From 10.000 Years to 4: One Equation Falsifies the Entire IPCC CO₂ Narrative – by Jonathan Cohler
The video above is a recent presentation by Jonathan Cohler at EIKE ( European Climate and Energy Institute). The english audio is available. He does a complete and evidence-based destruction of IPCC “concensus” Climate Science. For those prefering to read I provide a transcript lightly edited from the captions, along with some bolds and key exhibits from the talk.
Just very briefly, I’m Jonathan Cohler. I’m a Harvard-trained physicist, AI researcher, software developer. I serve on the Heartland Institute’s Board of Policy Advisors, and I’m a member of the CO2 Coalition. And over the past year, I’ve authored six climate papers, both peer-reviewed and pre-print, with illustrious co-authors including Willie Soon, David Legates, Keston Green, and Ole Humlum.
Collectively, the papers falsify the entire IPCC framework.
I presented some of this at Heartland’s conference in Washington this April, but today at EIKE is the first public presentation of our newest paper on the bomb radiocarbon falsification of the IPCC CO2 attribution, and more. So I’m going to start here by sharing my screen with you so you can see the presentation. So for 38 years, numerous IPCC purported metrics and associated lies have been paraded before the world as settled science.
Today, I’m going to show you that none of them are true, and most aren’t even real. One note on language I use, I use the word lie in its plain sense, a statement that is not true. Intent is not part of the definition. Orwell’s 2 plus 2 equals 5 is a lie regardless of who says it or why. When I call an IPCC claim a lie, I’m stating it’s false.
That said, intent in this case is not in doubt. The IPCC has had 38 years of access to all the data and the resources of every major government on earth. It knows what it has been promulgating, it knows what it has been suppressing, and significant numbers of scientists know as well. I won’t name any individuals, they know who they are, but I will name the institution, the IPCC.
My presentation is based on five papers, my 2025 peer-reviewed paper, building on Essex et al., 2007, and proving again that global mean surface temperature, GMST, does not exist. Our 2026 peer-reviewed paper on the invalidity of Argo-based ocean heat content with co-authors Dave Legates, Keston Green, Ole Humlum, Franklin Soon, and Willie Soon. Our 2026 paper with co-author Willie Soon on the dominance of natural CO2 dynamics currently under review.
My pre-print proving my new physical tether theorem. And most recently, our paper with co-author Willie Soon analyzing 50 years of global bomb radiocarbon decay, falsifying the key assumptions of the IPCC carbon cycle framework. I want to acknowledge all my co-authors, and in particular, my mentor and dear friend Willie Soon, whose decades of courageous work made much of this possible. I also want to honor the truly seminal contributions of Christopher Essex and Demetris Koutsoyiannis, whose work laid the foundation for all my papers here.
So let’s start with the verdict. Every major public-facing claim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, is scientifically invalid and categorically false. Not uncertain, not weakened, not in need of more research, false. I’ll prove this in the next 35 minutes or so by math, physics, and data. Words lie. Math does not. A statement is either derivable from its premises or not. There is no, quote, 97% of mathematicians agree nonsense. There’s proof or there isn’t.
For 38 years, the IPCC has paraded a framework draped in equations, satellite data, supercomputer models, academy awards, even Nobel Prizes. A snake eating its own tail. Each piece appears to validate the next. Once you see that the circle is empty, the entire framework collapses. Each lie leads to the next. None stand on their own.
GMST,Global mean surface temperature, the number that has purportedly risen 1.1 degrees since 1850, the number whose further rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees is, “catastrophic”, what some have called, “the most important number in the world”. CMIP, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, those are the general circulation models tuned to reproduce GMST.
OHC stands for Ocean Heat Content,a physically meaningless global aggregate constructed by the same averaging machinery as GMST. EEI, Earth’s Energy Imbalance, the energy gain inferred from OHC overriding satellite radiation measurements. CO2, atmospheric carbon dioxide, the persistence and attribution modeled by Bern impulse response functions validated against CMIP purported driving force in the entire attribution chain.
And then the loop closes back on itself. GMST tunes the models. The models produce Bern. Bern produces the budgets. Budgets define the targets. Targets are written in GMST. Each of the five nodes is independently falsified by physics, data, and math.
Let’s begin. Node 1, GMST is physically meaningless.
It’s the anchor of every policy claim. The Paris Agreement is written in degrees of GMST. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is defined in GMST. Transient climate response is defined in GMST. Attribution regressions use GMST as a dependent variable. CMIP models are tuned to reproduce GMST trajectories.
But GMST was proven meaningless in a 2007 paper by Essex, McKitrick, and Andresen unrefuted in 19 years. Two months ago, my physical tether theorem paper established from axioms of classical science alone that GMST cannot exist in the real world. It’s completely physically meaningless.
You take valid local thermometer readings, average them, get a global average. Seems right. Why not? Think telephone numbers. Average the phone numbers of everyone in Boston and Halle. Then ask three simple questions. Whose phone number is it? Is it a phone number? Does it mean anything at all?
Temperature is an intensive property defined only under local
thermodynamic equilibrium in single connected systems, like a
phone number that applies to one point on a telecom network.
The Earth’s surface, oceans, and atmosphere are not in equilibrium. They’re an open-driven non-equilibrium system. Persistent gradients, persistent fluxes, in-homogeneity at every scale. Physics has no law for aggregating local temperatures into a global mean. Disconnected systems cannot affect each other. Unlike quantum mechanical spooky action at a distance, which Einstein doubted and my friend and colleague John Clauser proved real, there is no thermodynamics at a distance.
The temperature in Boston has zero effect on the temperature in Halle. Temperature is defined only in a connected equilibrium system, and it is precisely the partial derivative of U, internal energy, with respect to S, entropy. Every thermometer agrees.
For an aggregate of disconnected systems, there is no thermodynamics, period. The GMST formulas imposed by the IPCC, NASA, or NOAA are just made up. The output is a number, not a temperature. Not anything in the physical, real world. The 2007 Essex paper showed the consequences for averaging arithmetic, area weighted, mass weighted, fourth root, enthalpy weighted. They all yield different numbers and different trends from the same data.
The choice is arbitrary. This isn’t a quarrel over data adjustments. We’re not talking about urban heat islands, homogenization, data improvement. No amount of data improvements can fix a category error. No averaging convention can rescue it. My physical tether theorem states it formally.
An abstract math formula is scientifically valid if and only if it is connected to the physical world by a unique, physical law-governed objective link. For a connected, equilibrated system, that link exists. Temperature is precisely the partial derivative of U with respect to S, and every valid thermometer agrees. A unique mapping exists. For disconnected systems, no physics, no mapping, just arbitrary statistical aggregations with no unique operational definition. The outputs are meaningless numbers.
