September | 2025 | Science Matters

ML CO2 Follows Temperatures From HadCRUT5

Previously I have demonstrated that temperature changes are predictive of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. That includes the remarkable GMT spike starting in January 2023 and rising to a peak in April 2024. The most recent study was June 2025 Update–Temperature Falls, CO2 Follows employing Mauna Loa CO2 data and UAH GMT data.

More recently another researcher, Bernard Robbins, found similar causation between ML CO2 and SST fluctuations reported by NOAA Global SST dataset. See More Evidence Temperatures Drive CO2 Levels, Not the Reverse. Along with some comments on my blog, I wondered whether the entire ML record of CO2 levels could be predicted from global temperature changes, which would require a GMT dataset covering 1959 to the present. This post shows that HADCRUT5 qualifies and indeed confirms other studies by researchers. I was particularly interested in the lack of warming in the 1960s and 70s, before the satellite temperature data became available.

The answer is yes: Just as temperature spikes result
in a corresponding CO2 spike as expected. Cooler temperatures
are predictive of lower CO2 levels.

Above are HadCRUT5 temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.

Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for HadCRUT5 are anomalies referenced to the 1961-1990 period. CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example February 2025 minus February 2024). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month. Note the recent CO2 upward spike and drop following the temperature spike and drop.

The final proof that CO2 follows temperature due to stimulation of natural CO2 reservoirs is demonstrated by the ability to calculate CO2 levels since 1959 with a simple mathematical formula:

For each subsequent year, the CO2 level for each month was generated

CO2 _{this month this year} = a + b × Temp _{this month this year} + CO2 _{this month last year}

The values for a and b are constants applied to all monthly temps, and are chosen to scale the forecasted CO2 level for comparison with the observed value. The values for scaling HADCRUT5 and MLCO2 were “a” = 1.12 and “b” = 1.65 Here is the result of those calculations.

In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9992 out of 1.0000. This mathematical generation of CO2 atmospheric levels is only possible if they are driven by temperature-dependent natural sources, and not by human emissions which are small in comparison, rise steadily and monotonically. For a more detailed look at the recent fluxes, here are the results since 2015, an ENSO neutral year.

For this recent period, the calculated CO2 values match well the annual lows, while some annual generated values of CO2 are slightly higher or lower than observed at other months of the year. Still the correlation for this period is 0.98

Key Point

Changes in CO2 follow changes in global temperatures on all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia. Since CO2 is the lagging variable, it cannot logically be the cause of temperature, the leading variable. It is folly to imagine that by reducing human emissions of CO2, we can change global temperatures, which are obviously driven by other factors.

Background Post Temperature Changes Cause CO2 Changes, Not the Reverse

This post is about proving that CO2 changes in response to temperature changes, not the other way around, as is often claimed. In order to do that we need two datasets: one for measurements of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations over time and one for estimates of Global Mean Temperature changes over time.

Climate science is unsettling because past data are not fixed, but change later on. I ran into this previously and now again in 2021 and 2022 when I set out to update an analysis done in 2014 by Jeremy Shiers (discussed in a previous post reprinted at the end). Jeremy provided a spreadsheet in his essay Murray Salby Showed CO2 Follows Temperature Now You Can Too posted in January 2014. I downloaded his spreadsheet intending to bring the analysis up to the present to see if the results hold up. The two sources of data were:

Temperature anomalies from RSS here: http://www.remss.com/missions/amsu

CO2 monthly levels from NOAA (Mauna Loa): https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/data.html

Changes in CO2 (ΔCO2)

Uploading the CO2 dataset showed that many numbers had changed (why?).

The blue line shows annual observed differences in monthly values year over year, e.g. June 2020 minus June 2019 etc. The first 12 months (1979) provide the observed starting values from which differentials are calculated. The orange line shows those CO2 values changed slightly in the 2020 dataset vs. the 2014 dataset, on average +0.035 ppm. But there is no pattern or trend added, and deviations vary randomly between + and -. So last year I took the 2020 dataset to replace the older one for updating the analysis.

Now I find the NOAA dataset starting in 2021 has almost completely new values due to a method shift in February 2021, requiring a recalibration of all previous measurements. The new picture of ΔCO2 is graphed below.

The method shift is reported at a NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory webpage, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) WMO Scale, with a justification for the difference between X2007 results and the new results from X2019 now in force. The orange line shows that the shift has resulted in higher values, especially early on and a general slightly increasing trend over time. However, these are small variations at the decimal level on values 340 and above. Further, the graph shows that yearly differentials month by month are virtually the same as before. Thus I redid the analysis with the new values.

Global Temperature Anomalies (ΔTemp)

The other time series was the record of global temperature anomalies according to RSS. The current RSS dataset is not at all the same as the past.

Here we see some seriously unsettling science at work. The purple line is RSS in 2014, and the blue is RSS as of 2020. Some further increases appear in the gold 2022 rss dataset. The red line shows alterations from the old to the new. There is a slight cooling of the data in the beginning years, then the three versions mostly match until 1997, when systematic warming enters the record. From 1997/5 to 2003/12 the average anomaly increases by 0.04C. After 2004/1 to 2012/8 the average increase is 0.15C. At the end from 2012/9 to 2013/12, the average anomaly was higher by 0.21. The 2022 version added slight warming over 2020 values.

RSS continues that accelerated warming to the present, but it cannot be trusted. And who knows what the numbers will be a few years down the line? As Dr. Ole Humlum said some years ago (regarding Gistemp): “It should however be noted, that a temperature record which keeps on changing the past hardly can qualify as being correct.”

Given the above manipulations, I went instead to the other satellite dataset UAH version 6. UAH has also made a shift by changing its baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020. This resulted in systematically reducing the anomaly values, but did not alter the pattern of variation over time. For comparison, here are the two records with measurements through December 2023.

Comparing UAH temperature anomalies to NOAA CO2 changes.

Here are UAH temperature anomalies compared to CO2 monthly changes year over year.

Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. As stated above, CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example June 2022 minus June 2021). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month.

The final proof that CO2 follows temperature due to stimulation of natural CO2 reservoirs is demonstrated by the ability to calculate CO2 levels since 1979 with a simple mathematical formula:

For each subsequent year, the co2 level for each month was generated

CO2 _{this month this year} = a + b × Temp _{this month this year} + CO2 _{this month last year}

Jeremy used Python to estimate a and b, but I used his spreadsheet to guess values that place for comparison the observed and calculated CO2 levels on top of each other.

In the chart calculated CO2 levels correlate with observed CO2 levels at 0.9986 out of 1.0000. This mathematical generation of CO2 atmospheric levels is only possible if they are driven by temperature-dependent natural sources, and not by human emissions which are small in comparison, rise steadily and monotonically.

Comment: UAH dataset reported a sharp warming spike starting mid year, with causes speculated but not proven. In any case, that surprising peak has not yet driven CO2 higher, though it might, but only if it persists despite the likely cooling already under way.

Previous Post: What Causes Rising Atmospheric CO2?

nasa_carbon_cycle_2008-1

This post is prompted by a recent exchange with those reasserting the “consensus” view attributing all additional atmospheric CO2 to humans burning fossil fuels.

The IPCC doctrine which has long been promoted goes as follows. We have a number over here for monthly fossil fuel CO2 emissions, and a number over there for monthly atmospheric CO2. We don’t have good numbers for the rest of it-oceans, soils, biosphere–though rough estimates are orders of magnitude higher, dwarfing human CO2. So we ignore nature and assume it is always a sink, explaining the difference between the two numbers we do have. Easy peasy, science settled.

What about the fact that nature continues to absorb about half of human emissions, even while FF CO2 increased by 60% over the last 2 decades? What about the fact that in 2020 FF CO2 declined significantly with no discernable impact on rising atmospheric CO2?

These and other issues are raised by Murray Salby and others who conclude that it is not that simple, and the science is not settled. And so these dissenters must be cancelled lest the narrative be weakened.

The non-IPCC paradigm is that atmospheric CO2 levels are a function of two very different fluxes. FF CO2 changes rapidly and increases steadily, while Natural CO2 changes slowly over time, and fluctuates up and down from temperature changes. The implications are that human CO2 is a simple addition, while natural CO2 comes from the integral of previous fluctuations. Jeremy Shiers has a series of posts at his blog clarifying this paradigm. See Increasing CO2 Raises Global Temperature Or Does Increasing Temperature Raise CO2 Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The following graph which shows the change in CO2 levels (rather than the levels directly) makes this much clearer.

Note the vertical scale refers to the first differential of the CO2 level not the level itself. The graph depicts that change rate in ppm per year.

There are big swings in the amount of CO2 emitted. Taking the mean as 1.6 ppmv/year (at a guess) there are +/- swings of around 1.2 nearly +/- 100%.

And, surprise surprise, the change in net emissions of CO2 is very strongly correlated with changes in global temperature.

This clearly indicates the net amount of CO2 emitted in any one year is directly linked to global mean temperature in that year.

For any given year the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the sum of

all the net annual emissions of CO2
in all previous years.

For each year the net annual emission of CO2 is proportional to the annual global mean temperature.

This means the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be related to the sum of temperatures in previous years.

So CO2 levels are not directly related to the current temperature but the integral of temperature over previous years.

The following graph again shows observed levels of CO2 and global temperatures but also has calculated levels of CO2 based on sum of previous years temperatures (dotted blue line).

Summary:

The massive fluxes from natural sources dominate the flow of CO2 through the atmosphere. Human CO2 from burning fossil fuels is around 4% of the annual addition from all sources. Even if rising CO2 could cause rising temperatures (no evidence, only claims), reducing our emissions would have little impact.

