“Climate Alarm is a Good Way of Expanding Government Power”: Interview With Professor Ross McKitrick

While there is a lot of talk about renewables being cheap, Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, gives a simple example of why this is not true. He draws a parallel with the building of railways. Suppose, for example, that a country wants to build a railroad from one end of the country to the other, and puts out a tender. Two bids are received, one of which is significantly cheaper than the other. However, the company that submitted the cheaper bid says that after every 10 miles, there is a three mile gap in the track. If such a condition is acceptable, the price is really cheap. “Well, obviously, the fact that it’s cheaper doesn’t help, because it’s now useless as a railroad. And electricity systems that are running on wind are useless for the same purpose. You can’t have an electricity system that when the wind dies down, there’s no electricity,” he says. The same kind of problems are true for solar power as well.

The energy system must be reliable

To make the power system work, i.e., to have electricity available all the time with renewables, you need either energy storage capacity or some kind of parallel system of generation. As far as storage is concerned, there are no good solutions at the moment, says McKitrick. One option, he notes, would be to try to create a lake in the sky and pump enough water up there while the weather is windy to use it as a hydro resource in the absence of wind. However, this is not a realistic solution. Another option would be batteries. “No one can even conceive today of how you’d have batteries large enough to run an entire country for anything more than 30 seconds or so,” he says.

And the third option? In order to have a sufficient and continuous supply of electricity, we would need another more reliable source than wind and solar – gas-fired power plants, for example. In other words, you will need to add this cost and essentially build duplicate electricity systems that run at the same time. McKitrick says this is inefficient, silly, and comes with a high cost. “Anything that people talk about is so incredibly expensive that suddenly the cost comparison goes back to where it always was, which is fossil fuel-based systems are inexpensive and 100% reliable,” he says. Nuclear, he adds, is expensive by comparison, but once it is built, the costs of running it are low and it lasts a long time. Hydropower is also good and reliable, but it can only be used where natural conditions are right. “We’ve used them because they’re the ones that work. And when you factor in the reliability, they’re also the least expensive overall. Wind and solar, they will never be competitive because of the intermittency,” says McKitrick.

Depending on the taxpayer

Since renewables are uncompetitive, governments subsidise them, or in other words, taxpayers pay for them, everywhere. McKitrick gives the example of his home province of Ontario, Canada. Around the mid-2000s, Ontario decided to start heavily subsidising wind farm development. “What they sold to the public was Ontario is now going to be a world leader in manufacturing wind turbines and everybody is going to be lining up to buy wind turbines from us. So there will be a great economic benefit,” McKitrick recalls but adds that nothing of the sort happened. “No, we didn’t have any comparative advantage in building wind turbines. We don’t have a wind turbine industry in Ontario. We ended up importing all the parts. The turbines went up and the Government changed and the subsidies disappeared. The whole industry disappeared,” McKitrick explains. According to him, this is what always happens when an industry comes into existence not because private investors have an interest in developing it, but because the Government is handing out taxpayer money to it. “It’s gone as soon as the subsidies are gone. And as long as the subsidies are in place, it’s a drain on your society. It is destroying your national wealth, not building it,” he says.

The energy transition and the deployment of renewable energy is only one part of the climate debate, however. The transition to a decarbonised economy should be preceded by the question of why we are doing it in the first place. Allegedly, it is because human-emitted CO₂ has caused global warming and if we do not stop it, if we continue to emit CO₂, we will end up with a climate catastrophe, full of hellfire and extreme weather events. But in reality, we should be asking, are these claims really accurate?

McKitrick is one of the many scientists trying to allay people’s climate anxiety. His interest in environmental issues began during his studies at the University of British Columbia in the early 1990s. General interest in environmental issues was on the rise, but there weren’t many economists studying the subject or considering the impact of environmental policies on the economy. “I decided to focus on climate change because Canada was beginning to think about whether a carbon tax would make sense. And the economics was interesting and the data was there to work on it,” he says.

