July | 2025 | Science Matters

DOE Climate Team: Twelve Keys in Assessing Climate Change

Last week saw the release of A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate by the U.S. DOE Climate Working Group. This post provides the key points from the twelve chapters of the document, comprised of the chapter summaries plus some salient explanations. This is a synopsis and readers are encouraged to access additional detailed information at the link in red above. I added some pertinent images along with some from the report.

Report to U.S. Energy Secretary Christopher Wright July 23, 2025
Climate Working Group:
John Christy, Ph.D.
Judith Curry, Ph.D.
Steven Koonin, Ph.D.
Ross McKitrick, Ph.D.
Roy Spencer, Ph.D.

Introduction

This report reviews scientific certainties and uncertainties in how anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gas emissions have affected, or will affect, the Nation’s climate, extreme weather events, and selected metrics of societal well-being. Those emissions are increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere through a complex and variable carbon cycle, where some portion of the additional CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries.

Chapter 1 Carbon Dioxide as a Pollutant

Carbon dioxide (CO2) differs in many ways from the so-called Criteria Air Pollutants. It does not affect local air quality and has no human toxicological implications at ambient levels. The growing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere directly influences the earth system by promoting plant growth (global greening), thereby enhancing agricultural yields, and by neutralizing ocean alkalinity. But the primary concern about CO2 is its role as a greenhouse gas (GHG) that alters the earth’s energy balance, warming the planet. How the climate will respond to that influence is a complex question that will occupy much of this report.

Chapter 2 Direct impact of CO2 on the Environment

CO2 enhances photosynthesis and improves plant water use efficiency, thereby promoting plant growth. Global greening due in part to increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere is well-established on all continents. The growing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere has the important positive effect of promoting plant growth by enhancing photosynthesis and improving water use efficiency. That is evident in the “global greening” phenomenon discussed below, as well as in the improving agricultural yields discussed in Chapter 10.

The IPCC has only minimally discussed global greening and CO2 fertilization of agricultural crops. The topic is briefly acknowledged in a few places in the body of the IPCC 6th and earlier Assessment Reports but is omitted in all Summary documents. Section 2.3.4.3.3 of the AR6 Working Group I report, entitled “global greening and browning,” points out that the IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land had concluded with high confidence that greening had increased globally over the past 2-3 decades.

It then discusses that there are variations in the greening trend among data sets, concluding that while they have high confidence greening has occurred, they have low confidence in the magnitude of the trend. There are also brief mentions of CO2 fertilization effects and improvements in water use efficiency in a few other chapters in the AR6 Working Groups I and II Reports. Overall, however, the Policymaker Summaries, Technical Summaries, and Synthesis Reports of AR5 and AR6 do not discuss the topic.

Source: Tom Segelstad Carbon isotope mass balance in CO2

CO2 absorption in sea water makes the oceans less alkaline. While this process is often called “ocean acidification”, that is a misnomer because the oceans are not expected to become acidic; “ocean neutralization” would be more accurate. Even if the water were to turn acidic, it is believed that life in the oceans evolved when the oceans were mildly acidic with pH 6.5 to 7.0 (Krissansen-Totton et al., 2018).

The recent decline in pH is within the range of natural variability on millennial time scales. Most ocean life evolved when the oceans were mildly acidic. Decreasing pH might adversely affect corals, although the Australian Great Barrier Reef has shown considerable growth in recent years.

It is being increasingly recognized that publication bias (alarming ocean acidification results preferred by high-impact research publications) exaggerates the reported impacts of declining ocean pH. An ICES Journal of Marine Science Special Issue addressed this problem with an article entitled, Towards a Broader Perspective on Ocean Acidification Research. In the Introduction to that Special Issue, H. I. Browman stated, “As is true across all of science, studies that report no effect of ocean acidification are typically more difficult to publish.” (Browman, 2016).

In summary, ocean life is complex and much of it evolved when the oceans were acidic relative to the present. The ancestors of modern coral first appeared about 245 million years ago. CO2 levels for more than 200 million years afterward were many times higher than they are today. Much of the public discussion of the effects of ocean “acidification” on marine biota has been one-sided and exaggerated.

Chapter 3 Human Influences on the Climate

The global climate is naturally variable on all time scales. Anthropogenic CO2 emissions add to that variability by changing the total radiative energy balance in the atmosphere.
The IPCC has downplayed the role of the sun in climate change but there are plausible solar irradiance reconstructions that imply it contributed to recent warming.
Climate projections are based on IPCC emission scenarios that have tended to exceed observed trends.
Most academic climate impact studies in recent years are based upon the extreme RCP 8.5 scenario that is now considered implausible; its use as a business-as-usual scenario has been misleading.
Carbon cycle models connect annual emissions to growth in the atmospheric CO2 stock. While models disagree over the rate of land and ocean CO2 uptake, all agree that it has been increasing since 1959.
There is evidence that urbanization biases in the land warming record have not been completely removed from climate data sets.

There are about 850 Gt of carbon (GtC) in the Earth’s atmosphere, almost all of it in the form of CO2. Each year, biological processes (plant growth and decay) and physical processes (ocean absorption and outgassing) exchange about 200 GtC of that carbon with the Earth’s surface (roughly 80 GtC with the land and 120 GtC with the oceans). Before human activities became significant, removals from the atmosphere were roughly in balance with additions. But burning fossil fuels (coal, oil, and gas) removes carbon from the ground and adds it to the annual exchange with the atmosphere. That addition (together with a much smaller contribution from cement manufacturing) amounted to 10.3 GtC in 2023, or only about 5 percent of the annual exchange with the atmosphere.

The carbon cycle accommodates about 50 percent of humanity’s small annual injection of carbon into the air by naturally sequestering it through plant growth and oceanic uptake, while the remainder accumulates in the atmosphere (Ciais et al., 2013). For that reason, the annual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration averages only about half of that naively expected from human emissions. The historical near constancy of that 50 percent fraction means that the more CO2 humanity has produced, the faster nature removed it from the atmosphere.

While land vegetation has been responding positively to more atmospheric CO2, uptake of extra CO2 by ocean biological processes remains too uncertain to be measured reliably.

Historical temperature data over land has been collected mainly where people live. This raises the problem of how to filter out non-climatic warming signals due to Urban Heat Islands (UHI) and other changes to the land surface. If these are not removed the data might over- attribute observed warming to greenhouse gases. The IPCC acknowledges that raw temperature data are contaminated with UHI effects but claims to have data cleaning procedures that remove them. It is an open question whether those procedures are sufficient.

The challenge in measuring UHI bias is relating local temperature change to a corresponding change in population or urbanization, rather than to a static classification variable such as rural or urban. Spencer et al. (2025) used newly available historical population archives to undertake such an analysis and found evidence of significant UHI bias in U.S. summertime temperature data.

In summary, while there is clearly warming in the land record, there is also evidence that it is biased upward by patterns of urbanization and that these biases have not been completely removed by the data processing algorithms used to produce climate data sets.

Chapter 4 Climate Sensitivity to CO2 Forcing

There is growing recognition that climate models are not fit for the purpose of determining the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) of the climate to increasing CO2. The IPCC has turned to data driven approaches including historical data and paleoclimate reconstructions, but their reliability is diminished by data inadequacies.

Data-driven ECS estimates tend to be lower than climate model-generated values. The IPCC AR6 upper bound for the likely range of ECS is 4.0°C, lower than the AR5 value of 4.5°C. This lowering of the upper bound seems well justified by paleoclimatic data. The AR6 lower bound for the likely range of ECS is 2.5°C, substantially higher than the AR5 value of 1.5°C. This raising of the lower bound is less justified; evidence since AR6 finds the lower bound of the likely range to be around 1.8°C.

In principle, ECS is an emergent property of GCMs—that is, it is not directly parameterized or tuned but rather emerges in the results of the simulation. Otherwise plausible GCMs and parameter selections have been discarded because of perceived conflict with an expected warming rate, or aversion to a model’s climate sensitivity being outside an accepted range (Mauritsen et al. 2012). This practice was commonplace for the models used in AR4; modelers have moved away from this practice with time. However, even in a CMIP6 model, the MPI (Max Planck Institute) modelers chose an ECS value of 3°C and then tuned the cloud parameterizations to match their intended result.

The Transient Climate Reponse (TCR) provides a more useful observational constraint on climate sensitivity. TCR is the global temperature increase that results when CO2 is increased at an annual rate of 1 percent over a period of 70 years (i.e., doubled gradually). Relative to the ECS, observationally determined values of TCR avoid the problems of uncertainties in ocean heat uptake and the fuzzy boundary in defining equilibrium arising from a range of timescales for the longer-term feedback processes (e.g., ice sheets). TCR is better constrained by historical warming, than ECS. AR6 judged the very likely range of TCR to be 1.2–2.4°C. In contrast to ECS, the upper bound of TCR is more tightly constrained. For comparison, the TCR values determined by Lewis (2023) are 1.25 to 2.0°C, showing much better agreement with AR6 values than was seen in a comparison of the ECS values.

Figure 8: Warming in the tropical troposphere according to the CMIP6 models.
Trends 1979–2014 (except the rightmost model, which is to 2007), for 20°N–20°S, 300–200 hPa.

Chapter 5 Discrepancies Between Models and Instrumental Observations

Climate models show warming biases in many aspects of their reproduction of the past several decades. In response to estimated changes in forcing they produce too much warming at the surface (except in the models with lowest ECS), too much warming in the lower-and mid-troposphere and too much amplification of warming aloft.

