Climate Impacts

More Evidence Temperatures Drive CO2 Levels, Not the Reverse

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Robbins, 2025 Figure 2: Global tropic SSTs overlaid onto monthly atmospheric CO2 increases (Mauna Loa)

Kenneth Richard posted a No Tricks Zone article: Another New Study Suggests Most – 80% – Of The Modern CO2 Increase Has Been Natural.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

CO2 concentration increases are not the cause of rising temperature,
but an effect of rising temperature.

The 2025 paper by Bernard Robbins is Atmospheric CO2: Exploring the Role of Sea Surface Temperatures and the Influence of Anthropogenic CO2.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Close examination of the small perturbations within the atmospheric CO2 trend, as measured at Mauna Loa, reveals a strong correlation with variations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs), most notably with those in the tropics. The temperature-dependent process of CO2 degassing and absorption via sea surfaces is well-documented, and changes in SSTs will also coincide with changes in terrestrial temperatures, and temperature-dependent changes in the marine and terrestrial biospheres with their associated carbon cycles.

Using SST and Mauna Loa datasets, three methods of analysis are presented that seek to identify and estimate the anthropogenic and, by default, natural components of recent increases in atmospheric CO2, an assumption being that changes in SSTs coincide with changes in nature’s influence, as a whole, on atmospheric CO2 levels. The findings of the analyses suggest that an anthropogenic component is likely to be around 20 %, or less, of the total increase since the start of the industrial revolution.

The inference is that around 80 % or more of those increases are of natural origin, and indeed the findings suggest that nature is continually working to maintain an atmospheric/surface CO2 balance, which is itself dependent on temperature. A further pointer to this balance may come from chemical measurements that indicate a brief peak in atmospheric CO2 levels centred around the 1940s, and that coincided with a peak in global SSTs.

Source: The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature OleHumlum, KjellStordahl, Jan-ErikSolheim.

Introduction

Research into the influence SSTs have on changes in atmospheric CO2 includes the work by Humlum et al. (2013). When examining phase relationships, they found a maximum correlation for changes in atmospheric CO2 lagging 11-12 months behind those of global SSTs [1]. A paper by the late Fred Goldberg (2008) noted their correlation by examining El Niño events [2]. He also considered Henry’s law [3] in relation to SSTs, i.e. a temperature-dependent equilibrium between atmospheric CO2 and its solubility in seawater. Spencer (2008) also noted similarities between surface temperature variations with changes in atmospheric CO2 [4].

For the oceans specifically, areas of surface CO2 absorption and degassing are shown in maps provided by NOAA [5] and ESA [6] for example. These maps show that colder sea surfaces towards the poles are net absorbers of CO2 whilst the warmer surface waters of the tropics are net emitters. An analogy often cited is the greater ability of carbonated drinks to retain CO2 at cooler temperatures; this ability drops as the drinks get warmer.

Figure 1: Deseasonalised atmospheric CO2 data (Mauna Loa).

A strong correlation between changes in atmospheric CO2 and SSTs can be readily discerned from the relevant datasets. To illustrate, the upper graph in Fig. 1 plots atmospheric CO2 in parts per million (ppm) as measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1982. The data [7] has been ‘deseason-alised’ by NOAA to remove natural annual CO2 cycles.

The similarity between the two traces is striking: short-term fluctuations in CO2 readings at Mauna Loa appear particularly sensitive to tropic conditions (if tropic SSTs are substituted for global SSTs in Fig. 2, the correlation is less strong). Warm tropical seas, with surface temperatures typically around 25-30 oC, cover almost one third of the earth’s surface. The most prominent peaks in the figure coincide with strong El Niño events. Taken at face value, and ignoring any influence from anthropogenic emissions, Fig. 2  suggests that if the tropic SST anomaly dropped to around -1 oC (with related drops globally) then the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, as measured at Mauna Loa, would level off.

Robbins, 2025 Figure 2: Global tropic SSTs overlaid onto monthly atmospheric CO2 increases (Mauna Loa)

An important point is that changes in SSTs will coincide with those of terrestrial temperatures, temperature-dependent changes to both terrestrial and marine carbon cycles and, taking into consideration the research by Humlum et al. (2013) who found that changes in atmospheric CO2 followed changes in SSTs, an assumption in the work presented here is that nature’s influence on atmospheric CO2 levels, as a whole, follows on from changes in SSTs.

Discussion

The techniques used in Analyses 1 and 2, aimed at discerning and estimating the human contribution to recent increases in atmospheric CO2, are based on processing of monthly data from both SST and atmospheric CO2 datasets. Using the technique described in Analysis 1, no contribution from human emissions to the measured increases in atmospheric CO2, since 1995, was discerned. Given an approximate 60 % increase in annual human emissions since 1995 this suggests, by itself, that any human contribution to the measured increases is likely to be relatively small compared to nature’s contribution.

For the technique described in Analysis 2, a figure of ~27 ppm was estimated for a possible human contribution out of a total increase of 143 ppm since 1850, equating to around 19 % of the total increase in atmospheric CO2 since the start of the industrial revolution. Thus the results of these two analyses, taken together, suggest that nature appears to account for around 80 % or more of increases in atmospheric CO2 since 1995.

The technique described in Analysis 3 examines the relationship between longer-term trends in SST datasets and atmospheric CO2 measurements. This data analysis goes as far back as the late 1950s, when the ongoing acquisition of atmospheric CO2 measurements began at Mauna Loa. The resulting three graphs show an apparent almost-linear long-term relationship between SSTs and atmospheric CO2. Linear trend lines fitted to these graphs produce gradients of between ~120 and ~145 ppm/ 0C for the three SST datasets examined.

Figure 15: Atmospheric CO2 as a function of global SST trend since 1958

As for anthropogenic CO2, published figures (e.g. GCB data) suggest a roughly linear relationship between cumulative anthropogenic emissions as a function of time, and atmospheric CO2 measurements from Mauna Loa. If it’s reasoned that this mostly accounts for the linear trends as calculated in Analysis 3, this reasoning would not fit with the findings of the first two analysis methods that suggest 80 % or more of recent atmospheric CO2 increases are of natural origin.

Conclusions

Analyses of SST and atmospheric CO2 data, acquired since 1995, produce an estimated atmospheric CO2 increase, possibly attributed to human emissions, of around 20 %, or less, of the total increase since the industrial revolution, thus inferring that around 80 % or more of the increase is of natural origin.

Further data examination points to an almost linear longer-term relationship between SSTs and atmospheric CO2 since at least the late 1950s, and is suggestive of nature working to maintain a temperature-dependent atmosphere/surface CO2 balance. Recent historical evidence of such a balance may come from chemical measurements that indicate a brief peak in atmospheric CO2 levels centred around the 1940s, and that coincided with a peak in global SSTs.

