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, and now dropping steadily back toward normal values.
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
March 2026 UAH Temps: SH Ocean Warms, NH Land Cools
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 the present.
UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for March 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 February 2026 NH and Tropic SSTs Warm Slightly. 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. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere. September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. 2025 has shown 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.
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 March 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. In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global ocean air anomaly up to 0.47C, where it stayed in March and April. In May drops in NH and Tropics pulled the air temps over oceans down despite an uptick in SH. At 0.43C, ocean air temps were similar to May 2020, albeit with higher SH anomalies. In November/December all regions were cooler, led by a sharp drop in SH bringing the Global ocean anomaly down to 0.02C. January and February saw continued Tropical cooling and NH cooling as well pulling Global ocean air temps lower. Now in March 2026 SH ocean warmed pulling up the Global ocean air anomaly.
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 March 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 January and February Global land rebounded up to 1.14C, led by a NH warming spike. That was reversed in March back down to 0.63C despits some SH land warming.
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 until August Global Land and Ocean was down to 0.39C. then rose slightly to 0.53 in October, before dropping to 0.3C in December, and slightly higher now in February and March 2026.
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.
At the World Prosperity Forum in Zurich—held alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos—climate scientist Anika Sweetland delivers a provocative and deeply personal address that challenges the foundations of modern climate orthodoxy.
Drawing on her own education and professional experience, Sweetland recounts how climate science training fostered fear, despair, and unquestioned consensus rather than open scientific inquiry. She argues that generations of students have been indoctrinated with alarmist narratives that distort climate history, suppress debate, and justify sweeping political and economic control.
In this speech, Sweetland examines:
♦ The psychological impact of climate alarmism on children and students
♦ Media-driven climate narratives and shifting doomsday predictions
♦ Historical climate cycles, ocean dynamics, and orbital forces
♦ The role of international institutions and the concentration of power
♦ Why carbon dioxide is portrayed as a villain—and why she disputes that claim
♦ How climate policy, finance, and governance have become tightly intertwined
Presented as a counterpoint to the centralized, collectivist worldview promoted at Davos, this talk embodies the mission of the World Prosperity Forum: to challenge prevailing narratives, defend sovereignty, and restore open debate on climate, energy, and economic policy. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcription with my bolds and added images.
My name is Annika Sweetland and I trained as a climate scientist and during my time in what was meant to be a world-class education, I learned the world was a fragile system on the brink of collapse and that we were practically doomed. What sets me apart from most climate scientists is this, I’ve realized I was indoctrinated. Going through my old lecture notes now, I see lie after lie after lie, painting a picture that does not and will not ever exist. I was that girl that ticked the box when booking a plane ticket to say yes, I’m willing to pay a higher price to make this an environmentally friendly transaction and offset my carbon emissions.
Airlines saving polar bears, sign me up. But of course the
consensus was always the same, there was nothing
I could really do to solve the climate crisis.
So let me take you through my journey from being a scientist in complete and utter despair to standing here before you today armed with the truth. Today I’m going to be telling you about the realities of climate education, so let’s start at the beginning of the climate merry-go-round, the indoctrination of school children. Do you realize the alleged consequences from climate change are actually similar to those of war? The child’s world is inherently unstable, after all due to extreme sea level rise and extreme weather events, their lives are at risk. But this is what we’re teaching our kids, that the world they live in is no longer a safe and stable environment, that ecosystems are collapsing and their world is on fire. This is an outrage, they promised this is the truth and if they question that narrative the school will write to their parents, no debate allowed. I have been told my whole life that there is impending doom in the form of climate change. It was in the news every day, my teachers schooled me on it, my friends were talking about it, there were even degrees in it.
I can be forgiven for believing it. Why wouldn’t you believe what your teachers are telling you? They’re the ultimate authority at a young age. But the most significant point is this, it is the effect it has on our children.
They are scaring our children with these ghastly stories, they are shaping them to feel powerless because they can’t do anything about it and they are moulding them to be disillusioned and angry because the so-called people in charge don’t appear to be doing anything about it either. This is how you get the Greta Thunbergs of the world, that girl honestly believes her world is burning. Imagine for a second what it truly feels like to believe that.
I was at school in 1999 and this new emergency of global warming made me feel anxious and at that time three percent of school-aged children were diagnosed with anxiety.By 2023 this had escalated to more than 20 percent of school-aged children being diagnosed with anxiety. This is not a coincidence, the psychological impact of this story is crippling children’s mental health and it is simply unacceptable.
It is wrong, it is socially irresponsible and the minute they try and peddle that story on my child, well let me just make this clear, hell will have no fury like a mother who knows the truth and who is also a climate expert. Hell will not have enough fury and this is why I’m angry because I’ve seen the system from within and what I found at university wasn’t a debate, it was a script. So when I call climate change a narrative, I’m not being edgy, I’m being precise.
If you want a quick test for whether something is solid science or nonsense, just look for consistency and this consistency is exactly what’s missing. Firstly, the story keeps on changing. If it were a real story I guess the general facts surrounding it would probably remain the same but in the 60s and 70s the majority of scientists were predicting global warming but if you looked in the newspaper you’d think we’re heading straight into an ice age.
In 1974, Radio Times ran the headline, the ice age cometh. American media followed suit. Every cold weather event was sold as proof that there was an ice age approaching. Sound familiar? It should. It’s how the media still works today. A flood, a heat wave, a storm, completely normal weather, splash it across the front page, call it unprecedented and blame climate change. Everyday weather is rebranded as existential crisis. My point is this, it was never scientists telling the world an ice age was coming, it was the media with their use of selected experts. But why? Let’s dig deeper.
Newsweek warned governments were unprepared for climate driven food shortages and that planners were ignoring climatic uncertainty and that delay would make the coming crisis impossible to manage. This wasn’t just weather reporting, it was a script to create panic about hunger, global instability, they pull the lever for sympathy, for suffering in poorer countries and even today we see images of flooded villages, failed crops, desperate families, all offered up as proof of climate catastrophe and as justification for sweeping political action, urgent action with no time to consider the consequences.
In 1988, there was a rebranding exercise. The New York Times headline read, global warming has begun, expert tells Senate. I read this article, the evidence rests on five months of slightly warm weather and in climate sciences, a trend takes 30 years to establish, not just a season and worse still was the baseline they chose, 1950 to 1980. This is the very cooling period they had just used to scream ice age.
This is a classic case of data manipulation, you take a cold reference point and everything after that is going to look unusually warm. This was never ever science, there was never ever a global warming trend, it was data manipulated to tell a story. The ice age never came, first wrong prediction, but the story of the ice age, that did its job.