Atmospheric CO2 Math

Ins: 4% human, 96% natural
Outs: 0% human, 98% natural.
Atmospheric storage difference: +2%
(so that: Ins = Outs + Atmospheric storage difference)

Balance = Atmospheric storage difference: 2%, of which,
Humans: 2% X 4% = 0.08%
Nature: 2% X 96 % = 1.92%

Ratio Natural : Human =1.92% : 0.08% = 24 : 1

Resources

For a possible explanation of natural warming and CO2 emissions see Little Ice Age Warming Recovery May be Over

Resources:

CO2 Fluxes, Sources and Sinks

Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

Fearless Physics from Dr. Salby

Climate Alarmism: Not Science, But Superstition

Posted on September 16 by Ron Clutz

Brian C. Joondeph writes at American Thinker, CO2 Alarmism: Science or Superstition? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

When Americans hear about carbon dioxide (CO2), it’s often shown as a harmful pollutant that threatens the planet. Politicians, activists, and media outlets warn that if we don’t reduce emissions right away, disaster will happen.

Preeminent “climate scientist” Al Gore told Congress in 2007, “The science is settled. Carbon dioxide emissions – from cars, power plants, buildings, and other sources – are heating the Earth’s atmosphere.” He continued warning, “The planet has a fever.”

What if the fever is instead a cold plunge? As CNN reminded us earlier this year, “Record-breaking cold: Temperatures to plunge to as much as 50 degrees below normal.”

The Weather Channel posted on Facebook last week, “Record-breaking cold temperatures for the month of August provide many their first taste of fall.” What happened to global warming?

Let’s not focus on the last year or the last fifty years. Instead, let’s look at the past 600 million years. From this perspective, the story looks very different.

Dr. Patrick Moore, cofounder of Greenpeace, authored a policy paper in 2016 titled, “The positive impact of CO2 emissions on the survival of life on earth.” Note the organization he cofounded. This is not some far-right, anti-science, fascist, Nazi, white supremacist organization, as the left would characterize anyone questioning “settled” climate science. Since its founding in 1971, Greenpeace has promoted environmental activism.

Dr. Moore, in his paper, presented this graph. The graph caption indicates that temperature and atmospheric CO2 are only loosely correlated, if at all. It’s a graph of global temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration over the past 600 million years. Note both temperature and CO2 are lower today than they have been during most of the era of modern life on Earth since the Cambrian Period. Also, note that this does not indicate a lockstep cause-effect relationship between the two parameters.

The main point from the graph is that current CO2 levels are not dangerously high. In fact, they are quite the opposite, being some of the lowest in history. For most of Earth’s history, CO2 concentrations were many times higher than today’s 420 ppm. Even during the Cretaceous period, when dinosaurs roamed, levels were about four times higher than today.

From a geological view, our current CO2 levels are among the lowest in history. Yet climate advocates focus on a tiny rise in CO2 in recent years, ignoring the previous half billion years.

Alarmists scream that 420 ppm is unprecedented and endangers the planet’s survival. However, the reality is nearly the opposite: we could be experiencing a CO2 drought.

To my knowledge, dinosaurs didn’t drive gas-guzzling SUVs, run the air conditioner, or cook on gas stoves. Yet, miraculously, the Earth neither burned up nor became uninhabitable, as Al Gore and other climate alarmists currently predict. Instead, life thrived, diversified, and expanded to the point that I can write this article on my laptop, in the comfort of my air-conditioned home, before I fire up the grill for dinner.

What stands out is not correlation but complexity. Temperature and CO2 did not move in lockstep. Sometimes, CO2 was high during cooling periods, and other times, CO2 decreased while temperatures rose. The “lockstep causation” story falls apart when viewed over millions of years. Earth’s climate is influenced by many factors, such as solar cycles, orbital changes, volcanic activity, and ocean currents, not just a single trace gas.

CO2 makes up only 0.04% of the atmosphere, less than one part per thousand. The complexity is summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC):

If CO2 has in the past reached ten times current levels without causing a runaway greenhouse effect, how can today’s modest increase be seen as an existential threat? The Earth system is more resilient than many activists admit. That resilience, demonstrated over hundreds of millions of years of survival, should humble today’s doom prophets.

Fortunately, policymakers are beginning to see that climate alarmism is based on shaky ground. As ZeroHedge reported, Trump’s EPA plans to remove greenhouse gases from the list of regulated pollutants, recognizing that treating CO₂ like sulfur dioxide or mercury isn’t scientifically justified. They summarized the rationale well.

Trump’s reversal of EPA standards and deregulation will help the U.S. economy. More importantly, it starts the much-needed process of removing climate change brainwashing from the federal government’s vernacular. It’s time for Western civilization to abandon the climate hoax and move on.

Published February, 2025

More recently, the New York Times reported a more significant development: The EPA is now revoking its Endangerment Finding on greenhouse gases. That 2009 decision served as the legal, though not scientific, foundation for the federal government’s climate policy.

By rescinding it, the agency admits what skeptics have claimed all along. CO2 is not a poison but a natural part of the biosphere, essential for plant life, agriculture, and human survival. Simply put, CO2 is plant food and vital for life on Earth.

When even the EPA admits that the case against CO2 isn’t as strong as claimed, why should the rest of us accept the narrative of “settled science,” whether it’s about CO2 or COVID-era masks, vaccines, distancing, and lockdowns?

Perhaps the most troubling result of climate panic isn’t faulty science but poor policymaking. Fear opens the door to authoritarian control. We saw this during COVID lockdowns when extreme restrictions were justified in the name of “public health.” Climate alarmists now use the same tactics, claiming that global warming is “an existential threat.”

As HotAir recently reported, three Canadian provinces have implemented sweeping bans on entering woodland areas, citing wildfire risks and climate change. Violators face heavy fines or jail time. Critics quickly pointed out the striking similarity to so-called “climate lockdowns,” once dismissed as conspiracy theories. Yet here they are, with citizens barred from a common outdoor activity in the name of climate policy.

This isn’t environmental stewardship; it’s authoritarian social control. A government willing to close forests today will be willing to restrict cars, air travel, or even personal diets tomorrow, all justified as part of a “climate emergency.”

Once rights are limited in the name of carbon, what boundaries remain? After all, humans exhale CO2, making all human activity a threat to the species, activities that should be restricted or stopped at any cost. In other words, population control by any means necessary.

None of this is to deny that climate science involves uncertainty. Proxy data are imperfect, and today’s industrial society introduces variables that weren’t present millions of years ago. Climate sensitivity to CO2, although debated, may not be zero, but is probably negligible and not worth imposing overwhelming socioeconomic regulations and burdens on working families and developing nations.

But uncertainty cuts both ways. If the science is uncertain, then the justification for strict, top-down rules collapses. Policy should demonstrate humility, not arrogance. Instead of harsh restrictions, we should focus on balanced adaptation, resilient infrastructure, responsible energy choices, and innovation, all while maintaining freedom and prosperity.

The real irony is that the more you zoom out, the less CO2 seems to be the “control knob” of climate. Over 600 million years, CO2 levels were much higher than today’s, yet Earth stayed habitable and life flourished. If anything, our current levels could be too low, raising worries about agricultural productivity and plant growth in a CO2-deficient atmosphere, which might cause starvation and desolation.

We are told to fear things that could actually be helpful. Higher CO2 levels increase crop yields, support reforestation, and restore dry lands. Calling it “pollution” goes against biology itself. CO2 is plant food, and without it, humans might face extinction like the dinosaurs.

It’s time to replace fear with perspective. Instead of shutting down people, destroying industries, or labeling farmers as villains, we should understand that CO2 is not our enemy. Climate alarmism is. Believing otherwise isn’t science; it’s superstition.

Alarmists Fail to Refute Realistic Climate Report

Posted on September 15 by Ron Clutz

They shoot, they miss, we score. David Wojick reports on the laughable failure of alarmists in his CFACT article Attack on DOE Climate Report is a comedy of criticism. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The DOE science report saying the impact of CO2 on climate is exaggerated was quickly followed by a massive alarmist report. The alarmist report claimed to refute the DOE report, and the press dutifully reported it doing that.

On close inspection, I find this claim to be not even close to true. In fact, it looks laughable. Mind you, this is a preliminary finding, as the two reports together run about 600 pages. I just took what is arguably the key DOE chapter and compared the two reports on that.

This is the chapter on CO2 sensitivity, which is how much warming will occur (in theory) if the atmospheric concentration doubled. It is a convenient metric that is widely used to assess the potential adverse impact, if any, of increasing CO2.

I first looked at the DOE report, then at the alarmist report, anxious to see how they claimed to falsify the DOE version. What I found instead was that they did not disagree with a single thing the DOE report said. No falsification, no refutation, not even a simple disagreement. Nothing! I could not stop laughing.

On reflection, this is not surprising, because what the DOE report says is simple and well known. They point out that:

♦ the range of sensitivity estimates is getting bigger, not smaller;
♦ some of the models have gotten so hot that the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) no longer accepts their results; that
♦ observation-based estimates are a lot lower than the model estimates; and that
♦ sensitivity could be lower than the IPCC suggests.

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.

There is lots of criticism in the alarmist report to be sure, but it is all editorial, not scientific. Basically, the alarmists wish the DOE report said something else — which is no surprise. They say the report “misrepresents” the science (because it is not alarmist), even though everything it says is true.

They list six specific criticisms. These six are scientifically irrelevant, but some are actually wrong. For example, they say the DOE report ignores that there are multiple lines of evidence, when in fact the chapter begins with a discussion of that very fact.

More deeply, they say the report ignores Transient Sensitivity (decades) in favor of Equilibrium Sensitivity (centuries). This is astoundingly wrong, because the chapter finishes with a section making the point that Transient Sensitivity is both better and much lower than Equilibrium Sensitivity. It is a primary point of the chapter.