Climate models also produce too much recent stratospheric cooling, invalid hemispheric albedos, too much snow loss, and too much warming in the Corn Belt. The IPCC has acknowledged some of these issues but not all.

The wide range of choices made by modelers to characterize the physical processes in the models (see Box: Climate Modeling in Section 5.1 above) is seen by the large spread of trends in the middle troposphere, ±40 percent about the median (Figure 5.6). This vividly illustrates the uncertainties in attempts to model (parameterize) a complex system involving turbulence, moist thermodynamics, and energy fluxes over the full range of the tropical atmosphere’s time and space scales. The atmosphere’s temperature profile is a case where models are not merely uncertain but also show a common warming bias relative to observations. This suggests that they misrepresent certain fundamental feedback processes.
The IPCC AR6 did not assess this issue.

An important element of the expected general “fingerprint” of anthropogenic climate change is simultaneous warming of the troposphere and cooling of the stratosphere. The latter feature is also influenced by ozone depletion and recovery. AR6 acknowledged that cooling had been observed but only until the year 2000. The stratosphere has shown some warming since, contrary to model projections.

The climate models were found to poorly explain the observed trends [in Northern Hemisphere snow cover]. While the models suggest snow cover should have steadily decreased for all four seasons, only spring and summer exhibited a long-term decrease, and the pattern of the observed decreases for these seasons was quite different from the modelled predictions. Moreover, the observed trends for autumn and winter suggest a long-term increase, although these trends were not statistically significant.

Beyond the models’ ability to reproduce features of today’s climate, the critical issue for society is how well they predict responses to subtle human influences, such as greenhouse gas emissions, aerosol cooling, and landuse changes. The most crucial aspect that models must capture correctly is “feedbacks.” These occur when climate changes either amplify or suppress further warming. In general, the modeled net effect of all feedbacks doubles or triples the direct warming impact of CO₂.

Economic losses normalized for wealth (upper panel) and the number of people affected normalized for population size (lower panel). Sample period is 1980–2010. Solid lines are IRW trends for the corresponding data. EM-DAT database.

Chapter Six Extreme Weather

This chapter is concerned with detection of trends in extreme weather, while Chapter 8 considers causal attribution, with Section 8.4 specifically addressing extreme weather. If no trend is detected, then clearly there is no basis for attribution. But even where a trend is observed, attribution to human-caused warming does not necessarily follow.

With these caveats in mind, we examine the evidence for changes in selected weather and climate extremes. A recurring theme is the wide gap between public perceptions and scientific evidence. It has become routine in media coverage, government and private sector discussions, and even in some academic literature to make generalized assertions that extreme weather of all types is getting worse due to GHGs and “climate change.” Yet expert assessments typically have not drawn such sweeping conclusions and instead have emphasized the difficulty both of identifying specific trends and establishing a causal connection with anthropogenic forcing.

Most types of extreme weather exhibit no statistically significant long-term trends over the available historical record. While there has been an increase in hot days in the U.S. since the 1950s, a point emphasized by AR6, numbers are still low relative to the 1920s and 1930s. Extreme convective storms, hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts exhibit considerable natural variability, but long-term increases are not detected. Some increases in extreme precipitation events can be detected in some regions over short intervals, but the trends do not persist over long periods and at the regional scale. Wildfires are not more common in the U.S. than they were in the 1980s. Burned area increased from the 1960s to the early 2000’s, however it is low compared to the estimated natural baseline level. U.S. wildfire activity is strongly affected by forest management practices.

Chapter 7 Changes in Sea Level

Since 1900, global average sea level has risen by about 8 inches. Sea level change along U.S. coasts is highly variable, associated with local variations in processes that contribute to sinking and also with ocean circulation patterns. The largest sea level increases along U.S. coasts are Galveston, New Orleans, and the Chesapeake Bay regions – each of these locations are associated with substantial local land sinking (subsidence) unrelated to climate change.

Extreme projections of global sea level rise are associated with an implausible extreme emissions scenario and inclusion of poorly understood processes associated with hypothetical ice sheet instabilities. In evaluating AR6 projections to 2050 (with reference to the baseline period 1995-2014), almost half of the interval has elapsed by 2025, with sea level rising at a lower rate than predicted. U.S.tide gauge measurements reveal no obvious acceleration beyond the historical average rate of sea level rise.

The concern over sea level rise is not about the roughly eight inches of global rise since 1900. Rather,it is about projections of accelerated rise based upon simulations of a warming climate through the 21st century. . .There is deep uncertainty surrounding projections of sea level rise to 2100 owing to uncertainties in ice sheet instabilities, particularly for the higher emissions scenarios.

In February 2022, NOAA issued its projections of sea level rise for various sites along the U.S. coast (Sweet et al., 2022). They claim that by 2050, the sea will have risen one foot at The Battery in Manhattan (relative to 2020). A one-foot rise in thirty years would be more than twice the current rate and about three times the average rate over the past century. In that historical context, NOAA’s projection is remarkable—as shown in Figure 7.6, it would require a dramatic acceleration beyond anything observed since the early 20th century. But even more noteworthy is that Sweet et al. (2022) say this rise is “locked in”—it will happen no matter what future emissions are. We should know in a decade or so whether that prediction has legs.

Chapter 8 Uncertainties in Climate Change Attribution

“Attribution” refers to identifying the cause of some aspect of climate change, specifically with reference to anthropogenic activity. There is an ongoing scientific debate around attribution methods, particularly regarding extreme weather events. Attribution is made difficult by high natural variability, the relatively small expected anthropogenic signal, lack of high-quality data, and reliance on deficient climate models. The IPCC has long cautioned that methods to establish causality in climate science are inherently uncertain and ultimately depend on expert judgement.

Substantive criticism of the main IPCC assessments of the role of CO2 in recent warming focus on inadequate assessment of natural climate variability, uncertainties in measurement of solar variability and in aerosol forcing, and problems in the statistical methods used for attribution.

As discussed in Chapter 6 natural variability dominates patterns of extreme weather systems and simplistic assertions of trend detection are frequently undermined by regional heterogeneity and trend reversals over time. Table 8.1 makes the related point that it is not currently possible to attribute changes in most extreme weather types to human influences. Taking wind as an example, the IPCC claims that an anthropogenic signal has not emerged in average wind speeds, severe windstorms, tropical cyclones or sand and dust storms, nor is one expected to emerge this century even under an extreme emissions scenario. The same applies to drought and fire weather.

The IPCC does not make attribution claims for most climate impact drivers related to extreme events. Statements related to statistics of global extremes (e.g. event probability or return times, magnitude and frequency) are not generally considered accurate owing to data limitations and are made with low confidence. Attribution of individual extreme weather events is challenging due to their rarity. Conflicting claims about the causes of the 2021 Western North America Heatwave illustrate the perils of hasty attribution claims about individual extreme events.

There are three areas of substantive criticism of the IPCC’s assessment of the causes of the recent warming: inadequate assessment of natural climate variability, inappropriate statistical methods, and substantial discrepancies between models and observations. The last is discussed in Chapter 5, while this chapter discusses the first two factors. All of these criticisms are relevant to the IPCC’s attribution of the recent warming, which also underpins extreme event attribution.

A sharp recent increase in global average temperatures has raised the question of short-term drivers of climate. One such candidate is the fraction of absorbed solar radiation which has also increased abruptly in recent years. The question is whether the change is an internal feedback to warming caused by greenhouse gases, or whether something else increased the fraction of absorbed radiation which then caused the recent warming.

Fig. 1. Qualitative tendencies in decadal SSR (Surface Solar Radiation) changes over the periods 1950s to 1980s, 1980s to 2000, and post-2000 in different world regions that are well covered by historic SSR records.

Arguably the most striking change in the Earth’s climate system during the 21st century is a significant reduction in planetary albedo since 2015, which has coincided with at least two years of record global warmth. Figure 8.2 shows the planetary albedo variations since 2000, when there are good satellite observations. The 0.5 percent reduction in planetary albedo since 2015 corresponds to an increase of 1.7 W/m2 in absorbed solar radiation averaged over the planet (Hansen and Karecha, 2025). For comparison, Forster et al. (2024) estimate the current forcing from the increase in atmospheric CO2 compared to preindustrial times to be 2.33 W/m2.

Changes in surface characteristics cannot explain this decrease in planetary albedo since 2015:

• Arctic sea ice extent has declined by about 5 percent since 1980, although following 2007 there has been a pause in the Arctic sea ice decline (England et al., 2025)

• Regarding Antarctic sea ice, the IPCC AR6 concludes that “There has been no significant trend in Antarctic sea ice area from 1979 to 2020 due to regionally opposing trends and large internal variability.” (Summary for Policymakers, A.1.5)

• Northern hemispheric annual snow cover has been slowly declining since 1967, with barely
significant trends. The data show the Northern Hemisphere has snowier winters, accompanied by more rapid melt in spring and summer.

• Global greening (Chapter 2) is contributing to the decrease in planetary albedo, as forests have a lower albedo than open lands or snow. However, there is some evidence that forests increase cloud cover (high reflectivity), which counteracts the direct albedo decrease associated with increasing forested area.

