Weekly clippings #16 - IPCC telephone, ESG RIP, no transition, global boiling, heat map absurdity

 As you know, my purpose in this project is to help investment managers recognize the ethical, scientific, investment, and economic errors in the ESG movement and thus the risks to reputation, regulation, and business that companies have adopted. I believe that when the public and regulators eventually get around to identifying the truth, some investment managers will have a great price to pay and with the investment management portion of my business entrusted to mutual fund managers this damage can spill over onto me even though I don’t use any products with an overt ESG slant. In my weekly clippings I almost completely focus on issues related to the dominant aspect of ESG – climate and energy – but I have similar concerns in the Social and Governance areas that receive far less attention by ESG investment products and I believe do less damage to investors and humanity.

This week in the Science category I have two articles that reference the IPCC: in the first case it is an examination of how the original facts identified in research get changed (often into their opposites) in the chain of communication, and this game of telephone explains why what most people hear and believe is far removed from what the actual science reports say. Second, an expert in extreme weather and risks explains that the IPCC’s own data shows that even in more than 100 years the probability of detecting an effect from climate policies is about the same as a coin flip. Funny how we are not told this.

In the Investment/Economics category I have articles about the inevitable fall of ESG, the absence of an energy transition, the impossible mining projects that would be required to move towards net zero and the disaster created by wind and solar energy policies in the UK.

In the Absurdity category I have a couple of my favorites: a report on the Great Barrier Reef that is both alarmist and completely devoid of facts and UK weather reports that use map colours like red-orange-yellow to present supposedly hotter than normal temperatures, but which in fact are perfectly normal and completely different from how they used to present temperature. If information this misleading was used in our industry we would be sued and out of business pretty quickly – oh wait, many investment companies are using similarly misleading information in promoting their ESG-based products. But then, to identify the errors requires knowledgeable, honest and diligent investigation, a skill set that is sadly lacking among investment managers, regulators and the public alike.

 

When the IPCC misrepresents the IPCC's reports  Scientific language that was more or less accurate in the body of the Working Group 1 (physical science) report got twisted in the Summary for Policymakers and then distorted out of recognition in the Working Group 2 (social impacts) report.

Can Climate Policy Change the Weather?  For those who believe that climate policy can be used to detectably affect the weather that your or I experience, that is simply a fantasy borne from today’s overheated claims of attribution and the fanciful idea that emissions are a disaster control knob. In the lifetimes of everyone reading this and our children’s lifetimes, the attribution of changes in extreme weather to climate policy at high levels of confidence is not expected to be possible. Don’t take it from me, that’s straight from the IPCC.

It’s only a matter of time until the ESG movement will R.I.P. “So many shareholder proposals were overreaching, lacking economic merit, or simply redundant,” the firm Blackrock said.

 It's official : EIA says there will be no energy transition in the U.S. by 2050 Bottom line: After the U.S. spends trillions of dollars subsidizing renewables and attempts to tax fossil fuels out of existence, it all fails to promote an energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables.

The IRA and the US’s mineral supply challenge  “Spurred by the IRA, energy-transition-related US demand for the critical minerals lithium, nickel and cobalt, taken together, will be 23 times higher in 2035 than it was in 2021. For copper, it will be twice as high.” Do you think environmentalists will allow such massive mining projects at all never mind the effects such an increase will have on prices?

Britain’s green energy disaster should be an awful warning to Americans  Vast amounts of energy will be generated only to be expensively constrained off and probably wasted, and the scenario of unmet demand – with attendant blackouts – will become unavoidable.

Global Boiling? Really?!?  “It was never about emissions, you see. It was always about fewer humans.” 

On the left, the BBC weather forecast for July 12 1999 with temperatures reaching 29C shown as orange on the map and described as “one more day of fine and dry weather.” On the right, an August 9 GB News headline with the same or lower temperatures shown as a blazing red map under a headline “Scorching 28C heat to smash Britain as maps turn red.” Behold the manmade climate crisis.

The astonishingly woke Australian Academy of Science  Remarkably, the report does not contain a single fact or figure to support any of its claims about the reef – except the area of the reef is 340,000 square kilometers. There are no figures, no percentages. Nowhere does it mention that coral grows 30 per cent faster for every degree increase in water temperatures. Or that there is 100 per cent more coral on the reef today than in 2012. Or that just 1 per cent of the reef has the potential to be impacted by farm sediment, fertilizer or pesticides, even in the slightest way. Or that the sea level has fallen by 1 meter in the last 5,000 years.