The media succeeded in creating a generation of fearful believers. In a speech to the Royal Society in 1988, Margaret Thatcher talked about the fear that people were feeling, the fear that humans were creating a global heat trap that could lead to climatic instability. This fear was gaslit by an NGO, the National Academy of Sciences, who promised the warming would cause a sea level rise of several feet over the next century.
The following year, another NGO, the UN, went on the record and promised entire nations will be wiped off the face of the earth due to climate change induced sea level rise by 2020. Well, we’re still here aren’t we? Second false prediction, none of this sea level rise has eventuated and it’s exactly the same story they preach today. Extreme sea level rise and climate change refugees are nothing but a myth designed to scare people into whatever policy response is waiting in the wings.
This is the first reason that the man-made climate change story is nothing more than a doomsday tale that has been evolving for the last 60 years. Think about it. These were arguably two of the world’s most powerful organisations. They’d had access to satellite data for 25 years, the best scientists, the most comprehensive data analysis in the world, plus the mainstream media at their fingertips. Was it really a coincidence that their story never came true? We now know that they would have known via satellites that the sea level was always rising steadily at 1.2 inches per decade, just like it does today. Plus, this sea rise actually brings sediment with it and increases the land mass at the same time, therefore rendering it impossible for islands to sink due to sea level rise.
However, because it was never a real story, they were never interested in the real data. They could clearly see that there was no unusual sea level rise, but they intentionally chose to mislead the public and put their fraudulent plan into action. They advised the World Meteorological Organisation, another NGO, to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Now, here’s where it gets juicy. The IPCC is structurally identical to the single world government model I was presented with during my studies as a prescriptive solution to climate change. My professors in global governance assured me that a global problem requires a single world government to fix it, and I admit it. I believed them. I respected my professors. Most of them were published authors in respected journals, and I was promised a world-class education.
But the tragedy is this. They were never training scientists.
They were training socialists to enact their agenda.
And it’s been clear to me for a time now that there’s never been a problem with our climate system, just a smoke screen to establish power and create control. Welcome to the only crisis where their solution is always the same. More control, more taxes, and less debate.
Let me make it clear how the IPCC benefits from maintaining and creating generations of climate change believers. To start with, they sit at the very top of the climate change establishment, and when I say establishment, I simply mean a stable network of institutions that fund, credential, and publish the urgency of man-made global warming. Climate finance reached a record-breaking $1.9 trillion in 2023, and last year saw a record $2.2 trillion in clean energy investment.
That’s more than $4 trillion in a couple of years. Think about who are the main winners here. They’re the unelected officials that sit atop the IPCC hierarchy. These are the people selling, building, financing, and certifying the global transition to clean energy. They are making billions.
The financial victims, the United Kingdom is a victim.
Our economy is on the verge of recession after 30 years of big signatory to international climate agreements. What do we have to show for it? Not only are our energy bills the highest in the developed world, but the economy outside of London is closer to that of Bulgaria’s than Germany’s. Today, 18 to 30-year-olds are the first generation to earn less than their parents. We are getting poorer, both relatively and absolutely. My fellow countrymen are suffering, and this also makes me angry. Because of climate policy, because the IPCC says so, we’re not allowed to drill our own gas fields, which will make us completely reliant for others’ gas in the future.
We have the best quality gas in the world, and its exploration has just been made illegal. For existing projects, for every dollar made, the company is taxed upwards of 78 cents due to unnecessary climate taxation. Let’s take a really good look at just how much power the IPCC have created for themselves. They act as a global risk allocation engine. They determine which technologies reduce subsidies, which activities become legally constrained, which investments are encouraged or stranded.
In the UK, we only have four oil refineries left. These are the basic building blocks of the modern industrial economy, but any company that comes in will not make a profit because the taxes are too high. The IPCC is making us poorer, both as nations and as individuals. Recent blackouts across Europe are just a glimpse into the dystopian future which awaits us.
As long as they continue to make us believe that man-made climate change is going to end life as we know it, we will keep filtering trillions of dollars throughout their organisation without questioning a thing. So what can we do? Firstly, I believe that the average person is more than capable of seeing a situation for what it really is. So please, tune in carefully as I seek to disprove the myth of man-made climate change once and for all.
I’ve got you on tenderhooks now, that’s a good thing. You’re still with me. Let’s bust the first myth. More carbon dioxide causes a warmer planet. Here’s the truth. A recent study by arguably two of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists, both Professor Emeritus, one from MIT, one from Princeton, I mean, these guys are not messing around. They have shown that there is a limit to the amount of heat that is able to be trapped by carbon dioxide and they call this the saturation point. We are at 99% of the saturation point. Relatively speaking, no matter how much carbon dioxide we pump into the air, it will not increase our global temperature. It is but a fallacy. Joe Rogan recently had those authors on his podcast, Dr. Linzen and Dr. Happer. Joe Rogan also wants people to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
Now let’s bust the second myth, that carbon dioxide is bad for the planet. Guess what? Carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet. That’s right, I said it, the truth. Satellite data shows that plant growth has increased significantly over the last 35 years due to increased carbon dioxide. NASA measured a 10% greening of the earth between 2000 and 2020 alone. Meanwhile, at university, I was taught that trees would starve due to climate change.
They intentionally used the word starve to elicit an emotional response. What actually happens is that when there’s more carbon dioxide available, not only do plants grow faster, but they use less water. We know this because commercial greenhouses pump carbon dioxide to 1400 parts per million because it grows the best plants. It’s called carbon dioxide enrichment. Come on. Carbon dioxide enriches the earth.
And the third myth, carbon dioxide has a direct relationship with temperature. Al Gore was the person responsible for demonizing carbon dioxide, and he said carbon dioxide is the highest it’s ever been. It’s just another lie. It’s actually the lowest it’s been in the last 320 million years. Not only that, but some of the highest levels of carbon dioxide occurred during an ice age 340 million years ago, which just proves that carbon dioxide and temperature have no direct link whatsoever.
Of course, in my training, carbon dioxide and its rise or fall could explain everything that happened in our climatic history through some sort of feedback loop or time lag mechanism. And this is the whole basis of their argument. That more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, the more the temperature will increase. The most important takeaway from this today is that is a lie. The truth is, the earth is just getting greener, and we are simply uneducated as to why the climate actually changes. Indeed, all of us are completely brainwashed to never question it.
So why do the IPCC have a conflict of interest with the truth? Let’s understand exactly how much power this unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable, non-governmental organization are protecting with their lies. The IPCC produce assessments that 195 governments around the world use as an authoritative reference for climate policy. They use IPCC scenarios to set emissions targets, justify carbon budgets. If countries argue for compensation or climate aid, they cite IPCC risk assessments.
The IPCC projections define which regions are at risk and therefore where the money flows. And what they really don’t want you to know is that the most powerful leverage is in financial markets. IPCC scenarios are used in ESG scoring frameworks,climate stress testing for banks, insurance risk models, central bank climate risk assessments, and investment screening criteria. In practice, this means that a company’s ability to access capital increasingly depends on whether its business model is aligned with IPCC-derived pathways.
