts have criticized Australia's carbon offset system as deeply flawed: people receive carbon credits for not cutting down forests that were never meant to be cut down, for growing trees that already exist, and for growing forests in places where they will never grow in the long term. Instead of requiring major polluters to actually reduce the huge amount of carbon they release into the atmosphere for free, they can offset their emissions by planting a few trees. Therein lies the fatal flaw in net zero logic: no matter how the continued exploitation of fossil fuels is justified, true zero is the only way to truly escape catastrophe on our planet.
This ploy of using the land sector to disguise negligible reductions in overall emissions has allowed the government to claim that Australia's emissions have fallen by 28.2 percent since 2005. Excluding land use from the latest data shows that total emissions across all industrial processes (transport, electricity and other sectors) fell by just 1.8 percent.
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Read more: https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2024/09/28/exposed-net-zeros-climate-delusions#mtr
For once, Gergis and I agree on one thing, at least when it comes to land use tricks. There appear to be a number of questionable practices when it comes to using alleged improvements in land's ability to absorb CO2 to balance the books on emissions reduction claims, some of which have been uncovered by WUWT.
Australia is particularly vulnerable to bushfires, so any attempt to accumulate carbon biomass in dry forests will go up in smoke if a fire takes hold of the region. The apparent policy of allowing dry, combustible plant waste to accumulate in poorly managed Australian forests, rather than conducting regular low-intensity burns, makes the fires, when they actually occur, even worse.
As for the rest of Gergis' climate belief systemI think a little healthy skepticism is in order. Just look at how she reacted when flaws in her scientific work were discovered.
Gergis' 2012 essay (eventually retracted) was shredded quite heavily by Steve McIntyre. Instead of accepting that she had made a mistake by misdescribing and mishandling the data used in her analysis, she tried to argue that it didn't matter and called people who objected to her methodological error as amateurs – “…Just to be clear, there was an error in the words describing the proxy selection method and not flaws in the overall analysis as claimed by amateur climate skeptic bloggers. ….”
It didn't stop in 2012, Gergis returned in 2016 with another article, eviscerated again by Steve McIntyre in McIntyre's article “Joelle Gergis, Data Torturer”. McIntyre even suggests that Gergis used a form of “Hide the Decline.”
Everyone makes mistakes, sometimes big mistakes. The right thing, in my opinion, would have been to show a little grace and immediately accept that she stuffed herself – that would have sorted things out quickly and cleanly. But to arrogantly dismiss people who have pointed out the mistake as “amateurs,” to try to claim that the “mistakes” are just a wording problem, and then to appear to make similar mistakes in a later essay, I will just do that don't I'll lose sleep over their climate warnings.
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