Figure 8.2. Earth’s albedo (reflectivity, in percent), with seasonality removed. From Hansen and Karecha (2025)

In summary, the decline in planetary albedo and the concurrent decline in cloudiness have emphasized the importance of clouds and their variations to global climate variability and change. A change of 1- 2 percent in global cloud cover has a greater radiative impact on the climate than the direct radiative effect of doubling CO2. While it is difficult to untangle causes of the recent trend, the competing explanations for the cause of the declining cloud cover have substantial implications for assessing the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity and for the attribution of the recent warming. An additional 10 years of data should help clarify
whether this is a strong positive cloud feedback associated with warming or a temporary fluctuation driven by natural variability.

Chapter 9 Climate Change and US Agriculture

There has been abundant evidence going back decades that rising CO2 levels benefit plants, including agricultural crops, and that CO2-induced warming will be a net benefit to U.S. agriculture. The increase in ambient CO2 has also boosted productivity of all major U.S. crop types. There is reason to conclude that on balance climate change has been and will continue to be neutral or beneficial for most U.S. agriculture.

A major deficiency of all these [econometric] studies is that they omit the role of CO2 fertilization. Climate change as it relates to this report is caused by GHG emissions, chiefly CO2. The econometric analyses referenced above focus only on temperature and precipitation changes and do not take account of the beneficial growth effect of the additional CO2 that drives them. As explained in Chapter 2, CO2 is a major driver of plant growth, so this omission biases the analysis towards underestimation of the benefits of climate change to agriculture.

A 2021 report from the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research (Taylor and Schlenker 2021) used satellite-measured observations of outdoor CO2 levels across the United States, matched to county-level agricultural output data and other economic variables. After controlling for the effects of weather, pollution and technology the authors concluded that CO2 emissions had boosted U.S. crop production since 1940 by 50 to 80 percent, attributing much larger gains than had previously been estimated using FACE experiments. They found that every ppm of increase in CO2 concentration boosts corn yields by 0.5 percent, soybeans by 0.6 percent, and wheat by 0.8 percent.

Notwithstanding the abundant evidence for the direct benefits of CO2 and of CO2-induced warming on crop growth, in 2023 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA 2023) boosted its estimate of the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) about five-fold based largely on a very pessimistic 2017 estimate of global agricultural damages from climate warming (Moore et al., 2017). One of the two damage models used by the EPA attributed nearly half of the 2030 SCC to projected global agricultural damages based on the Moore et al. (2017) analysis. This study was a meta-analysis of crop model studies simulating yield changes for agricultural crops under various climate warming scenarios. Moore et al. projected declining global crop yields for all crop types in all regions due to warming.

In summary, there is abundant evidence going back decades that rising CO2 levels benefit plants,including agricultural crops, and that CO2-induced warming will be a net benefit to U.S. agriculture. To the extent nutrient dilution occurs there are mitigating strategies available that will need to be researched and adapted to local conditions.

Chapter 10 Managing Risks of Extreme Weather

Trends in losses from extreme weather and climate events are dominated by population increases and economic growth. Technological advances such as improved weather forecasting and early warning systems have substantially reduced losses from extreme weather events. Better building codes, flood defenses, and disaster response mechanisms have lowered economic losses relative to GDP. The U.S. economy’s expansion has diluted the relative impact of disaster costs, as seen in the comparison of historical and modern GDP percentages. Heat-related mortality risk has dropped substantially due to adaptive measures including the adoption of air conditioning, which relies on the availability of affordable energy. U.S. mortality risks even under extreme warming scenarios are not projected to
increase if people are able to undertake adaptive responses.

There is strong evidence that people adapt to weather risks. Lee and Dessler (2023) reported that 86 percent of temperature-related deaths across 40 cities in the U.S. were due to cold-related mortality, and that due to adaptation the relative risk of death declined in hot and cold cities alike as seasonal temperatures increased. Allen and Sheridan (2018) found that short, early-season cold events were 2 to 5 times deadlier than hot events, but the mortality risk of both cold and hot extremes drops to nearly zero if the events occur late in the season.

In the context of large declines in heat-related mortality, rising temperatures are associated with a net saving of lives since they reduce mortality from cold events. AR6 Working Group 2 Chapter 16.2.3.5 (O’Neill et al. 2022) acknowledges that heat-related mortality risk is declining over time:

Heat-attributable mortality fractions have declined over time in most countries owing to general improvements in health care systems, increasing prevalence of residential air conditioning, and behavioral changes. These factors, which determine the susceptibility of the population to heat, have predominated over the influence of temperature change.

Yet the IPCC misrepresents the overall situation in its AR6 Synthesis report. Section A.2.5 of that document states: “In all regions increases in extreme heat events have resulted in human mortality and morbidity (very high confidence).” But it is silent on the larger decline of deaths during extreme cold events.

Chapter 11 Climate Change, the Economy, and Social Cost of Carbon

Economists have long considered climate a relatively unimportant factor in economic growth, a view echoed by the IPCC itself in AR5. Mainstream climate economics has recognized that CO2-induced warming might have some negative economic effects, but they are too small to justify aggressive abatement policy and that trying to “stop” or cap global warming even at levels well above the Paris target would be worse than doing nothing. An influential study in 2012 suggested that global warming would harm growth in poor countries, but the finding has subsequently been found not to be robust. Studies that take full account of modeling uncertainties either find no evidence of a negative effect on global growth from CO2 emissions or find poor countries as likely to benefit as rich countries.

Figure 11.2: Decline in U.S. GDP per degree of warming. Source: CEA-OMB (2023)

Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimates are highly uncertain due to unknowns in future economic growth, socioeconomic pathways, discount rates, climate damages, and system responses. The SCC is not intrinsically informative as to the economic or societal impacts of climate change. It provides an index connecting large networks of assumptions about the climate and the economy to a dollar value. Some assumptions yield a high SCC and others yield a low or negative SCC (i.e. a social benefit of emissions). The evidence for or against the underlying assumptions needs to be established independently; the resulting SCC adds no additional information about the validity of those assumptions. Consideration of potential tipping points does not justify major revisions to SCC estimates.

Although the literature refers to “estimates” of the SCC, it is not estimated in the way other economic statistics are estimated. For instance, data on market transactions including prices and quantities can be used to estimate the current inflation rate or the growth rate of per capita real Gross Domestic Product, and there are well-understood uncertainties associated with these quantities. But there are no market data available to measure many, if not most, of the marginal damages or benefits believed to be associated with CO2 emissions, so these need to be imputed using economic models.

For example, an influential component of some SCC calculations is the perceived social cost associated with a changed risk of future mortality due to extreme weather. There is no market in which people can directly attach a price to that risk. At best economists can try to infer such values by looking at transactions in related markets such as real estate or insurance, but isolating the component of price changes attributable to atmospheric CO2 levels is very difficult.

It is increasingly being argued that the SCC is too variable to be useful for policymakers. Cambridge Econometrics (Thoung, 2017) stated it’s “time to kill it” due to uncertainties. The UK and EU no longer use SCC for policy appraisal, opting for “target-consistent” carbon pricing (UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero 2022, Dunne 2017). However, the uncertainty of SCC estimates doesn’t mean that other regulatory instruments are inherently better or more efficient. Many emissions regulations (such as electric vehicle mandates, renewable energy mandates, energy efficiency regulations and bans on certain types of home appliances) cost far more per tonne of abatement than any mainstream SCC estimate, which
is sufficient to establish that they fail a cost-benefit test.

Chapter 12 Global Climate Impact of US Emissions Policies

U.S. policy actions are expected to have undetectably small direct impacts on the global climate and any effects will emerge only with long delays.

The emissions rates and atmospheric concentrations of criteria air contaminants are closely connected because their lifetimes are short and their concentrations are small; when local emissions are reduced the local pollution concentration drops rapidly, usually within a few days. But the global average CO2 concentration behaves very differently, since emissions mix globally and the global carbon cycle is vast and slow. Any change in local CO2 emissions today will have only a very small global effect, and only with a long delay.

Consequently, any reduction in U.S. emissions would only modestly slow, but not prevent, the rise of global CO2 concentration. And even if global emissions were to stop tomorrow, it would take decades or centuries to see a meaningful reduction in the global CO2concentration and hence human influences on the climate. The practice of referring to unilateral U.S. reductions as “combatting climate change” or “taking action on climate” on the assumption we can stop climate change therefore reflects a profound misunderstanding of the scale of the issue.

Concluding thoughts

This report supports a more nuanced and evidence-based approach for informing climate policy that explicitly acknowledges uncertainties. The risks and benefits of a climate changing under both natural and human influences must be weighed against the costs, efficacy, and collateral impacts of any “climate action”, considering the nation’s need for reliable and affordable energy with minimal local pollution. Beyond continuing precise, un-interrupted observations of the global climate system, it will be important to make realistic assumptions about future emissions, re-evaluate climate models to address biases and uncertainties, and clearly acknowledge the limitations of extreme event attribution studies. An approach that acknowledges both the potential risks and benefits of CO2, rather than relying on flawed models and extreme scenarios, is essential for informed and effective decision-making.

EPA Proposal to Reconsider GHG Endangerment Finding

Posted on July 30 by Ron Clutz

nprm-12712-01-oar-vehicle-rule-reg-preamble-2025-0729 Download

From Executive Summary

In this action, the EPA proposes to rescind all greenhouse gas (GHG) emission standards for light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicles and engines under CAA section 202(a). Upon review of the underlying actions and intervening legal and scientific developments, including recent decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court and the scientific information summarized in this preamble, the EPA no longer believes that we have the statutory authority and record basis required to maintain this novel and transformative regulatory program. We seek comment on all aspects of this proposal, including on the legal and scientific developments that are being subject to public comment for the first time in this rulemaking.