Human emissions of CO2 are about 1/20-th of the natural turnover, and the findings of the analyses presented here suggest that this relatively-small human contribution is being readily incorporated into nature’s carbon cycles as they continually adjust to our constantly-changing climate.

As for surface temperatures, the research by Humlum et al. concluded that changes in atmospheric temperature are an ‘effect’ of changes in SSTs and not a ‘cause’ as some might advocate. And Humlum’s ‘take home’ message from a recent presentation was:

‘What controls the ocean surface temperature, controls the global climate’ [33]. He suggests the sun would be a good candidate, modulated with the cloud cover.

See Also

June 2025 Update–Temperature Falls, CO2 Follows

Killer Climate Lawsuit on Shaky Ground

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Washington Free Beacon reports on shaky case to make climate change a killer First-Of-Its-Kind Lawsuit Blaming Oil Companies for Woman’s Heat-Wave Death Failed to Mention Her Heart Disease. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

‘The diagnosis and likely treatment for it is highly relevant,’
doctor tells Free Beacon

A first-of-its-kind lawsuit accusing some of the nation’s largest oil companies of causing global warming and therefore causing a Washington woman’s 2021 heat-wave death left out one critical detail: she had been diagnosed with heart disease.

Juliana Leon’s death certificate, obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, shows she had been diagnosed with hypertensive cardiovascular disease, a condition that stems from unmanaged high blood pressure and increases the risks of heart failure and sudden cardiac death. The medical examiner for King County, Wash., determined that the condition contributed to her death, meaning it wasn’t the direct cause of death, but made her more vulnerable to it.

The wrongful death lawsuit Leon’s daughter filed earlier this year against oil companies, however, failed to make a single mention of her underlying condition. It instead focused entirely on the direct cause of death: hyperthermia.

The revelation, which has not been reported until now, is relevant because it could explain why Leon succumbed to the high temperatures that hit the Pacific Northwest in June 2021, according to doctors interviewed by the Free Beacon. And it is important too because of the lawsuit’s potentially wide-reaching impact. If successful, the lawsuit could lead to dozens of similar wrongful death suits and even future criminal homicide prosecutions against the oil industry.

The lawsuit—the first instance of a case attempting to put oil companies on the hook for heat-related wrongful death—is part of a coordinated effort nationwide to use the courts to cripple the oil industry and usher in a green energy transition. Activists say such litigation will hold the industry accountable, while critics say it is designed to bankrupt the industry, something that would have devastating economic impacts.

“The main reasons for hyperthermia under these conditions include medications or skin conditions impairing the ability to sweat. People with hypertensive cardiovascular disease are likely to be taking such medicines,” said Jane Orient, the executive director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons and a clinical lecturer at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.

“I think the diagnosis and likely treatment for it are highly relevant,” she continued. “A body temperature as high as 110 is extremely unlikely without impairment in the body’s temperature-regulating mechanism, at least under the circumstances here. Most people will have dehydration, but not heat stroke, during a heat wave. This lady likely had both.”

Jeffrey Singer, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and the founder of a private surgical practice in Arizona, agreed that the diagnosis could be relevant.  Singer told the Free Beacon:

“Having hypertension and its cardiovascular stigmata, depending on severity, might affect a person’s risk of succumbing to hyperthermia. But it’s the hyperthermia that kills,”

Lawyers representing Leon’s estate and daughter did not respond to requests for comment.

Leon died on June 28, 2021, during an extreme heat wave, which ultimately claimed the lives of 100 people in Washington, state data show. According to the wrongful death lawsuit, Leon died in her car after the vehicle’s air conditioning system broke and as outside temperature exceeded 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Her internal temperature rose to 110 degrees Fahrenheit right before she died.

Two weeks earlier, Leon had undergone bariatric surgery, a weight-loss surgery that helps reduce the risk of heart disease and high blood pressure. As a result, she had been on a liquid diet in the two weeks leading up to her death. In fact, Leon died in her car on her drive home from the doctor’s office where she was informed that morning that she may begin to eat soft foods again.

Still, the lawsuit blames seven oil companies for her death, arguing that they knew their products caused global warming decades ago, but continued selling them anyway. The lawsuit states that the 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest wouldn’t have occurred without human-caused global warming.

A study published in the American Meteorological Society’s journal Weather and Forecasting last year found that there is “little evidence” greenhouse gases amplified the heat wave and emphasized that weather forecasts for the event were “highly accurate.” “Global warming may have made a small contribution, but an extreme heat wave, driven by natural variability, would have occurred in any case,” it concluded.  Singer told the Free Beacon:

“You don’t need climate change to have a heat wave. Humans have been experiencing heat spells since the beginning of recorded history,”

The Free Beacon reported last week that an environmental group funded by the powerful Rockefeller Family Fund is quietly steering the wrongful death suit. According to legal filings, Leon’s daughter quietly appointed a climate activist to serve as the agent for her deceased mother’s estate. Those documents were authored by lawyers at the Rockefeller-backed Center for Climate Integrity, a nonprofit leading the coordinated, nationwide plan to “drive divestment” from and “delegitimize” the oil industry through litigation.

Beware Claims Attributing Extreme Events to Hydrocarbons

Posted on by Ron Clutz

RIP. You did good science and for that we are grateful.

Roger Pielke Jr. alerts us to a dangerous development in the IPCC effort claiming loss and damage from using hydrocarbons.  His blog article is A Takeover of the IPCC.

The IPCC’s longstanding framework for detection and attribution looks DOA in AR7

Pielke:  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just released the names of its authors for its seventh assessment report (AR7). The author list for its Chapter 3 — Changes in regional climate and extremes, and their causes — suggests strongly that the IPCC will be shifting from its longstanding focus on detection and attribution (D&A) of extreme events to a focus on “extreme event attribution” (EEA).

The IPCC AR6 was decidedly lukewarm to freezing cold on the notion of EEA, and emphasized the traditional D&A framework. Those days may now be over.  World Weather Attribution (WWA) co-founder Frederika Otto has been put in charge of the chapter, along with another academic who focuses on extreme event attribution.

Pielke has a series of articles taking exception to EEA methods and claims.  This post is a synopsis of work by Patrick Brown on the same issue, which is likely to be featured by climatists in the days and months ahead.

How Climate Attribution Studies Become Devious and Untrustworthy

Patrick Brown raises the question Do Climate Attribution Studies Tell the Full Story? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images, his analysis concluding thusly:

How a cascade of selection effects bias
the collective output of extreme event attribution studies.

Weather and climate extremes—such as high temperatures, floods, droughts, tropical cyclones, extratropical cyclones, and severe thunderstorms—have always threatened both human and natural systems. Given their significant impacts, there is considerable interest in how human-caused climate change influences these extremes. This is the focus of the relatively new discipline of Extreme Event Attribution (EEA).