They have a monopoly not only on the success of entire countries but on individual business interests. In effect, their projections now sit upstream of policy, regulation, infrastructure, and economic structure. And this here, this is why they carry so much power. This isn’t just undemocratic, it’s anti-democratic. I never voted for them to make these decisions. These are people that cannot be held to account by the electorate and that is an unacceptable structure. It is a socialist, globalist agenda that has been carried out right beneath our noses. And it is the spitting image of the one world government framework that was prescribed in my training.
So, with the whole world relying on their projections, with trillions of dollars on the line, you would think that their utmost priority should be the accuracy of those projections. It’s why the believers say, look at the data, you can’t ignore the data. Well, spoiler alert, the data is doctored, just like it’s always been, just like my textbooks were, just like my lecture notes were, this whole thing is indoctrination.
And here is the proof. Hackers leaked emails from IPCC assessment report authors which exposed them freely discussing their efforts in deleting and manipulating the real data because it didn’t quite fit with their doomsday story.
And I quote, I’ll maybe cut the last few points of the filtered curve as that’s trending down. They needed it to be trending upward to fit with their past projections. Another email says, I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick to hide the decline. These are real emails between the authors of the IPCC report. There are more than 2000 emails like this showing corrupt behavior and they are still the lead authors today. They are unelected, corrupt and have a conflict of interest with the truth. Trillions of dollars of spending rests on fabricated nonsense.
In the UK, if we don’t allocate our national budget to their satisfaction, we’re taken to court. Most recently, we were taken to the European Court of Human Rights because of failure to adequately prepare for extreme heat and flooding. And this, they say, violates fundamental human rights because we are not protecting people against man-made climate change. It is an outrage. So what can we do? It’s time to reclaim our sovereignty.
And we do this by formally leaving all agreements governed by the climate establishment, repeal the Climate Change Act, withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, withdraw from the UNFCC, leave the Paris Agreement. America withdrew from all United Nations architecture this month. It’s time for the rest of the world to follow suit.
I can already hear the objections, but if we don’t act, aren’t we doomed? As a climate scientist, let me reassure you. The climate is meant to change and it’s meant to change drastically. It is just its natural state and this is very much like the earth. We are in a natural period of warming called the Holocene. We’re still coming out of the Little Ice Age, which was between 1400 and 1900. Our earth’s climate gets warmer and cooler in 1500 year cycles. There is also an ocean pattern called El Nino Southern Oscillation, (ENSO) which drives huge temperature changes. Most global warming is in fact driven by changes in the ocean currents. Other changes are driven by orbital forcings called milankovitch cycles. These cycles change the position of our planet relative to the sun and historically produce an ice age every 100,000 years. There’s nothing man-made about it. There is only natural climate change.
But training experts that the world will listen to and who will enact their agenda is a crucial part of the IPCC’s strategy to retain control. Well, I’m a climate scientist. I’m an expert. So, listen to me. All man-made climate education in schools has to stop. It is not science. It is consensus which is very different to objective scientific fact.
Teach them natural climate change. Teach them about milankovitch cycles, the El Nino. Do not teach them lies that I have just proven wrong. I don’t want my child to gain an ideology. I want him to gain an education. The next generation must be clever. And for this to happen, they need to be learning factual information.
For anyone out there that has ever felt guilty or afraid due to climate change, I want to reassure you, you are not the problem. We have been brainwashed every day by the media. We are being lied to every day. And if we question it, we’re told we’re crazy. We are told we’re in denial because the climate establishment is afraid.
They will tell you that I’m the extreme one because I don’t believe the world is on fire. They will do everything they can to make us fearful. The world as we know it is ending, burning, boiling, to maintain control, constrain us in regulatory burden, and have us accountable to their courts if we spend our taxpayers money the wrong way.
The climate establishment targeted intelligent people who genuinely loved the environment. They taught us the earth was dying and on the brink of collapse. And I believed it. That is not stupidity. That is programming. Because my university lecturers who I respected and the institution of the university itself assured me this was the latest cutting edge research.
I mean I’m thinking I want my money back at this point. They told you it’s settled. They told you it’s urgent. They told you to comply. Well, I’ve told you what they haven’t. The climate is meant to change. The man couldn’t affect the climate system even if he wanted to. Carbon dioxide is good for the planet and will not increase the temperature any. And both children and university students are being brainwashed to blindly perform and enact their agenda.
Well, I am no puppet. For me, once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The choice of what to believe is now yours. But the establishment should be afraid because I am a climate scientist who knows the truth. Thank you. Thank you so much. I also just want to thank the Heartland Institute so much for having me speak at the inaugural World Prosperity Forum here in Zurich.
The arctic ice extents are now reported through end of March 2026, the month whose average is taken as the annual maximum. As noted previously the wavy polar vortex has hampered ice formation with incusions of warmer southern air into the Arctic circle. This may be changing according to the most recent image from AER PV blog.
Figure 12. Observed 10 mb geopotential heights (dam; contours) and temperature anomalies (°C; shading) across the Northern Hemisphere averaged from 17 Mar. (b) Same as (a) except forecasted averaged from 28 Mar to 1 Apr 2026. The forecasts are from the 00Z 17 Mar 2026 GFS ensemble.
Remarkably, the 2025 annual daily extent maximum of 14.48M km2 was on day 73 of that year. Arctic ice reached 14.55 on day 63 in 2026, and continued near that level until day 74, before starting the usual decline.
The chart below shows the 20-year averages for Arctic ice extents for March along with 2026, 2025 and 2006 as well as SII v.4.
The 20-year average maximum daily ice extent appears at 14.93M km2 on day 71 before starting to decline. MASIE 2006 and 2026 started this period the same and tracked each other until 2026 ended higher by ~200k km2, and slightly above 2025.
The table below shows the distibution of ice extents on day 90 across regions of the Arctic ocean.
Region
2026090
Day 90 Average
2026-Ave.
2006090
2026-2006
(0) Northern_Hemisphere
14149101
14587351
-438250
13913402
235699
(1) Beaufort_Sea
1071070
1070279
791
1068683
2387
(2) Chukchi_Sea
966006
964325
1681
959091
6915
(3) East_Siberian_Sea
1087137
1086309
828
1084627
2510
(4) Laptev_Sea
897845
897135
709
897773
71
(5) Kara_Sea
930404
918948
11456
922164
8240
(6) Barents_Sea
582189
653649
-71460
623912
-41723
(7) Greenland_Sea
569080
667067
-97988
604935
-35856
(8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence
1403737
1384371
19366
1026934
376804
(9) Canadian_Archipelago
854931
853349
1582
851691
3240
(10) Hudson_Bay
1260887
1255554
5333
1240389
20498
(11) Central_Arctic
3223020
3234756
-11736
3241074
-18054
(12) Bering_Sea
819147
705446
113701
662863
156284
(13) Baltic_Sea
36855
60091
-23235
129348
-92492
(14) Sea_of_Okhotsk
433109
826350
-393242
588167
-155058
The table shows that most regions are close to or above the 20-year average. The majority of the 3% overall deficit is from Sea of Okhotsk, down ~400k km2, Smaller deficits are in Barents and Greenland seas, partly offset by a surplus in Bering sea. All of those regions will be nearly ice-free end of summer.