The EPA now proposes to rescind the Endangerment Finding and all resulting GHG emission standards for new motor vehicles and engines, including the light-duty, medium-duty, and heavy-duty vehicle and engine standards for model years (MY) 2012 to 2027 and beyond. The remainder of this section describes the need for regulatory action and the scope of the proposed action, including rescission of the Endangerment Finding, repeal of related GHG emission standards, and minor conforming adjustments to unrelated emission standards for new motor vehicles and engines that we are not proposing to alter as part of this rulemaking.

Section II of this preamble sets out relevant background, including the events leading up to the Endangerment Finding, the approach taken in the Endangerment Finding to analyzing the scientific record, and the regulations issued since 2009 in reliance on the Endangerment Finding. We also summarize the premises, assumptions, and conclusions in the Endangerment Finding and the scientific information, including empirical data, peer-reviewed studies, and real-world developments since 2009 that led the Administrator to develop concerns sufficient to initiate reconsideration of the ongoing validity and reliability of the Endangerment Finding.

Section III of this preamble describes our legal authority to rescind the Endangerment Finding and repeal the resulting GHG standards issued under CAA section 202(a). Because this proposed action would not impact fuel economy standards and emission standards for criteria pollutants and hazardous air pollutants regulated under the CAA, we explain the relationship between these regulations to set the outer bounds of amendments at issue in this rulemaking.

Section IV.A of this preamble describes our proposal to rescind these prior actions because the Endangerment Finding exceeded our statutory authority under CAA section 202(a). As explained further below, we propose that the term “air pollution” as used in CAA section 202(a) is best read in context as referring to local or regional exposure to dangerous air pollution, consistent with our longstanding practice before 2009. We further propose that CAA section 202(a) does not grant the Administrator “procedural discretion” to issue standalone findings that trigger a duty to regulate, or, conversely, to prescribe standards, without making the requisite findings for the particular air pollutant emissions and class or classes of new motor vehicles or engines at issue. We also propose that CAA section 202(a) does not authorize the Administrator to make separate findings for endangerment and causation or contribution. Rather, we propose that CAA section 202(a) requires the Administrator to find that the relevant air pollutant emissions from the class or classes of new motor vehicles or engines at issue cause, or contribute to, air pollution which endangers public health or welfare, without relying on emissions from stationary or other sources regulated by distinct CAA provisions. As the Supreme Court made clear in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, 603 U.S. 369 (2024), we can no longer rely on statutory silence or ambiguity to expand our regulatory power. And because the Nation’s response to global climate change concerns is an issue of significant importance that Congress did not clearly address in CAA section 202(a), we propose that the major questions doctrine further reinforces and provides an additional basis for our proposed interpretations and actions.

The Agency did not have the benefit of the Court’s decisions in Loper Bright and West Virginia, among other applicable precedents, when issuing the Endangerment Finding in 2009. Finally, we explain that the EPA reached contrary conclusions in the Endangerment Finding by misconstruing the Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007), which vacated our denial of a petition for rulemaking on distinct grounds. Read on its own terms, Massachusetts did not require the Agency to find that GHGs are subject to regulation under CAA section 202(a) and does not support our implementation of the statute since 2009.

The Administrator’s review of the relevant information, including scientific literature, gave rise to serious concerns that our actions taken to regulate GHG emissions from new motor vehicles and engines exceed our statutory authority under CAA section 202(a) and are otherwise inappropriate. Continuing to impose billions of dollars in regulatory costs on American businesses and consumers without an adequate legal basis would threaten to undermine public confidence in our activities and commitment to fulfilling the Agency’s core mission: protecting human health and the environment. The EPA has expended significant resources implementing the GHG regulatory program for mobile sources and attempting to expand its GHG regulatory program to stationary sources with limited success in the courts and no apparent real-world results, often at the expense of programs that fall squarely within our statutory authority. Prompt action is needed to address these concerns with the benefit of public participation.

Relatedly, the Administrator has serious concerns that many of the scientific underpinnings of the Endangerment Finding are materially weaker than previously believed and contradicted by empirical data, peer-reviewed studies, and scientific developments since 2009. This proposal seeks public comment on these developments for the first time. Prompt action is needed to address these concerns, and the Administrator requests stakeholder input on the continuing vitality of the assumptions, predictions, and conclusions animating the Endangerment Finding.

No Right to a Stable Climate

Posted on July 29 by Ron Clutz

Judges in high courts are all claiming a “Human Right to a Stable Climate,” as though any court, parliament or government can make it happen. The latest proclamations come from the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights ( IACtHR )

The 234-page IACtHR advisory opinion sets out the court’s perspective on the climate emergency and human rights, recognizing that states have legal obligations under international law to protect current and future generations from the impacts of climate change, to take “urgent and effective” action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, to adapt, to cooperate, and to guard against climate disinformation and greenwashing.

Question to perplexity.ai: Could courts’ emphasis on human activity overlook natural climate variability evidence?

Answer: (my bolds) Courts’ emphasis on human activity as the primary driver of recent climate change is based on the strong scientific consensus reflected in assessments by bodies like the IPCC, and courts have generally accepted these conclusions as beyond reasonable dispute when adjudicating climate law cases23. This approach often involves taking “judicial notice” of mainstream climate science, meaning courts regard anthropogenic climate change as an established fact, obviating the need to litigate scientific basics repeatedly23.

However, this legal methodology can, in practice, result in
underweighting evidence of natural climate variability:

The dominant legal standard centers on whether human-caused disruptions introduce new or heightened risks to rights, rather than parsing the specific historical roles of natural versus anthropogenic drivers6. Thus, courts sometimes set a lower bar for causal linkage, assuming risks to rights where types of harm are deemed foreseeable consequences of climate change, even if local variability or confounding natural factors exist65.
Defense arguments in litigation, such as those in Juliana v. United States, have challenged the ability of current science to disentangle anthropogenic from natural variability (especially for region-specific impacts), but such arguments are usually overruled or considered less compelling compared to the broader trend evidence53.
Some court rulings have acknowledged the complexity and multiple contributors to climate outcomes, yet uphold state obligations for mitigation and adaptation, reasoning that even where natural variability exists, the unprecedented pace and scope of human forcing is sufficient to establish state duties under rights frameworks6.

In summary, while courts do not categorically ignore natural climate variability, their emphasis on human activity is guided by prevailing scientific consensus and the precautionary principle. This can lead to less rigorous scrutiny of the full extent of natural variability’s contribution, particularly where the focus is on the foreseeability and scale of rights-endangering risks from ongoing anthropogenic change. Legal recognition of these risks typically does not require natural and human factors to be weighed equally—potentially overlooking specific nuances of natural variability in individual cases6 53.

Caveat: There are exceptions, and courts have dismissed some claims where causal links to human activity were too indirect or not supported by sufficient evidence, especially in jurisdictions with stricter standards for standing or causation6. However, the overarching trend is to defer to consensus science prioritizing human-driven change as the principal legal concern.

Question to perplexity.ai: Could ignoring natural variability lead to misjudging climate damage extent?

Answer: (My bolds)

Ignoring natural climate variability in assessing climate damage could indeed lead to misjudging the extent and nuances of that damage. Scientific and assessment literature on climate impacts and natural resource damage emphasizes that both natural variability and human-driven climate change influence climate-related hazards and ecosystem responses, and failing to account for natural variability can complicate accurate attribution and magnitude estimation of damage.

Key points synthesized from relevant sources include:

Baseline Challenge and Detection Difficulty: Climate change increases variability and the frequency of extreme events such as droughts, floods, and storms, but natural variability also influences these patterns. This complicates establishing a stable baseline for comparison. Ignoring natural fluctuations can lead to an under- or overestimate of true climate-related damages, as it is harder to detect how much harm is caused specifically by human activity versus natural cycles5.
Attribution Complexity: Natural variability introduces uncertainty when attributing specific events or damages to human-caused climate change. Explicitly considering natural variability in event attribution studies increases uncertainty ranges but still supports the conclusion that human activity raises the likelihood and severity of some events. Neglecting natural variability risks oversimplifying cause-effect relationships and could distort the assessment of climate risks and damages6.
Changing Reference Conditions: The selection of appropriate reference or baseline conditions for assessing injury to natural resources needs to factor in both long-term trends and natural fluctuations altered by climate change. Static references ignoring natural variability may mischaracterize damage extent or recovery needs5.
Implications for Risk and Damage Assessment: Failure to incorporate natural variability may lead to misjudging vulnerabilities, underestimating risk likelihoods, and misguided policy decisions. Accurate modeling and impact assessment require analysis frameworks that integrate historical variability alongside anthropogenic warming influences27.

In summary, rigorous climate damage and risk assessments seek to integrate natural variability to improve accuracy and avoid misjudging the scale or cause of damage. While natural variability is not a reason to dismiss anthropogenic climate impacts, acknowledging it refines understanding and strengthens attribution and legal or policy responses.

This nuanced view aligns with the legal and scientific approaches courts rely upon when considering climate damage claims: they defer to comprehensive scientific consensus but remain mindful of uncertainties introduced by natural climate variability.

My Comment:

Not seeing much of that nuance from judges blindly following IPCC nostrums. The right to a stable climate ignores the fact the modern era is full of both warm and cool periods, including many times without any possible human influence.

A coincidental positive correlation is considered evidence of human causality, ignoring periods of weak or negative correlation.