In both cases, “ignores” is their word, not mine, and clearly wrong. Conversely, they also attribute claims to the DOE report that are not made. Assuming things not stated is a common tendency among those who disagree.

The alarmist report is grandly titled “Climate Experts’ Review of the DOE Climate Working Group Report” and is available here

The DOE report – “A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” – to be found here.

The alarmist site proudly lists some of the ridiculous press coverage it received. For example:

“85 climate scientists refute Trump administration report downplaying climate change” (The Hill)

“‘Not scientifically credible’: Scientists repudiate Trump administration climate report” (LA Times)

“Climate scientists file a public, point-by-point rebuttal of Trump admin report casting doubt on climate change” (CNN)

This is alarmist nonsense personified, a perfect example of why
the EPA Endangerment Finding should be revoked. It’s all hype.

Nature Study Rigged to Shakedown Big and Little Oil

Posted on September 14 by Ron Clutz

in this video, John Robson deconstructs the recent attempt to indict hydrocarbon fuel producers and deprive the world of 80% of the primary energy it needs. The transcript is in italics with my bolds and added images.

This just in. Canadian companies convicted of burning up planet after show trial. Hydrocarbon bureaucrats sentenced to economic death. As you see, this breaking news caught me on the road here in this hotel. But somebody has to say something. So for the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson, and this is our quick reaction response to the pseudoscientific claim that Canadian companies are destroying the earth a bit.

And that response is that this court has no legitimacy at all. What it’s doing is no more science than what Lysenko did. It’s politics in a wig and ugly politics at that. According to a media friendly study in Nature, complete with its own lurid press release, sorry, news article:

The weather attribution wizards have nailed not just human CO2, but yes, individual firms for causing bad weather, and they shall be sued into extinction. After all, this new weather attribution was invented to bypass the tedious necessity of detecting trends in weather before explaining them, for the very purpose not to facilitate understanding, but to facilitate lawsuits.

As Roger Pielke Jr. recently growled while examining a hatchet job on the US Department of Energy skeptical red team climate report, he said, quote, “In my areas of expertise, he had found numerous statements that were simply false. among them that world weather attribution was not created with litigation in mind.”And how does he know that that claim is false? Because he did actual research, including finding a quotation from WWA’s chief scientist, Fredericke Otto:

Unlike every other branch of climate science or science in general, event attribution was actually originally suggested with the courts in mind.”

Of course, it was. And here we go. As the Nature propaganda said:

Legal experts say it’s a line of evidence that could feed into climate litigation that focuses on specific events such as the 2021 heatwave that hammered the US Pacific Northwest in 2021. Already, a county government in Oregon has filed a 52 billion US civil lawsuit against fossil fuel companies for contributing to that event.

So, it’s revealing, and not in a good way, that the Nature Study itself credits upfront “approaches promoted by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative and other Methods.”

Alarmists don’t love Weather Attribution because it conducts fair trials. They love it because it convicts everybody with roughly the subtlety of Andrey Vyshinsky or Lavrentiy Beria. But it is not science. As Patrick Brown pointed out this January, their tricks for stacking the jury box include, in this case, in order to attribute droughts to human evil and folly, they overwhelmingly studied places where drought had increased, even though globally there were more places where it decreased. You know, just in case their models let them down, but they’re not likely to. [See Beware Claims Attributing Extreme Events to Hydrocarbons]

As we noted in June, dizzy with success, the fellow travelers at CNN touted a study where:

“Using a combination of scientific theory, modern observations, and multiple sophisticated computer models, researchers found a clear signal of human-caused climate change was likely discernable with high confidence as early as 1885.”

That is before the invention of the internal combustion automobile. Now, the obvious implication here, and the correct one, is that these models would find such a signal anywhere because we’re told that in 1885, atmospheric CO2 was around 293 parts per million, just a whisker above the 280 parts per million that alarmists wrongly believe was constant in pre-industrial times. That very small change couldn’t possibly have measurably affected the weather. Such a fluctuation is very obviously noise, not signal. Especially when it’s coming from ice cores whose bubbles take decades or even centuries to seal.

Yet the source here tells us that in 1885 it was 293.3 parts per million. And this mathiness looks impressive, but it’s actually another key warning sign that something that is not science is lurching about in a stolen lab code. Real science deals in uncertainties. It shows error bars. Fake science bludgeons the public with spurious decimal places. According to the CBC’s credulous take:

“I was surprised that even the smallest carbon majors were actually very substantially contributing to the probability of the heat waves, said Yan Quilkai, a climate scientist at ETHZurich, who led the study.”

Oh, come now. Surely you suspected your rigged models would convict the defendant of a serious crime. After all, it’s what they’re for. And here we go. The study allegedly found that major oil companies alone caused more than half the supposed 1.3° C warming since pre-industrial times. And that of that share, Canadian companies caused 0.01°C.

I mean, one might retort, De minimis non curat lex ( The law does not concern itself about trifles.) if not educated in a government school, but instead in Latin or in sound constitutional and legal principles. Or you might say, get the heck out of my lab if you’ve been educated in science because there is no way, no way at all that 0.01 out of 1.30 is signal and not noise here.

Now to his credit or that of the shattered remains of his conscience, nature’s Jeff Tollefson does admit that:

“despite the eyepopping estimates for responsibilities allocated to individual carbon majors, the uncertainties remain high in many instances in large part because the most extreme heat waves are statistically rare.”

Yeah, indeed they’re so rare that there’s no statistically sound way of determining how likely they are. As we pointed out in our turning down the heat waves fact check video with regard to that 2021 Pacific Northwest heat dome that the alarmists so love:

“The heatwave could be viewed as virtually impossible without global warming. But it was virtually impossible with it as well. Sometimes weird things happen.”

What’s more, World Weather Attribution’s gleeful attribution of it to humans and our carbon original sin was eventually submitted to a serious journal and so rubbished by one of the reviewers that they had to add a bunch of disclaimers saying that of course they couldn’t really know. But did it dent their popularity or their self-confidence? Hooha. This study in Nature says, “The median estimate indicates that climate change has also increased the probability of heat waves by more than 10,000.” 10,000 what? we ask. Percent? Times?

But it gets worse because this kind of talk suggests that they know how common and intense heat waves were around 1850, and how common and intense they are now. But they don’t. They have no idea. There weren’t systematic measurements of daily temperature in most of the world even into the mid 20th century. And the proxies when you go further back certainly give no idea how common or intense they were even a century ago, let alone 500 years.

So they’re making it up, then hiding it with decimals, saying in a spreadsheet attached to the study that, for instance, Cenovus Energy alone increased the probability of an early 2009 heatwave in Victoria, New South Wales and Tasmania’s northern provinces by 1.01% and its intensity by, get this, 0.0003°C. Four decimal places. As the Duke of Wellington once said, “If you believe that, you’ll believe anything.”

It’s also anti-scientific to claim to give a change in global temperature to two decimal places over the last 175 years when nobody knows the temperature anywhere to within one decimal place a century ago. And another thing we actually do know that during the Holocene era the earth has cycled regularly between warmer and cooler periods including down from the medieval warm period into the little ice age and back up after 1850.

So at least some of the warming since must by any logical standard have been natural. In which case they’re blaming oil companies alone for more than the entire human contribution. But the attributors duck this absurdity by absurdly assuming that it’s basically all on us. The chutzpah here is astounding. But it’s exactly the kind of thing they do.

And if you use the same warped modeling to assess the shares of some other human activity, you’d dependably get a searing indictment. And in fact, if you used it on all of them, I’ll bet you you’d get over a 100% of that 1.3 degrees C, never mind if whatever smaller share actually wasn’t natural. But they don’t run that kind of test because what they’re doing isn’t science. They’re not seeking truth and testing theories ruthlessly. They’re zealots shrieking about enemies of the people.

They also write:

“with reference to 1850 to 1900, climate change has increased the median intensity of heat waves by 1.36°C over 2000 to 2009, of which 0.44°C is traced back to the 14 top carbon majors and 0.22°C to the 166 others. These contributions correspond respectively to 32% and 16% of the overall effect of climate change.”

And again, it sounds precise, all right, but climate change is a statistical description of changes in long-term weather. It isn’t a causal force. So, they don’t even know what climate change is. And all those double decimals swirling around trying to hypnotize you are a dead giveaway that they’re in over their heads or worse. And it is worse because they also don’t know what science is. They don’t do counterfactuals and consider what extreme events might have been prevented by warming as well as caused by it.

And they’re certainly not comparing known extreme events today with known extreme events in the past. Instead, they take what did happen and sometimes what didn’t, match it against invented scenarios to prove that we caused bad weather. And then they say, “Gotcha.” when the computer Julie says, “Yes, we caused bad weather.” And then they speed dial their lawyer.

That CBC item included the usual guff from the usual suspects, including Naomi Oreskes. It said,

“referring to previous research from her and other experts showing major oil companies knew about the impacts of carbon emissions and the dangers of global warming decades before countries started enacting climate policies.”

Right? Trotsky was a conscious agent of fascism and imperial oil has been trying to incinerate the earth for half a century and now it’s been proved to two decimal places to the satisfaction of people in the media who barely survived grade 10 math. So, while speaking of people not doing science when it is their job, let us also mention people not doing journalism when it is their job.

CTV, for instance, pounced on the supposed study and shrieked, “These Canadian companies among humanity’s biggest carbon emitters study says.” But the study says nothing of the kind. And in fact, nor really does the story, which includes this bit:

“The 14 largest carbon emitters were led by fossil fuel and coal producers from the former Soviet Union and China, followed by oil companies Saudi Aramco, Gasprom, and Exxon Mobile. Together, they made the same contribution to climate change as the remaining 166 entities, according to the study.”