As for the March Monthly Averages, here is the history:
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.
Drone footage shows hundreds of solar panels ripped apart and scattered across farmland after a powerful tornado tore through Wheatfield overnight. Homes in the area also suffered heavy damage as the violent storm carved a path of destruction. Photo credit Joemar Sombero
Energy Bad Boys draw the lessons from an Indiana tornado impacting power supply in their blog article Solar Scattered, Coal Still Standing. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
What an Indiana tornado revealed about the cost of fragile power
On Tuesday, March 10th, an EF-1 tornado destroyed the Dunns Bridge Solar I and II facilities owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO). The facilities, located outside of Wheatfield, Indiana, had2.4 million solar panels, totaling 700 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, and reportedly cost $1 billion to construct—a little over $1,400 per kilowatt (kW).
The Chief Deputy of Jasper County Sheriff’s Department, Brandon Napier, noted, “Just the path of the tornado that came through, we have several large solar fields to the east of the town here it went right through the solar field and just ripped a lot of them out.”
While the solar panels were damaged by the tornado, we are not aware of any reports of damage at the nearby R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, a 950 MW coal facility that NIPSCO was planning to retire at the end of 2025. However, it is still running thanks to a 202(C) order issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requiring the plant to continue operations. Click on the map below to explore the custom Google Map we made this week of the facilities.
To enlarge, open in new tab.
This article will explore the cost of the destroyed solar facility compared to the nearby R.M. Schahfer Plant, and explore how energy costs have changed in the NIPSCO service territory in response to changes in the company’s generation fleet, using some cool data from S&P Global.
According to S&P Global, the Dunns Bridge solar projects were built to “support Northern Indiana Public Service’s goal of becoming coal-free by 2028, reducing carbon emissions by more than 90 percent by 2030, compared to a 2005 baseline, according to the utility.”
The situation begs several questions:
If climate change is going to make the weather more extreme,how does it make any sense to shut down coal plants and build energy generation facilities, like solar, that are destroyed by extreme weather?
Are the company’s coal-free and emissions reduction goals increasing the company’s exposure to costs associated with weather events, and why should ratepayers be saddled with these additional costs?
Was there any damage to the R.M. Schahfer coal plant or the onsite battery storage facility at Dunns Bridge?
What type of insurance policy is in place for the solar facility, and what deductible would the company be required to pay, if any?
What liability, if any, does the company have for the cleanup of the site and surrounding areas?
How is any of this in the best interests of ratepayers?
The Cost of Tornado-Truncated Solar Facility
Let’s be incredibly uncharitable and look at the anticipated levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of the solar facility over its projected 25-year useful lifetime, and its actual, tornado-truncated lifetime.
Dunns Bridge I began generating power in June of 2023, producing a total of 1.3 million megawatt hours (MWh) up until December of 2025, the most recent month for which data are available. Dunns Bridge II began generating power in January of 2025, and through December, it produced 812,439 MW of power, which is good for a 21.3 percent capacity factor.
We calculated the LCOE over two time periods: a 25-year lifecycle, a standard assumption in the industry, and a 2-year lifecycle to account for the facility being destroyed very early in its lifecycle. The results are about what we would expect. Our estimated subsidized costs over 25 years are approximately equal to S&P Global’s reported PPA cost for the facilities, including subsidies.
Is this a fair comparison? Probably not, because the solar facility was almost certainly insured and will likely be rebuilt after the site is remediated. The question is: how much are the cleanup and replacement costs,and what is the insurance deductible for the damaged facility, and who has to pay them?
The Cost of the Nearby Coal Plant
In our upcoming LCOE study for Reliable Energy Inc. in Indiana, we found that the R.M. Schahfer plant was the most expensive coal plant in the state, due primarily to very high delivered fuel costs at the plant ($50 per MWh).
However, the December 2025 data from S&P Global, the most recent available, show the delivered fuel cost was about $27 per MWh, which substantially improves the economics of the plant, although this could possibly be the result of the company assuming the plant would retire at the end of the year, rather than being required to stay open.
At $70 per MWh, the Schahfer plant is competitive with subsidized solar
over a 25-year lifespan, cheaper than the unsubsidized cost over 25 years,
and a bargain compared with our admittedly uncharitable comparison
to the facility’s actual 2-year lifespan.
NIPSCO’s Changing Generation Profile
NIPSCO’s Dunns Bridge solar facilities are part of a larger trend away from coal-fired power generation toward natural gas, MISO market purchases, and increasingly, wind and solar ownership or power purchase agreements (PPAs).
This trend has coincided with a massive increase in the utilities’ estimated rate base. Data from S&P Global show NIPSCO’s rate base has more than doubled since 2016. You’ll notice that the rate base was essentially flat from 2000 to 2010 in non-inflation-adjusted terms. This is because electric companies are supposed to see their rate bases stabilize as their assets depreciate over time.
It’s also interesting to look at what’s causing the rate base growth. In the mid 2000s and 2010s, the growth in NIPSCO’s spending was driven by generation spending. However, transmission and distribution spending began to increase around 2018, and generation spending fell in 2021, but rebounded slightly in 2024.
Conclusion
There are lots of things that break when they get hit by a tornado,
but our power plants shouldn’t be one of them.
The demise of the Dunns Bridge I & II solar facilities by one of the weakest classifications of tornado should be a nudge to Indiana policymakers and utility regulators that shutting down dispatchable thermal plants in favor of flimsier wind and solar facilities is not a prudent course of action.
Frankly, the Trump administration should be lambasting companies like NIPSCO for continuing to pursue their voluntary decarbonization pledges when electricity bills are rising, and demand is soaring due to data centers. A few mean tweets might go a long way toward helping utility executives and their Wall Street investors understand they can no longer Green Plate the grid at the expense of everyday Americans.
Solar panels in field with the sun reflecting on the panels creating a glare. Source: Northern Indiana Public Service Company LLC (NIPSCO),
It rewrote March record books and even topped a few April records.
Here’s our full recap on this historic early spring heat wave
and how climate change likely influenced it.
