Authored by John Staddon via DailySceptic.org,

As the West fitfully weakens industrial civilisation by trying to eliminate oil, coal and natural gas as energy sources, the scientific basis for Net Zero is based more on ‘general agreement’ than hard data. Climate scientists nevertheless sound optimistic about the progress that’s being made in destroying society’s carbon energy base.

There are of course criticisms of the idea of a carbon-dioxide-induced apocalypse, largely supported as it is by general circulation (i.e., whole-earth) planetary models. There are too many different GCMs all with too many free parameters (aka ‘fudge factors’), as well as wildly divergent readings of historical climate records: Are violent climate events really more frequent, and how does weather actually relate to climate? The popular press cries havoc, but the data are not so clear. The looming economic costs of a Net Zero target are leading to some political pushback. Nevertheless, the recent jury acquittal of nine Extinction Rebellion vandals shows that passionate belief in the imminent dangers of CO2 is not limited to activists.

Climate science is complicated, but the key question is simple. The climate does seem to be getting warmer, but are we responsible? Does the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide have a major effect on the temperature of the earth? The standard answer is “yes, of course”. But in fact there are good reasons for doubt.

Popular accounts of the ‘climate emergency’ rarely show quantitative data. Yet there are widely available graphs that anyone can understand. Here are three graphs which suggest that the answer to the question is probably “no”. It is likely that beyond a certain point, carbon dioxide has a relatively minor effect on planetary temperature.

The very long-term historical record

This graph is controversial, simply because estimates of CO2 concentration and temperature before thermometers were widely available – i.e., through 99.99% of the Earth’s history – must be estimated indirectly, by proxies such as ice cores, tree rings and isotope measurements.

If this graph of global temperature and CO2 concentration over the past 600 million years is approximately valid, it shows two things:

According to one expert, and as the far right point on the graph shows, “the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere today is the lowest in Earth history except for a period just following the end-Permian extinction event and very early in the Phanerozoic (that is, around 550 million years ago). [emphasis added]”

There is no correlation between the CO2 level and global temperature: when CO2 is high, temperature may be low, and vice versa.

The second conclusion is less certain than the first. But, certainly vertebrate life has flourished on earth at CO2 concentrations much higher than today’s.

The long-term historical record

The CO2-temperature correlation is much clearer over a shorter time scale, 800,000 years, as in the next graph (which is not at all controversial). The graph shows temperature (red line) and four estimates of atmospheric CO2 from the EPICA Antarctic ice dome studies across an 800,000-year time period.

The two main conclusions to be drawn from this graph are:

At this time scale CO2 concentration and temperature are strongly correlated: CO2 and temperature go up and down together.

But CO2 increases reliably lag behind temperature increases, showing that the CO2 changes are caused by the temperature increases, rather than the reverse. Reason: As oceans heat up, gases, including CO2, are expelled, when they cool atmospheric CO2 is absorbed; warm water can hold less dissolved gas than cool (most planetary CO2 stored in the oceans).

There are arguments, based on positive feedback, that even though ocean heating precedes rather than follows CO2 increase, the effective causation is opposite: CO2 causes heating, not the reverse. But the simplest conclusion is that major changes in atmospheric CO2 are caused by changes in planetary temperature, not the other way round.

Physics

The final graph is from a recent long paper by two physicists, William Wijngaarden (York University, Toronto) and William Happer (Princeton). The article just considers the basic physics of the greenhouse effect, given the physical properties of air and the handful of low-concentration greenhouse gases (CO2, nitrous oxide and methane) that it contains.

The blue bell-shaped curve shows the amount of solar energy flux (at different wavelengths, x-axis) radiated to space from an earth with no atmosphere. (Most is in the infrared region 400-1000 or so.) The green line is the flux with an atmosphere with no CO2 but with all other greenhouse gases at their standard concentrations. The black line is for all greenhouse gases, CO2 included, at their standard concentrations. The red line is for twice the standard concentration of CO2 (400 to 800 ppm) but with all the other greenhouse gases unchanged.

At 400 ppm CO2 does have a greenhouse effect: Radiated energy is reduced in the 500-700 frequency range. But an increase to 800 ppm has almost no additional effect – the black and red lines are almost the same. Doubling the standard concentration of CO2 from 400 to 800 ppm has almost no additional greenhouse effect.

