Explore
Get Book
Is Groupthink leading us down the wrong path?
8th October 2025
Today it is 293.1 degrees Kelvin. According to some, a 2 degree warming will be terrible.
Maybe it will, maybe it won’t. A three degree warming is circa 1 percent higher.
What if we are looking at things all wrong? Should we focus on C02 or should we be doing much more about the general ecology.
To measure the earth’s temperature and get measurements to within 1 percent is quite a challenge. To claim that measurements people make and have made are accurate is hard to accept entirely when they got the amount of CO2 that plants absorb quite wrong. They were out by 31%. A 31% error in temperature measurements takes us to 380 degrees Kelvin or 87 degrees Celsius. That would be some error.
Plants are all around us and easy to weigh. It is an easy job to work out how much CO2 a plant/tree absorbs. Measuring lots of spots on the globe to within 1% is much harder, is it not. The effect of wind farms needs to be taken into account too.
What we do know is that CO2 levels are rising. We also know that insect populations are declining. We know microplastics are being spread at an ever-increasing rate. We know that there has been substantial habitat loss. We know that the seas are in a poor state. We know most large rivers have been dammed and countless rivers are polluted. We know that the non-farm animal population is shrinking.
What if we are suffering from groupthink and doing things to address the worry about CO2 levels and allowing ourselves to fall into an ecosystem collapse trap.
Maybe we could set about planting lots more trees. Maybe we could close off half the seas to fishing and mining.
Is coal that dirty?
Power stations that burn coal to generate electricity produce more than double the amount of CO2. Bad? Maybe, but 3% of the methane burnt in power stations is lost to the atmosphere during extraction from the ground and transportation. Methane is said to be thirty times as warming. 30 x 3 = 90. The ratio is not 100 : 240. but 190 : 240. So, gas is not much better than coal. However, groupthink thinks otherwise. I would rather the UK went back to coal and planted 200 million trees to compensate. We have parcels of land across the nation to do it. It would be better for the environment than importing gas for the next few decades. Cheaper too. (Modern coal plants can filter the majority of the soot.)