Record-breaking March heatwave, intensified by climate change, continues to shatter records across the U.S., Climate Central
Record-shattering March temperatures in Western North America virtually impossible without climate change, World Weather Attribution
2026 likely to be the Hottest year ever? If you’re like me, your response is: That’s not the way it’s going down where I live. Fortunately there is a website that allows anyone to check their personal experience with the weather station data nearby. weatherspark.com provides data summaries for you to judge what’s going on in weather history where you live. In my case a modern weather station is a few miles away March 2026 Weather History at Montréal–Mirabel International Airport.The story about March 2026 is evident below in charts and graphs from this site. There’s a map that allows you to find your locale.
First, consider above the norms for March from the period 1980 to 2016.
Then, there’s March 2026 compared to the normal observations.
The graph shows this March had a few warm days, many days below zero and overall pretty much sub-normal. But since climate is more than temperature, consider cloudiness.
Wow, look at all that gray and just a few spots of blue. Most of the month was cloudy, which means blocking the warming sun from hitting the surface. And with all those clouds, let’s look at precipitation:
So, there were twenty-three days when it rained or snowed, including freezing rainstorms. Given what we know about the hydrology cycles, that means a lot of heat removed upward from the surface.
So the implications for March temperatures in my locale.
There you have it before your eyes. March is often the beginning of
spring weather, but this year was completely cold, frigid or freezing.
No sign of global warming around here.
Summary:
Claims of hottest this or that month or year are based on averages of averages of temperatures, which in principle is an intrinsic quality and distinctive to a locale. The claim involves selecting some places and time periods where warming appears, while ignoring other places where it has been cooling. Attribution studies select hot spots and exclude cold places, despite CO2 supposedly being evenly distributed.
Remember: They want you to panic. Before doing so, check out what the data says in your neck of the woods. For example, NOAA declared that “July 2024 was the warmest ever recorded for the globe.”
London, 24 March. Extreme weather attribution studies are based on flawed logic and generate misleading headlines, according to a new briefing paper from The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF).
In Contorted Science: The Flawed Logic of Extreme Event Attribution, Dr. Ralph B. Alexander argues that studies attempting to link specific heatwaves, hurricanes and floods to human-caused climate change are fundamentally misleading and have been created for legal and political, rather than scientific reasons.
The paper scrutinises recent high-profile studies by World Weather Attribution and the Grantham Institute. In 2025 alone, World Weather Attribution claimed that 24 of 29 extreme events examined were made more severe or more likely by climate change.
Alexander shows how such conclusions depend heavily on climate models that struggle to reproduce historical climate patterns and assume scientists can accurately simulate a “natural” climate without human emissions.
Some key recurring weaknesses are identified within attribution studies:
Flawed logic: attribution claims involve “begging the question”, the act of simply assuming the conclusion you are trying to investigate.
Statistical practices that inflate headline probability claims while downplaying uncertainty.
The neglect of historical records showing comparable extreme events long before modern emissions levels.
The report traces the growth of rapid event attribution to political frustration with the cautious conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which has expressed low confidence in long-term global trends for most types of extreme weather. It recognises the role of a 2012 meeting convened by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The meeting was aimed at strengthening the perceived link between extreme weather and climate change in order to pursue litigation against fossil fuel companies.
The report’s author, Ralph Alexander, said:
“Extreme event attribution studies are a blot on science, the hallmarks of which are empirical evidence and logic. Neither feature is central to attribution studies, which were created for legal and political not scientific reasons.”
Harry Wilkinson, Head of Policy at The Global Warming Policy Foundation said:
“It is disturbing that event attribution studies have got so much traction in the international media, despite their underlying flaws. This is a major scientific scandal.”
Recent event attribution studies 2025 was no exception to the ever-growing trend of assigning weather extremes to global warming: World Weather Attribution contended that 24 of 29 extreme events studied were made more severe or more likely by climate change, as indicated in Figure 1.7 That is a staggeringly large number, at a time when event attribution methodology is still highly uncertain. To begin with, attribution studies rely on computer climate models that have a dismal track record in predicting the future, or indeed of hindcasting the past. Not only do a majority of the models overestimate the warming rate, but they also wrongly predict a hot spot in the upper atmosphere that is not there, and are unable to accurately reproduce sea surface temperatures and sea-level rise.
But, more importantly, the underlying scientific basis of such studies can be questioned too, as done in a recent series of blog posts by Roger Pielke Jr., a prolific climate writer and former professor at the University of Colorado.
Pielke identifies three ‘tricks’ used in event attribution studies to justify their highly exaggerated claims.
♦ The first, which he terms ‘attribution inflation,’ arises from mathematical sloppiness. Rounding numbers used in calculating probabilities of a particular extreme event happening, instead of retaining decimal points, can lead to inflated and misleading probabilities. ♦ The second trick, which Pielke calls ‘begging the question’ (a logical fallacy), simply assumes the conclusion that the study seeks to prove. For example, assuming that every storm is made stronger due to warmer oceans makes it child’s play to conclude that the storm which just happened was made more likely due to climate change. ♦ The third trick, ‘ignoring evidence,’ means just that. The following sections will reveal numerous examples.
The paper goes on to deconstruct several studies including these examples:
Conclusions
Physicist Friederike Otto, WWA’s chief scientist, has stated:
Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.
Apart from WWA, the US National Academies have recently established a committee to ‘examine current scientific understanding of attribution of extreme weather events and their impacts on climate change, and consider user needs and opportunities to improve attribution science capabilities.’ Nonetheless, the committee intends to focus on the dubious science behind extreme event attribution, and not any legal ramifications.
It remains to be seen whether multiple court cases against fossil fuel companies, based on extreme event attribution, will succeed. Nevertheless, there is already a burgeoning industry of legal activists with a vested interest in exploiting so-called attribution science. By September 2024, it was estimated that 50 lawsuits had been filed by US states, counties and local governments, and about half that number in Europe and other countries.
Extreme event attribution studies are deeply flawed, with fundamental logical and methodological errors – the result of such studies being created for legal and political, not scientific, reasons. The examples presented here, involving heatwaves, hurricanes and floods, are but a few of the proliferating number of mistaken studies appearing in contemporary scientific reports.
Alex Newman reports at Liberty Sentinel New Climate Study Debunks Key UN IPCC Dogma. Excerpts in italics with my added bolds and images. Discussion of the Study itself follows later below.
Breaking research reveals the key metric behind so-called global warming
is based on “physically meaningless” calculations. If true,
it could upend decades of climate science and policy.
Lead author Jonathan Cohler, a physicist, who worked with top scientists around the world including Dr. Willie Soon, explained that even though the U.S. government is leaving the IPCC under Trump, the UN continues to march on with its climate agenda. However, with more and more evidence and scientific papers dismantling the core “science,” the UN’s agenda appears to be on thin ice.
