Waleed Aly runs hot and cold, and fast and loose, with climate facts

The Project host Waleed Aly. Picture: AAP

The lessons from the pandemic are like beauty; they are in the eye of the beholder. Whatever your pet cause or ideology, COVID-19 is your chance to promote it.

A million or more Australians are out of work. Small-business owners have been forced to lock up their life’s labours. Borders are closed. The virus poses a real and present threat to the lives of the elderly. And overseas, the tragedy and trauma are much worse.

Rather than see the reality of carbon-constrained economies, Waleed Aly and other climate catastrophists seem to be singing Irving Berlin — “Blue skies, smiling at me / Nothing but blue skies do I see”.

On The Project last week, Aly argued the pandemic has a “silver lining” because we could use it to “future-proof” our economy by ­investing in renewable energy. “Since COVID-19 knocked climate change off the front pages, something remarkable has happened — nature’s taken a deep breath,” said Aly, showing pictures of clear air and blue skies over cities usually smothered in a pall of pollution.

The global pandemic COVID-19 is a long way from over, but already we know that after the health crisis comes the economic crisis. So what will that look like, and how are we likely to respond?#TheProjectTV pic.twitter.com/L1JuNyBOPr

— The Project (@theprojecttv) April 30, 2020

“With a third of the entire world in some form of lockdown, we’ve been given a small glimpse of what a healing planet looks like,” Aly went on. The trauma ­beneath those clear skies — world infections rising above three million, deaths topping 240,000 globally, poverty growing, millions out of work and the threat of a ­global depression — is an “opportunity”, apparently.

“2020 could see a staggering 5.5 per cent drop in projected global CO2 emissions from 2019,” enthused Aly. “That’s double the year-on-year reduction required to keep global temperature increases less than two degrees over pre-industrial levels.”

The piece then espoused overblown claims about Australia ­becoming a “renewable energy superpower” in which 59,000 jobs would be created and we could transmit solar electricity via sea cables into Asia. This is the hyperbole we have heard from journalists, activists, academics and business leaders for two decades as they line up for government grants and subsidies, and love the media adulation.

Such fantastic spruiking is ­seldom tested against reality. We await The Project’s analysis of Michael Moore’s Planet of the Humans and its demolition of renewable energy mythology, highlighted in this column last week.

Still, we can come back to ­renewable energy evangelism ­another time. Let us focus on those blue skies, because they ­expose how many climate zealots are ­either deliberately misleading or have a shallow comprehension of the science.

The link between greenhouse gases, climate change and air pollution is complex and paradoxical. Like all aspects of climate science, it is still being researched but it has long been known that particulate air pollution — the ­anthropogenic aerosols that ­create dirty air — work against global warming. That is, they have a cooling effect.

This is one argument scientists use to explain the lack of global warming during the 1960s and 70s, when greenhouse gas emissions were rising but temperatures were not. The particulate air pollution, they reason, had a cooling force against the warming force of carbon dioxide.

Use of the word “pollution” for CO2 emissions has always rankled with me for this reason (and also because CO2 is essential to life on Earth). The word has been co-opted, including by Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, in an Orwellian attempt to conflate climate issues with air pollution and create a threat people can visualise.

So, Aly shows the clear skies of our pandemic-induced temporary de-industrialisation and pretends it is the portent of a cooler planet, when that aspect will do the opposite. The greenhouse gases that drive his dreaded global warming are invisible, and often come from the very same sources as the particulate pollution (fossil fuels burned by cars, factories and power stations).

NASA’s 2010 Earth Observatory publication, Aerosols: Tiny Particles, Big Impact, by Adam Voiland, says: “On a global scale, these aerosol ‘indirect effects’ typically work in opposition to greenhouse gases and cause cooling.”

Voiland suggests the cooling effect of air pollution could be about half the warming from greenhouse gases.

A 2018 study, Climate Impacts from a Removal of Anthro­po­genic Aerosol Emissions by BH Samset et al from Oslo’s Centre for International Climate and ­Environment Research, tried to quantify the warming effect of ­removing this pollution.

“We show how cleaning up aerosols, predominantly sulphate, may add an additional half a degree of global warming, with impacts that strengthen those from greenhouse gas warming,” the study says.

So, the clear skies that Aly says have “given us a moment to consider what a healing world might look like” would lead to an extra half a degree of warming. According to the science, it is reducing the invisible gases that matters.

These are complex issues that scientists and policy-makers continue to grapple with around the world. But alarmists in the media prefer cliches, deceptions and exaggerated simplicity.