GMST is a number the IPCC has falsely labeled as a temperature. Consequences are immediate and total. The 1.5 degree C limit is not a physical threshold. It’s an arbitrary number with a fake label applied to a meaningless calculation. The claim that the planet is warm by 1.1 degrees C is not a measurement. The equilibrium climate sensitivity defined as a change in GMST per CO2 doubling is equally physically meaningless.
The AR5 attribution statement, “more than half of observed warming is anthropogenic”, is a regression on a dependent variable that doesn’t exist. Every claim built on GMST is null and void. And AR6 went further. They abandoned their own calibrated uncertainty language and declared human influence, “unequivocal”, and then proceeded to use the word at least 37 times.
Unequivocal is not a science word. Science does not produce unequivocal claims.
Math proofs do. Empirical science operates within probability and falsifiability. Karl Popper settled this long ago. By its own word choice, the IPCC has abandoned science. Node 1 falsified. Every quantity dependent on GMST collapses with it.
Node 2, CMIP models are tuned to a fiction.
Every IPCC projection comes from CMIP, the coupled model intercomparison project. The models are tuned so simulated GMST matches the numerically calculated and physically meaningless GMST. Remember, there is no observed GMST. Those are just Orwellian words that the IPCC uses. It is purely a calculation.
Models that fail to reproduce historical GMST are discarded or retuned. GMST is physically meaningless. The model tuning target is physically meaningless. The model extracted parameters are extracted against a physically meaningless target. This is not a small effect. Cloud feedbacks, radiative forcing, equilibrium climate sensitivity, transient climate response, every one is an emergent property of models optimized against a physically meaningless target.
Equilibrium climate sensitivity, look at what IPCC actually means by this. ECS is defined as the change in GMST between models at 280 and 560 ppm CO2 both run to model equilibrium. But the earth is never in equilibrium. The fact that a model converges to equilibrium proves it isn’t modeling the earth. The equilibrium is a feature of the model, not the earth.
And even that’s not true. The CMIP model purveyors don’t actually run to that fictional equilibrium. They run 150 years or so, observe the drift, and extrapolate. They assume the model will reach an equilibrium that it never reaches.
ECS is an assumed extrapolation of an unreached state of a model
that fails reality at the level of being able to converge in the first place.
All to promulgate a number physically meaningless by definition. If A is meaningless and B is meaningless, then A minus B is meaningless. A and B are both meaningless GMST values. I know this is twisted IPCC Orwellian stuff, but follow me here because this is what is actually happening. Trillions of dollars of policy are calibrated to a number that does not exist in the real world, to a fake equilibrium state that never occurs in a model that fails to represent earth by virtue of having that equilibrium state in the first place.
And the model itself contains essentially none of the physics that drives earth’s permanent non-equilibrium state, namely meaningful cloud microphysics and feedbacks, real solar variability, turbulence, phase changes, biological dissipation, and more. Node 2, falsified.
Node 3, IPCC’s Argo-derived ocean heat content is physically meaningless.
You’ll notice I keep repeating those words. It’s not just a tick. My personal favorite from the circle of lies. Argo has deployed roughly 4,400 autonomous floats across the oceans. Each measures local temperature, salinity, and pressure as they drift.
And ocean heat content is a real physical concept and a physical
phenomenon, but what the IPCC presents as ocean heat content is not.
Orwell strikes again. Argo-derived IPCC OHC is a global statistical aggregate fabricated from local measurements through five layers of processing that destroy all physical meaning. This is the official Argo map, and it looks impressive, but it’s cropped to hide the poles and doesn’t differentiate deep from upper floats.
This is the real picture from NOAA showing every float that surfaced in the 12 days prior to March 25. Look at the poles. Virtually no floats beyond 60 degrees. And the entire deep Argo fleet has deployed only 230 floats to the bottom half of the ocean, below 2,000 meters, where literally half of the thermal energy resides. But the Argo program calls that, “nearly complete global coverage” in perfect Orwell style. Let that sink in for a moment.
Half the ocean’s volume sits below 2,000 meters, and it’s not sampled at all.Twenty-five percent of the surface is excluded entirely. Continental shelves, the Mediterranean, South China Sea, the Arctic, all ice-covered regions, add continental slopes and polar undersampling, and the IPCC interpolation scheme covers at most 40 percent of ocean volume.
Within the 40 percent, the volume actually sampled around the temperature sensors is one part per billion, 10 to the ninth. So here’s how each of the 4,200 non-deep floats works. They descend to 1,000 meters. They drift for nine days doing nothing. They drop down to 2,000 meters. They ascend slowly to the surface over 6 to 10 hours, collecting about 1,000 temperature measurements. Then they spend about 15 minutes at the surface to get a GPS time and location fix, transmit the measurements to a satellite, rinse and repeat for a few years until the battery dies.
Now, to be fair, that’s valid local data gathering,
but that’s also where reality ends.
Five steps destroy the physics. Number one, there is no subsurface positioning. Every measurement from the ascent is assigned to the one surface GPS time and location fix. Two, 12,000 profiles per month are extrapolated onto 45,000 grid cells using correlation scales up to 2,800 kilometers. Every single gridded value is calculated, not measured, and extrapolation does not increase information content. It decreases it. Number three, the same invalid process constructs a reference climatology over an arbitrary 15-year baseline, adding an entire other layer of invalid averaging.
Then anomalies are computed, which we like to call the ghost minus ghost trick, a discrete sum over these calculated meaningless anomalies, not an integral, which would require continuous data, multiplied by incorrectly assumed constant density and heat capacity.
EEI is then declared to be 0.7 plus or minus 0.2 watts per square meter
despite 60% of the ocean unsampled and true uncertainty easily
exceeding plus or minus 1 watt per square meter.
The actual result, EEI (Earth’s Energy Imbalance) is no different from zero. Even without thermodynamic nullification, at least seven independent uncertainty sources, mesoscale variability, deep ocean ignorance, sea level closure, framework bias, baseline bias, and more easily exceed plus or minus 1 watt per meter squared. The claimed signal of 0.7 is smaller than the noise. Now in 1998, the founding document designed ARGO for real-time forecasting, namely hurricane intensification, marine weather, search and rescue, ship routing, fisheries, ENSO outlooks, decision windows of hours to weeks. Neither ARGO nor land weather stations were designed for centennial energy accounting. The original ARGO objectives contained no mention whatsoever of global ocean heat content or earth energy imbalance because ARGO was never designed for global climate monitoring.
That idea was forced on the system more than a decade later during ClimateGate when Kevin Trenberth emailed hockey stick Michael Mann and the entire climate science hockey team. He wrote,
“We can’t account for the lack of warming, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data shows there should be even more warming, but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate”.