Over the past couple of decades, there has been an explosion in EEA studies focusing on (or, “triggered by”) some prior notable weather or climate extreme. Non-peer-reviewed reports from World Weather Attribution (e.g., here, here, and here) represent some of the most notable examples of these kinds of analyses, and many similar studies also populate the peer-reviewed literature. The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society’s “Explaining Extreme Events From a Climate Perspective” annual series compiles such studies, as does the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, and they are also synthesized in reports like those from the IPCC (IPCC WG1 AR6 Chapter 11.2.3) and the United States National Climate Assessment.

The collective output of these kinds of studies certainly gives the impression that human-caused climate change is drastically changing the frequency and intensity of all kinds of weather extremes. Indeed, Carbon Brief recently published an extensive summary of the science of EEA studies, which begins with the proclamation, “As global temperatures rise, extreme weather events are becoming more intense and more frequent all around the world.”

However, these numbers cannot be taken as an accurate quantification of the influence of climate change on extreme weather because they are heavily influenced by a cascade of selection biases originating from the physical climate system, as well as researcher and media incentives. Identifying and understanding these biases is a prerequisite for properly interpreting the collective output of EEA studies and, thus, what implications they hold for general scientific understanding, as well as political and legal questions.

The large apparent discrepancy between the size of the influence of human-caused climate change on extreme weather reported in EEA studies (like those compiled by Carbon Brief) compared to more comprehensive systematic analyses (like those compiled by the IPCC) can, in large part, be attributed to the many layers of Selection Biases that influence the EEA literature’s collective output.

Selection Bias is a broad term that refers to any bias that arises from a process that selects data for analysis in a way that fails to ensure that data is representative of the broader population that the study wishes to describe.

Selection biases in the context of EEA studies include those associated with the physical climate system itself, those concerning proclivities and incentives facing researchers/journals, and those concerning the proclivities and incentives facing the media. They include

Occurrence Bias is a bias introduced by the physical climate system. Since EEA studies tend to be triggered by extreme events that have actually occurred, there is reason to believe that these studies will disproportionately sample events that are more likely than average to be exacerbated by climate change because the events occurred in the first place. Essentially, extreme events that are more likely to occur under climate change—and thus more likely to be observed—are going to be overrepresented in EEA studies, and extreme events that are less likely to occur under climate change—and thus less likely to be observed—are going to be underrepresented in EEA studies.

The map below illustrates this phenomenon. It shows changes in the magnitude of extreme drought under climate change. Specifically, it shows the fractional change in the intensity of once-per-50-year droughts (as quantified by monthly soil moisture) between a preindustrial and 21st-century run (SSP2-4.5 emissions) of the highly-regarded NCAR CESM2 Climate Model. Blue areas represent locations where the model simulates that extreme droughts become less frequent and intense with enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations, and red areas represent locations where the model simulates that extreme droughts become more frequent and intense with enhanced greenhouse gas concentrations. It is notable that overall, this model simulates that warming decreases the frequency and intensity of extreme drought in more locations than it increases it (consistent with soil moistening under warming simulated by other models).

Now, here’s the kicker: The black dots show locations where once-per-50-year droughts actually occurred in the 21st-century simulation and thus represent events that would plausibly trigger EEA studies.

What do you notice about where the dots are compared to where the red is? That’s right; the simulated EEA studies overwhelmingly sample areas where droughts are getting more intense and more frequent by the very nature that those are the types of droughts that are more likely to occur in the warming climate. The result is that the EEA sample is majorly biased: warming decreased the intensity of once-per-50-year droughts by about 1% overall, but it increased their intensity within the EEA sample by 18%!

Thus, if you just relied on the EEA sample, you would come away with an
incorrect impression not only on the magnitude of change in extreme droughts
but also on the sign of the direction of change!

Choice Bias arises when researchers use prior knowledge to choose events for EEA studies that are more likely to have been made more severe by climate change. A clear example of Choice Bias pervading the Carbon Brief database is there have been 3.6 times more studies on extreme heat than there have been on extreme winter weather (205 vs. 57). Another example would be the dearth of EEA studies on extratropical cyclones (the kinds of low-pressure systems with cold and warm fronts that are responsible for most of the dramatic weather outside of the tropics). The IPCC states that the number of extratropical cyclones associated with intense surface wind speeds is expected to decrease strongly in the Northern Hemisphere with warming. Yet, it is relatively rare for EEA attribution studies to be done on these types of systems, which results in an exclusion of this good news from the EEA literature.

Publication Bias could be playing a role, too, where researchers are more likely to submit, and journals are likely to publish studies that report significant effects on salient events compared to studies that find null effects.

From Clark et al., 2023

Finally, the climate reporting media ecosystem is characterized by actors whose explicit mission is to raise awareness of the negative impacts of climate change, and thus, there will be a natural Media Coverage Bias with a tendency to selectively highlight EEA studies where climate change is found to be a larger driver than EEA studies that do not reach such a conclusion. These selection biases are apparent at the aggregate level, but there is also strong evidence of their presence in individual studies.

A more recent specific example suggestive of many of these dynamics is a study, Gilford et al. (2024), titled “Human-caused ocean warming has intensified recent hurricanes”. This study was conducted by three researchers at Climate Central, which summarizes the study’s findings with the following infographic:

From Climate Central press release on Gilford et al. (2024).

Essentially, they claim that climate change is enhancing the intensity of all hurricanes and that the enhancement is quite large: Storms today are calculated to be an entire Category stronger than they would have been in a preindustrial climate.

This is a huge effect, and thus, if it were real, it is reasonable to expect to see clear long-term trends in metrics of tropical cyclone (hurricane) intensity like the accumulated number of major (Category 3+) hurricane days or the accumulated cyclone energy from all tropical cyclones (which is proportional to the square of hurricane windspeed accumulated over their lifetimes). However, any long-term trends in such metrics are subtle at best, both globally and over the North Atlantic.

From Colorado State University Department of Atmospheric Science Tropical Meteorology Project.

So, this is a microcosm of the aforementioned apparent discrepancy between more broad quantifications of changes in extremes and their associated EEA counterparts, and again, I’d argue there are several selection biases at play affecting the production and dissemination of the EEA study.

Let’s start with Choice Bias on methodology. Human-caused warming changes the environment in some ways that work to enhance hurricanes and in other ways that diminish them. The main way that hurricanes are enhanced is via the increase in sea surface temperatures (which provides the fundamental fuel for hurricanes), and the main way that hurricanes are diminished is via changes in atmospheric wind shear and humidity.

The net result of these countervailing factors pulling in opposite directions is that we expect fewer hurricanes overall, but when hurricanes are able to form, they can be stronger than they would otherwise. These factors, though, are small relative to natural random variability, and thus, they are difficult to detect in observations.

However, the Climate Central researchers made the methodological choice
to largely exclude the influence of factors that diminish
hurricane development from the study.