Conclusion

Taken together, these three bits of data should make anyone doubt that further increases in CO2 pose any kind of environmental threat. The earth may be warming, but it is unlikely that CO2 is responsible. There is almost no chance that these changes are life threatening or even – granted that human activity is probably not responsible – that warming will continue indefinitely. It’s time to cease panicking. Let’s zero Net Zero.

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The Eviction Notice is being written. And it will come in four languages. Russian. Farsi. Mandarin. And last but not least, English…

A much-cherished pleasure of professional writing is to always be enriched by informed readers. This “eviction” insight – worth a thousand geopolitical treatises – was offered by one of my sharpest readers commenting on a column.

Concisely, what we have here expresses a deeply felt consensus across the spectrum not only in West Asia but also in most latitudes across the Global South/Global Majority.

The Unthinkable, in the form of a genocide conducted live, in real time on every smartphone in the third decade of the millennium – which I called the Raging Twenties in a previous book – has acted like a particle accelerator, concentrating hearts and minds.

Those that chose to set West Asia on fire are already confronting nasty blowback. And that goes way beyond diplomacy exercised by Global South leaders.

For the first time in ages, via President Xi Jinping, China has been more than explicit geopolitically (a true Sovereign cannot hedge when it comes to genocide). China’s unmistaken position on Palestine goes way beyond the geoeconomics routine of promoting BRI’s trade and transportation corridors.

All that while President Putin defined sending humanitarian aid to Gaza as a “sacred duty”, which in Russian code includes, crucially, the military spectrum.

For all the maneuvering and occasional posturing, for all practical purposes everyone knows the current UN arrangement is rotten beyond repair, totally impotent when it comes to imposing meaningful peace negotiations, sanctions or investigations of serial war crimes.

The new UN in the making is BRICS 11 – actually BRICS 10, considering new Trojan Horse Argentina in practice may be relegated to a marginal role, assuming it joins on January 1st, 2024.

BRICS 10, led by Russia-China, both regulated by a strong moral compass, keep their ear on the ground and listen to the Arab street and the lands of Islam. Especially their people, much more than their elites. This will be an essential element in 2024 during the Russian presidency of BRICS.

Even with no check out, you will have to leave

The current order of business in the New Great Game is to organize the expulsion of the Hegemon from West Asia – as much a technical challenge as a civilizational challenge.

As it stands, the Washington-Tel Aviv continuum are already prisoners of their own device. This ain’t no Hotel California; you may not check out any time you like, but you will be forced to leave.

That may happen in a relatively gentle manner – think Kabul as a Saigon remix – or if push comes to shove may involve a naval Apocalypse Now, complete with expensive iron bathtubs turned into sub-ocean coral reefs and the demise of CENTCOM and its AFRICOM projection.

The crucial vector all along is how Iran – and Russia – have played, year after year, with infinite patience, the master strategy devised by Gen. Soleimani, whose assassination actually started the Raging Twenties.

A de-weaponized Hegemon cannot defeat the “new axis of evil”, Russia-Iran-China, not only in West Asia but also anywhere in Eurasia, Asia-Pacific, and pan-Africa. Direct participation/normalization of the genocide only worked to accelerate the progressive, inevitable exclusion of the Hegemon from most of the Global South.

All that while Russia meticulously crafts the integration of the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Baltic Sea (Finnish hysteria notwithstanding), the Arctic and the Northwestern Pacific Sea and China turbo-charges the integration of the South China Sea.

Xi and Putin are gifted players of chess and go – and profit from stellar advisers of the caliber of Patrushev and Wang Yi. China playing geopolitical go is an exercise in non-confrontation: all you need to do is to block your opponent’s ability to move.

Chess and go, in a diplomatic tandem, represent a game where you don’t interrupt your opponent when it is repeatedly shooting itself on the knees. As an extra bonus, you get your opponent antagonizing over 90% of the world’s population.

All that will lead to the Hegemon’s economy eventually collapsing. And then it can be beaten by default.

Western “values” buried under the rubble

As Russia, especially via Lavrov’s efforts, offers the Global South/Global Majority a civilizational project, focused on mutually respectful multipolarity, China via Xi Jinping offers the notion of “community with a shared future” and a set of initiatives, discussed in lengthy detail at the Belt & Road Initiative (BRI) Forum in Beijing in October, where Russia, not by accident, was the guest of honor.