In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was agreed between countries, which set a target for greenhouse gas reductions. In general, McKitrick says, the discussions at the time were about climate scientists talking about climate-related issues and problems, but they also wanted economists to come in and talk about the economic impact of the policies that were planned. “There weren’t many people working on the topic, so I would often get invited to these kinds of meetings and I’d see the standard science presentation. I didn’t really have any opinion on it one way or the other. I just took it all in,” he says.

A faulty hockey stick graph

But at around the turn of the millennium, at those meetings, weather data collected by the satellites were presented. “It was, to me, quite an unusual thing, because I’d seen lots of presentations of the surface thermometer data and the description of the global warming problem. Then somebody said there’s also this satellite data that’s measuring the layers of the atmosphere where all this is supposed to be happening and it doesn’t show any warming. Which is unusual,” he says, adding that for some reason it was not considered important. “I thought, wait a second, that’s an important point. We should understand this before we go rushing into some of these expensive policies. We need to ask how solid the science here is,” McKitrick says.

He then became interested in climate science itself, beyond the economic impacts of any climate policy in particular, and looked at the data provided by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for example. “Immediately I was struck by the fact that the statistical analysis wasn’t very impressive. That they were doing really rudimentary analyses and it was clear that they didn’t have as much training in statistics as an economist would,” he says.

In 2003, he was contacted by Stephen McIntyre, a mathematician who was working in the mining sector and was interested in replicating paleoclimate studies. He would later start the popular website ClimateAudit.org, which critically assessed the statistical analysis behind climate science claims.

McIntyre explained that he had been trying to understand the data on which University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann et al. created his famous hockey stick graph showing a steep rise in temperatures on Earth in the second half of the 20th century.

Together with McKitrick they then analysed the underlying data that climate scientists had obtained primarily by studying tree rings offering proxy data of the planet’s climate history. McKitrick and McIntyre discovered a significant number of errors in the work of Mann et al. “These are long paleoclimate series, mostly tree rings, things like that, and just graphing them up they didn’t look like hockey sticks. And most of the data series just had no trend at all. And a lot of them even go down in the 20th century,” he says.

They were able to reconstruct the steps that Mann and his co-authors had taken in analysing the data, and they saw that, in essence, Mann et al. had only used the data that showed warming. That is, McKitrick says, Mann and his colleagues extracted 20 out of 400 data series – the ones from which it could be deduced that the rise in temperatures in the second half of the 20th century resembled the image of a hockey stick when plotted on a graph. Understandably, presenting data in this selective way is in itself a bad enough way to conduct research, but McKitrick adds that the selected data itself were also problematic in the Mann et al. work. “The additional problem is those 20 series used are the bristlecone pines, which are known in the field not to be good temperature proxies,” he explains, adding that, ultimately, a graph of any shape could be produced on climate history in this way. The same problems apply to similar hockey stick graphs produced later. “You have no way statistically to say that a hockey stick shape is the preferred outcome versus some completely different shape,” McKitrick says.

Mann vs Steyn: the flawed hockey stick still lives on

McKitrick and McIntyre published their first paper on the hockey stick in 2003 and the work of Mann et al. has been criticised many times since by others, but that doesn’t mean that this graph of temperature rise isn’t presented as truth time and time again. A good example of this is a recent court case in Washington D.C., USA, in which McKitrick was involved as a witness. It is a well-known case in which the same climate scientist, Michael Mann, sued Canadian author and broadcaster Mark Steyn, accusing him of defamation. The case concerned an article by Steyn in the National Review in 2012. In addition to Steyn, Mann sued another author, Rand Simberg, whose earlier article had been commented on by Steyn in his own. Simberg had written of Mann as “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science”. Sandusky was a coach at the University of Pennsylvania – the same university where Mann works – who was convicted in June 2012 of child molestation. A subsequent independent report into the university’s actions revealed that the university’s administration had treated the matter with abject disregard, and rather wanted to cover it up for fear of discrediting the school in the public eye.