“The public has been told that the ocean is ‘warming’ and absorbing over 90% of ‘excess’ planetary heat,” explained Cohler. “But when we examined how these numbers are actually calculated, we found they represent computational artifacts rather than measurements of real physical energy rendering the entire process a category error.”
The analysis focuses on data from the international Argo float program, a network of approximately 4,000 autonomous floats that drift through the ocean measuring temperature and other data. These measurements form the backbone of modern climate assessments, including those by the IPCC. Even leaving aside the fundamental category error, for the sake of argument, this research nonetheless reveals multiple fundamental problems with how this data is processed, Cohler said.
Fig. 1. (left) Global mean OHC (Cheng et al. 2024a) for 0–2000 m relative to a base period 1981–2010 (ZJ). The 95% confidence intervals are shown (sampling and instrumental uncertainties). (right) Trend from 2000 to 2023 in OHC for 0–2000 m (W m−2). The stippled areas show places where the trend is not significant at the 5% level. Source: Distinctive Pattern of Global Warming in Ocean Heat Content by Trenberth et al (2025).
[Note: The graph showing zettajoules can be misleading. Ocean heat graphs labelled in Zettajoules make it look scary, but the actual temperature changes involved are microscopic, and impossible to measure to such accuracy in pre-ARGO days. And as this post shows, ARGO measurements are also unreliable.]
Since 2004, for instance, ARGO data shows an increase of about two hundredths of a degree.
Abstract Global ocean heat content (OHC) anomalies and derived Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) estimates, central to contemporary climate assessments including IPCC AR6, are constructed through processes that violate the scientific method. These metrics rely almost exclusively on temperature data from the Argo profiling float array. Their validity and reliability hinge on several critical but herein refuted assumptions about measurement representativeness, interpolation/extrapolation methods, the physical meaning of anomalies, and integration conventions.
Core Argo and Biogeochemical Argo floats deliver discrete, point measurements of intensive properties like temperature along irregular, untracked three-dimensional trajectories during ascent from 2000 m to the surface. This samples only the upper ocean, excluding roughly 50% of total ocean volume and thermal energy. Horizontal positions are recorded only at surface intervals ~10 days apart, leaving subsurface locations entirely unknown. All data from each ascent are arbitrarily assigned to the surfacing position, introducing unknown horizontal offsets (up to 50 km) and temporal offsets (up to 10 hours) for the deepest measurements.
Anomalies are computed by subtracting values from statistically derived reference climatologies based on sparse historical data over arbitrary baseline periods. Measured temperatures are then interpolated onto global 3D grids using prescribed covariance functions. These anomalies represent numerical differences without physical meaning as temperature deviations, because temperature, an intensive property, is not additive across non-equilibrium spatial or temporal domains (Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018).
IPCC AR6 Earth Energy Budget fig. 7.2
The integrated OHC scalar depends heavily on arbitrary averaging and interpolation rules, producing computational artifacts rather than measures of actual ocean energy uptake or planetary radiative imbalance. Derived EEI values, such as the 0.7 ± 0.2 W m⁻² in IPCC AR6 Figure 7.2, inherit these biases and stem from circular methodology: CERES satellite top-of-atmosphere radiative flux measurements (absolute uncertainties ± 3–5 W m⁻² or higher) are adjusted via least squares to match Argo OHC-derived estimates, rather than offering independent validation.
We rigorously quantify major uncertainty sources, including unresolved mesoscale variability (± 0.9 W m⁻²), deep ocean ignorance bounds (± 0.35 W m⁻² from sparse Deep Argo), polar undersampling (± 0.1 W m⁻²), Nyquist-Shannon aliasing in sparse deep ocean and polar sampling, sealevel budget closure discrepancy between satellite altimetry/gravimetry and Argo OHC (±0.33 Wm-2), arbitrary baseline choices (± 0.2 W m⁻²), Eulerian-Lagrangian discrepancies (± 0.25 W m⁻²), and untracked trajectories and positional assignments.
Although the concepts of OHC and EEI are thermodynamically well-defined physical quantities, the numerical values produced by current Argo-based methodologies are physically meaningless computational constructs that do not validly represent those quantities. We conclude that EEI uncertainties reach >± 1 W m⁻² at 95% confidence, roughly an order of magnitude larger than the uncertainty that IPCC AR6 reports, rendering current OHC change and EEI estimates statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Conclusions
EEI estimates that depend on Argo-derived global OHC lack physical validity and reliability as measures of ocean thermal energy change or planetary radiative imbalance. The final OHC scalar is a computational artifact produced by assigning sparse intensive temperature measurements to arbitrary positions, subtracting them from a non-physical climatological reference, and integrating interpolated values that dominate the unsampled ocean volume. These operations destroy thermodynamic interpretability, rendering the resulting scalar sensitive to methodological choices rather than to any conserved physical quantity.
The widely cited claim that ~90–93% of the observed planetary heat gain is stored in the ocean, and that ~85–93% of oceanic uptake resides in the upper 2000 m (as adopted in Forster et al., 2021, Chapter 7, based on von Schuckmann et al., 2020, 2023), rests on this invalid calculation and is non-compliant with the scientific method. The claimed vertical partitioning is not empirically robust; given the structural uncertainties quantified herein, alternative distributions including a physically plausible 50-50 split between upper and deep ocean remain consistent with the flawed observational constraints and cannot be scientifically excluded.
The fundamental thermodynamic invalidity of averaging intensive temperature measurements across non-equilibrium spatial and temporal domains (as detailed in Section 1.2; Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018; Cohler, 2025) renders global temperature metrics physically meaningless numerical abstractions. Without a physically meaningful, thermodynamically valid global metric for ocean energy change or planetary imbalance, current assessments of anthropogenic climate forcing and future projections lack an empirical foundation (see also Cohler et al.,2025, for independent evidence that the anthropogenic CO₂-global warming hypothesis lacks empirical substantiation due to natural dominance and model failures).
The assumed level three million years ago of CO2 was around 400 ppm, a convenient mark that has been used to explain the subsequent ice age and a drop to 250 ppm. Due to the recently published paper, this explanation has become more problematic and natural climate variation is correctly noted to have occurred with the temperature changes. Alas, similar explanations are mostly ignored in discussing today’s climate changes in the interests of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Some cling desperately to a dominant CO2 role, including one of the authors of the findings published in Nature. The co-author states that the results suggest even greater climate sensitivity to the warming effect of CO2. In short, there is a great deal of applying the laws of physics and chemistry to one era, but failing to extend the same courtesy to another.