A group of Chinese scholars concisely frame the approach as China “creating/facilitating global nodes for relating/communicating and platforms for concrete collaboration/practical exchanges. The participants remains Sovereign, contribute to the common endeavor (or simply specific projects) and receive benefits making them willing to keep on.”

It’s as if Beijing was acting as a sort of shining star and guiding light.

In sharp contrast, what remains of Western civilization – certainly with not much to do with Montaigne,

Pico della Mirandola or Schopenhauer – increasingly plunges into a self-constructed Heart of Darkness (without Conrad’s literary greatness), confronting the true, irredeemably horrifying face of conformist, subservient individualism.

Welcome to the New Medievalism, precipitated by the “kill apps” of Western racism, as argued in a brilliant book, Chinese Cosmopolitanism, by scholar Shuchen Xiang, professor of Philosophy at Xidan University.

The “kill apps” of Western racism, writes Prof. Xiang, are fear of change; the ontology of bivalent dualism; the invention of the ‘barbarian’ as the racial Other; the metaphysics of colonialism; and the insatiable nature of this racist psychology. All these “apps” are now exploding, in real time, in West Asia. The key consequence is that the Western “values” construct has already perished, buried under the Gaza rubble.

Now to a ray of light: a case can be made – and we’ll be back to it – that orthodox Christianity, moderate Islam and several strands of Taoism/Confucianism may embrace the future as the three main civilizations of a cleansed Mankind.

Authored by Andrew Korybko via Substack,

NATO logistics chief Lieutenant-General Alexander Sollfrank suggested the creation of a so-called “military Schengen” for optimizing the movement of such equipment across the EU. At present, bureaucratic and logistical obstacles impede the free flow of arms throughout the bloc, which he believes could hamstring the West’s ability to respond to any unexpected conflict along its periphery. It’s not just this proposal’s substance that’s significant, however, but also its timing.

“NATO’s Proxy War On Russia Through Ukraine Appears To Be Winding Down” for the reasons explained in the preceding hyperlinked analysis. Accordingly, Bloomberg’s report about the EU’s draft security guarantees to Ukraine conspicuously omits any mention of mutual defense obligations of the kind that Kiev has sought for years and which greatly contributed to the latest phase of this nearly decade-long conflict. Sollfrank’s suggestion therefore seems to contradict these emerging de-escalation trends.

Upon reflection, however, it’s actually revealed to be a thinly disguised Germany power play over Poland. The EU’s informal leader ramped up its regional competition with Poland in mid-August through its promised military patronage of Ukraine, which readers can learn more about in that hyperlinked analysis. In brief, Poland aspired to become the leader of Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) throughout the course of the NATO-Russian proxy war, but Germany rose to the occasion to challenge its ambitions.

The liberal-globalist opposition coalition’s victory in last month’s Polish elections, which its Foreign Minister earlier accused Germany of meddling in, will likely result in former Prime Minister and European Council President Donald Tusk’s return to the premiership. In that event, this German-aligned politician could voluntarily subordinate his country to Berlin, thus resulting in Poland ceding its envisaged regional sphere of influence to that country and becoming its largest-ever vassal indefinitely.

Tusk’s plans to improve ties with the de facto German-controlled EU are regarded by conservative-nationalists as a means to that end, particularly due to that body’s efforts to further erode Polish sovereignty. Although he claims to oppose changes to the EU Treaty, some doubt his sincerity and suspect that he slyly wants to prevent large-scale protests over this issue. If these two scenarios come to pass, then Poland’s sovereignty would be further reduced, including in the defense sphere.

Prior to last month’s elections, Germany and Poland were competing to build the EU’s largest military, but the aforesaid sequence of events could result in Warsaw throwing in the towel. Even though its next potential Defense Minister said that his country won’t cancel any of its military contracts, conservative-nationalists also suspect that he’s either being insincere or could be coerced by Berlin/Brussels into doing so. All things considered, these concerns are credible and should be taken seriously.

Germany’s national interests as its incumbent policymakers conceive them to be rest in becoming the EU’s hegemon, which necessitates neutralizing Poland’s ambitions to lead the CEE space, ergo its alleged support of Tusk and speculative efforts to erode Polish sovereignty via the EU. These moves importantly preceded NATO’s proposed “military Schengen”, and that’s not by coincidence either. Rather, they’re meant to facilitate Germany’s unprecedented post-WWII power play over Poland.