What followed was a 12-year program to repurpose ARGO as the global energy accounting tool, force series to match ARGO, and codify the result into AR6 as EEI equals 0.7 plus or minus 0.2. Our OHC paper published on March 10th this year agrees with Trenberth’s 2009 assessment. His response a few days later, he said, “It is absolute nonsense. I don’t want to waste my time on it”. Clearly, we’re over the target. Node 3 falsified. ARGO derived OHC is physically meaningless.
Node 4, Earth’s energy imbalance is indistinguishable from zero.
First, look at the name, Earth’s energy imbalance. Watts are power, not energy. The correct name would be net radiative flux or power balance at the top of the atmosphere. But honesty is not an IPCC concern. The IPCC’s founding mandate charges them with assessing, “the risk of human-induced climate change”. Not whether humans are causing it, but that humans are causing it. The conclusion is built into the question.
EEI is computed in one of two ways.First, from CERES top of atmosphere satellite measured net radiation flux. And second, from ARGO derived OHC growth divided by Earth’s surface area and elapsed time. The CERES team itself admitted in Loeb et al. 2018 that its instruments cannot measure the absolute energy budget. And yet AR6 figure 7.2 went ahead and reported EEI as 0.7 plus or minus 0.2 watts per square meter with no caveat. Notice, by the way, that the number sits down at the surface on the ocean, not at the top of the atmosphere.
Hmm. Where does that number come from? CERES quietly reports an absolute imbalance of 4.3 watts per square meter, then silently adjusts it to match the ARGO derived 0.7. The matched values are then cited as independent confirmation of each other. AR6 page 935 documents the adjustment openly. Circular reasoning, not validation. The signal is indistinguishable from zero. Node 4, falsified.
Node 5, bomb radiocarbon falsification of the carbon cycle.
My newest paper with Willie Soon titled, One Equation Reproduces 54 Years of Bomb Radiocarbon Decay and Challenges Central Assumptions of the IPCC Carbon Cycle Framework. We extracted two atmospheric time scales precisely from the data. It falsifies every Bern IRF model the IPCC has published. It shows post-industrial CO2 rise is natural. And it closes every standard IPCC and consensus escape hatch, including the Suess effect.
Between 1955 and 1963, atmospheric thermonuclear, aka hydrogen bomb testing, roughly doubled atmospheric carbon-14, known as radiocarbon. After the 1963 test ban, the excess decayed. We have measured that continuously for over 50 years. This is the most precise impulse response experiment ever done. We created the pulse. The atmosphere gave us the response. No model, no tuning, a direct measurement of nature’s eeigenvalue.
The IPCC has had this data set for 40 years and never used it to check,
validate, or falsify any of its carbon cycle claims.
They ignored it. We don’t. Start with two definitions from AR6 glossary, page 2237. Number one, quote, carbon dioxide is an extreme example. Its turnover time is only about four years because of the rapid exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean and terrestrial biota. Number two, quote, response time or adjustment time is the time scale characterizing the decay of an instantaneous pulse into the reservoir, unquote. Both are measured atmospheric quantities.
The global measured turnover time given by atmospheric inventory divided by gross output flux is 3.8 plus or minus 0.12 years. Computed two independent ways. First, snapshot mass balance from AR6 figure 512 and refined reservoir routing on Mauna Loa data. They agreed to better than 1% supported by dozens of peer-reviewed studies over 40 years. Even the IPCC quotes about four years.
The adjustment time, the decay of an instantaneous pulse is exactly what the radiocarbon experiment measures. The 1955 to 63 nuclear tests were the pulse. The answer, decay time scale is 18.383 plus or minus 0.015 years. Single exponential R squared 99.998% over 54 years.
Using the IPCC’s own AR6 definitions, the two atmospheric time scales are 3.8 years for CO2 turnover and 18.383 years for bomb radiocarbon adjustment time linked by the bridge equations shown on the slide. Not 1,000, not 10,000, not hundreds of thousands. That’s what the data says. Now, look at what the IPCC has published. The Bern IRF model is the carbon cycle equation underlying every IPCC CO2 projection, every global warming potential, every CO2 equivalent number, every remaining carbon budget, every net zero pathway. The IPCC labels its time scales as policy relevant, then applies the Bern IRF models at 100, 200, 500, and even 1,000 year horizons.
The IPCC’s published Bern IRF models take a specific mathematical form, a permanent fraction, A0, plus a sum of exponentials. AR2 used five exponentials, AR3 through 6 used three exponentials. Now, look at the E folding time, T sub 1 over E. AR5 and 6 say it’s 165 years, AR4 says it’s 96 years, AR3 says it’s 46, and AR2 says it’s 41. Look at the permanent fraction, A0. AR5 and 6 say it’s 22%, AR4 says it’s 22, AR3 said it was 15, and AR2 said it was 14%. Very strange.
Now, look at the tau 1, which is the longest time constant. AR5 and 6 said it was 394 years, AR4 said it was 173, AR3 said it was 171, and AR2 said it was 372. Real physical impulse responses don’t double and halve and double again as modeling groups update their codes.
The bomb radiocarbon record was a single exponential decay the whole time. Bern was not. Now, look at all four Bern IRFs against the actual data. Everyone diverges within the first year or two. The Bern models predict 33 to 48% of a pulse will remain after 54 years. The data at 54 years says 4%.
The divergence from reality grows dramatically, a factor of 10 by 2020, a factor of 90 by 100 years, and a factor of 18,500 at 200 years. What does the IPCC say? AR5 box 6.1, multiple residence times for an excess of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, stating, “15 to 40% of CO2 emitted until 2100 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years”.
Now, step back for a moment. Why are they using this functional form at all? Why a sum of exponentials with a permanent constant added? The multi-exponential family is the natural function class for linear relaxation processes. That part is correct mathematics. But the family is general. The simplest member of the family, which is one exponential with no permanent fraction, decays to zero with a single time constant. Exactly what the data shows, 18.383 years, permanent fraction zero.
The data picks the simplest answer within the IPCC’s own function class. But the IPCC doesn’t allow that answer. Their published forms require permanent fractions from 14 to 22%. They require three or more exponentials. And neither of those requirements comes from physics or reality.
There are constraints imposed on top of the function class
to purposely exclude the single exponential point.
Why? The single exponential has no permanent fraction. The permanent fraction is the entire policy payload. It’s what creates the multi-thousand year residence result. It is the lie buried in the math. It justifies cumulative carbon budgets, net zero targets, the claim that an emission today is committing the atmosphere for a thousand years or more. All lies. Set the permanent fraction to what the data shows, i.e. zero, and the cumulative emissions framework collapses. Set the number of modes to what the data requires, i.e. one, and the long tail disappears. The function class is correct, but its constraints were chosen to to preserve a predetermined political conclusion.
Bern is parallel. Reality is serial. We call this the parallel serial fallacy. A sum of exponentials is the impulse response of independent parallel reservoirs each draining directly on its own time constant. That is how the Bern IRF manufactures the long tails.