Are these Choice Biases in event type and methodology an accident? There are many reasons to believe they are not.

The research paper itself spells out that the motivation of the study is to “connect the dots” between climate change and hurricanes because “landfalling hurricanes with high intensities—can act as ‘focusing events’ that draw public attention” and that “Increased attention during and in wake of storms creates opportunities for public and private discourse around climate and disaster preparedness.”

Then, there is the extensive media coverage of this study. It was picked up by 134 news outlets and ranked in the 99.95th percentile of research articles (across all journals) of similar age in terms of online attention. Further, it was immediately incorporated into seven Wikipedia articles (likely having high leverage on AI queries, which would make its findings indistinguishable from scientific “fact”). This is affected by the aforementioned Media Coverage Bias, but it is also undoubtedly directly influenced by the efforts of Climate Central, which is explicitly an advocacy organization whose self-described specialty is media placement and dissemination. 

The above sheds light on the reasons for certain choice biases in a particular study, but there is plenty of evidence that these selection biases are pervasive in the EEA field. After all, Dr. Myles Allen essentially founded the field with the motivation of answering the question, “Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?”. This same motivation seems to animate many of the most high-profile scientists in the field today, like Allen’s protege, Dr. Friederike Otto (co-founder and leader of World Weather Attribution). She and her organization are frequently cited as bringing the necessary intellectual authority to credibly sue fossil fuel companies. She states the motivation of her work explicitly:

“Attributing extreme weather events to climate change, as I do
through my work as a climatologist, means we can hold
countries and companies to account for their inaction.”

Given the explicitly stated motivation of those in the EEA field, it is quite reasonable to suppose that there are major selection biases at play, and thus, it is not at all surprising that the collective output of the EEA field would look so different from more broad comprehensive assessments.

Surplus Arctic Ice late August 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

After a sub-par March maximum, by end of May 2025 Arctic ice closed the gap with the 19-year average. Then in June the gap reopened and in July the melting pace matched the average, abeit four days in advance of average. In mid-August MASIE showed the Arctic ice extent matching the 19-year average. Now with a week to go Arctic ice has been above average for the last five days, by over +200k km2 yesterday.

During August the average year loses 1.9M km2 of ice extent.  MASIE on day 213 was 308k km2 down, and the gap closed steadily, going into surplus on day 230. Note 2020 and 2024 were well  below average mid-August.  2024 ended nearly average, while 2020 went down almost off the chart. Meanwhile SII v.4 started August ~400k km2 lower than MASIE, increasing to 600k km2 yesterday.  More on what happened to SII in footnote.

The regional distribution of ice extents is shown in the table below. (Bering and Okhotsk seas are excluded since both are now virtually open water.)

Region 2025234 Ave. Day 234 2025-Ave. 2020234 2025-2020
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 5665223 5452280 212942 4947191 718032
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 912878 636530 276349 802063 110815
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 456078 382204 73873 382512 73565
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 597683 465057 132626 248241 349443
 (4) Laptev_Sea 210514 216232 -5718 36330 174184
 (5) Kara_Sea 3533 70094 -66561 23616 -20083
 (6) Barents_Sea 0 18103 -18103 342 -342
 (7) Greenland_Sea 124456 195018 -70562 227692 -103236
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 63370 40548 22822 13063 50308
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 371460 348507 22954 356783 14677
 (10) Hudson_Bay 21111 34968 -13858 35329 -14218
 (11) Central_Arctic 2902590 3043900 -141310 2820550 82040

The table shows large surpluses in Eurasian basins  Beaufort, Chukchi and E. Siberian, more than offsetting deficits in Central Arctic, Kara and Greenland seas. Hudson Bay is mostly open water at this time of year. 2025 exceeds the average ice extents by 212k km2, or 4%, and is 718k km2 greater than 2020, or 0.7 Wadhams of ice extent.

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher  temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post SH Drives UAH Temps Cooler July 2025.

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also.  See Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

post-glacial_sea_level

Footnote Regarding  SII v.4

NSDIC acknowledged my query regarding the SII (Sea Ice Index) dataset. While awaiting an explanation I investigated further. My last download of the SII Daily Arctic Ice Extents was on July 30, meaning that the most recent data in that file was day 210, July 29. The header on that file was Sea_Ice_Index_Daily_Extent_G02135_v3.

Then on August 1, the downloaded file had the heading Sea_Ice_Index_Daily_Extent_G02135_v4. So it appears that these are now the values from a new version of SII. As I wrote in my query, since March 14 all of the values for Arctic Ice Extents are lower in this new record. The graph above shows the implications for August as an example of estimates from SIIv.4

The change started in January 2025 and will be the basis for future reporting.  The logic for this is presented in this document: Sea Ice Index Version 4 Analysis

In June 2025, NSIDC was informed that access to data from the Special Sensor Microwave
Imager/Sounder (SSMIS) onboard the Defense Meteorological Satellite Program (DMSP)
satellites would end on July 31 (NSIDC, 2025). To prepare for this, we rapidly developed version
4 of the Sea Ice Index. This new version transitions from using sea ice concentration fields
derived from SSMIS data as input to using fields derived from the Advanced Microwave
Scanning Radiometer 2 (AMSR2) sensor onboard the Global Change Observation Mission – W1
(GCOM-W1) satellite.  On 29 July 2025, we learned that the Defense Department decision to terminate access to DMSP data had been reversed and that data will continue to be available until September 2026.

We are publishing Version 4, however, for these reasons:

• The SSMIS instruments are well past their designed lifespan and a transition to
AMSR2 is inevitable. Unless the sensors fail earlier, the DoD will formally end the
program in September 2026.
• Although access of SSMIS will continue through September 2026, the Fleet
Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center (FNMOC), where SSMIS data
from the DMSP satellite are downloaded, made an announcement that “Support
will be on a best effort basis and should be considered data of opportunity.” This
means that SSMIS data will likely contain data gaps.
• We have developer time to make this transition now and may not in the future.
• We are confident that Version 4 data are commensurate in accuracy to those
provided by Version 3.

 

No Climate Crisis in Texas

Posted on by Ron Clutz

CO2 Coalition analyzed the data and concluded that Texas has no climate crisis to fear.  The report is Texas and Climate Change: No Climate Crisis in the Lone Star State.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report will examine the scientific basis for claims of harmful effects from climate change in Texas. Assertions have been made that many areas around the world are experiencing negative impacts from unusual and unprecedented warming driven by increasing human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Texas is no different. Promotion of the need to achieve “net zero” emissions is predicated on fear of existing and future devastating calamities resulting from CO2-enhanced warming.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment (NCA5) report (USGCRP, 2023) says that climate change is “putting us at risk from climate hazards that degrade our lands and waters, quality of life, health and well-being, and cultural interconnectedness.” The NCA5 report lists “warmer temperatures, more erratic precipitation, and sea level rise,” as well as “drier conditions” and “extreme heat and high humidity,” as the “climate hazards” affecting the Southern Great Plains, which encompasses the State of Texas (Figure 1).