If Tusk improves ties with the EU like he promised, complies with any EU Treaty changes despite unconvincingly claiming to oppose them, and the “military Schengen” is imposed upon his country, then German forces could return to Poland en masse on the pretext of defending the EU from Russia. This doesn’t contradict the de-escalation trends pertaining to the NATO-Russian proxy war, but complements them since it could be spun as compensating for the lack of Article 5-like guarantees to Ukraine.

On the one hand, the EU would wisely avoid laying any tripwires that Kiev could maliciously exploit to provoke a larger conflict with Russia upon the inevitable freezing of the present one (whenever that happens), while at the same time reassuring the public that they can still adequately respond if need be. The “military Schengen” would serve the purpose of enabling the bloc’s de facto German leader to swiftly dispatch its forces, which are planned to be the EU’s largest, to the eastern frontier in that event.

It goes without saying that they’d have to transit through Poland and could easily end up deployed there indefinitely, whether as a so-called “deterrent to Russian aggression” or as part of a preplanned response to an artificially manufactured (i.e. false flag) border incident. After having voluntarily subordinated itself to Berlin under Tusk as is soon expected for the reasons that were explained, the restoration of German hegemony over Poland would therefore be completed without firing a shot.

In that scenario, which Polish conservative-nationalists are powerless to prevent and can only be offset by unlikely variables beyond their control, Germany would essentially be tasked by the US with “containing” Russia in Europe as part of Washington’s “Lead From Behind” stratagem. Once that country’s continental hegemony is fully secured through the means that were described in this analysis, America can then more confidently “Pivot (back) to Asia” to focus on containing China.

Those two superpowers are currently in the midst of an incipient thaw as proven by the positive outcome of their leaders’ latest face-to-face meeting earlier this month on the sidelines of the APEC Summit in San Francisco, but it can’t be taken for granted that this trend will continue. It therefore makes sense for the US to outsource its anti-Russian containment operations in Europe to Germany in order to free up the resources required for more muscularly containing China in Asia if this thaw fails.

As has traditionally been the case throughout history, Polish sovereignty is once again in the process of being sacrificed as part of the Great Powers’ games, but this time its borders will remain intact even though the country is poised to functionally become a German vassal in the coming future. There are indeed some variables beyond Poland’s control that could offset this scenario, but they’re very unlikely, so it’s probably a fait accompli by this point that Poland will play second fiddle to Germany indefinitely.

In 2022, global imports climbed to $25.6 trillion in value, or about the size of the U.S. GDP.

As an engine of growth, global trade broadens consumer choices and can lower the cost of goods. For businesses, it can improve the quality of inputs and strengthen competitiveness.

In the graphic below, Visual Capitalist’s Dorothy Neufeld and Christina Kostandi show the 50 largest importers, with data from the World Trade Organization.

Which Countries Import the Most Goods?

With $3.4 trillion in imports in 2022, the U.S. is the largest importer globally.

Even though higher inflation and market uncertainty loomed over the economy, U.S. imports increased 15% annually, with China as its top goods importing partner.

As the world’s second-largest economy, China’s imports hit $2.7 trillion in value, although growth slowed in 2022.

Taiwan, China’s top trading partner for imports, is a major provider of electronics products, including semiconductor chips. However, the China-Taiwan trade relationship remains complicated given geopolitical tensions sparking unexpected import bans.

A handful of European countries also fell in the top 10 importers, led by Germany and the Netherlands. Overall, the European Union is the largest importer of agricultural products, fuels and mining products, and automotive products globally.

Global Trade Fragmentation

In 2023, the World Trade Organization projects that import volumes will contract as much as 1.2% across North and South America, Asia, and Europe.

In part, this is being driven by slower demand in manufacturing economies.

Whether or not this weaker volume is also being impacted by trade fragmentation remains unclear. One indicator may be seen in the trade of intermediate goods, which are products like wood and steel that are used in the production of a final good.

In the first half of 2023, the share of intermediate goods in world trade dropped to 48.5%, down from its three-year average of 51%. On the one hand, this may suggest that supply chains are contracting. Yet it may also be due to the influence of higher commodity prices, which have a bigger impact on the cost of intermediate goods than on final goods.

Still, other factors have an impact on the flow of trade. These include subsidies, export bans, and legislative policy, such as the $52.7 billion U.S. CHIPS Act, that incentivizes local production of semiconductors.

Considering these factors, broader trends of global de-globalization remain to be seen.