Critics seeking to downplay ice core evidence often suggest it is too imprecise to provide a wholly accurate record of gas levels and temperature. But it is accurate enough to give a broad cyclical insight. It remains the source of some of the best data we have on the past climate. It is undoubtedly more accurate than most proxy evidence from millions of years ago. But whatever the evidence used, it is hard to detect any obvious and continuous link between CO2 and temperature across the entire geological record going back 600 million years to the start of abundant life on Earth. Certainly none to justify the political notion that humans control the climate thermostat by burning hydrocarbons.
In fact the evidence is so slim that Les Hatton, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science at Kingston University, was recently able to determine from ice core records that 100-year rises of 1.1°C in the current interglacial, which started 20,000 years ago, have occurred in one in six centuries. Going back 150,000 years, the frequency was around one in six to one in 20 centuries.
None of these findings suggest that current warming is either unusual or
primarily caused by human activity. Needless to say, none of these findings
trouble the headline writers in narrative-addicted mainstream media.
Much public discourse in global warming centres around the oft-quoted rise in temperature of approximately 1.1°C in global average temperature in the post-industrial period. This is considered in some quarters to constitute a “Climate Emergency” demanding “Climate Action”. In this paper we first dissect the background behind this number and what it means. Second, we use the Epica-Vostok Ice core dataset, a single proxy dataset for temperature data sampled every century for the last 800,000 years or so.
And ask the question “Is a 1.1°C temperature rise in a century unusual in this dataset?” The answer is surprising.
By considering interglacial onsets and decays as well as intermediating Ice Ages, it turns out that a rise of this amount would have been considered unusual more than 200,000 years ago, but this rise is not unusual in the current interglacial which started some 20,000 years ago with around 16% of all centuries since the last Ice Age exhibiting a temperature rise of at least 1.1°C. None of these could have anthropogenic components as they pre-dated the industrial era.
This result suggests that attempts to partition the current rise
into anthropogenic and nonanthropogenic components
are questionable given that it is not even unusual.
The last 20,000 years
It is important to note that we live in an Interglacial rise, a period of generally rising temperature. As can be seen in Fig. 2, temperatures have climbed by about 12°C since we emerged from the last Ice Age some 20,000 years ago. In other words, on average they have increased by about 12/200 = 0.06°C per century. Just after the Ice Age ended, the rate of increase was almost twice as high at around 0.1°C per century. Since then it has continued to rise but more slowly although with considerable century on century variability.
Conclusions
The Vostok Ice Core data contains numerous interesting features which can be confirmed by anybody as the data is open. We can conclude the following:
♦ A rise of 1.1°C in a century is not unusual in the current interglacial. In fact 16% of the centuries since the end of the last Ice age show a rise at least as big as the current century and none of these could have been affected by anthropogenic action.
♦ A rise of 1.1°C in a century would have been considered unusual any time more than 200,000 years ago. For some unknown reason nothing to do with us, the temperature has become more volatile in century on century changes in the last 200,000 years. Whether this is a physical effect or an artifact of isotopic smoothing with time is unknown although there is no evidence for the latter on the peaks of the last four interglacials and there is an abrupt change in magnitude of about 4°C in between the last 5 interglacials and the preceding 4 which is atypical of a continuous smoothing process.
♦ The current interglacial is nothing special. It is currently still more than 3°C cooler than the peak of the last one about 130,000 years ago (which was by assumption entirely free of anthropogenic effect) and the degree of variability in this data is much the same now as then.
Given then that a rise of 1.1°C is quite commonplace in this current interglacial and that none of the earlier occurrences could have been affected by anthropogenic activity, this raises the question of why we are trying to attribute the current rise to anthropogenic effects as if it was unusual.
In the above brief interview Nobel Laureate John Clauser explains simply and clearly why CO2 climate hysteria is bogus. For those preferring to read, below is a transcript in italics with my bolds and added images.
Nobel Laureate John Clauser: Climate Models Miss Key Variable
I think one of the more important things that’s happened recently is a gentleman, Steve Koonin, who was Barack Obama’s science advisor, recently published a very important seminal book called Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. It’s a very important book, and his basic message is that the IPCC has 40 different computer models, all of which are making predictions, and all of which are being quoted by the press as predicting a climate crisis apocalypse. The problem is they all are in total disagreement, violent disagreement with each other in their predictions, and not one of them is capable of predicting retroactively, of explaining the history of the Earth’s climate for the last hundred years.
He finds this very distressing, and he then correspondingly says or believes that there is an important piece of physics that is missing in virtually all of these computer models. So what I’m adding to the mix here is I believe I have the missing piece of the puzzle, if you will, that has been left out in virtually all of these computer programs, and that is the effect of clouds. The 2003 National Academy report totally admitted that they didn’t understand it, and they made a whole series of mistaken statements regarding the effects of clouds.
If you look at Al Gore’s movie, he insists on talking about a cloud-free Earth, and the only way he can do this, he generates one from the mosaic of photos. Each one taken on a cloudless day for covering the whole Earth. That’s a totally artificial Earth, and is a totally artificial case for using a model, and this is pretty much what the IPCC and others use is a cloud-free Earth.
If you look at pictures of the Earth in visible light, i.e. real sunlight, which is sunlight is the stuff that heats the Earth. The infrared re-radiation is the stuff that that cools the Earth, and it’s the balance between these two that controls the Earth’s temperature, and the important piece of the puzzle that has been left out is trying to do this all with a cloud-free Earth, when the real Earth is shrouded in clouds. I have some pictures, I don’t know if you can show them, of satellite pictures of the Earth.
These are all freely available on NASA’s website, and they show cloud cover variations anywhere from 5 to 95 percent. Typically, the Earth is shrouded in clouds at least between a third of its area to two-thirds of its area, and it fluctuates, the cloud cover fraction fluctuates quite dramatically on daily, weekly time scales. We call this weather.
You can’t have weather without having clouds, and it is this fluctuation in cloud cover of the Earth that causes what I would refer to as sunlight reflectivity thermostat that controls the climate, controls the temperature of the Earth, and stabilizes it very powerfully and very dramatically. This mechanism, totally heretofore unnoticed, and I call it kind of an elephant in the room, hiding in plain sight that nobody seems to have noticed. I can’t imagine why not, but there were similar elephants in the room in quantum mechanics that I discovered.
So the variation in the cloud cover, the importance in the actual power balance is 200 times more powerful than the effect, the small effect by comparison of CO2. And I might add also of methane. Methane and CO2 are comparable in the total heat loss.
So let me give you an example of how this mechanism works. Okay, first off, you have to notice that the Earth is two-thirds ocean, and that’s where most of the importance of the clouds comes in. Sunlight is the heating mechanism.
Clouds appear bright white. Ground, oceans, etc. are very dark and reflect very little light. But clouds reflect 90% of the sunlight that hits them, gets reflected back out into space, where it no longer comes to the Earth, no longer heats the Earth. Say you only got a third of a cloud cover. So you now have lots and lots of sunlight.