But reality is serial. Carbon flows from the atmosphere to
the surface ocean. Surface ocean to the thermocline
to the deep ocean. Each stage feeds the next.
The deep ocean is not a parallel drain on the atmosphere. It is the end of a serial pipeline. Parallel and serial systems are governed by entirely differential equations with different solution spaces. No parameter choice in the parallel family produces the serial answer.
The actual physical serial cascade observed from upstream collapses to a single dominant fast mode. Exactly what the bomb radioarbon data show. Wrong differential equations, wrong solution space, wrong functional form, structural falsification.
Now, we play Whack-a-Lie, the thousand-year defense.
So, where does the thousand-year tale come from? What’s the evidence? Answer: There is none. Not from measurement, not from observation, not from math, only neverending popup assertions.
The first one that always pops up is 14 C is just a tracer. It’s not the bulk. We proved the operator equivalence theorem OE and it it closes that completely.12 CO2 and 14 CO2 are exchanged by the exact same physical processes. Their mass balance operators are identical up to a small fractionation factor. Identical linear operators have identical eigen values. The bulk and the tracer decay with the exact same time constants.
Whack that one and out pops, the bomb pulse is too small. So the Revel nonlinearity kicks in at larger amplitude. The the OE closes that too. eigenvalues are intrinsic to the linear operator, not the input amplitude. And there is no evidence of a global ocean sink slowing ever.
Whack that and we get revel plus slow deep ocean circulation manufactures the tail. Bern is parallel. Reality is serial. Rapid cycling to the thermocline drains the surface. The deep ocean is downstream, not in parallel. Whack that. You’ve now whacked all three. and they cycle back to tracer versus bulk as if you never mentioned it.
Now, one other defense I didn’t put on the slide. They’ll come and say, “But the surface ocean is observed to be saturating.” What they’re talking is about is there are three subtropical gyre stations between 22 and 32° north. One is called HOT in Hawaii,BATS in Bermuda, and ESOC in the Canary Islands. The combined area of those three points in the ocean is less than 1 millionth of the ocean surface.
The only regimes where revel buffering could show up first because gyres have the lowest exchange flux and the surface is only half the story. To slow that drain, the entire water column below down to the abyss would have to be saturated too with DIC (Dissolved Inorganic Carbon) . There is no such measurement. Argo OHC is meaningless. DIC sampling is even sparer. No global time series at policy precision.
And the IPCC’s claimed 2 and a half gigaton per year ocean sync isn’t measured at all. It’s a budget residual. Emissions minus atmospheric growth minus an alleged land sink. Even granting them their imaginary 2 gigaton per year ocean sink. The ocean holds 38,000 gigatons of carbon. That’s 0.66% per year below the precision of a single DIC measurement. That would be 666% per century. Saturation on any policy relevant time scale is mathematically impossible.
The bomb radiocarbon record proves it directly. Eight independent fit windows
across 50 years return the same value to within four parts in a thousand.
The global atmospheric sink rate has not slowed anywhere ever.
This is Whack-a-Lie. Each retreat has zero supporting evidence. When closed, another pops up. When they’re all closed, the cycle starts over again. They fail Popper’s criterion. The thousand-year claim is unfalsifiable by their own standards.
IPCC airborne fraction confusion.
The IPCC reports a “stable airborne fraction” of “about 44%” cited as evidence that the ocean sink will saturate. But there are two distinct quantities both commonly called airborne fraction totally contradictory and both used by the IPCC imperfect Orwellian double speak lock step.
First is called ABF subL where L stands for logical. That’s the fraction of cumulative anthropogenic mass still airborne exactly as in IPCC’s own glossary definition. Under mass balance with the 3.8 year residence time, ABF subL is approximately 5.3% not 44%.
The second is called ABF subC. C is for crazy. That’s my word. I think Koutsoyiannis called it computational, but I prefer crazy. The the annual ratio of atmospheric increase to anthropogenic emissions, that’s a year-by-year number. And from 1966 to 2019, it ranges between 18 to 77%. Up and down.It’s not like uniformly increasing or anything. It’s just randomly up and down between 18 and 77, a range factor of four.
The Orwellian “stable 44%” doesn’t exist. That arises only from unmentioned 15 to 30 year smoothing windows and then the constancy is a property of the smoothing operator. The variance collapses by a factor of two at a 4-year smoothing independently supporting our tow of 3.8 years.
The atmospheric CO2 inventory is rising. There is a net input of CO2. So what’s the signature of that net input? Note, I’m not talking about the signature of the atmosphere, but the signature of the net input to the atmosphere over the instrumental years. Koutsoyiannis measured it directly using the standard Keeling plot intercept method that you see on the screen. He calls the number delta 13 C subi meaning for input. Koutsoyiannis computed it across the 40 plus years from 1978 to 2022 at four clean air stations both hemispheres. The result -3.2 plus or minus.3 per mill constant no trend no drift.
Proxy reconstruction extended the analysis back 500 years to the little ice age. Same value invariant minus3. If fossil fuel carbon at 28 per mill were a significant fraction of the net input, the flux weighted signature would have to have drifted more negative values. It doesn’t. Fossil fuel carbon is below the detection threshold as a quantitative driver of the observed CO2 growth. Period.
The Suess effect that declining total atmospheric delta is evidence of fossil fuel dilution is completely falsified by this finding alone. The decline of total delta 13C by about 2 per mill is consistent with natural CO2 being added at the natural signature. But the constant net input signature of -3.2 per mill is not consistent with fossil fuel dilution. Suess effect al falsified. These three independent lines converge on the same verdict. The bomb radioarbon value which is 18.383 the constant delta 13 C subi which is -3.2 and the direct mass balance. Different physics, different data, same answer. The atmospheric rise of CO2 over 62 years is natural. The human contribution to the rise is negligible. Node 5 falsified.
The loop is closed. I’ve walked the circle of lies. GMST is not a physical quantity. It’s falsified by the physical tether theorem and Essex et al. CMIP is tuned to a fiction. OHC is an untethered global average over a non-equilibrium fluid. EI is indistinguishable from zero. Bern IRF mathematically incompatible with single exponential.
The rise is natural. The five nodes do not stand independently. GMST tunes the models. The models project OHC and EEI. The Bern IRF preserves the energy budget. The budget preserves GMST. Remove any node. The others lose their bases. Remove all five. The framework is gone. Every downstream quantity collapses with them. Every 1.52° threshold, every global warming potential, every CO2 equivalent number, every remaining carbon budget, it’s all void.
Every single IPCC climate metric is physically meaningless
because they’re all built on the same falsified constructs.
More than 30 IPCC metrics gone. All physically meaningless.
And now we’re back to the empty circle.