Climate Hawks Endangered Species

Posted on July 28 by Ron Clutz

Danielle Franz writes at Real Clear Energy No Country for Climate Hawks. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Once perched atop the climate movement’s moral high ground, the self-anointed “climate hawks” are now watching their influence dwindle, and nowhere is that retreat more visible than in California. Long the epicenter of progressive climate ambition, the Golden State is now backpedaling. Democrats who once championed aggressive environmental mandates are hitting pause, reworking regulations, and distancing themselves from policies that have driven up energy and housing costs. A post-2024 reality check has swept the party: climate may still poll well in theory, but not when it collides with affordability.

This shift isn’t isolated. It’s emblematic of the climate hawks’ broader failure — a movement that moralized, catastrophized, and sacrificed working-class livelihoods on the altar of performative virtue. And it didn’t stop with workers. Families were expected to absorb the fallout — higher costs, fewer opportunities, and a more uncertain future — all in the name of climate dogma. For years, these activists dominated environmental discourse by demanding ideological purity.

They mistook loud rhetoric for leadership, performance for policy,
and apocalyptic forecasts for political strategy.

Thankfully, as The Breakthrough Institute’s Alex Trembath has long forecast, the era of the climate hawk is over. And the climate will be better off for it. As former allies begin to walk away, it’s clear their crowning achievement was turning climate into a culture war they were never equipped to win.

At the heart of this shift is a growing movement that doesn’t
treat energy as a sin, but as a tool of national strength.

It’s a philosophy that values building over banning, which means restoring industrial capacity, modernizing infrastructure, and investing in the American worker. It rejects the scarcity mindset that tells people they must give up comfort, reliability, or opportunity in the name of climate – so that the next generation doesn’t grow up fearing collapse, but growing into a culture of confidence, responsibility, and renewal.

Instead, it insists that the way forward is to invest in
the backbone of our economy, empower the working class,
and bring energy production home.

It recognizes the answer to environmental challenges isn’t less; it’s more. More energy. More innovation. More freedom to solve problems creatively. Instead of forcing society to shrink and sacrifice, we ask how we can grow smarter. Recognizing that climate strategy must also serve the interests of the people, national security, and long-term prosperity, it’s a vision rooted in hope for the future, not austerity.

And there’s a policy consensus emerging.
Clean energy systems need to be affordable and reliable.

Rather than relying on long-term subsidies or regulations, domestic policy should be structured to encourage the innovation, commercialization, and deployment of cheaper and cleaner energy resources. This way, American resources and technology can expand energy at home and dominate global markets, while also reducing emissions. Likewise, policy should prioritize climate adaptation. We should empower communities with the tools and flexibility to manage their forests, embrace regenerative agriculture, and resourcefully steward their ecosystems as the climate changes. Our environmental approach should be grounded in the American family and national interest at the center of the conversation.

What’s replacing the hawks isn’t apathy. It’s realism. A new generation is emerging – leaders who are less interested in preaching and more interested in producing. They view climate not as a moral crusade, but as a challenge of engineering, economics, and national renewal. They understand that the future won’t be built through degrowth or doomerism, but through innovation, adaptation, and strategic investment in America’s strengths.

This isn’t about utopian dreams or global pledges. It’s about reindustrializing the nation, repowering the grid, and grounding environmental goals to serve the American people. That’s how you build lasting support – and get real results.

The climate hawks are facing extinction. And in their absence,
something stronger is finally taking flight.

Canada Update: Suddenly, Climate Hysteria is Gone

Posted on July 26 by Ron Clutz

Joe Oliver writes at Financial Post And suddenly, climate change hysteria is gone. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Only 4% of Canadians think climate change is our top problem.
But many of them are hard-core activists ready to block projects.

Over the past several months, public concern about climate change has declined dramatically, replaced by newfound enthusiasm for the development of Canada’s vast oil and gas reserves. The federal government is now under mounting political pressure to expedite the construction of pipelines to tidewater that will bring economic growth, employment, energy security and funding for social programs or tax relief.

What caused the sharp reversal in public opinion?
And will the government actually deliver?

Prime Minister Mark Carney has long championed climate catastrophism and a commitment to net zero, both in his various jobs on the world stage and in his 2021 book, Values. After entering politics, however, he has embraced fossil fuels, and the legacy media have joined him in a head-spinning abandonment of its obsessive focus on global warming’s alleged existential threat to humanity. Whether Carney’s transformation reflects transitory political expediency or is an overdue acknowledgment of economic and scientific reality is now key to Canada’s economic prospects.

Over the past four decades, incessant advocacy from the scientific establishment, media and opinion leaders made first global warming and then climate change the consensus view. Deviation jeopardized reputations and careers, especially for scientists and academics, who risked losing funding or even their jobs. It was no surprise, then, that in 2022, 73 per cent of Canadians believed we were confronting a climate emergency. But now, according to a recent Leger poll, only four per cent say climate change is the number one issue facing Canada.

President Donald Trump’s shocking tariffs and 51st-state talk have diverted Canadians’ attention from climate change. And so have the exorbitant costs of green policies, the growing realization that nothing Canada does can measurably impact global temperatures, and the fact that green policies either weren’t adopted in many countries or have became politically toxic in countries where they were. Despite literally trillions of dollars being spent globally on reducing emissions, hydrocarbons still account for over 80 per cent of the world’s primary energy.

According to McKinsey, achieving net zero globally by 2050 would cost the Western countries a prohibitive $275-550 trillion. That makes it politically untenable.

Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler recently argued that green policies are largely responsible for European GDP falling from equal to American in 2008 to just two-thirds of it today. Soaring energy prices have led to de-industrialization, compounding the effects of high taxes and social spending, intrusive regulations and a protected workforce. Canada also, and for similar reasons, suffered a lost decade: growth of just half a per cent in real GDP per capita — compared with 20.7 per cent in the U.S.

And maybe the public has finally become skeptical of endless prophecies of impending disasters: “endangered” polar bears almost tripled in the past 50 years; hundreds of Pacific islands have increased in land size; death from extreme weather decreased by 99 per cent in the past 100 years; nine times as many people die from the cold as the heat; and so on. The Little Ice Age ended in the late 19th century with a gradual rise in temperatures — if not, we would still be in an ice age. Yet just 14 months ago, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said we had only two years to save the planet.

Future psychologists, economists and historians will examine the early 21st-century phenomenon of collective climate hysteria, what drove it, what ended it (if it has ended) and what damage it wrought. One thing is all but certain: there will be no admission of guilt for the enormous harm inflicted on Canada and other economies. Although the public has moved on, a hard-core group of climate militants is prepared to exploit every legal and regulatory impediment to resource development in Canada. The federal government will have to use all its legislative and executive authority to push the new energy projects it says it favours through to completion. Only then will Canadians know whether Mark Carney has truly changed his core beliefs.

Tide Running Out on Climatism

Posted on July 24 by Ron Clutz

Gary Abernathy explains how momentum is shifting away from climatists in his Empowering America article The climate change cult is encountering more resistance these days. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The devastating Texas flooding over the July 4 weekend was a natural disaster of immense proportions. The lives lost brought unthinkable heartache for families. Especially difficult to fathom is that so many victims were young children.

Adding to the grief was the irresponsible blame game that almost immediately arose in the wake of the tragedy. Many on the left couldn’t wait to point fingers at Republicans, from President Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Of course, the climate cult again demonized fossil fuels, global warming and other predictable villains from the days of yore (or Gore). The group Climate Central could only contain itself until July 8 before rushing out to hold a press briefing to reiterate its dogma that “climate change drives more extreme weather,” and that the Texas storms were “made more likely and powerful in a warmer climate.”

Leftwing climate groups often accuse anyone who disagrees as being a “climate denier.” But few actually deny that the climate indeed changes, often dramatically. The archeological record makes clear that the earth has warmed, cooled, experienced flooding and undergone a number of other climate-related upheavals through the centuries, long before human activity could be faulted. But groups like Climate Central identify the manmade practice of burning fossil fuels as the modern culprit.

Any brave soul who dares to challenge the extent to which carbon emissions and greenhouse gases impact climate change is shouted down by the cult and buried under an avalanche of “scholarly” papers produced by “the overwhelming majority of the scientific community.”

The good news is that the same day that Climate Central was regurgitating its tried-and-true rhetoric, the New York Times reported (in what it likely considered an expose), “The Energy Department has hired at least three scientists who are well-known for their rejection of the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change, according to records reviewed by The New York Times.”

What seemed frightening to the Times and the indoctrinated left comes as welcome relief for millions of other Americans who believe that the war on affordable and reliable energy sources is based more on politics than science.

The extent to which fewer Americans are being successfully propagandized is made clear by recent polling. On July 11, CNN data analyst Harry Enten told viewers that as early as 1989, 35 percent of Americans were “greatly worried” about climate change, a number that jumped to 46 percent by 2020. But, as Enten admitted with some astonishment, only 40 percent of Americans currently feel “greatly worried” about climate change. The reason for growing public skepticism on climate change is probably because most Americans have wised up to how data can be easily manipulated for political ends.

We know from experience it’s not hard to convince “experts” to sign on to a “consensus” opinion to add gravitas to the cause de jour. Back in 2020, more than 50 former intelligence officials famously signed onto a letter claiming that emails found on Hunter Biden’s laptop had “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” That was not true, and it was later discovered that former CIA Acting Director Michael Morell had drafted the letter to help Joe Biden’s campaign. Everyone else just signed on, their devotion to a particular election outcome apparently outweighing the lack of evidence backing their claim.