In addition, Texas A&M University has published a Texas-specific report, Future Trends of Extreme Weather in Texas (Nielsen-Gammon et al., 2024), which warns of future harm to the citizens of Texas from man-made climate change. Predicted effects include increasing temperature, precipitation, drought, floods, storms, sea-level rise and wildfires.

Within this report, we analyze scientific data from various sources, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and reports published in peer-reviewed journals.

Based on these data, we arrived at the following key findings:

  • The temperature in Texas has shown no unprecedented or unusual warming, despite
    increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2). Recent temperatures in Texas are similar
    to those found more than 100 years ago.
  • The annual number of 100 °F days in Texas has an overall decreasing trend.
  • Texas has had a modest increase of 0.0245 inches per year of precipitation during 1850–
    2023, which means that Texas is in no immediate danger of becoming drier.
  • Droughts in Texas are not becoming more severe or numerous.
  • Tornadoes, hurricanes, and floods are not becoming more frequent in Texas.
  • Sea-level rise and coastal subsidence are not threatening or inundating the Texan coast.
  • Wildfires are not becoming more frequent or severe in the United States.
  • Air quality in the United States is generally good and getting better.
  • Agriculture in Texas is thriving.
  • Carbon dioxide (CO2) is essential and beneficial for life on Earth, as CO2 greens the Earth
    and more CO2 allows plants to grow bigger, produce more food and better resist
    drought.

The evidence presented here is clear: there is no climate crisis in Texas. Not only is CO2 beneficial, but it is essential for life on Earth. Therefore, any measures for combating a purported climate crisis and for reducing CO2 emissions are not only unnecessary and costly but would also cause considerable harm to agriculture with no benefit.

The complete publication is Texas and Climate Change which includes exhibits like these:

About That Annoying DOE Climate Review

Posted on by Ron Clutz

When it comes to the recent DOE Climate Review, legacy media coverage is lop-sided and limited to declarations of disgust and dismissal from climate insiders.  Andrew Bolt in Australia is an exception, interested as he is in why climatists find the study so annoying.  So his interview with one of the authors explores the controversy and why the media is averting their attention.

For those preferring to read, below is a transcript from the closed captions in italics wtih my bolds and added images. AB refers to Bolt and SK to Koonin

AB: I’m amazed how little attention the media has given to a new report on global warming I mentioned last week. I’m not that surprised to be honest. I mean, I’ve seen how the media ignores proof that the warming scare is grossly exaggerated, but I think you deserve to know more about this report.

In the United States, Chris Wright is the brilliant gas tycoon who now leads the US Department of Energy. He hired five very prominent climate experts to report back to the government on what the climate was really doing and whether we could trust predictions by the most popular climate models that we’re facing dangerous warming of at least 3 degrees this century and we’re already copying all sorts of climate disasters.

Well, the authors’ conclusion was that the climate models are actually unreliable. They’re all over the shop. They predict probably one degree more warming than is likely and we aren’t getting many of the predicted climate disasters. Plus, global warming also has benefits that are often ignored, especially a big increase in trees and crops that we’ve been seeing, a greening of the planet.

And in this report, the authors sum it all up like this. models, the climate models and experience suggests that carbon dioxide induced warming may be less damaging economically than commonly believed and excessively aggressive mitigation policies, you might include our own net zero schemes, could prove more detrimental than beneficial.  [See DOE Climate Team: Twelve Keys in Assessing Climate Change]

So, you can understand why the authors have since been absolutely trashed for daring to doubt the climate scare and upsetting the climate industry. They’ve been called all sorts of names painted as fools, frauds, Donald Trump Toadies, even Stalinists, would you believe? But don’t be fooled by the abuse because the five authors are in fact very prominent experts. Professor emeritus Judith Curry has published 192 peer-reviewed papers on the climate. Dr. Roy Spencer, NASA senior scientist runs probably the most accurate measure of world temperature. Professor Ross McKitrick is an expert reviewer of the last three reports of the IPCC (intergovernmental panel on climate change). And distinguished professor John Christie, is a former lead author of an IPCC report. I mean, these are very serious people.

Plus Steven Koonin. He’s a physicist and former under secretary of science for President Barack Obama, a Democrat. And I am joined by Steven, Steve thank you so much for your time. Why did you and the other four experts behind this report actually agree to do it when you must have known the climate industry and the media would really go after you?

SK: Indeed. But you know, all five of us scientists have long felt that the science was misrepresented to the public and the decision makers, and we wanted to do our best to set the record straight.

AB: Well, on many points your report agrees with what I’ll call the consensus, the alarmist position, perhaps the position of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. You say, “Yes, global warming is real. Yes, it’s a problem. Yes, it’s caused in part by humans.” Now, tell us where you disagree with this consensus.

SK: Well, you know, people have said 95% of our report agrees with or is taken right out of the IPCC. It’s just that there are aspects of what the consensus says that do not find their way to the public. For example:

♦  There are no detectable trends in the great majority of extreme weather types.

♦  The models that we use to project climates into the future are demonstrably deficient. They’re in               many ways all over the place in terms of their projections. And,

♦  The projected impacts of future climate change, even using those deficient models, are minimal.

These are very important central points that are there in the report
but do not make their way into the public discussion.

AB: You actually point out that the models tend to run hot, as in predict more warming than we’ve had. They’re unreliable. A number of basing false assumptions of how much emissions we’re going to get. You actually predict almost one degree less warming over the century than the IPCC model consensus. How important is that?

SK: Well, to be clear, we don’t predict. We simply cite and assess the work of others. But certainly, if the warming is a degree less than what the IPCC consensus says, that’s a big deal.

AB: And what about the climate disasters? I mean, every time like we’ve got it right now, you know, we’ve got some algae blooming off the South Australian coast. Global warming. We get heavy rain, global warming. We get a drought, global warming. How much influence has man-made warming really had from the work that you’ve done in this report? How much has it really influenced the natural disasters we tend to see?

SK: Yeah, you know, people have a very short memory for weather disasters. There’s a lovely example that turned up at the beginning of July, having to do with the floods in Texas that we that were a terrible tragedy. But if you look back in the records, you can find the same kind of event happening in the same place in 1900. And of course, human influences on the climate were much smaller in 1900. And so you have a very hard time to logically attributing the recent disaster to carbon dioxide.

The same is true for many other severe weather phenomena.
They happened in the past. They’re just relatively rare. And so
we get surprised when we see them happen in the present day.

AB: Yeah. I noticed for instance in your report you say the number of heat waves in America actually peaked nearly 100 years ago.