Their Whack-a-Lie Orwellian defense is that they have multiple lines of evidence. But even that fails because 5 * 0 equals 0. 38 years. How many of the major public-facing claims of the IPCC survive? Zero. Every major public-facing claim of the IPC is scientifically invalid and categorically false. For 38 years, the IPCC has rewritten Western energy policy. Net zero by 2050, hundreds of trillions in projected expenditure, bans on combustion engines, natural gas, the cancellation of modern industrial civilization.
The IPCC never subjected its claims to proper falsification.
It declared them facts by repetition. “Unequivocal” 37 times in AR6.
We performed the falsification steps. They skipped. Five hypotheses flatly falsified. Direct empirical absolute. 38 years. All lies. Zero physical foundation. Words lied. Math didn’t. Math never lies. Galileo told us that God wrote two books, the Bible and the universe itself. He said, “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, in the language of mathematics. The math is the universe speaking. We listened. The IPCC did not.”
The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots. It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition. Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.
As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016). The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022 At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Then there was an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2, which dropped back toward normal values. Now in August 2026 there is again an El Nino peaking, albeit at a lower level.
For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa. While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~66 ppm, an 18% increase.
Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.
The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.
Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping well below its peak.
Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT
August 2026 UAH Temps: Ocean and Land Warms in All Regions
With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea. While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in. The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995. Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into 2024 peaking in April, then cooling off to a low in January 2026. Since then El Nino in the Tropics has risen sharply pulling up all regions despite a drop in July.
UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for August 2026. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data. Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead the update from HadSST4 I posted recently on July 2026 El Nino Spikes SSTs Warming, These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.
Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. 2025 showed a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February. Then in November and December SH land temps spiked while ocean temps showed litle change. In February 2026 NH land temps doubled, from Dec. 0.53C up to 1.14C last month. Despite SH land changing little, and Tropical land cooling, the Global land anomaly jumped up from 0.53 to 0.93C. That reversed in March with both NH land and Global land anomaly back down to 0.63C. That cooling offset SH Ocean warming doubling from 0.19C to 0.38C. In May was a warming spike in Tropics and SH ocean air while NH ocean air was flat. At the same time, Land air temps warmed in Tropics and NH while dropping in SH. The unusual end result for May was Global, Land and Ocean air temp anomalies all showing the same 0.53C. In June and July there were ups and down, and now in August an upward bump in NH and SH, both land and sea.
Note: UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021. v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.
Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system. Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy. Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements. In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates. Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.
Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST. Thus cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow. He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months. This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?
After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4. For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for August 2026. The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.
The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI). The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.
After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024. The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.86C in April. Since then all regions have cooled down sharply to a low of 0.27C in January. During 2025 there were ups and downs, but in November/December all regions were cooler, led by a sharp drop in SH bringing the Global ocean anomaly down to 0.02C. In 2026, ocean warming was evident, with Tropics and SH pulling up Global ocean air temps despite little rise in NH ocean. Now in June and July that has reversed with SH cooling and pulling down the Global ocean anomaly, even despite tropical warming. Now in August all regions are up again, near summer of 2024 values, though Tropics rose only slightly.
Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern
We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly. The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground. UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps. The graph updated for Augusr is below.
Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land. The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in August 2024, with a large drop in between. In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. February showed a sharp drop in NH land air temps from 1.07C down to 0.56C, pulling the Global land anomaly downward from 0.9C to 0.6C. Some ups and downs followed with returns close to February values in August. A remarkable spike in October was completely reversed in November/December, along with NH dropping sharply bringing the Global Land anomaly down to 0.52C, half of its peak value of 1.17C 09/2024.
In 2026 January and February Global land rebounded up to 1.14C, led by a NH warming spike. That NH spike was reversed in March and April back down to 0.43C. In June land temps in SH plunged nearly 0.6C down to 0.2C, pulling Global land anomaly down more than 0.1C. July and August saw Global land temps up again with warming in all regions.
The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980
The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present. The average monthly anomaly is -0.02 for this period of more than four decades. The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20. An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022. March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed
With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C. The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, later months declined steadily dropping. to 0.3C in December. In 2026 the global anomaly was little changed through April, then rose to a new peak of 0.68C in August.
The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.
TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps. Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak. Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force. TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4, but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995. Of course, the future has not yet been written.
This is the latest and greatest meme to scare the world of climate collapse, and it is gathering momentum and triggering followers. A sanity check is published at climatetippingpoints, despite they also being prone to CO2 Hysteria. The article is Fact-Check: have actuaries predicted that billions will die beyond 2 degrees? Excerpts below with my bolds and added images and comments.
Roger Hallam (the co-founder of climate activist groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil) has widely promoted this, repeatedly stating for example that “the British insurance sector once did an analysis showing that at 3 degrees Celsius of global warming, 4 billion people could die — and at 2 degrees, 2 billion lives could be lost. But that’s not even the full truth — it’s the minimum.” Hallam has also notedthat the trial of some Just Stop Oil activists (which resulted in acquittal) included the court taking “4 billion deaths at 3°C” as an “agreed fact“.
Based on this analysis, Hallam has co-founded a new campaign called ‘4 Billion Dead‘ (4BD), explicitly referencing the 3°C-based number in its name, connecting it to an outlier estimate of 3°C by 2050 (itself based on a linear extrapolation of just the last few years’ warming), and using it as the basis for planning and promoting a new civil disobedience campaign:
So where did these numbers come from then, and are they reliable?
[However, details in the Risk impact matrix give the game away–see below]
Does this confirm then that the Planetary Solvency report is predicting there’ll be 2 billion dead at 2°C or more, and over 4 billion deaths at over 3°C? It may seem like it, but the answer is actuallyno – the numbers in this dashboard and supporting appendix are labelled as illustrative (as flagged above both instances, including on the latter that it is “not a prediction or central scenario“).
This means these are justhypothetical numbers to show how such a dashboard would work, and not empirical predictions or projections based on some underlying analysis. This has been confirmed by speaking to one of this Planetary Solvency report’s authors, who agreed that these numbers aren’t based on a specific scientific analysis (with no associated calculations on death numbers presented in the report’s supplementary material either, unlike for GDP), rather being meant as a hypothetical illustration of a worst-case scenario to measure risk against, to be followed later with more detailed empirical analyses. Critically, the worst-case scenario here is implicitly part of a spread of many potential outcomes at 3°C, rather than 3°C itself being the worst-case scenario with these numbers the expected outcome if it is reached.