Similarly, individual treatises on climate science aren’t authored by hundreds of scientists. Each one is written by, at most, a handful of researchers who then circulate their work and ask others to sign on – giving activists the fodder they need to claim that “the overwhelming majority” of the scientific community is in agreement. In fact, scientific papers being published as authoritative when, in fact, they are not is a growing problem.

“Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud,” according to a 2024 report in The Guardian.

Fortunately, there has always been a segment of the scientific community willing to stand up to the mob and interpret climate data independently. The three scientists hired by the Energy Department and targeted by the Times for expressing skepticism on manmade climate change – physicist Steven E. Koonin, atmospheric scientist John Christy, and meteorologist Roy Spencer – are among the brave.

In decades past, a key tenet of science was to question everything, on the theory that raising doubts and concerns was the best path to the truth. As Dr. Koonin wrote in a Wall Street Journal essay, “Any serious discussion of the changing climate must begin by acknowledging not only the scientific certainties but also the uncertainties, especially in projecting the future.”

Instead of natural disasters serving as excuses to launch attacks and place blame using the same tired, lockstep rhetoric, here’s hoping for a new age of climate enlightenment, led by scientists, journalists and others with the curiosity – and courage – to question everything.

That’s light at the end of the tunnel, hopefully not an oncoming train.

ICJ Issues Biased Advice on Climate Change

Posted on July 23 by Ron Clutz

Activists hoping the opinion from the ICJ’s judges will have far-reaching legal consequences in the fight against climate change Image: Peter Dejong/AP Photo/picture alliance

The media is rampant today with headlines like these:

World Court says countries are legally obligated to curb emissions, protect climate, UN News

World’s top court says major polluters may need to pay reparations for climate harm, CNN

UN’s top court says failing to protect planet from climate change could violate international law, CBC

Top UN court says countries can sue each other over climate change, BBC

Top U.N. Court Says Countries Must Act on Climate Change, New York Times

Etc., Etc., Etc.

I asked perplexity.ai: (bolds in answer supplied by perplexity)

Question: How did the ICJ address scientists disputing IPCC reports like Clintel in its climate advice?

Answer: The International Court of Justice (ICJ), in its advisory proceedings on climate change, did not address or give consideration to scientists or groups—such as Clintel—who dispute the findings of the IPCC. Instead, the ICJ relied heavily and explicitly on the IPCC as the authoritative source on climate science throughout the process.

Key points from the available evidence:

The ICJ held a private meeting with IPCC scientists just before hearings began, reflecting the Court’s view of the IPCC as the “scientific pillar” of the climate change regime1.
This meeting was not part of the formal, public hearings and did not include scientists who dissent from the IPCC—states and organizations participating in the advisory proceedings had no opportunity to question or respond to IPCC scientists1.
The process was criticized for lacking transparency and procedural fairness precisely because it favored a single scientific perspective (the IPCC’s), with no indication that alternative scientific viewpoints were admitted or reviewed1.
The UN General Assembly’s request for the advisory opinion itself referenced the “utmost concern [for] the scientific consensus expressed” in the IPCC reports, reinforcing the Court’s mandate to treat the IPCC’s findings as the foundation for its analysis13.
Available commentaries and summaries of the ICJ process do not mention any engagement with scientists or organizations disputing IPCC conclusions, nor do they report that groups like Clintel were referenced or invited as experts13.
While the ICJ has, in rare past cases, consulted technical experts informally, in this climate case it only announced consultation with IPCC figures, reinforcing the exclusion of dissident scientific voices19.

In summary, the ICJ’s approach gave exclusive scientific authority to the IPCC and provided no forum, reference, or weight to scientists disputing its reports, such as those from Clintel13. The Court did not discuss or acknowledge the existence of such scientific disagreement in its process, instead treating the IPCC’s consensus as fact. This approach has been criticized for its lack of transparency and its failure to incorporate procedural safeguards for alternative scientific views19.

Followup Question: Why might the World Court have misunderstood the legal status of the Paris Accord?

Answer: The World Court might have appeared to misunderstand or at least oversimplify the legal status of the Paris Agreement because the Agreement’s nature is complex and somewhat ambiguous under international law, blending legally binding procedural obligations with politically framed, flexible commitments that lack sharp enforcement mechanisms.

Key reasons explaining why the Court could be seen as misunderstanding or glossing over these complexities include:

Legal Flexibility and Lack of Enforcement: The Paris Agreement is a treaty with binding procedural obligations but lacks strong accountability measures, sanctions, or punitive mechanisms for non-compliance1. Articles 13 and 15 establish monitoring and compliance mechanisms that are explicitly “non-intrusive” and “non-punitive,” reflecting the Agreement’s flexible, voluntary essence rather than strict legal constraints on outcome1. Courts may struggle to treat such a hybrid treaty as fully binding in the traditional sense.
Ambiguity over Obligation Types: The Paris Agreement distinguishes between “obligations of conduct” (procedural duties) versus “obligations of result” (achieving emission cuts). It requires parties to submit NDCs and report on implementation but does not legally bind States to achieve specific emission targets or outcomes34. This ambiguity can lead to varying interpretations of the Agreement’s binding force.
Differing State Practices and Interpretations: There remains disagreement among states and experts about whether the Paris Agreement creates firm legal obligations to prevent climate change or is largely aspirational with voluntary commitments6. Some states perceive it as political guidance rather than a hard treaty, influencing how international bodies perceive its weight.
Constraints of International Litigation and Court Jurisdiction: International courts like the ICJ have limited jurisdiction and cannot enforce treaty provisions on states unwilling to submit to their authority1. This constrains how formally the Court can treat the Agreement’s legal status, especially when major emitters are outside its compulsory jurisdiction16. The Court’s advisory role means it clarifies law based on existing commitments but cannot enforce or create new obligations.
Interaction with Customary International Law: Some legal scholarship suggests that customary international law—independent but related to treaty law—may impose broader climate duties on states, which complicates whether the Court grounds its decisions on the Paris Agreement alone or on evolving international legal norms1.

In sum, the World Court may have been perceived as misunderstanding the Paris Agreement’s legal status because the Agreement is simultaneously a legally binding treaty in form with procedural and transparency obligations, yet it remains politically flexible, non-punitive, and ambiguous regarding enforcement or specific outcome obligations. This hybrid nature poses challenges for courts in characterizing it strictly as a binding treaty imposing strong legal duties, thus potentially giving the appearance of oversimplification or misunderstanding in the Court’s advice.

Therefore, the Court’s approach likely reflects the difficulty of interpreting a treaty designed to maximize participation through flexibility rather than strong binding commitments, rather than a simple misunderstanding of the Paris Agreement’s status1 3 46.

My Summary

Despite the courtroom venue and judges participating in rendering an opinion, this was a political, not a legal process. A court of law seeks truth through an adversarial process whereby parties advocate for two or more viewpoints on the matter at hand, including facts and logic of the arguments. Here there was no hearing and weighing of differing evidence and perspectives, just a preconceived partisan political declaration.

Supreme Screw-up: Climate Fallacies Embraced by Canada’s Highest Court

Posted on July 23 by Ron Clutz

Canadian Supreme Court justices rendered an opionion regarding climate change that does not bear up under scrutiny. Former government litigator Jack Wright exposes the errors in his C2C Journal article Supreme Screw-up: How Canada’s Highest Court Got Climate Change Wrong. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Many Canadians think of the Supreme Court as a wise and august body that can be trusted to give the final word on the country’s most important issues. But what happens when most of its justices get it wrong? Former government litigator Jack Wright delves into the court’s landmark ruling upholding the federal carbon tax and uncovers mistakes, shoddy reasoning and unfounded conclusions. In this exclusive legal analysis, Wright finds that the key climate-related contentions at the heart of the court’s decision were made with no evidence presented, no oral arguments and no cross-examination – and are flat wrong. Now being held up as binding judicial precedent by climate activists looking for ever-more restrictive regulations, the decision is proving to be not just flawed but dangerous.

The Supreme Court of Canada sits at the apex of the Canadian judicial ladder. But like any group of humans, the reasoning of its nine justices isn’t always right. What happens if the court’s reasons for decision include some mistakes and some confusing or inconsistent comments? Are all of Canada’s lower courts bound by these “precedents”? The short answer is no: a court’s decision is only precedent-setting for what it actually decided, and not concerning all of the detailed explanations for how the court got there. Still, erroneous reasoning at the top can create major problems as it often triggers unnecessary and harmful litigation that treats errors as binding precedents. That has proved to be the case with the errors in a crucial case that has profound economic, political and social implications affecting all Canadians.

Advocates for ever-increasing climate action have pounced on the decision in the case known as Reference re Greenhouse Gas Pollution Pricing Act, 2021 as precedent to justify further climate-related litigation, as if the courts or Parliament could stabilize the global climate. Such “lawfare”, as these kinds of tactics have come to be known, continues largely because of the non-binding comments in Greenhouse Gas. But the motivating claim – that these explanatory comments are binding precedents – is wrong.

They also misunderstand the special nature of a reference case.

In Canadian law a reference case is a submission by the federal or a provincial government to the courts asking for an advisory opinion on a major legal issue, usually the constitutionality of particular legislation. The opinion given by the Supreme Court is in the form of a judicial decision; strictly speaking, it is not legally binding, although no government has ever ignored such an opinion.

In Greenhouse Gas, the provinces of Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta sought the Supreme Court’s opinion on the constitutionality of the federal carbon tax, with all arguing that it is unconstitutional. In March 2021, a 7-2 majority upheld as constitutional Ottawa’s imposition of “backup” federal carbon pricing in any province which has no equivalent provincial measures. It did so based on the national concern doctrine (under the “peace, order and good government” clause in Canada’s Constitution).