So, Canada’s eight enemies of humanity actually ranked between 70th and 163rd. And together, they supposedly warmed the planet by 0.01°C over nearly two centuries. Which means if they kept at it for another 1750 years, they might warm the place by 0.1° C. And anyone who tells you they can calculate the impact on the weather of such a trivial change is a charlatan and a rogue. And journalists who parrot such claims without any attempt to do basic math, let alone probe how the authors think they know these things, or what other views exist, belong at Pravda, not in free world newspapers.

Now, before concluding, your honor, we wish to say one thing directly to the prisoners currently slumped in the dock or on the lam. The CBC reported that it: “reached out to several carbon majors mentioned in the story, but they either declined to comment or didn’t respond by publication time.” Likewise: “Nature also reached out to the following companies for comment on the study’s findings, but did not receive a response. BP, Shell, Chevron, National Iranian Oil Company, and Coal India.”

And what indeed could they say? The hydrocarbon energy companies have for too long and with too few exceptions followed a strategy of appeasement, confessing on the science and groveling on the policy, endorsing net zero in the hope of being the last one shot. But since everybody gets shot, it was always a terrible plan. And with the execution fast approaching, it’s time to abandon it.

Of course, if you honestly believe that your product is destroying the Earth, you should say so and get the heck out of that line of work. But if you don’t believe it, stand up for yourselves and not just by saying that the other companies are worse. Because these climate fanatics are not going to stop. They plan to destroy you using pseudoscience to win lawfare. They intend to sue you into oblivion. You, the companies that the rest of us rely on to avoid starving and freezing, and then they’re going to wonder why it got dark all of a sudden. And darkness at noon in the lab definitely has something to do with it.

So, please don’t just stand there. Say something.
Plead not guilty because you’re not and they are.

For the climate discussion nexus, I’m John Robson and that’s our quick response to this Nature study indicting oil companies for setting the planet on fire.

Swamp Lawfare Update: Reported Demise of DOE Climate Report Premature

Posted on September 13 by Ron Clutz

As expected, climatists were aghast at content in the DOE Climate Review, and the usual suspects complained to the court (Massachusetts, no surprise) on a technicality. The legal maneuvers are twisted, also usual when deployed by wealthy obstructionist pros like EDF (Environmental Defense Fund) and UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists). After some digging, I found the documentary trail with excerpts highlighted below and links in red to official docs for those interested. Source: Court Listener Environmental Defense Fund, Inc. v. Wright (1:25-cv-12249)

The Complaint

The Climate Working Group worked in secret for months to produce a report for DOE and EPA that would provide justification for their predetermined goal of rescinding the Endangerment Finding. In May, unbeknownst to the public, the group transmitted its report to EPA, and EPA then relied extensively on the report in preparing its proposal to rescind the Endangerment Finding.

It was not until the same day that EPA released that proposal, July 29, that the existence and work of the group was made public. Secrecy was so important to Defendants that when the New York Times asked one of the group’s members in early July about his role at DOE, the member obscured his work for the group and simply said that he is an “unpaid person who’s available to them if they need it.”

But federal law does not permit agencies to create or rely on such secret, unaccountable groups when engaged in policymaking. In the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), Congress mandated transparency in the establishment and operation of any federal advisory committee, including by requiring that the group’s formation be promptly disclosed and that its meetings, emails, and other records be open to the public. Here, Defendants did not disclose the Climate Working Group’s existence until months after it began working, and not a single meeting or record has been made public other than the group’s report. Defendants also violated FACA’s prohibition on stacking an advisory committee with adherents of only one point of view; the Climate Working Group’s members were all chosen for their skepticism of climate science, and the group does not have a single member that agrees with the consensus of the overwhelming majority of the scientific community on the effects of climate change.

The Environmental Defense Fund and the Union of Concerned Scientists bring this action to enjoin Defendants’ flagrant violations of FACA, to bring transparency to the Climate Working Group’s work to date as the law requires, and to compel Defendants to follow the law if they wish to rely on outside scientific advisors to justify their actions going forward. If DOE and EPA wish to establish an advisory committee for the enormously consequential purposes for which they have put the Climate Working Group to use, they must comply with the rules that Congress has prescribed.

Defendants’ Response

Plaintiffs invoke the Federal Advisory Committee Act (“FACA”), and contend that the Department of Energy (“DOE”) and Secretary Christopher Wright violated its requirements in establishing the now-dissolved DOE Climate Working Group (“CWG”). But the true goal of their lawsuit is not promoting openness and transparency in public decision-making. While Plaintiffs complain that they only recently learned of the CWG’s existence, DOE released its Report publicly weeks ago, and the Government provided opportunities for public comment on the CWG’s work. Instead, as the introduction to their Complaint makes clear, Plaintiffs’ objective is to delay and prematurely undermine a contemplated future policy decision by a different agency: namely, EPA’s proposed reconsideration of its 2009 greenhouse gas endangerment finding. Their sole hook for that relief is that EPA cited the CWG report—among numerous other sources—in a notice of proposed rulemaking (“NPRM”). That gambit fails at every level. Plaintiffs’ requested relief is foreclosed by Article III, the scope of FACA, and equitable principles.

More broadly, Plaintiffs’ Motion for Preliminary Injunction or, in the Alternative, For Summary Judgment or Consolidation Under Rule 65(a)(2), ECF Nos. 15-16, fails for at least three different reasons. First, Plaintiffs fail to establish that they are likely to succeed on the merits, because the CWG is not an entity covered by FACA; the statutory requirements are inapplicable to groups assembled to exchange facts or information with federal officials. In all events, most of Plaintiffs’ claims are now moot due to the CWG’s dissolution.

Second, Plaintiffs have identified no imminent irreparable harm requiring judicial intervention at this early juncture. They face no harm (irreparable or otherwise) from the prospect of ongoing work performed by the CWG because the group has already been dissolved. And EPA’s upcoming September 22, 2025, deadline for public comment on its NPRM poses no harm, because Plaintiffs are free to raise their concerns about the CWG report via public comment. Nor would any alleged harm stemming from an inability to comment be irreparable. Plaintiffs request that this Court ultimately issue declaratory relief finding the CWG unlawful and an injunction preventing Defendants from relying on its work. Either remedy would fully repair any injury suffered by Plaintiffs from the FACA violations they allege if they ultimately prevail on the merits, rendering a preliminary injunction unnecessary.

Third, Plaintiffs have not shown that the balance of the equities or the public interest weighs in their favor. These factors favor allowing the Government to use the information provided by the scientists of the CWG, promoting dialogue based on honest scrutiny and scientific transparency in the public sphere, and not prematurely pretermitting an ongoing rulemaking process. Even if the Court were inclined to grant some relief, the remedies sought by Plaintiffs are overbroad. Even when a FACA violation is proven on the merits, injunctions preventing the use of committee work are a highly disfavored remedy, as declaratory relief can fully remedy all injuries alleged. Plaintiffs have certainly shown no entitlement to such an extraordinary remedy at the preliminary injunction stage. And because the CWG has been dissolved, no practical purpose is served by an order compelling it to comply with FACA’s procedural requirements going forward. Nor is extension of the comment period on EPA’s NPRM warranted or proper. Plaintiffs cannot circumvent the Clean Air Act or APA finality requirements by alleging a FACA violation in order to indefinitely delay a pending rulemaking with which they disagree.

Plaintiffs’ Reply

For months, Defendants brazenly violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act. They constituted the Climate Working Group (CWG) in secret, had it meet in secret to produce a report with advice and recommendations for policymakers, and then provided the report to EPA in secret for use in a proposal to rescind EPA’s Endangerment Finding. Defendants present no serious argument that they did not violate FACA in taking all of these actions. Instead, when these actions were challenged in court, Defendants purported to dissolve the CWG the day before their opposition was due, and in their filing the next day, they argued that the dissolution mooted the case and left the Court powerless to provide relief for their many legal violations.

But the rule of law is not a game of catch me if you can. DOE, EPA, and the CWG violated FACA with every action they took producing and utilizing the CWG Report, and those unlawful actions continue to harm Plaintiffs in myriad ways. Indeed, Defendants do not dispute that the CWG lacked fairly balanced views—including views representative of those held by Plaintiffs—and was subject to inappropriate influence from Secretary Wright. The continued existence and use of the CWG Report produced with these legal infirmities significantly harms Plaintiffs, and there are multiple forms of declaratory, injunctive and Administrative Procedure Act relief that this Court may enter to redress these injuries.

Amicus Brief American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce

Amicus writes to explain why censoring the CWG Report in EPA’s ongoing rulemaking is inappropriate and beyond the power of this Court. The extraordinary request for censorship here should fail for multiple reasons, but AmFree covers five.

First, Plaintiffs lack standing to seek relief against EPA because censoring the study would not redress any cognizable Article III harm. See Nat. Res. Def. Council v. Peña, 147 F.3d 1012, 1020–23 (D.C. Cir. 1998) (so holding). Second, the Clean Air Act strips district courts of power to enjoin EPA’s actions in ongoing Clean Air Act rulemaking proceedings or to control the agency’s rulemaking docket, making courts of appeals (in this case, the D.C. Circuit) the “sole forum” for these disputes. See 42 U.S.C. § 7607(b), (d)(8). Third, censorship remedies are not available under the Administrative Procedure Act (“APA”) or through a writ of mandamus, because such an order does not compel a discrete action required by FACA. Fourth, censoring the government’s use of the CWG Report is punishment that exceeds this Court’s remedial equity jurisdiction. Fifth, Plaintiffs cannot show irreparable harm because they have adequate avenues for judicial relief namely, challenging EPA’s rulemaking record in the D.C. Circuit, after a final rule.