Sunlight impinging on the ocean evaporates seawater. Seawater forms water vapor. The water vapor floats up into the sky and forms clouds. It forms lots and lots of clouds because the cloud creation rate is very high. But we started out with too low set of clouds, and now we have an increasing number. So now we end up with very high cloud coverage.
Okay, so now say it’s two-thirds. Well, let me give you an example. If you want to try to read a book on an overcast day indoors without turning the lights on, it’s just too dark. You can’t do it without turning the lights off. The question is, where did all that sunlight go? It’s coming in scattered light coming in through the window, but boy, it’s a lot darker now. So where did it go? There’s only one place.
It got scattered back out into space where it’s no longer hitting the Earth. So, okay, so we now have the total power input coming to the Earth is now much, much smaller. Okay, well, this is happening on the oceans too. If you have large cloud cover, you have a lot of shadows. Clouds create shadows. You can see this by standing and watching clouds pass over. Well, the oceans are now shadowed. The shadows don’t have enough energy to evaporate anywhere near as much water. So we have too much cloud cover.
Then we reduce the evaporation rate of water, and so that then reduces the production of cloud. So we now have these two competing clouds. Okay, so the power loss is like 104 watts per square meterwhen we only have a third cloud cover, and 208 watts per square meter of surface area of the Earth when we have a very low cloud cover.
Figure 10. This graph is the cloud fraction and is set forth on the left vertical axis. The temperature is on the right vertical axis and the horizontal axis represents the observation year. The information was extrapolated from figures prepared by Hans-Rolf Dubal and Fritz Vahrenholt [37]. Source: Nelson & Nelson (2024;)
So the difference between those is the order of 104 watts per square meter of surface area. That needs to be compared with this minuscule half a watt per square meter of surface area that CO2 contributes. So the power in this thermostat, in terms of what they refer to as radiative forcing, these are the how many watts per square meter of surface area are involved, is 200 times more powerful than the effect of CO2 and also methane, by the way.
So I then assert that this is so powerful. I mean, it’s like your house has a huge furnace with a very accurate thermostat controlling its temperature, and somebody leaves a minor, a small bathroom window, and there’s a small heat leak. Would the rest of the house notice a change in temperature? None if your thermostat is working very well.
This is clearly the most important, the controlling mechanism for the Earth’s temperature and climate, and it dwarfs the effect of CO2 and methane. All the government programs that are designed to limit CO2 and methane should be immediately dropped. We’re spending trillions of dollars on this, and it’s sort of like Everett Dirksen’s famous line, you know, a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.
The PM did abolish the consumer carbon tax,
though only by shifting it to businesses.
Delegates at the first World Climate Conference held in 1979 adopted a declaration calling on governments to “foresee and prevent man-made changes to the climate that might be adverse to the well-being of humanity.” It was, in effect, a declaration of war against the oil and gas industry.
At the time, I was the president of a Calgary-headquartered oil and gas company that I had co-founded, as well as volunteer-president of our industry’s public communication vehicle, the Independent Petroleum Association of Canada. My industry colleagues were reluctant to take on the global climate elite, but I believed doing so was vital to the future of our industry, which was the bedrock of western Canada’s economy. My public commentary was, of course, condemned as evidence that I was only out to save the oil and gas industry.
But it wasn’t just my responsibility as an industry leader that called me to challenge that World Climate Conference declaration. I knew that extremely hot temperatures had been occurring long before that first Kyoto conference. For example, in the 1920s European immigrantssettled in the verdant grasslands of southeastern Alberta. Some of those hopeful settlers were my wife’s grandparents. A decade later, rain stopped falling and temperatures soared as high as 43 C. Hot, dry winds blew precious topsoil away, spawning choking dust storms. The “Dirty Thirties” had arrived. Starving settlers turned to eating rabbits, gophers and anything else edible they could scrounge. Parents took their kids to school in blinding dust storms, clutching fencelines and breathing through bandanas. And the wind kept blowing through the long, cold Alberta winters. Contrary to net-zero zealots’ rhetoric, half of Canada’s 20 hottest days pre-dated that 1979 World Climate Conference.
World Climate Change Conferences continued during the 1980s and 1990s, each featuring more alarmist rhetoric than the last. At the 1997 conference in Japan, 37 industrialized countries adopted the “Kyoto Protocol,” which committed them to reducing green-house gas emissions to five per cent below 1990 levels by 2012. The war on fossil fuels was on in earnest, and it was destined to escalate to ridiculous heights. At the 2012 conference in Qatar, the rich countries committed to reducing emissions by at least 18 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
The naivety of those targets is breathtaking. Countries accounting for over half of global emissions, including China, Russia and India, continued their rapid growth without constraint. Virtually all other Asian, Middle Eastern and South American nations had no intention of playing the Kyoto game. Their emissions were going nowhere but up.
The 22nd climate conference was held in Morocco in November 2016, a year after Canadians elected the Trudeau government. In keeping with the new prime minister’s zealous embrace of the cause, environment minister Catherine McKenna led a delegation of 225, one of the largest among the 100 countries assembled. That cost taxpayers a lot in emissions-spewing flights!
Imagine our delegation’s shock when, just 24 hours after the conference opened, they heard the soon-to-be 45th U.S. president, Donald Trump, declare that man-made global warming was a “big hoax” promulgated by China and other countries wanting to steal American jobs.
With all the major players sidelined, who was left to save the planet from climate Armageddon? Just the EU, Japan and Australia, with a combined emission share of 15 per cent. And Canada, adding our minuscule 1.6 per cent. But futility didn’t deter the Trudeau government from saddling Canadians with carbon taxes and taxpayer-funded wind and solar power subsidies in pursuit of its “net-zero” holy grail.
Now we have a new prime minister who is trying to appear less committed to the net-zero mission. But the transformation of the UN Secretary General’s “special envoy on climate action and finance” has been less than biblical. True, one of his first actions on taking power was to remove the despised consumer carbon tax. But that was largely sleight-of-hand, moving the tax out of public view onto beleaguered businesses already struggling with Trump tariffs.
Meanwhile, the foundations of the net-zero emissions religion are crumbling rapidly. In 2021, Microsoft founder Bill Gates wrote a pro-carbon tax book entitled “How to Avoid a Climate Change Disaster.” But four years later, in a letter published on the eve of the most recent UN COP conference, he advised, “too many resources are focused on emissions and the environment. More money should go toward improving lives and curbing disease and poverty.” And he called out the “doomsday view” of climate change, urging world leaders to make a strategic pivot and focus on issues that “have the greatest impact on human welfare.”
Net-zero fatigued Canadians should be asking their prime minister, “Why are you weakening our already struggling economy with carbon taxes and wasting taxpayer money subsidizing wind farms when it will make no perceptible difference to the global climate?” He owes them an answer.
Science Matters 