In doing so, the majority unusually delved into the wisdom of climate and energy policy, which requires complicated scientific knowledge and resolving conflicting political priorities. The majority assumed – without any evidence – some crucial scientific facts about the causes and effects of climate change. There was no such evidence because a reference case is initiated at the appellate level and, unlike lower trial courts, appellate courts normally have no fact-finding function.

The majority made two important scientific assumptions. First, it assumed that climate change poses a threat to the survival of humanity. Second, it assumed that Canada’s climate is substantially controlled by Canada’s own emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide (CO₂). Based on these assumptions, it would follow that Canada can avert the harms of climate change to Canadians by reducing Canadian CO₂emissions through a carbon tax.

Suffice it to say that the high court’s two critical premises around which the whole reference case hinged were not proven material facts because there was no evidence before the Court. They were merely the untested assumptions of the seven justices. The first of these key assumptions is highly arguable; the second is outright fallacious. I will address the second of these assumptions first.

The Fantasy of a “Carbon Wall” Around Canada and its Provinces

The majority’s written decision, authored by Chief Justice Richard Wagner, contains a crucial assumption about the physics and chemistry of climate change. . . It held that severely harmful effects of emissions will mostly be caused by – and affect – people situated closest to the geographical origin of the emissions. This is a fallacy which I have termed the “Carbon Wall”.

The Carbon Wall fallacy leads to the error that the federal government can more easily control what the majority termed “grievous” interprovincial impacts caused by CO2 emissions from adjacent provinces. In essence, that government action can “wall off” the effects of greenhouse gas emissions around their area of origin. In fact, there is no CO2 “wall” around any country, nor can one ever be placed around a province by judicial finding or bureaucratic regulation. Unlike local pollutants, CO2 molecules emitted in the United States or China can flow over Canada and all around the planet, and vice-versa. Weather may be largely local, but climate is ultimately global, and so is the movement (and any climate effects) of CO2.

The “Carbon Wall” fallacy: The idea that local CO2 emissions cause local climate change is a common misunderstanding; Canada’s top justices accepted it, envisioning CO2 as akin to traditional pollution that might flow down rivers and cross provincial boundaries, and whose damage can therefore be locally controlled. (Sources of photos: (top) Shutterstock; (bottom) Daveography.ca, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Thus, the majority assumed that climate change consists of CO2, following its emission, having a direct noxious climate impact upon geographically contiguous areas. We are not told, however, what particular form that harm takes, how it is caused or on what evidence it is based. But if Canada’s senior-most justices truly understood the basic mechanics of climate, they would have realized that virtually the entire impact of which they speak must come from outside the country, since Canada generates only 1.5 percent of global CO2 emissions, making each province only a tiny contributor to total global emissions.

Other Fallacious or Unsupported “Carbon Wall” Thinking

The majority also incorrectly suggested (para. 10) that, “The effects of climate change have been and will be particularly severe and devastating in Canada.” There is no evidence to support this assumption. While basic climatology holds that the Earth’s polar regions will warm more than lower latitudes, this is not unique to Canada. And rising levels of CO2 have also generated benefits through increasing agricultural productivity and forest and plant growth.

The good news: The Supreme Court said climate change would be “particularly severe and devastating in Canada”, an assumption for which there is no evidence; rising levels of atmospheric CO2 have actually led to a “greening” of the Earth, increasing agricultural productivity and forest and plant growth. (Source of photos: Pexels)

All that the Supreme Court’s ‘twice as fast’ alarm about Canadian warming shows is that Canadians live on land and not the ocean. The statement, while technically true, communicates nothing of significance. But it is highly misleading.

Canada is not bound in any meaningful way by the Paris Agreement, its contents should not influence decisions by Canadian courts, and the Supreme Court majority in Greenhouse Gas found nothing from the Paris Agreement that would be meaningfully precedential for those seeking to save themselves from ‘climate damage’.

The Assumption of an Existential Threat to Humanity

Climate change, Greenhouse Gas declares emphatically (para. 167), is “an existential challenge…a threat of the highest order to the country, and…[an] undisputed threat to the future of humanity [that] cannot be ignored.” It would seem to follow from this resounding pronouncement that the planet requires rapid decarbonization, with a massive and very costly diversion of resources to do so, and without regard to the cost trade-offs for other important human needs such food, housing and transportation or for such matters as safety and security.

Weighing such competing human needs is a political process, not a judicial judgment. Yet the Supreme Court’s assertions of catastrophe stand alone in mid-judgment, devoid of expert sources, of any investigation of facts, or of any reasoning from facts. This is unfortunate, because the court majority’s seemingly unqualified belief is anything but “undisputed”.

Many experts specifically dispute that humanity’s survival is at stake. Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus, the Yale University economist who is considered the “father” of the carbon tax, does so in his book The Climate Casino (page 134). Nor does the IPCC itself make such a claim.

“For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers. Changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation, governance, and many other aspects of socioeconomic development will have an impact on the supply and demand of economic goods and services that is large relative to the impact of climate change.” IPCC Report, Working Group 2, 2014

As Greenhouse Gas involved no evidentiary procedures, then what could have been the source of the Supreme Court’s ‘existential threat’ declaration? A search of the court files shows that this was assembled from an affidavit in Canada’s Record by a federal manager, John Moffet, an assistant deputy minister with Environment and Climate Change Canada.

Suffice it here to note that Canadian evidentiary rules do not allow for reliance upon a federal government manager’s affidavit for dispositive proof of an existential threat to an entire nation and indeed the whole planet. Moffet was neither disinterested in the dispute nor an expert on any aspect of climate science or any related scientific discipline that would qualify him as an independent expert witness.

The Unfolding Danger in the Supreme Court’s Climate Assumptions

There is no sense in parsing each of the assertions made by the majority in the Background, quite a few of which are highly questionable. But there is no existential threat inference to be drawn even if all are accepted. Climate change may be a serious problem, but it is only one among many other serious and resource-consuming human problems to be weighed and balanced.

If the Supreme Court of Canada chooses to evaluate complex climate policy in future (which the Court really lacks the institutional capacity to do), it should at least make arrangements for a full evidentiary record. For climate change, that would be enormous and would take months of hearings. A Royal Commission would be better placed to handle such a mission.

But judgments like Greenhouse Gas are wholly inadequate. It contains no true factual findings of an existential threat to humanity, or of a Carbon Wall around Canada, or of a possible Carbon Wall controllable by federal regulation around each of our provinces. There is no federal claim to be saving Canadians from interprovincial climate “pollution” and only a diffuse and very insignificant Canadian contribution to overall planetary climate change. Thus, the majority’s assumptions cannot serve as authority for the lower courts to adjudicate the cases that come before them under the guise of saving Canadians from climate change.

We cannot allow single-issue adherents (often wielding generous federal funding)
to repurpose our courts on pretextual bases and achieve goals
that they were denied through the ballot box.

SH and Tropics Lead UAH Cooling June 2025

Posted on July 21 by Ron Clutz

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.

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 ~60 ppm, a 15% 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.

gmt-warming-events

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 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

June 2025 SH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower

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 June 2025. 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 behind the update from HadSST4. I posted recently on SSTs June 2025 Ocean SSTs: NH Warms, SH Cools.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 land air temps, especially NH, dropped in February and recovered in March. Now in June SH land dropped markedly and NH land down slightly, while ocean air temps rose slightly in NH, offset by cooling in SH and Tropics.

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 June 2025. 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.

In 2021-22, SH and NH showed spikes up and down while the Tropics cooled dramatically, with some ups and downs, but hitting a new low in January 2023. At that point all regions were more or less in negative territory.

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. Now in June Global ocean air anomaly is little changed despite a slight rise in NH.

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 June 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. In March that drop reversed with both NH and Global land back to January values, holding there in April. In May sharp drops in NH and Tropics land air temps pulled the Global land air temps back down close to February value. In June the Global land air drop was significant, down from 0.67C to 0.55C despite a small rise in the Tropics.

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 -0.03, 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, and in June a further decline to 0.8C. October went down to 0.7C, November and December dropped to 0.6C. February went down to 0.5C, then back up to 0.6C in March and April driven by the bounce in NH land air temps, followed by May’s return to 0.5C, and June slightly lower at 0.48C.

The graph reminds of another chart showing the abrupt ejection of humid air from Hunga Tonga eruption.

Note on Ocean Cooling Not Yet Fully Appearing in UAH Dataset

The above chart shows sea surface temperature anomalies (SSTA) in the North Atlantic 0 to 60N. The index is derived from ERSSTv.5 by subtracting the global anomalies from the North Atlantic anomalies, the differences as shown in the chart. The baseline of 0.0C is the average for the years 1951 to 1980. The mean anomaly since 1980 is in purple at 0.33C, and persisted throughout up to 2018. The orange line is the average anomaly in the the last six years, 2019 to 04/2025 inclusive, at 0.84C. The remarkable spikes in 2023 and 2024 drove that rise to exceed 1.4C, which has been cut in half over the last 10 months. As Dr. Humlum observed, such oceanic changes usually portend air temperature changes later on.

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.

Climate Model Assumptions Contrary to Balloon Data

Posted on July 21 by Ron Clutz

Recently Michael Connolly presented the evidence contradicting assumptions built into GCMs (Global Climate Models). This post consists of the exhibits he used, and additional Connolly comments in italics from a similar talk this month to Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. (Video embedded later in post.)