Plaintiffs “are champing at the bit to challenge EPA’s anticipated rule [repealing] carbon dioxide emission[]” standards for new motor vehicles. In re Murray Energy Corp., 788 F.3d 330, 333 (D.C. Cir. 2015) (Kavanaugh, J.). “But courts have never reviewed proposed rules, notwithstanding the costs that parties may routinely incur in preparing for anticipated final rules.” Id. at 335. This Court should not do so here.

What’s Next for CWG

Steven Koonin writes this excerpt in Climate Change Dispatch article

Our report is the first from Washington in years that deviates from the narrative of a climate headed for catastrophe. That these findings surprised many speaks to a governmental failure to communicate climate science accurately to the public.

Reports like ours may draw a lot of anger, but our work accurately portrays important aspects of climate science.

Our work has attracted strong criticism, despite its grounding in established science. Almost 60,000 comments were submitted to the Federal Register during the month after its publication, and the Environmental Defense Fund and Union of Concerned Scientists filed a lawsuit to prevent the Energy Department or Environmental Protection Agency from using the report in decision-making.

Most of these challenges have no scientific backing.

Though scientists supporting the so-called consensus on climate change have organized several serious critiques, these at most add detail and nuance to our findings, without negating the report’s central points.

They still merit a response, which will form the next round in an overdue public debate on the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.

Climate policies must balance the risks of climate change against a response’s costs, efficacy, and collateral effects.

Reports like ours may draw a lot of anger, but our work accurately portrays important aspects of climate science. Acknowledging the facts is essential for informed policy decisions.

Mr. Koonin is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and the author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”

Expectations Belém COP30 Nov. 2025

Posted on September 12 by Ron Clutz

From November 10-21, 2025, Brazil will host COP30 in the Amazonian city of Belém, with tens of thousands of delegates, journalists, civil society, and industry representatives expected to attend the summit. The COP meeting serves as the main decision-making platform for the parties to the UNFCCC and convenes annually, unless determined otherwise. These conferences are designed to assess how well countries are meeting their climate goals and to track each party’s progress toward the overarching objectives of the Convention. Source: COP30: What to Expect from Fiker Institute, based in Dubai.

What’s On the Agenda

COP30 must do the difficult job of restoring confidence in the process following the disappointment of COP29. In preparation for COP30, the summit’s President, Brazilian Ambassador André Corrêa do Lago, released a fourth open letter addressed to all delegates, laying out the Action Agenda for Brazil’s hosting of the conference. Rather than introducing new frameworks or making fresh promises, the Brazilian presidency has signaled a desire to focus on delivering on existing commitments, which amount to approximately 400 pledges made over the last few COPs. The letter identifies six thematic priorities:

♦ accelerating the transition in energy and transport systems;
♦ safeguarding biodiversity;
♦ overhauling agri-food systems;
♦ building climate-resilient cities;
♦ advancing human development; and
♦ unlocking finance and technology.

What Does perplexity.ai Expect from COP30?

Q: About the IPCC COP30, what failures are likely to occur?

A: The most likely failures at IPCC COP30 will include insufficient financial commitments, lack of ambitious national climate targets, deadlocks in negotiations, and ineffective enforcement of agreed actions.

Persistent Finance Shortfalls

- Developed countries have repeatedly failed to meet climate finance pledges, particularly the $100 billion per year commitment for developing nations.
- Weak enforcement means finance promises often remain symbolic, undermining support for vulnerable nations.

Lack of Ambitious Climate Targets

- Many countries are expected to delay or avoid submitting stronger climate plans (NDCs), threatening global efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.
- Negotiation deadlocks, such as disagreements on monitoring national progress, may stop meaningful advances.

Fragmented and Inadequate Adaptation

- Adaptation efforts are often incremental, poorly funded, and not well-integrated into broader policy plans, leaving communities at risk.
- Planning is prioritized over actual implementation, causing delays in urgent climate action.

Continued Fossil Fuel Dependence

- Global fossil fuel use remains high, with little meaningful reduction, despite decades of negotiations.
- Major emitting countries may continue to obstruct ambitious global decarbonization agreements.

Weak Enforcement and Accountability

- With insufficient accountability or sanctions for non-compliance, many countries may not deliver on their climate promises, resulting in fragmented progress.

Inadequate Response to Deforestation and Food Systems

- COPs have failed to effectively address tropical deforestation and emissions from food systems, both critical for climate adaptation and mitigation.
- Lack of binding, global treaties against deforestation and food-system emissions is a major gap.

In summary, the most likely failures at COP30 will center on inadequate funding, weak and delayed national commitments, governance gaps, continued reliance on fossil fuels, and the lack of implementation for both mitigation and adaptation pledges.

Q: How could finance pledges fail again at COP30?

A: Finance pledges at COP30 could fail again due to several recurring issues: vague commitments, lack of accountability, limited transparency, under-developed reporting mechanisms, geopolitical tensions, and insufficient mobilization of private capital.

Vague and Non-Binding Commitments

- Previous COP promises (like the $100 billion annual goal) were not legally enforceable, allowing donor nations to fall short without consequence.
- Language in COP30 agreements may again lack concrete deadlines, binding obligations, or penalty mechanisms.

Ineffective Accountability and Transparency

- Tracking finance flows—especially from private sources or indirect support—is technically complex and prone to inconsistent or optimistic reporting.
- Transparency protocols, such as biennial reports, will not come into effect until 2028, meaning interim pledges may remain unverifiable or inflated.

Geopolitical and Economic Constraints

- High debt burdens and tough capital markets in both donor and developing countries could limit new investments or redirect funds away from climate action.
- International tensions, recession fears, or shifts in political priorities may reduce the willingness of major economies to contribute robustly.

Inadequate Mobilization of Private Sector Capital

- COP30’s ambitious $1.3 trillion annual finance goal relies on mobilizing private investment, but there is chronic uncertainty in how private money will be counted, standardized, and guaranteed for climate impact.
- Public sector funding alone is insufficient, and incentives for private sector participation remain weak or poorly designed.

Delayed Implementation of New Strategies

- Key reports and strategies for unlocking climate finance (such as the “Baku to Belém Roadmap”) may not translate into immediate action, leading to a gap between pledges and real monetary flows.
- Developing countries face challenges in preparing robust project pipelines, which delays the actual disbursement of pledged funds.

In summary, finance pledges at COP30 are at high risk of failing due to weak enforcement, slow implementation of transparency tools, geopolitical uncertainty, untested reliance on private investment, and past tendencies to over-promise and under-deliver.

Background COP Briefing Post

Nine years ago French Mathematicians spoke out prior to COP21 in Paris, and their words provide a rational briefing for COP30 beginning Belém this November. In a nutshell:

Fighting Global Warming is Absurd, Costly and Pointless.

Absurd because of no reliable evidence that anything unusual is happening in our climate.
Costly because trillions of dollars are wasted on immature, inefficient technologies that serve only to make cheap, reliable energy expensive and intermittent.
Pointless because we do not control the weather anyway.

The prestigious Société de Calcul Mathématique (Society for Mathematical Calculation) issued a detailed 195-page White Paper that presents a blistering point-by-point critique of the key dogmas of global warming. The synopsis is blunt and extremely well documented. Here are extracts from the opening statements of the first three chapters of the SCM White Paper with my bolds and images.

Sisyphus at work.

Chapter 1: The crusade is absurd
There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world‘s climate is in any way ‘disturbed.’ It is variable, as it has always been, but rather less so now than during certain periods or geological eras. Modern methods are far from being able to accurately measure the planet‘s global temperature even today, so measurements made 50 or 100 years ago are even less reliable. Concentrations of CO2 vary, as they always have done; the figures that are being released are biased and dishonest. Rising sea levels are a normal phenomenon linked to upthrust buoyancy; they are nothing to do with so-called global warming. As for extreme weather events — they are no more frequent now than they have been in the past. We ourselves have processed the raw data on hurricanes….

Chapter 2: The crusade is costly
Direct aid for industries that are completely unviable (such as photovoltaics and wind turbines) but presented as ‘virtuous’ runs into billions of euros, according to recent reports published by the Cour des Comptes (French Audit Office) in 2013. But the highest cost lies in the principle of ‘energy saving,’ which is presented as especially virtuous. Since no civilization can develop when it is saving energy, ours has stopped developing: France now has more than three million people unemployed — it is the price we have to pay for our virtue….

Chapter 3: The crusade is pointless
Human beings cannot, in any event, change the climate. If we in France were to stop all industrial activity (let’s not talk about our intellectual activity, which ceased long ago), if we were to eradicate all trace of animal life, the composition of the atmosphere would not alter in any measurable, perceptible way. To explain this, let us make a comparison with the rotation of the planet: it is slowing down. To address that, we might be tempted to ask the entire population of China to run in an easterly direction. But, no matter how big China and its population are, this would have no measurable impact on the Earth‘s rotation.

cg565e788a82606

Full text in pdf format is available in English at link below:

The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade
White Paper drawn up by the Société de Calcul Mathématique SA
(Mathematical Modelling Company, Corp.)

A Second report was published in 2016 entitled: Global Warming and Employment, which analyzes in depth the economic destruction from ill-advised climate change policies.

The two principal themes are that jobs are disappearing and that the destructive forces are embedded in our societies.

Jobs are Disappearing discusses issues such as:

The State is incapable of devising and implementing an industrial policy.

The fundamental absurdity of the concept of sustainable development

Biofuels an especially absurd policy leading to ridiculous taxes and job losses.