SK: The number of heat waves that were striking America at the time, and what we see now is much less, you know. The damning thing about the heat waves is that we really don’t understand why the 30s were so much warmer than it has been in many subsequent decades. And that speaks to our rather poor understanding of the ways in which the climate varies.

AB: I think the real thing about your report that’s annoying so many people in the climate industry is this. You say the warming will be less than what most people are claiming. You say the disasters from the warming we’ve seen are basically exaggerated.  They’re not that many that you can point to. And the the attempts we make to stop all this are very expensive. And well, do they really work? Isn’ it the takeaway here, that it might not actually be worth trying to stop what isn’t the the climate disaster that many claim.

SK: Absolutely. You know, in deciding what to do, we have to balance the hazards, the certainties and uncertainties in the changing climate against other considerations. Like the world needs more and more energy, and in deciding what to do you have to look at the costs. Are they going to be effective? What about equity between generations, between countries, and so on. It’s not simply that, oh my god, we’ve broken the climate and we’ve got to fix it. And I do think some people get annoyed when we start to expose those nuances of the situation.

AB: Oh yes. So you’ve really offended in the church of climate. And of course you also stress what’s undeniably true. The greening of the planet is actually a benefit of extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. More trees, more plants, more food.

SK: Agricultural yields have in fact doubled over the last 60 years or so. And a good fraction of that, NASA says 75% is attributable to higher carbon dioxide levels. You know, if you look inside a hot house, we put the carbon dioxide levels typically up to about 1,200 parts per million, which is just about three times what you find in the atmosphere even now.

AB: Now, you’ve come under massive attack, of course, Steve Koonin. I mean, environmental groups are even suing to censor the report. You’ve got media outlets of the left demonizing you, running so-called fact checks. I’ve had a look at a few, and they’re not persuasive. Some climate scientists are abusing you, claiming, you know, the group of you are just handpicked skeptics, even though you used to be with the Obama administration.  Have there been any criticisms of your report that you think, “Yep, that’s fairenough. we’ve goofed here or we haven’t taken this into consideration. Any criticism you think you can you should take on the chin?

SK: Well, we’ve seen one already that we basically made a a typographical error in one of the footnotes. We have acknowledged that to the person who pointed it out and of course we will fix it. But you know, we’re refraining right now from looking in detail at the criticisms till they come in over the next couple weeks through the public portal. Then as we have promised, we will deal with every serious criticism seriously and like good scientists we will modify the report as might be warranted from those criticisms.

AB: Steve Koonin, you’ve been fighting the alarmism for some time now. I think this is your your weightiest blow against the scaremongering. So congratulations and thank you so much for your time.

Happer & Wrightstone: Get Real and Stop Blaming CO2

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The above interview was conducted by NTD news with CO2 Coalition founder William Happer (WH) and Executive Director Gregory Wrightstone (GW).  For those preferring to read, below is a transcript from the closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images.

NTD: The Environmental Protection Agency’s Lee Z eldin announced a proposal earlier this week to overturn a 16-year-old scientific finding from the Obama administration. It allowed three administrations to regulate greenhouse gas emissions like CO2. If successful, this would roll back climate rules on cars, undo $1 trillion in regulatory costs, and save over $54 billion each year. With the public comment period now open, here to break down what all of this means are two guests. William Happer, professor emeritus at Princeton University department of physics, and Gregory Wrightstone, geologist and executive director of the CO2 coalition. Thank you both so much for being here.

Now, first, how big of a deal would this be, repealing the 2009 endangerment finding? Who has benefited under it so far?

WH: Well, I’m not sure who you asked this question, but I will answer it and Greg can add to what I say. This is something that was long overdue. I mean, it was a ridiculous regulation that purported that carbon dioxide, which all of us breathe out, is a pollutant. I mean, I can’t think of anything dumber than that, but that’s what it was. And so finally there’s been an administration with the courage to tell the truth, that it isn’t a pollutant at all and it’s actually good for the earth to have more carbon dioxide.

NTD: What is the likely legal process of repealing this? And Gregory, this finding was the legal prerequisite used by the Obama and Biden administrations to regulate new car and engine emissions. What is the likely legal process of repealing this now?

GW: Well, this right now is just dealing with cars and light trucks and vehicles, but it’s sure to extend into the other things. Your viewers have had their freedom systematically eroded using the endangerment finding. With this endangerment finding, they’ve been able to tell you what car kind of car to drive. Look at the ceiling fan over your head, regulate that. All these electrical devices, your washer, dryer, dishwasher. the only ones you can buy today are government approved devices because of the endangerment finding. So what this does is to actually liberate Americans for freedom to choose what kind of appliances they want. If they want to buy a dishwasher that’s very efficient in terms of washing dishes, not in terms of how much electricity you use. That should be my choice and your choice and all of your viewers’ choices. So, this is really liberation day for America and restoring a lot of the freedoms that were lost based on this failed endangerment finding.

NTD: Expanding on that, William, what about the science needed to decide whether or not this will get repealed? Besides the legal angle, break down for us the science that’s needed to decide whether or not this will get repealed.

GW: Well, the science is quite clear. Understand what they did in 2009, they excluded any contrary science. By contrary science, anything that indicated that CO2 was not a pollutant. But the Supreme Court rulings in 2024 now say you have to consider all of the science. And there’s just a huge amount of of science right now that that disputes endangerment, that actually confirms carbon dioxide has hugely beneficial aspects. Greening the earth, vegetation growth, crop production is exploding. And Dr. Happer can perhaps talk about how the the greenhouse gas warming potential is not at all what they say it is.

NTD: Will CO2 cause dangerous warming? On that note, will you break down that aspect for us ?

WH: Well, as Greg said, the accusation against CO2 is that it would cause dangerous warming of the earth. And as usual there’s a grain of truth that CO2 will cause some warming, but the warming will be trivial. It will almost certainly be beneficial to most of the earth. The reason it warms is CO2 is a greenhouse gas. It lets sunlight come through and warm the surface of the earth. But it retards the cooling of the earth by infrared radiation to space. And it’s the balance of those two that determines the earth’s temperature.

But it’s a very inefficient greenhouse gas. It doesn’t much matter if you double CO2. You only change the cooling radiation into space by 1%, a tiny effect. And so, it’s amazing they’ve managed to blow up this molehill into this mountainous threat. It’s not a threat at all. It’s a benefit.

NTD: On that note, Gregory, in terms of how we got to the endangerment finding, was contradictory science a factor in that decision?

Well, actually, no. There was no contradictory science. And again, now bear in mind things are different today than they were even just two years ago. with two Supreme Court rulings last year. In Ohio vs. state farm case the US Supreme Court ruled that these regulatory agencies like the DOE, EPA, DOT, all of these alphabet soup regulatory bodies need to consider all significant science that affects their judgment which EPA in the endangerment finding did not do.