Michael Connolly:

I’m an engineer and a scientist. As an engineer, I use computer models to design and make things. As a scientist, I look at the data to see if my computer models are correct. So, what we did at the center for environmental research and earth sciences (CERES) is that we looked at the data from 20 million radio balloons.

We then asked, can we look at this data and see how we can use it to check the computer models? And we found there’s two types of balloons. One: the average weather balloon does about a 100 measurements as it goes up to the stratosphere. But the ones which measure ozone do a measurement about once every second. So you have maybe four or 5,000 measurements on each sample. But all of the climate models, and by the way, nobody in the climate model community bothered to check the data to see if their models were correct, which I find very bizarre. But what all of the model community do is they divide the earth into a number of little boxes. So on a horizontal scale the boxes are about 1,000 mi long and on a vertical scale they’re about less than a mile in height.

They then make a number of assumptions about how the air behaves within each of these boxes. So their first assumption is that the air in each box is in a state which we call thermodynamic equilibrium. which I’ll explain in a few minutes. So they assume that on a horizontal scale the air in a box is in equilibrium over a distance of a 1,000 miles. But on a vertical scale only in equilibrium for slightly less than a mile.

And they also assume that the different boxes are not in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other. Because if it turns out that the boxes are in thermodynamic equilibrium with each other, all of the assumptions of the climate models collapse because Einstein and his co-authors over a 100 years ago showed that if a system was in thermodynamic equilibrium, if you put in a greenhouse gas into that system, it would absorb more energy. But if it’s in thermodynamic equilibrium, it emits more energy. So increasing the level of greenhouse gases will increase the rate of absorption but also increase the rate of emission. So there’s no net change due to the radiation. So if it turns out that the assumption that the the different boxes aren’t in thermodynamic equilibrium is false, then the whole theory of man-made global warming collapses.

So how do we know if something is in thermodynamic equilibrium or not? Well, what you do is you take a system and you do all the measurements of the different parameters involved and if you can describe the system in what’s called an equation of state with using these parameters, then we say the state is in thermodynamic equilibrium. So in other words, obeying an equation of state is one side of the coin of being in thermodynamic equilibrium. They’re both different sides of the same coin.

So for the air, the equation of state is this. It’s called the ideal gas law. And this is the equation that’s used by the climate modelers in treating the different boxes as being in thermodynamic equilibrium. You can see down there it tells you the relationship between the different parameters, but it doesn’t tell you how much energy it would take to change the temperature of a system. For that you need to know the heat capacity of the system. And it doesn’t tell you anything about potential energy. In other words, if I take a cubic meter of air and lift it up and keep it at the same temperature and pressure, it would obey the same equation, but it would have gravitational potential energy because it takes energy to lift it up. That’s not reflected in the equation of state.

As a chemist I thought there was something dead obvious to do. The equation of state can be rewritten in a different form called the molar density form, and this form has been used by chemists for hundreds of years to determine the molecular weight of new gases. So we asked what happens if we describe the atmosphere in terms of molar density form instead of the energy form? We were the first and still the only people to have done this.

When we did that we got a big surprise. We found that if you plot the molar density versus pressure you get these two straight lines. Now this means that the atmosphere in the troposphere, that’s the lower bit, is obeying an equation of state. So that means it’s in thermodynamic equilibrium. And when you get to the tropopause it turns into another straight line. Now this is quite common in studying materials. If you can describe it in terms of one equation of state and then it changes into another equation of state, we call it a change of phase. For example, you can describe water using the gaseous water using the gas laws, but then when it turns into liquid water, you have to use a different equation of state.

Now we studied all the different weather balloons from all around the world and we found that this phenomenon occurred in all of them. The only difference was that in the tropics the change of phase occurred at a higher altitude and in the Arctic and polar regions it occurred at a lower altitude. So, when we were here in Tucson 5 years ago, we made a video for the entire year of all of the radio balloon data for Tucson for 2018. And the reason for this video is that looking at a static graph like that, you don’t see any changes. Now, in the models that they’re using, the different boxes are isolated from each other, if you put energy into one of the boxes, it would kind of stay there. But if they’re in thermodynamic equilibrium, you put energy into one box, then all of the boxes will change because all of the energy will be distributed throughout the system. When you look at the video, the behavior of the boundary layer position moves up and down.

But also the temperature: if it moves to the right, the temperature is increasing. If it moves to the left, the temperature is decreasing. And what you will see once you watch the video, it’s all synchronized. In other words, if a change occurs, if the troposphere is warming up and the temperature is moving to the right, the tropopause moves down, the tropopause moves in the opposite direction. So in other words, when the troposphere heats up, the tropopause cools down. when the troposphere cools down the tropopause heats up and it does so in a synchronized way. So that synchronization shows that it’s thermodynamically connect connected. The idea that all of these boxes are not in thermodynamic equilibrium is contradicted by this data. [The referenced video starts at 10 minutes into the embedded presentation below.]

So that’s the first assumption. Now looking at the second assumption.
Back in the day, 18th century or something, Hadley was looking to explain the trade winds. So he came up with this idea of what happens: The very hot temperatures landing on the equator heated up the atmosphere. here and this hot air then rose up. Then as it rose up it started to move towards the poles and as it moved towards the poles it cooled down and you got this circular phenomenon. They came up with three different types of circular cells: the Hadley cells; the Ferrel cells and the Polar cells. But all of these this theoretical stuff was based on ground measurements.

And again uh nobody bothered to check whether this is true or not. So I’ll just show how we checked it. But first of all I just want to explain what’s meant by mass flux. So if you take a square meter and you measure the air flowing through it and what weight of air that is the mass flux. So in the weather balloons they give you the speed of the air and they give you the direction in which it’s it’s going. So you can use this to calculate the mass flux. So we said fine. So can we use this to check the idea of the Hadley cells and it turns out that you can. So we did and we published a paper two years ago.

We found first of all if you take a balloon and you launch it up through one of these cells then if Hadley is correct you would expect the hot air was rising here in the tropics and that drags in the air from the colder regions and then it hits the tropopause. Now, when Hadley came up with the idea, nobody knew the tropopause existed, and it’s only 30 years before I was born that it was actually discovered. So, that’s telling something about my age.

Anyway, if you send a balloon up through the atmosphere, you would expect the mass flux flow to flow in that direction down at the lower levels. And then as you go up at some stage it would shift over and start going in the opposite directions. So since that was available that mass flux we could measure from the balloon data we did that and we got a surprise.

There was absolutely no circulation patterns at all. Instead what the atmosphere was doing. So if we point here you can see these ones are the lower ones. So you have the direction the north south direction of the mass flux. These are the ones at the lower half of the troposphere. These are the ones in the opposite half of the troposphere.

For a Hadley cell you would expect these ones to be flowing in the opposite direction to these ones. But instead what we find is they all flow in the same direction. And in a very unusual pattern. What happens is here it’s flowing south then the atmosphere slows down over a couple of days goes back and forth and so on. So instead of this circular pattern what’s happening is the whole atmosphere is moving like a giant pendulum back and forth. So we have the atmosphere going one way, then after a few days it turns around and comes back in the opposite direction. And this is for Iceland but we found the exact same thing occurred for all the different stations.

So in that published paper we we took a station from each of the different five climate types and we found the exact same sort of thing happened. Now people said: okay so maybe it’s going back and forward on a daily basis but over a period of a year it might average out. So we average the data over the five years for each of the stations.

And since we published that paper, we’ve analyzed over 250 of the weather stations in the tropics. And we found for these 82% of them are Hadley. 73 in the northern hemisphere. So the majority are not Hadley cells. And in the southern hemisphere they’re equally balanced. But the problem with even the ones that were Hadley cells is you can see here the mass flux grow flowing in this direction the area under the curve is not the same as the one up above. And if it was a proper Hadley cell, they’d have to be the same. So what we found is for none of them this worked out. So they don’t exist, right?

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Science Matters

Reading between the lines, and underneath the hype.

Month: July 2025

DOE Climate Team: Twelve Keys in Assessing Climate Change

Introduction

Chapter 1 Carbon Dioxide as a Pollutant

Chapter 2 Direct impact of CO2 on the Environment

Chapter 3 Human Influences on the Climate

Chapter 4 Climate Sensitivity to CO2 Forcing

Chapter 5 Discrepancies Between Models and Instrumental Observations

Chapter Six Extreme Weather

Chapter 7 Changes in Sea Level

Chapter 8 Uncertainties in Climate Change Attribution

Chapter 9 Climate Change and US Agriculture

Chapter 10 Managing Risks of Extreme Weather

Chapter 11 Climate Change, the Economy, and Social Cost of Carbon

Chapter 12 Global Climate Impact of US Emissions Policies

Concluding thoughts

EPA Proposal to Reconsider GHG Endangerment Finding

No Right to a Stable Climate

My Comment:

See Also

Climate Hawks Endangered Species

Canada Update: Suddenly, Climate Hysteria is Gone

See Also

Tide Running Out on Climatism

ICJ Issues Biased Advice on Climate Change

My Summary

Supreme Screw-up: Climate Fallacies Embraced by Canada’s Highest Court

The Fantasy of a “Carbon Wall” Around Canada and its Provinces

The Assumption of an Existential Threat to Humanity

The Unfolding Danger in the Supreme Court’s Climate Assumptions

SH and Tropics Lead UAH Cooling June 2025

June 2025 SH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

Note on Ocean Cooling Not Yet Fully Appearing in UAH Dataset

Climate Model Assumptions Contrary to Balloon Data