EU policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40% drives jobs elsewhere while being pointless: the planet has never asked for it, is completely unaware of it, and will never notice it!

The War against the Car and Road Maintenance undercuts economic mobility while destroying transportation sector jobs.

Solar and wind energy are weak, diffuse, and inconsistent, inadequate to power modern civilization.

Food production activities are attacked as being “bad for the planet.”

So-called Green jobs are entirely financed by subsidies.

The Brutalizing Whip discusses the damages to public finances and to social wealth and well-being, including these topics:

Taxes have never been so high

The Government is borrowing more and more

Dilapidated infrastructure

Instead of job creation, Relocations and Losses

The wastefulness associated with the new forms of energy

Return to the economy of an underdeveloped country

What is our predicament?
Four Horsemen are bringing down our societies:

The Ministry of Ecology (climate and environment);
Journalists;
Scientists;
Corporation Environmentalist Departments.

Steps required to recover from this demise:

Go back to the basic rules of research.
Go back to the basic rules of law
Do not trust international organizations
Leave the planet alone
Beware of any premature optimism

Conclusion

Climate lemmings

The real question is this: how have policymakers managed to make such absurd decisions, to blinker themselves to such a degree, when so many means of scientific investigation are available? The answer is simple: as soon as something is seen as being green, as being good for the planet, all discussion comes to an end and any scientific analysis becomes pointless or counterproductive. The policymakers will not listen to anyone or anything; they take all sorts of hasty, contradictory, damaging and absurd decisions. When will they finally be held to account?

Footnote:

The above cartoon image of climate talks includes water rising over politicians’ feet. But actual observations made in Fiji (presiding over 2017 talks in Bonn) show sea levels are stable (link below).

Fear Not For Fiji

In 2016 SCM issued a report Global Temperatures Available data and critical analysis

It is a valuable description of the temperature metrics and issues regarding climate analysis. They conclude:

None of the information on global temperatures is of any scientific value, and it should not
be used as a basis for any policy decisions. It is perfectly clear that:

there are far too few temperature sensors to give us a picture of the planet’s temperature;
we do not know what such a temperature might mean because nobody has given it
any specific physical significance;
the data have been subject to much dissimulation and manipulation. There is a
clear will not to mention anything that might be reassuring, and to highlight things
that are presented as worrying;
despite all this, direct use of the available figures does not indicate any genuine
trend towards global warming!

Why Fossil Fuels Still Rule

Posted on September 11 by Ron Clutz

Kite & Key explain in their video, transcript in italics with my bolds and added images.

Tech executives. Heads of state. Brilliant scientists and engineers.

They’re some of the most talented and respected individuals in the world — and, in recent years, they’ve all come together behind a common purpose.

They’ve marshaled their talents — and trillions of dollars in cash — to move the world beyond the era of fossil fuels.

What can you accomplish when you have that much talent working towards a single goal?

Would you believe … almost nothing?

In recent years, the world has gone to extraordinary lengths to break its dependence on fossil fuels.

We’ve signed international treaties.

We’ve started enormous government programs.

We’ve launched corporate sustainability initiatives.

We’ve vandalized Stonehenge.

Not sure why that last one was necessary. Druids are about as low-carbon as they come.

Now, what do we have to show for all of these efforts to move beyond fossil fuels?

Well, it’s not nothing. But if you squint even just a little … it looks like nothing.

Here’s what we mean. Between 2015 and 2023, the world invested over $12 trillion in alternative energy. By the end of that period, we were investing nearly double as much in alternatives as we were in fossil fuels.ⁱ

And the consequences of all that effort?

Well, according to the International Energy Agency, in the decade from 2013 to 2023 the percentage of global energy derived from fossil fuels declined from 82 percent … to 80 percent.ⁱⁱ

Since 1965 oil, gas and coal (FF, sometimes termed “Thermal”) averaged 88% of PE consumed, ranging from 93% in 1965 to 81% in 2024. Source: Energy Institute

Now, none of this is to make fun of these efforts. The people behind these initiatives are often very, very smart. Which ought to make us even more curious about why they’re still not able to move the needle much.

Why, despite all their efforts, do fossil fuels continue to be the world’s primary energy sources?

Well, here’s the thing: It’s not because of a lack of money or initiative.
It’s because of the way energy actually works.

Because basically our entire existence — lighting and heating our homes, traveling to work, getting food onto the shelves of your grocery store — is dependent on energy, we need our power sources to be reliable, affordable, and abundant. And on that front … fossil fuels have proven hard to beat.

There are a lot of reasons for that, but here are three of the biggest ones.

First: efficiency. Fossil fuels allow you to get a lot of energy out of very little material.

For example, to generate as much energy as you get from just one oil well in the Permian Basin of West Texas you’d need to build 10 windmills, each about 330 feet high.ⁱⁱⁱ And because demand is only going up — the world uses 40 percent more energy now than it did just 20 years ago^iv — we’re deeply dependent on whichever sources can give us the most bang for our buck.

To replace the electricity from now closed Indian Point nuclear plant would require covering Albany County with wind turbines.

Second: reliability. Energy buffs like to talk about something called the capacity factor, which in plain English means the amount of time a power source can generate its maximum amount of power. For solar, it’s less than 25 percent of the time. For wind, it’s about 34 percent. By contrast, coal is at over 42 percent and natural gas is at essentially 60 percent.^v

Third: storage. Fossil fuels are easy and cheap to store, which is necessary to make sure you’ve got enough supply to know the lights will stay on.

How cheap? The costs of storing a barrel of oil or the equivalent amount of natural gas is about $1 a month. For coal, it’s even cheaper.^vi To store the same amount of energy from wind or solar — which would require a lithium battery — costs 30 times as much.^vii

All of which is to say that when you look at the physics and the economics
— you can start to see why America still gets more than
80 percent of its energy from fossil fuels.^viii

Which, by the way, is pretty standard for wealthy countries: They talk a lot about renewables, but when it comes right down to it?

The U.K. gets about 75 percent of its energy from fossil fuels. As does Germany. In Japan it’s over 83 percent. In Australia it’s 85 percent.^ix Not because they aren’t trying to move away from fossil fuels, but because they’re coming up against the reality that fossil fuels are the only sources that can give them as much power as their countries need.

There is, however, at least one noteworthy counterexample: France, which, as of 2023, relies on fossil fuels for less than 50 percent of its energy needs.^x How do they do that? Well, here’s the catch: It’s not because of things like wind and solar. France gets over 1/3 of its power from nuclear, a carbon-free energy source that can run at full power over 92 percent of the time.^xi

Which is an interesting idea … that the world’s wealthy democracies are largely ignoring. In fact, of the 61 new nuclear reactors currently being built around the world, 29 of them are in China.^xii And many of the rest are in places like Bangladesh, Turkey, and Egypt.

But there’s one other factor we have to take into consideration when we think about why fossil fuels have endured — and it’s a big one. When we talk about energy, many of us think in terms of electricity. But in reality, America’s single largest use of energy is for transportation. And nearly 90 percent of that energy comes from oil.^xiii

Why? Well, for a clarifying example, think about the journey of a package that you buy online. Maybe it comes from overseas on a cargo ship or, if you’re really fancy, a plane. It gets sent to a warehouse, loaded onto a truck, sent off to a series of processing centers, and then arrives seamlessly … on your neighbor’s porch, for some reason.

Now, this process is invisible to most of us, but if we tried to dramatically change the fuel sources involved … well, let’s just say we’d notice.

Want that package to come on an electric plane? Given the current limits of the technology, it could travel a distance of about 30 miles.^xiv

Want it to cross the ocean on a battery-powered cargo ship? The journeys those vessels take can run anywhere from 15 to 50 days.^xv The biggest battery available could get you … one day of power.^xvi Which would ensure your package was speedily delivered to the bottom of the Western Pacific.

Want an electric big rig to move your package across the country? Because they can travel less than half as far as a normal truck before they have to recharge, are three times as expensive to buy, and would require trucking companies to roughly double their number of both drivers and vehicles, your package would arrive much later and be way more expensive.^xvii

In fact, it’s estimated that moving to all-electric trucking would be so costly that on its own it’d create a one percent increase in inflation for the entire country.^xviii

Bottom line: The decisions as to which energy sources we rely on aren’t arbitrary.
The world as we know it is powered by reliable fuel sources like
natural gas, oil, and — when we’ll allow it — nuclear.

Plenty of people would like to move beyond those sources in theory. But when they experienced what the world actually looks like without them — higher prices, slower travel, less reliable electricity — chances are there’d be a lot fewer takers.

Except the Druids. These dudes would be fine.

DOE Climate Report a Box of Surprises for the Unversed

Posted on September 10 by Ron Clutz

The Kim Strassel interview at WSJ is Energy Secretary Chris Wright on Resetting the Climate Debate. Below in italics is a transcript from the closed captions with my bolds and added images.

The Department of Energy’s new climate report is making waves, offering a fresh look at the alarmist claims pushed by special-interest groups and prior administrations. The report’s five scientists lay out data showing that while climate change is real, it isn’t the threat suggested by media or the climate lobby. On this episode of All Things, Energy Secretary Chris Wright takes Kim Strassel through the findings, including the upsides of warming, the minimal economic effects of climate change, the limits of U.S. policy actions and the lack of evidence that climate is related to the frequency or intensity of extreme weather.

KS: Tell us why you commissioned that report.

CW: The climate chain is a real physical phenomenon. It’s scientifically fascinating. It is a truly global issue. But you know there’s certain facts and data about it. There’s certain implications about it. And most everything I hear in the media, in the news from politicians, from protesters when I speak at universities, they’re just so unaware of the basics of what is climate change.