And the evidence we say is is entirely overwhelming. We see by almost every metric you look at, we find that Earth’s ecosystems are thriving and prospering, and the human conditions are improving because of increases in CO2. It’s really the greatest untold story of the 21st century, that of a thriving earth and the benefits to humanity. It’s a feel-good story, but they’ve turned this into fear-mongering where children can’t sleep at night because they’re being lied to by this the promoters we call the climate industrial complex.

Let’s get back to true science, the scientific method. Enough of this consensus science and group think. We support the scientific method and critical thinking which has been removed from many of these government agencies for 30 years or longer.

Climate models

NTD: And William, on that note, there is a big focus on climate change or climate alarm as some might say. Talk to us about some of the climate models that are used. What did these models get wrong?

WH: Well, I think the main thing the models get wrong is that they they know perfectly well that the direct effects of carbon dioxide will cause a very small warming of the earth if there are no other effects. If you double CO2 100% increase, which would take more than a century by the way, that would only warm the earth by a little less than one degree centigrade. It’s a trivial amount and we may never double it anyway.

So here’s what they’ve done. They’ve taken this trivial warming is agreed by most people who understand how this works, and they’ve multiplied it by factors three, four, five and saying that there’s these enormous positive feedbacks on the direct warming. That’s completely crazy because most feedbacks in nature are negative. With most other systems in nature, the first thing you calculate is usually too big, not too small. It’s even got a fancy name. It’s called Chatelier’s principle.

And so everything they’ve done violates Chatelier’s principle that works for everything else in nature, but it apparently doesn’t work for climate alarmists.

China

NTD: And staying with you, William, we often hear the US and Europe talking about cutting emissions, whether that’s in cars or cows even. But at the same time, the carbon brief notes that China is the world’s largest annual greenhouse gas emitter and leads in coal use. How should we look at this if the argument is global warming and not regional?

WH: Well, of course, China has built lots of very efficient new coal plants in the last 10 years. they’re ultra supercritical plants many of them. They’re really good plants and so they’ve raised the standard of living there. Part of their policy is is quite okay and the CO2 they’re emitting is good for the earth you know.

I’m not supporting any of the political things that they do but I don’t think there’s a thing wrong with releasing carbon dioxide. More power to them for that.

CO2 Coalition

NTD: On that note, Gregory, you’re the executive director of the CO2 coalition. Give us a sense of what this coalition does and how this fits in with environmental discussions.

GW: We’re 10 years old now. It was founded in 2015 by Dr. William Happer, our chair that was just on here. And we’re some 200 of the top experts and scientists in the world that don’t buy into the company line on climate change. We don’t believe that increases in human emissions of CO2 are leading to harmful warming. Rather just the opposite, we see huge benefits. Crop growth records are being broken year after year and they attribute 70% of that to increasing CO2. Crop growth and crop productivity is outpacing population growth. That’s a good thing, a really good thing.

We are in a warming trend. Yes, we are. It’s been warming for more than 300 years. But you know what that does? That means since 1900, our growing seasons in the continental United States have increased by more than two weeks. That’s a really good thing for agriculture. Your farmers will tell you they love that. So at the CO2 Coalition, our unofficial motto is: We love CO2 and so should you.

Arctic Ice Returns to Mean Mid-August 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

After a sub-par March maximum, by end of May 2025 Arctic ice closed the gap with the 19-year average. Then in June the gap reopened and in July the melting pace matched the average, abeit four days in advance of average. Now mid-August MASIE shows the Arctic ice extent matching the 19-year average.

During this period the average year loses ~2.4M km2 of ice extent.   MASIE on day 197 was 287k km2 down, and the gap increased to 460k km2 by July 27 (day 208). In August 2025 the melt rate slowed, erasing the deficit to average the last 3 days. Note 2007 and 2024 were ~200k km2 below average mid-August.  Meanwhile SII v.4 is showing much lower ice extents than previously, ranging from -200k km2 to -550k km2 below MASIE extents.

The regional distribution of ice extents is shown in the table below. (Bering and Okhotsk seas are excluded since both are now virtually open water.)

Region 2025227 Day 227 2025-Ave. 2020227 2025-2020
 (0) Northern_Hemisphere 5881998 5894299 -12301 5162062 719936
 (1) Beaufort_Sea 932422 706128 226294 838854 93568
 (2) Chukchi_Sea 527504 438457 89047 410757 116747
 (3) East_Siberian_Sea 622184 563120 59064 276845 345339
 (4) Laptev_Sea 252320 243841 8479 24033 228287
 (5) Kara_Sea 10947 94167 -83220 22002 -11055
 (6) Barents_Sea 0 22056 -22056 3285 -3285
 (7) Greenland_Sea 115125 223328 -108202 265814 -150688
 (8) Baffin_Bay_Gulf_of_St._Lawrence 75407 56928 18479 12720 62688
 (9) Canadian_Archipelago 392776 404096 -11320 366453 26323
 (10) Hudson_Bay 25381 65298 -39917 53142 -27761
 (11) Central_Arctic 2927007 3075808 -148801 2887486.48 39520

The table shows large surpluses in Eurasian basins  Beaufort, Chukchi and E. Siberian, offset by deficits in Central Arctic, Kara and Greenland seas. Hudson Bay is mostly open water at this time of year. 2025 exceeds the ice extents in 2020 by 720k km2.

Why is this important?  All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher  temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels.  The lack of additional warming prior to 2023 El Nino is documented in a post SH Drives UAH Temps Cooler July 2025.

The lack of acceleration in sea levels along coastlines has been discussed also.  See Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update

Also, a longer term perspective is informative:

post-glacial_sea_level

Postscript Re. SII v.4

Update: Strange Sea Ice Data July End 2025

 

Why Climate Doomsters Can’t Recant

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ted Nordhaus writes at The EcoModernist Why I Stopped Being a Climate Catastrophist,
And why so many climate pragmatists can’t quit catastrophism.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

In the book Break Through, Michael Shellenberger and I argued that if the world kept burning fossil fuels at current rates, catastrophe was virtually assured.  I no longer believe this hyperbole. Yes, the world will continue to warm as long as we keep burning fossil fuels. And sea levels will rise. About 9 inches over the last century, perhaps another 2 or 3 feet over the course of the rest of this century. But the rest of it? Not so much.

There is little reason to think that the Amazon is at risk of collapsing over the next 50 years. Agricultural yield and output will almost certainly continue to rise, if not necessarily at the same rate as it has over the last 50 years. There has been no observable increase in meteorological drought globally that might trigger the resource wars that the Pentagon was scenario planning back then.

Figure 3: CMIP6 GCM ensemble mean simulations spanning from 1850 to 2100, employing historical effective radiative forcing functions from 1850 to 2014 (see Figure 1C) and the forcing functions based on the SSP scenarios 1-2.6, 2-4.5, 3-7.0, and 5-8.5. Curve colors are scaled according to the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) of the models. The right panels depict the risks and impacts of climate change in relation to various global Reasons for Concern (RFCs) (IPCC, 2023). (Adapted from Scafetta, 2024).