This means that even taking this report as it stands (leaving questions around the robustness of the magnitude of these death and GDP numbers to other posts), these numbers cannot be treated as predictions by actuaries (which implies an empirically-grounded expectation of the most likely future resulting from 3°C), in contrast to how they’ve been referred to in the earlier quotes, social media posts, and campaigns. Instead, they can at most be interpreted as (and for clarity should be communicated as) provisional expert ‘guesstimates‘ of a potential worst-case scenario, which was used to test-run a climate risk analysis methodology,
The UK insurance industry has not predicted mass death then, and four billion dead at 3°C is not an agreed fact but a misunderstood hypothetical worst-case scenario awaiting study. Some of the example reactions above could be down to an honest but widespread misreading, given that media outlets at the time reported these numbers like they were empirical estimates and lacked subsequent pushback (e.g.The Guardianarticle in January 2025), and skim-reading the report itself one might miss the “illustrative” labels.
It might be argued by some promoters that presenting this scenario as a prediction made by a respected body anyway is useful for promoting appropriately urgent action, but such misrepresentation runs the risk of fuelling scepticism or fatalism too. [You Think?]
Update: NYT Rushes To Blame Climate Change For Nepal’s Glacier Collapse—It Wasn’t
Anthony Watts writes at Climate Dispatch:
The New York Times(NYT), in its article “Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods,” claims that climate change increased the risk of the catastrophic glacier collapse and flooding in Nepal by thawing permafrost and destabilizing the mountainside. [some emphasis, links added]
This is false. The best evidence suggests the disaster was primarily caused by a complex cascade of geological failures and vulnerabilities in human infrastructure, not proof of a “climate crisis.”
“Climate change is heating up the Himalayas and supercharging the risk of disasters like the deadly flash flooding in Nepal and Tibet,” says the NYT, which quotes one researcher saying, “‘There’s a very straight link between climate change and these types of disasters.’”
Yet just a few paragraphs later, the article quotes Newcastle University geomorphologist Stuart Dunning,
“I don’t think we can simply say this is a result of climate change.”
A top meteorologist says the evidence points to geological failure and vulnerable infrastructure, not a “climate crisis.”
That caution should have been the headline. Instead, it was buried.
Ironically, the NYT itself provides historical context that weakens its central narrative. The article acknowledges that glacier failures have occurred dozens of times in the China-Nepal border region since 1900.
Since these events occurred repeatedly for well over a century, long before human greenhouse gas emissions rose, this event cannot be automatically linked to modern greenhouse gas emissions and human-induced climate change.
The disaster in Nepal is likely not over. And as expected, the climate alarmists are already claiming humans and CO2 are implicated. Some examples from the usual suspects.
CBC: Scientists fear Nepal’s disaster is just a glimpse of the carnage climate change could cause Global warming contributes to conditions that make a glacier collapses, floods more likely, experts say
ABC Australia: Nepal flood exposes risks from melting glaciers and thawing permafrost. Scientists have warned for years that a warming climate is destabilising the Himalayas.
New York Times: Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods
The Guardian: Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal
Forbes:Nepal Flash Flood: Experts Say Climate Change Primed Disaster
Scientific American: the Nepal disaster—and why climate change could make these events more likely
The answer is increasingly concerning but it is not as simple as saying that every flood is caused by climate change. The danger comes from a combination of changing climate conditions, unstable terrain, expanding glacial lakes, extreme rainfall, rapidly changing rivers and development in narrow mountain valleys.
Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya are losing ice, while many high-altitude areas are experiencing changes in snow cover and frozen ground. These changes do not simply mean that there is “less ice.” They can also alter the stability of the entire mountain environment.
Flooding is not new to Nepal. Every monsoon, heavy rainfall causes rivers to swell, while landslides frequently block roads and damage settlements. But high-mountain floods can have another source. Water can suddenly be released from a glacier, a glacial lake or a temporary blockage in a mountain valley. A flood can also be triggered by a rock or ice avalanche entering a river. This is one reason Himalayan floods can be so difficult to predict.
The August 2026 disaster in the Nepal-China border region has highlighted precisely this problem. Preliminary scientific assessments indicate that an ice-rock avalanche entered the Lhende Khola system before producing a destructive downstream surge. Researchers have also emphasized that the exact chain of events is still being investigated.
Recent research has shown just how complicated the region can be. A 2026 study documented major outburst floods from supraglacial lakes along the China-Nepal Himalayan border in 2025, demonstrating that water can also accumulate and drain within or on top of debris-covered glaciers in ways that are difficult to observe from the ground.
Following the August 2026 disaster, scientists told Reuters that warming temperatures are contributing to instability in high mountain ice and rock, while emphasizing that the precise trigger of the event remains under investigation. That scientific caution is important. Climate change is a risk multiplier, not a single switch that turns every mountain hazard on.
The August 2026 disaster is a painful reminder of what can happen when a high-altitude event suddenly connects with a populated river valley. It also demonstrates why Himalayan hazards cannot be viewed separately. A glacier can influence a lake. A lake can interact with a landslide. A landslide can change a river. A river can destroy infrastructure many kilometres away. That chain is what makes the Himalayas so difficult—and increasingly important—to understand.
Blatten dominated discussions at an international landslide conference held last month in Lausanne, where over 60 experts gathered to understand how such an event unfolded — and how to anticipate the next one.
Six months on, certain patterns have emerged, say scientists. The three largest Alpine landslides of the past 20 years — Piz Cengalo (2017), Piz Scerscen (2024) and now Blatten (2025) — all involved rockfalls onto glaciers that transformed into massive rock-ice avalanches and debris flows.
Whether Blatten can be attributed to climate change remains a central, unresolved question. Some scientists argue the link is evident. University of Zurich scientist Christian Huggel believes climate change played a key role in Blatten. “Of course, the geology, especially the layering and composition of the rock, is the key factor in such an event,” he told a conference in Innsbruck, Austria, in September. But Huggel believes that without climate warming, the Blatten landslide would have happened centuries later, if at all.
Others are more cautious. A July factsheet from the federal technology institute ETH Zurich concluded it was “quite likely” that warming was a relevant factor, noting that the unstable rock zone lies within permafrost, which is sensitive to rising temperatures. Switzerland has warmed 2.9° degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times — about twice the global average — leading to widespread glacier loss, altered snowfall patterns and thawing permafrost.
Rockfalls are increasing as snowmelt and permafrost thaw worsen, but scientists say it’s still unclear whether larger rockslides are becoming more frequent, and it’s hard to make reliable statements about very big, rare events as data is uneven. “Processes are interlinked and difficult to disentangle,” says ETH Zurich glaciologist Daniel Farinotti, who hopes to present firmer conclusions about the Blatten disaster next year. “What can be said is that the local geology, climate, glacier and permafrost all played a role [in the Blatten disaster].”
The chart above from DMI shows why Arctic ice melted more slowly than average. This year the daily mean temperature never went above freezing, From now on it will only grow colder. August is significant because it is the last month that NH ice extent declines. Those familar with the datasets know that March monthly average is taken as the annual maximum ice extent, and September monthly average serves as the annual minimum. Importantly both months are neutral, i.e. the ice extent values are nearly the same at the month start and end. All the melting occurs April to August, all the freezing October to February.