And and to give one example there, you hear these kids, I’m choking, I’m coughing on so much carbon pollution, you know. And look, the Clean Air Act was about real pollutants that do make you cough, that are toxic, that do have, you know, acute human impacts in local concentrations. As for carbon dioxide, I say it’s like oxygen and water, H2O, CO2 is one of the three most critical molecules for life on Earth. It is the essential life giving plant food that makes our life possible.

So it does absorb infrared radiation. So we can have a real dialogue about too much of it or too little of it. which is actually I think a bigger risk. But you know calling it a pollutant is just nuts.

KS: So let’s go through some of the big takeaways of it because I think people would be amazed that it’s not what they hear in the media every day. One important thing that I think is is notable and I’ll just say it at the the top is that you know that no one in this entire report is denying that the climate is changing. We all agree that it’s changing. It’s always changing in some way.

One thing that might surprise people was that some aspects of a changing climate can actually be good. Because you only ever hear about the apocalyptic points. But the report goes into some detail about how this can be better for agricultural production. It also talks about throughout history, cold has been a much greater threat to human health than heat. More people die from cold every year.

A 2015 study by 22 scientists from around the world found that cold kills over 17 times more people than heat. Thus the planet’s recent modest warming has been saving millions of lives.

It might also surprise people that we still don’t know the extent to which humans really affect the climate. I would like you to talk about that because that’s going to be really confusing to some folks out there because all they hear is, the consensus is that humans are causing massive damaging climate problems. That’s what you constantly get from the media refrain on this. How do you put those through things? How do you explain that to folks who might be surprised with what this report says compared to what they have heard non-stop for more than a decade now?

CW: Of course everyone says that, Republican politicians, Democratic politicians, the media everywhere because that’s what they hear. But it shows they don’t actually read, and of course, why would people read these giant bureaucratic clunky reports from intergovernmental panel on climate change, the IPCC that you hear about? The problem with the IPCC is actually the layers of reporting. There’s the report that’s by the scientists, and then there’s the release or the summary for policy makers as they call it in the IPCC world that’s written by politicians and it is striking there are things in the summary for policy makers just directly contradictory to the science actually in the reports themselves.

And the biggest thing there that everybody hears is that weather, extreme storms are getting stronger and more frequent and the damage of this is taking an increasing toll on society and hence we’re in a climate emergency. None of that is true and none of that is clear in the intergovernmental panel on climate change reports. These are the reports written by people that have dedicated their life to climate change.

If you thought ah you know it’s a real thing but it’s not that big of a deal, you’re not going to spend your whole life as an author of an IPCC report. It’s sort of self- selecting for the people most interested in climate change. They’re honest scientists, for the large majority of them, but they’re the most interested in this thing. Maybe they think it’s the most important thing, the most exciting to them.

In these IPCC reports, there’s the collection of data on extreme weather: hurricanes, no increase in the frequency or intensity of hurricanes. floods, droughts, no increase in the frequency or intensity of them. The only the only meaningful extreme weather event that shows a trend and it’s not a huge trend is tornadoes and it’s downward. There’s like 50% less extreme high energy tornadoes today than 50 years ago. We don’t know why but you know that one’s sort of a favorable trend.

Most all of them have variations from year to year. Some of them have decadal oscillations. So they they go through phases of stronger and weaker but none of them show a scary upward trend. And my punch line, if you look at the deaths from extreme weather, they’ve just declined like a stone throughout the last hundred years, including in the last 20 or 30 years. So your risk of dying from extreme weather is the lowest we’ve ever had data on.

But yet 20% of kids report nightmares about fears of climate change. Like, how do those go together? And that’s despite the fact that we have much greater populations in a lot of these areas that are hit.

And that’s all useful information out there as well about not conflating the economic damage of a of a storm with meaning that it’s actually a bigger or worse storm. It just might mean that there were more things in its path to actually get wrecked. And people conflate those things too often with really sloppy consequences for the science.

KS: In the broader debate, if you look at many areas of science, for example we’ve been studying physics for millennia. There’s a been a lot of work done and a lot of people coming up with theories and then them getting knocked down. And we crawl our way forward but we have gained a pretty good understanding of many things in nature. Still climate science is new in the grand scheme of things, kind of in its infancy and we’re still learning a lot. Is that an accurate statement?

CW: Oh yeah. Look, it’s an incredibly complicated system. This is a tightly coupled, chaotic system. And you know, best exemplified by weather forecasts. We get better at weather forecasts now. 50 years ago, maybe you could have a reasonable projection out four or five days. Today, it’s closer to two weeks. There’s people in the AI world telling me we can do a reasonable projection all the way out to a month today. I’ve never seen that, but that is a claim of massive advanced computing going out a month. That’s just how complicated these phenomenon are.

So when you come back and report that with this little knob CO2 concentration, you’re going to dial in to a tenth of a degree the temperature at the end of the century. That should be greeted with a lot of skepticism. There’s some reality. It is a warming fact. There’s a bias. There’s an upward average trend. But yeah, this you know attributing this storm, this much damage came from climate change.These are stretching science beyond science and going into science fiction.

There are more items from this report that I think might surprise people. It is very important to broaden this out to a couple other findings that would surprise people One point is that there’s not been so far and they’re not projected to be a lot of negative economic effects from this. And moreover the US’s ability to change global climate is extremely limited. Even if we were to take some very drastic policy measures it would generally have a negligible effect on global climate trends.

And that’s another part of the IPCC reports that not only is never read, but it’s never even talked about. In the past, I put out the summary of what are the economic conclusions of the IPCC authors. They survey all the economic literature on climate change. And yet our current warming trends, the projections are that maybe at the end of this century, we might lose a few tenths of a percent or maybe two, three or four percent per capita income, if we do nothing about climate change by the end of this century.

But in that same model with economic growth projected ahead, we’re about 400% richer than we are today. So, our great great grandchildren might be 400% richer than us or in the worst case, if you take the outer bounds scenarios, well, they might only be 380 or 85% richer than us. I don’t think that qualifies as a climate catastrophe or this disaster meme around something projected to be relatively modest. And even in the words of the climate economists, they’ll say, “Look, climate impacts are nowhere near as important as education policy or trade impacts or efficiencies and other things.” So people studying these things closely, I think, are quite sober and reasonable about them.

The problem is you never hear from them. Only the most extreme ones that made the dramatic, you know, that, you know, the Statue of Liberty is going to be underwater, you know, the people that make the crazy claims, they’re the newsworthy ones. So they’re the ones that are put on TV all the time, but they’re not representative at all of the consensus.

Now consensus does not mean correct, but just the center point of people looking at this. Yeah. That you know their centrist view of climate change is a very slow moving but significant process. Nothing about alarmism, nothing about disaster. You know all the crazy stuff you hear is out of line with mainstream climate science and mainstream climate economics, but not the five authors of this report. They’re just making accessible to the broader public or at least the moderately scientifically inclined public to get in tune with what we think we know about climate change to date. They don’t talk a lot about projections because no one knows the future, but I think we’ve got a hundred years of pretty good data. That’s a good place to start when you’re trying to think how might things be in another 10 or 50 or 100 years.

KS: Yeah. And that’s what I loved about this report. If you go through it, every single statement in there is just common sense and you can’t really disagree with it if you’re looking at the numbers and the data. They really summed up the state of climate science at the moment.

Why I like this report and the way you framed it in your introduction at the beginning is that we as a country and as a member of this globe, we’re always facing myriad problems. And if you don’t have the whole picture, it’s impossible to prioritize which of those to focus on because by the way, we do have limited focus and limited resources to sort of manage some of these to a certain degree. In your introduction you put that perhaps the world’s greatest problem at the moment is actually energy poverty. And to fix that, to truly lift people up, we need reliable, affordable energy.

CW: And that’s just common sense. And in fact, I would say that’s why President Trump got elected. People were eventually tiring of these kind of alarmist claims that didn’t seem to make much sense. You know, every every 10 years the world’s going to end 10 years from now. And and honestly, unless you’re watching the news, no one would notice climate change if it was not in the news. If I were to change the temperature in the room you’re sitting right now by a couple degrees Fahrenheit over 20 minutes, you wouldn’t even notice it unless you’re very sensitive. I’m not. But that two degrees Fahrenheit, that’s the warming the planet has observed over a century, you know. But if I did it in 10 minutes or 15 minutes, you wouldn’t notice it.

So, President Trump got elected because, you know, 15%, 20% of Americans are struggling to pay their monthly electricity bill. They’re struggling to pay for gasoline to get to work. They’re struggling to start a new business because energy costs and energy connections are more expensive. That’s a problem in the here and now.

And that’s not an unrelated problem. We’ve driven up the cost of energy in the United States and Europe has done it dramatically all in the name of combating climate change. You know, we’re barely tweaking global emissions of greenhouse gases that might lead the planet to be a hundredth of a degree cooler in the year 2100. That’s the potential output if we implement these policies, but yet the short-term impacts are just crushing people’s opportunities and the ability to pay their bills. That’s getting way way off track.

That’s why the American public elected President Trump and maybe why President Trump tapped me. What I want to do is engage the public in this discussion: what do we know about climate change? What do we know about energy systems and how they could change and what kind of trade offs do we want to make? And the more people get exposed to the facts, the more I think people become realistic.

You talked about affordability problems in the United States. Let me just give one other punchline, World Health Organization data. Around two to three million people die every year from indoor air pollution. And that’s because two billion people, a quarter of humanity, cook their daily meals and heat their homes burning wood or dung or agricultural waste indoors. That smoke is just a deadly toxic pollutant that kills millions and crushes the freedom of women and children who gather the wood and spend hours a day over these smoky fires.