But why did Simberg draw a parallel with this case? Mann was one of the main actors in the 2009 Climategate email scandal when a whistleblower or hacker leaked emails stored at the computer server of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit. These emails contained 15 years of communications between the most prominent climate scientists in the world with Mann being one of them. And they were embarrassing. The emails provided insight into the practices that ranged from bad professionalism to fraudulent science. Bias, data manipulation, dodging freedom of information requests and trying to subvert the peer-review process were uncovered.

However, the reason for drawing parallels with the ugly Sandusky affair was that the university had also launched an investigation into Mann, but found no misuse of data. “Mann could be said to be the Jerry Sandusky of climate science, except for instead molesting children, he has molested and tortured data in the service of politicised science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and planet,” Simberg wrote on the blog of a libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute. Steyn quoted Simberg in his article but added that while he himself would not have compared Mann to a child molester in this way, there is a point to what Simberg is saying. “Michael Mann was the man behind the fraudulent climate-change ‘hockey-stick’ graph, the very ringmaster of the tree-ring circus,” he wrote.

More than 10 years after the publication of the articles, Mann and his lawyers finally succeeded in taking the case to a jury in Washington, D.C., and the court concluded that Mann had been libelled.

Simberg and Steyn were found to have made false statements and were ordered to pay Mann $1 each to compensate them. However, as the comments were also found to have been written with “maliciousness, spite, ill will, vengeance or deliberate intent to harm”, punitive damages were awarded – Simberg had to pay $1,000 and Steyn $1 million. Steyn vowed to appeal the decision.

McKitrick comments that, in his view, both the defence lawyers and the experts involved, including himself, did a good job, but that the court is simply a terribly bad place to debate climate science. And in the end, the court was not deciding whether the hockey stick graph was flawed or not, it was clearly a political issue. “In a town like Washington D.C., which leans very heavily Democrat, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Michael Mann’s lawyer, made it clear that the defendants were just evil Right-wing Republican types, probably Trump supporters, and that’s all the jury heard in the end,” he comments.

Reasonable views on climate do not reach the mass media

The critique of the hockey stick graph is, of course, not the only work McKitrick and colleagues have done and published on temperatures. For example, as early as 2004, McKitrick and climatologist Patrick Michaels examined temperature records from the late 20th century and found that they were significantly biased, i.e., they did not remove the warming effect of human activity and urbanisation on temperatures.

In addition, McKitrick has been a reviewer and provided formal commentary on the reports of the IPCC. While these kinds of comments point out shortcomings that could be corrected by the report’s authors, McKitrick says that the recent trend has been to disregard them altogether, with many scientists not seeing a point to send their comments in at all.

On the other hand, it is important to understand what these IPCC reports actually say. If the UN Secretary-General claims that we are on the fast track to a climate hell, can the IPCC confirm this? McKitrick says no. For example, there is a lot of talk in the media about heat waves, major storms and other extreme weather events, and that climate change will make them more frequent and worse. But McKitrick says not to take it too seriously what the press says. “Most of what you hear, at least most of what I hear in the media, is ridiculous. The normal, sensible, scientifically sound work never makes the papers. What makes the papers is the far out, outrageous, speculative stuff about the worst case scenarios. So don’t go by what you’re seeing in the papers,” he says, adding that the IPCC reports do not confirm an increase in extreme weather events. “There is some evidence that heat waves have gotten worse, although not in the United States. The 1930s was far worse than anything we’ve had since. But the major forms of extreme weather, they’re not really trends and we don’t really expect there to be as a result of CO₂ emissions,” McKitrick says, noting that the IPCC reports also do not use terms such as climate crisis or climate catastrophe. This is the message being given by Guterres and other political figures.

What role does CO₂ play?