[ It reminds me what a Saskatchewan grain farmer told me: “Around here we only have AAA farmers”. I asked what he meant and he replied: “April to August and then Arizona.”]
The arctic ice extents are now reported through August 31, 2026, and as noted previously the wavy polar vortex had hampered ice formation with incursions of warmer southern air into the Arctic circle. This factor receded in May and June, with July extents closing the gap with the averages. August ends with ice extents well above the 20-year average. The Northern Sea Route (NSR) goes through the Russian shelf seas of Laptev, East Siberian, and Chukchi seas on the way to Bering Strait in Beaufort Sea.
The image from August 31 shows the Arctic Ocean core is still solid, while the Eurasian NSR now has open water on the left vertical side, including passages through Laptev (top left) and Chukchi (bottom Left). As usual in August, Hudson Bay (bottom right) is full open water, as is Baffin Bay (middle right). At this point Canadian Archipelago has opened up the eastern end of the NW passage, but still has extensive fast ice in Beaufort sea (bottom center). Canadian Ice Service latest conditions along the Alaskan coast include an ice warning for ships:
The chart below shows the 20-year August averages for Arctic ice extents, along with 2026, 2025 and 2007 as well as SII v.4. Note that on average during this period 1.9M km2 of ice extent is lost. In August, MASIE was above average the last 3 weeks, showing considerable surplus ice end of August. SII v.4 continues to greatly underestimate Arctic ice extent, ending this period ~0.5M km2 lower than MASIE, or half a Wadham in deficit.
The table below shows the distibution of ice extents on day 243 across regions of the Arctic ocean.
Region
2026243
Day 243 Ave
2026-Ave.
2007243
2026-2007
(0) Northern_Hemisphere
5320736
4960255
360481
4827899
492837
(1) Beaufort_Sea
734913
573741
161172
688338
46574
(2) Chukchi_Sea
424517
290417
134100
123559
300958
(3) East_Siberian_Sea
369883
370301
-417
311
369572
(4) Laptev_Sea
316828
174987
141840
273250
43578
(5) Kara_Sea
6471
46663
-40192
104111
-97641
(6) Barents_Sea
0
15154
-15154
9657
-9657
(7) Greenland_Sea
142412
164671
-22259
344052
-201641
(8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence
36105
29325
6780
37456
-1352
(9) Canadian_Archipelago
315921
297208
18713
263154
52766
(10) Hudson_Bay
16
20010
-19994
40797
-40781
(11) Central_Arctic
2972584
2976914
-4330
2941956
30628
The table shows an overall surplus of 360k km2 or 7%, and almost a half wadham greater than 2007. Many regions are close to or above the 20-year average. The seas of Laptev, Chukchi and Beaufort are in surplus. The only sizeable deficit is in Greenland Sea. Bering and Okhotsk seas are left off the list since they are open water now as usual.
Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring ice and snow extents.
The disaster in Nepal is likely not over. And as expected, the climate alarmists are already claiming humans and CO2 are implicated. Some examples from the usual suspects.
CBC: Scientists fear Nepal’s disaster is just a glimpse of the carnage climate change could cause Global warming contributes to conditions that make a glacier collapses, floods more likely, experts say
ABC Australia: Nepal flood exposes risks from melting glaciers and thawing permafrost. Scientists have warned for years that a warming climate is destabilising the Himalayas.
New York Times: Climate Change Raises Risk of Disasters Like Nepal Floods
The Guardian: Climate crisis could be destabilising mountain areas like Nepal
Forbes:Nepal Flash Flood: Experts Say Climate Change Primed Disaster
Scientific American: the Nepal disaster—and why climate change could make these events more likely
The answer is increasingly concerning but it is not as simple as saying that every flood is caused by climate change. The danger comes from a combination of changing climate conditions, unstable terrain, expanding glacial lakes, extreme rainfall, rapidly changing rivers and development in narrow mountain valleys.
Glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya are losing ice, while many high-altitude areas are experiencing changes in snow cover and frozen ground. These changes do not simply mean that there is “less ice.” They can also alter the stability of the entire mountain environment.
Flooding is not new to Nepal. Every monsoon, heavy rainfall causes rivers to swell, while landslides frequently block roads and damage settlements. But high-mountain floods can have another source. Water can suddenly be released from a glacier, a glacial lake or a temporary blockage in a mountain valley. A flood can also be triggered by a rock or ice avalanche entering a river. This is one reason Himalayan floods can be so difficult to predict.
The August 2026 disaster in the Nepal-China border region has highlighted precisely this problem. Preliminary scientific assessments indicate that an ice-rock avalanche entered the Lhende Khola system before producing a destructive downstream surge. Researchers have also emphasized that the exact chain of events is still being investigated.
Recent research has shown just how complicated the region can be. A 2026 study documented major outburst floods from supraglacial lakes along the China-Nepal Himalayan border in 2025, demonstrating that water can also accumulate and drain within or on top of debris-covered glaciers in ways that are difficult to observe from the ground.
Following the August 2026 disaster, scientists told Reuters that warming temperatures are contributing to instability in high mountain ice and rock, while emphasizing that the precise trigger of the event remains under investigation. That scientific caution is important. Climate change is a risk multiplier, not a single switch that turns every mountain hazard on.
The August 2026 disaster is a painful reminder of what can happen when a high-altitude event suddenly connects with a populated river valley. It also demonstrates why Himalayan hazards cannot be viewed separately. A glacier can influence a lake. A lake can interact with a landslide. A landslide can change a river. A river can destroy infrastructure many kilometres away. That chain is what makes the Himalayas so difficult—and increasingly important—to understand.
Blatten dominated discussions at an international landslide conference held last month in Lausanne, where over 60 experts gathered to understand how such an event unfolded — and how to anticipate the next one.
Six months on, certain patterns have emerged, say scientists. The three largest Alpine landslides of the past 20 years — Piz Cengalo (2017), Piz Scerscen (2024) and now Blatten (2025) — all involved rockfalls onto glaciers that transformed into massive rock-ice avalanches and debris flows.
Whether Blatten can be attributed to climate change remains a central, unresolved question. Some scientists argue the link is evident. University of Zurich scientist Christian Huggel believes climate change played a key role in Blatten. “Of course, the geology, especially the layering and composition of the rock, is the key factor in such an event,” he told a conference in Innsbruck, Austria, in September. But Huggel believes that without climate warming, the Blatten landslide would have happened centuries later, if at all.
Others are more cautious. A July factsheet from the federal technology institute ETH Zurich concluded it was “quite likely” that warming was a relevant factor, noting that the unstable rock zone lies within permafrost, which is sensitive to rising temperatures. Switzerland has warmed 2.9° degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times — about twice the global average — leading to widespread glacier loss, altered snowfall patterns and thawing permafrost.