That’s an energy crisis we know how to solve. It’s affordable. It’s reliable and massively transformative of lives. But yet we never hear about that. That’s clearly a bigger priority than shaving a few hundreds of a degree off global temperatures three or four generations from now.

KS: Last question here, I do just want to ask a political question. Those of us who believe in free markets, who want opportunity, abundance, you know, the ability for people to succeed and have more, have understood a long time ago that if the activist climate agenda were imposed from above and government, that’s just an end to most of those free market ambitions. Because in order to to follow the agenda they want, which is total control over what you drive and what you eat and what kind of job you have and what kind of house you live in. You squash that freedom.

And I think a lot of free marketers have nonetheless struggled to know how to engage in these climate wars. For a while they said, “Well, the climate’s not changing.” And then for a while it was like, “It’ll just cost too much.” And then for a while it was, “Well, we’ll just have to do everything all of the above.” You seem to be saying, actually, you want to talk about the science, let’s talk about the science. And what it actually shows is that we don’t need to go down that road of of stripping everything away to control everything given the actual level of what we’re dealing with here. Is that right?

CW: That’s right, Kim. Yeah. And I say two things created the modern world. doubled our life expectancy, you know, created planes, trains, and automobiles and modern medicine. The growth of human freedom, bottom-up social organization or human liberty, and the explosion in affordable energy from the arrival of hydrocarbons. First coal, then oil, then wood, and now the derivative energy sources of hydrocarbons like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar. You can’t have any of those without abundant hydrocarbons.

And this climate movement opposes both of them. They’re making energy more expensive. They’re trying to get in the way of the main energy source. Hydrocarbons were 85% of global energy when I was born and they’re 85% of global energy today. Turns out it’s hard to change the energy system, but they’re making them more expensive.

And to your point, they’re going back to top-down control. The government’s going to decide what’s virtuous, what car you can buy, how you can heat your home. We’re going to force you to electrically heat your home, which is two to five times more expensive than burning natural gas. And when you heat your home electrically, guess what? The US’s main source of electricity comes from natural gas.

You’re not even changing. You’re not reducing gas consumption. You’re just making it more expensive. But it’s about political control. It’s about reducing human freedom. So, let’s do this. Let’s shine light on all of this on the trade-offs we’re making. And I think Americans will choose a much more reasonable, informed pathway for energy and climate policy going forward.

I’m hugely optimistic. Shining light on this, I think, is going to get us to a much better place.

The Sea is Not Coming to Get You

Posted on September 9 by Ron Clutz

Issues and Insights Editorial Board published Another Crack Appears In The Global Warming Narrative. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Al Gore famously warned that sea level rise caused by man’s use of fossil fuels was going to kill us. Barack Obama implied that he had magic powers that would control surging sea levels. A fresh study shows just how dishonest this pair and the many others who did their best to misinform the public have been.

Gore’s 2006 propaganda film told us to beware of sea levels rising by 20 feet, devastating New York and Florida. The uber-narcissistic Obama promised an adoring crowd that his nomination to be the Democratic Party’s 2008 presidential nominee “was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.” California Gov. Jerry Brown predicted a little more than a decade ago that collapsing glaciers would submerge both the Los Angeles and San Francisco international airports.

These of course are just three of many examples of alarmists, hacks, globalist busybodies, NASA eggheads, academic ideologues and true believers fear-mongering over sea-level rise.

Obama, no climate refugee he, was later roasted for buying oceanfront compounds in Martha’s Vineyard and Hawaii. The purchases clearly show he didn’t believe what he said – he was just another political hack appealing for votes and hoping to burnish a legacy before he even set foot in the White House.

But how can we know it’s just fear-mongering?

Actual science, not Gore’s junk variety, now tells us that “approximately 95% of the suitable locations” researchers looked at showed “no statistically significant acceleration of the rate of sea level rise.” This “suggests that local, non-climatic phenomena are a plausible cause of the accelerated sea level rise observed at the remaining 5% of the suitable locations.”

“On average,” the European paper says, “the rate of rise projected by the IPCC is biased upward with approximately 2 mm per year in comparison with the observed rate.”

As it turns out:

The majority of the local causes of rapid sea level rise (or drop) appear to be geologic. Tectonic motion explains sudden changes of sea level rise found in a few places. More gradual but rapid rise (or fall) of sea level is mostly caused by glacial isostatic adjustment and in a few isolated cases by an excessive sediment load.

What else do we know about the oceans? It’s been well established that sea levels, like Earth’s climate, have been constantly changing without any human influence.

We acknowledge that we live in an era of rising sea levels, just as we live in a time in which we are escaping the lower temperatures of the Little Ice Age that lasted until the late 19th century, if not, according to some researchers, the early 20th century. But the rise we’re seeing is slow, not remotely catastrophic, and not outside of historical norms (even though the hysterics continue to claim the rise is “accelerating” and is “unprecedented”).

The climate cranks, warming crackpots, and those possessed of Marxphilia won’t be deterred by this or any other scientific evidence. But it’s news that can help persuade larger swaths of voters that the global warming scare is a con. As more Americans learn the truth, the radicals and zealots who perpetuate the fiction will fade into the oblivion they deserve.

See Also

Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update

Fear Not For Fiji

September 2025 Arctic Ice Outlook

Posted on September 8 by Ron Clutz

Figure 1. Distribution of SIO contributions for July estimates of September 2025 pan-Arctic sea-ice extent. Public/citizen contributions include Sun.

2025: July Report from Sea Ice Prediction Network

The July 2025 Outlook received 22 pan-Arctic contributions (Figure 1). This year’s median forecasted value for pan-Arctic September sea-ice extent is 4.27 million square kilometers with an interquartile range of 4.13 to 4.54 million square kilometers. This is lower than observed in 2023 (4.37 million square miles) and 2024 (4.35 million square miles) observed in September. The lowest sea-ice extent forecast is 3.38 million square kilometers, from Sun, which would be a new record low for the satellite period (1979-present); the highest sea-ice extent forecast is 5.17. . . The observed extent values are from the NSIDC Sea Ice Index (Fetterer et al., 2017), based on the NASA Team algorithm sea ice concentration fields distributed by the NASA Snow and Ice Distributed Active Archive Center (DAAC) at NSIDC (DiGirolamo et al., 2022; Meier et al., 2021).

These are predictions as of August 20 for the September 2025 monthly average ice extent reported by NOAA Sea Ice Index (SII). This post provides a look at the 2025 Year To Date (YTD) based on monthly averages comparing MASIE and SII datasets. (19 year average is 2006 to 2024 inclusive).

The graph puts 2025 into recent historical perspective. Note how 2025 was slightly below the 18-year average for the first 3 months, then tracked closely to average through August. The outlier 2012 provided the highest March maximum as well as the lowest September minimum, coinciding with the Great Arctic Cyclone that year. 2007 began the period with the lowest minimum except for 2012. SIIv.4 2025 tracked closely to MASIE the first 6 months, then dropped lower July and in August 459k km2 below MASIE 2025 and also lower than 2007 and 2012.

The table below provides the monthly Arctic ice extent averages for comparisons (all are M km2)

Monthly	MASIE 2025	SIIv.4 2025	MASIE -SII	MASIE-19yr AVE	SIIv.4-19yr AVE
Jan	13.206	13.131	0.075	-0.583	-0.470
Feb	13.802	13.745	0.057	-0.878	-0.715
Mar	14.274	14.140	0.134	-0.587	-0.545
Apr	13.846	13.910	-0.063	-0.249	-0.109
May	12.497	12.559	-0.062	-0.119	-0.108
June	10.510	10.485	0.025	-0.306	-0.388
July	7.942	7.660	0.282	-0.345	-0.375
Aug	5.854	5.395	0.459	-0.020	-0.220

The first two data columns are the 2025 YTD shown by MASIE and SII, with the MASIE surpluses in column three. Column four shows MASIE 2025 compared to MASIE 19 year averages, while column five shows SII 2025 compared to SII 19 year averages. YTD August MASIE started the year in deficits to average but recovered in spring to virtually match average in August. SII was below its averages throughout and much lower than MASIE in July, and in August down by nearly half a Wadham.

Current Arctic Ice Extent Conditions

This 30 day period shows the annual dip in arctic ice extents, the daily lowest value coming on or about day 260, ten days from now. Currently MASIE shows Arctic ice tracking well above average with a surplus of 235k km2 yesterday. Both 2007 and 202 were much below average, while 2024 nearly average at the minimum. SIIv.4 has been reporting lower extents, in the range of 300 to 400k km2 less than MASIE, yesterday a deficit of 367k km2.

After the dip there will be continuing recovery of ice extent, with end of September usually higher than the beginning. The September monthly average will be interesting to compare.

Summary

The experts involved in SIPN are expecting SII 2025 September to be somewhat lower than recent years. The way MASIE is going, this September looks to be above its average, and much higher than SII. While the daily minimum for the year occurs mid September, ice extent on September 30 is typically close to the ice extent on September 1.

Footnote:

Some people unhappy with the higher amounts of ice extent shown by MASIE continue to claim that Sea Ice Index is the only dataset that can be used. This is false in fact and in logic. Why should anyone accept that the highest quality picture of ice day to day has no shelf life, that one year’s charts can not be compared with another year? Researchers do this, including Walt Meier in charge of Sea Ice Index. That said, I understand his interest in directing people to use his product rather than one he does not control. As I have said before:

MASIE is rigorous, reliable, serves as calibration for satellite products, and continues the long and honorable tradition of naval ice charting using modern technologies. More on this at my post Support MASIE Arctic Ice Dataset

MASIE: “high-resolution, accurate charts of ice conditions”
Walt Meier, NSIDC, October 2015 article in Annals of Glaciology.

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Science Matters

Reading between the lines, and underneath the hype.

Month: September 2025