As presented by political figures and portrayed as the scientific consensus in the media, one of the main reasons for climate change is human emissions of CO₂. But the question actually is if CO₂ is even capable of doing anything to change the climate. According to McKitrick, we have known of the warming effect of this gas for 150 years. But can it really have a big effect on the climate? “How will that affect our weather systems and life on Earth? That’s where all the uncertainties are. And most of those uncertainties are still quite large. There’s been very little progress in answering that question. Is it a large effect or a small effect? There’s very good evidence for a small effect,” he argues while adding that current developments in Asia, particularly in China and India, where CO₂ emissions are increasing, particularly because of coal-fired power generation, which is growing rapidly, could still be a likely cause for concern exactly because it is happening so quickly. On the other hand, McKitrick says, fossil fuel use is essential for these societies to increase their prosperity. “Wealth and income around the world have gone up a lot and in the process, they’ve made people much less vulnerable to environmental catastrophes and problems of all kinds. So as the CO₂ level is going up in the air, so are the incomes or the resources to deal with whatever challenges we encounter in the natural world, and weather vulnerability and things like that. So there’s another side even to that part,” McKitrick says, adding that in the context where Asia is rapidly increasing its CO₂ emissions, zeroing out CO₂ emissions in the West would not have much effect, even if we really think that reducing CO₂ would help prevent climate change. Reduction by us is offset by the increase in Asia.

McKitrick points out that more CO₂ has positive effects as well that are not being talked about.

“It’s improved agricultural productivity and it’s turning deserts into green spaces. And so this aspect of it, again, doesn’t make the headlines, doesn’t get discussed in the news, but it’s a very real phenomenon,” he says.

In particular, McKitrick says, it is worth pointing out that the role of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases is also the basis of the climate models that are used to predict our climate future and that are also used by the IPCC in its assessments. There are dozens of these models, and they vary in their predictions of global warming, but McKitrick says that in broad terms they all have one thing in common: they all expect too much warming. These models have been run for decades and today, in black and white, it is possible to see that they are not consistent with reality. McKitrick asks, for example, would we take a stock market analyst who consistently misses the mark in a serious manner? And how long – until bankruptcy? Yet somehow, similarly faulty climate models are still going ahead.

Too little climate debate and too much politics

All in all, in McKitrick’s view, the whole climate debate today is driven by various interests which are both financial and political. And it is these interests that are driving the talk of a catastrophe and of a solution in the rapid development of renewable energy with taxpayers’ money. On the government side, however, this also looks like a good way of expanding power. “Climate is a great story for doing that, because it means every single aspect of life. You now need to have regulatory supervision and government oversight on every single thing that people are doing,” he notes. So clearly the climate debate has also become a political issue. And that includes universities and science as a whole. McKitrick says that Western universities today have become very Left-wing, and this is also affecting scientists and their research. “I think a lot of them do secretly think that I would like it if the papers that I publish are beneficial to politicians on the Left, and I resent it if the work I publish is beneficial to politicians on the Right. So I might even shape my publication and research work with that in mind,” he says.

Scientific journals also make it difficult to publish work critical of ‘accepted’ climate science, while reputable scientific journals accept poor-quality work based on the basic tenets of climate alarmism – for example, McKitrick says, work that argues that climate change could cause frog extinction. Any sensible work on the same subject, arguing, for example, that frogs actually benefit from a warmer climate, will probably be published in a smaller journal. Perhaps rather than restricting freedom of expression, he says, this is more about “the freedom of reach” or limiting the reach of messages that are deemed ‘unacceptable’. “For people who question the consensus, it’s harder for them to get a message out,” he says, adding that it’s even more difficult in the mainstream media, where climate crisis activists attack anyone who disagrees with their vision of a catastrophe and the mainstream press is usually on their side. “So hopefully, at a certain point, people who follow this issue realise that, yes, there’s a filter,” McKitrick says. He adds that the filter is not complete and that it is still possible for anyone who is interested to find factual information to actually read. This is something he recommends everyone to do.

First published by Freedom Research. Subscribe here.