Rockfalls are increasing as snowmelt and permafrost thaw worsen, but scientists say it’s still unclear whether larger rockslides are becoming more frequent, and it’s hard to make reliable statements about very big, rare events as data is uneven. “Processes are interlinked and difficult to disentangle,” says ETH Zurich glaciologist Daniel Farinotti, who hopes to present firmer conclusions about the Blatten disaster next year. “What can be said is that the local geology, climate, glacier and permafrost all played a role [in the Blatten disaster].”
Raymond Inauen is creating a series of light-hearted chats about CO2 and climate at his blog World of CO2. These are conversing in plain language apart from technical complexities. An example is above from the first four at the Youtube channel Conrad – The World of CO₂
This is a work in progress and more content is forthcoming, and he is hoping to get suggestions for future videos. Thanks Raymond for opening up a new form of communicating about these matters.
Brabim Karki writes from Nepal about the escalating trade war between these two former allies. As a citizen of both nations, I have mixed reactions and welcome a disinterested viewpoint. The article in The Spectator is Trump’s Canada Tariffs Aren’t the Betrayal Ottawa Claims. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Mark Carney says Washington ambushed an ally. But Canada’s
protected markets and dependence on US trade tell a different story.
Every diplomatic breakup produces two stories, and the one Ottawa is telling that Washington ambushed a trusted partner at the negotiating table has already won the sympathy of most of the press. It is a good story. It is also incomplete.
What actually happened last week is that trade talks fell apart because the United States asked Canada to accept terms Canada found uncomfortable, and Canada refused. Prime Minister Mark Carney called the American position “unfair” and “uneconomic.” He may be right that it was tough. He is wrong to suggest that toughness, on its own, is grounds for outrage. The United States has run a trade relationship with Canada for decades that gave Ottawa nearly unrestricted access to the world’s largest consumer market while Canada kept its own protections, most notoriously its dairy supply management system firmly in place. Donald Trump’s blunt framing on social media, “Canada wants the benefits of being a State, without being one,” is crude. It is not wrong.
Trade relationships built on one side’s permanent tolerance
of the other’s protections were never going to last forever.
Trump’s tariffs are not an act of aggression against an ally. They are the predictable consequence of a negotiation in which one side finally stopped accepting asymmetrical terms it had tolerated for years.
The asymmetry Trump is pointing to is real, not invented. Canadian dairy tariffs on U.S. products have run well above 200 percent under the country’s supply management regime, even as Canadian goods flow south with comparatively modest friction. American dairy farmers in Wisconsin and New York have complained about this for a generation, through Republican and Democratic administrations alike. Trump did not manufacture this grievance. He inherited it and, unlike his predecessors, chose to act on it rather than manage it quietly. Carney’s own advisers have not seriously disputed that the tariff wall exists; they have argued only that dismantling it now would be politically costly at home. That is an argument about Canadian domestic politics, not about whether the American complaint is legitimate.
The walkout itself weakens Canada’s position more than it strengthens it. Carney told reporters the American side “asked too much and offered too little,” then pulled his negotiators from Washington and out of what by his own account had been a week of real progress. U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer’s account is less charitable: Canada, he said, backed away from terms it had already agreed to. Whichever version proves closer to the truth, walking away rewards Ottawa’s leverage only if the United States needs a deal more than Canada does. It does not. American exports to Canada matter, but Canada sends a far larger share of its own economy south than the reverse. A negotiating partner who breaks off talks from the weaker hand is making a statement, not a strategy.
Canada has spent the past several months hedging toward Beijing, and that context matters more than Ottawa would like to admit. A new trade arrangement with China, cutting tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for agricultural access, landed in the middle of a fragile American relationship already strained by years of tariff threats. One can defend Canada’s right to diversify its trading partners. One cannot then act surprised when Washington treats that diversification as evidence that Ottawa is playing both sides, and responds accordingly.
The escalating tariffs on both sides will likely raise costs for consumers in both countries, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is not wrong that supply chains built over 30 years under NAFTA and its successor don’t unwind painlessly. Businesses in Michigan and Ontario alike will feel this fight before their governments do. That is a genuine cost, and it should temper any triumphalism about the tariffs themselves.
But a cost is not a refutation. Trade relationships built on one side’s permanent tolerance of the other’s protections were never going to last forever, and someone was eventually going to test whether Canada’s dairy walls and Washington’s patience could coexist indefinitely. Trump tested it. Carney blinked first, then called it an attack. Alliances endure disagreement. What they cannot survive indefinitely is one partner mistaking the other’s patience for permanent policy.
Canada is about to find out how much of that patience is left.
Podcast #423, 8/25/26: Ron Clutz continues a three-part framework on climate change: humans cause warming, warming is dangerous, and government can stop it. He argues observed warming can be explained by post–Little Ice Age recovery plus multidecadal oscillations and solar-orbital effects, and says “alarmists” deny these. He describes a taxpayer-funded “climate scare machine” and cites a Climate Change Business Journal estimate of a $3.4T/year global climate industry. Using Joseph D’Aleo’s materials, he disputes claims about heatwaves, storms, droughts, wildfires, ice loss, ocean acidification, health, and food, then focuses on Arctic sea ice cycles and sea-level model projections versus tide gauges. He stresses climate is local (Köppen zones) and says climate policies are wasteful, ineffective, and harmful, citing project failures, costs, and energy poverty.
Note: Clicking on a red link above will download a pptx presentation file which can be opened in powerpoint or compatible application. Once opened, select the slide show menu and then “from current slide”, which will be the first one. The slides will then be full screen, and some with gif images will display the animations.
You can also view these pptx files online for free at GroupDocsViewer. When the file opens there, click on “Present” for full screen display including animations.
Podcast #423, 8/25/26: Ron Clutz continues a three-part framework on climate change: humans cause warming, warming is dangerous, and government can stop it. He argues observed warming can be explained by post–Little Ice Age recovery plus multidecadal oscillations and solar-orbital effects, and says “alarmists” deny these. He describes a taxpayer-funded “climate scare machine” and cites a Climate Change Business Journal estimate of a $3.4T/year global climate industry. Using Joseph D’Aleo’s materials, he disputes claims about heatwaves, storms, droughts, wildfires, ice loss, ocean acidification, health, and food, then focuses on Arctic sea ice cycles and sea-level model projections versus tide gauges. He stresses climate is local (Köppen zones) and says climate policies are wasteful, ineffective, and harmful, citing project failures, costs, and energy poverty.
Note: Clicking on a red link above will download a pptx presentation file which can be opened in powerpoint or compatible application. Once opened, select the slide show menu and then “from current slide”, which will be the first one. The slides will then be full screen, and some with gif images will display the animations.
You can also view these pptx files online for free at GroupDocsViewer. When the file opens there, click on “Present” for full screen display including animations.