At the time that we published Break Through, I, along with most climate scientists and advocates, believed that business as usual emissions would lead to around five degrees of warming by the end of this century. As Zeke Hausfather, Glen Peters, Roger Pielke Jr, and Justin Richie have demonstrated over the last decade or so, that assumption was never plausible.  The class of scenarios upon which it was based assumed very high population growth, very high economic growth, and slow technological change. None of these trends individually track at all with actual long term global trends.

Fertility rates have been falling, global economic growth slowing,
and the global economy decarbonizing for decades.

As a result of these dynamics, most estimates of worst case warming by the end of the century now suggest 3 degrees or less. But as consensus around these estimates has shifted, the reaction to this good news among much of the climate science and advocacy community has not been to become less catastrophic. Rather, it has been to simply shift the locus of catastrophe from five to three degrees of warming. Climate advocates have arguably become more catastrophic about climate change in recent years, not less.

When Is Weather Climate Change?

For me, the cognitive dissonance began as I became familiar with Roger Pielke Jr’s work on normalized hurricane losses, in the late 2000s. This was around the time that a lot of messaging from the climate advocacy community had started to focus on extreme weather events, not just as harbingers for the storms of our grandchildren, to borrow the title of James Hansen’s 2009 book, but as being fueled by climate change in the present.

If you want to know why Pielke has been so demonized over the last
15 years by climate activists and activist climate scientists,
it’s because he got in the way of this new narrative.

Integrated Storm Activity Annually over the Continental U.S. (ISAAC)

Pielke’s work, going back to the mid-1990s showed, again and again, that the normalized economic costs of climate related disasters weren’t increasing, despite the documented warming of the climate. And unlike a lot of researchers who sometimes produce studies that cut against the climate movement’s chosen narratives, he wasn’t willing to be quiet about it. Pielke got in the way of the advocacy community at the moment that it was determined to argue that present day disasters were driven by climate change and got run over.

Put these two factors together—the outsized influence that exposure and vulnerability have on the cost of extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the very modest intensification that climate change contributes to these events, when it plays any role at all—and what should be clear is that climate change is contributing very little to present day disasters. It is a relatively small factor in the frequency and intensity of climate hazards that are experienced by human societies, which in turn play a small role in the human and economic costs of climate related disasters compared to non-climate factors.

This also means that the scale of anthropogenic climate change that would be necessary to very dramatically intensify those hazards, such that they overwhelm the non-climate factors in determining the consequences of future climate related events, is implausibly large. 

A Sting in the Tail?

For a long time, even after I had come to terms with the fundamental disconnect between what climate advocates were saying about extreme events and the role that climate change could conceivably be playing, I held on to the possibility of catastrophic climate futures based upon uncertainty. The sting, as they say, is in the tail, meaning so-called fat tails in the climate risk distribution. These are tipping points or similar low probability, high consequence scenarios that aren’t factored into central estimates. The ice sheets could collapse much faster than we understand or the gulf stream might shut down, bringing frigid temperatures to western Europe, or permafrost and methane hydrates frozen in the sea floor might rapidly melt, accelerating warming.

But like the supposed collapse of the Amazon, once you look more closely at these risks they don’t add up to catastrophic outcomes for humanity.  While sensationalist news stories frequently refer to the collapse of the gulf stream, what they are really referring to is the slowing of the Atlantic Meridian Overturning Circulation (AMOC). AMOC helps transport warm water to the North Atlantic and moderates winter temperatures across western Europe. But its collapse, much less its slowing, would not result in a hard freeze across all of Europe. Indeed, under plausible conditions in which it might significantly slow, it would act as a negative feedback, counterbalancing warming, which is happening faster across the European continent than almost any place else in the world.

Permafrost and methane hydrate thawing, meanwhile, are slow processes not fast ones. Even irreversible melting would occur over millennial timescales, fast in geological terms but very slow in human terms. The same is true of accelerated melting of ice caps. Even under very high warming scenarios, broadly acknowledged today as improbable, the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets contribute around a meter of sea level rise by the end of this century. Those processes would continue far into the future. But even very accelerated scenarios for rapid disintegration of ice sheets unfold over many centuries, not decades.

Moreover, the problem with grounding strong precautionary claims in these known unknowns is that doing so demands strong remedies in the present in response to future risks that are both unquantifiable and unfalsifiable, a problem made even worse by the fact that “fat tail” proponents generally then proceed to ignore the fact that the unknown, unquantifiable, and unfalsifiable risks they are referring to are incredibly low probability and instead set about centering them in the climate discourse.

Clean Energy Without Catastrophism

Why do so many smart people, most trained as scientists, engineers, lawyers, or public policy experts, and all who will tell you, and I say this not ironically, that they “believe in science,” get the science of climate risk so badly wrong?

There are, in my view, several reasons. The first is that highly educated people with high levels of science literacy are no less likely to get basic scientific issues wrong than anyone else when the facts conflict with their social identities and ideological commitments. Yale Law Professor Dan Kahan has shown that people who are highly concerned about climate change actually have less accurate views about climate change overall than climate skeptics and that this remains true even among partisans with high levels of education and general science literacy. Elsewhere, Kahan and others have demonstrated that on many issues, highly educated people are often more likely to stubbornly hold onto erroneous beliefs because they are more expert at defending their political views and ideological commitments.

The second reason is that there are strong social, political, and professional incentives if you make a living doing left of center climate and energy policy to get climate risk wrong. The capture of Democratic and progressive politics by environmentalism over the last generation has been close to total. There is little tolerance on the Left for any expression of materialist politics that challenge foundational claims of the environmental movement.  Meanwhile the climate movement has effectively conflated consensus science about the reality and anthropogenic origins of climate change with catastrophist claims about climate risk for which there is no consensus whatsoever.

Whether you are an academic researcher, a think tank policy wonk, a program officer at an environmental or liberal philanthropy, or a Democratic Congressional staffer, there is simply no benefit and plenty of downside to questioning, much less challenging, the central notion that climate change is an existential threat to the human future. It’s a good way to lose friends or even your job. It won’t help you get your next job or your next grant. And so everyone, mostly falls in line. Better to go along to get along.

Finally, there is a widespread belief that one can’t make a strong case for clean energy and technological innovation absent the catastrophic specter of climate change. “Why bother with nuclear power or clean energy if climate change is not a catastrophic risk,” is a frequent response. And this view simply ignores the entire history of modern energy innovation. Over the last two centuries, the world has moved inexorably from dirtier and more carbon intensive technologies to cleaner ones. Burning coal, despite its significant environmental impacts, is cleaner than burning wood and dung. Burning gas is cleaner than coal. And obviously producing energy with wind, solar, and nuclear is cleaner than doing so with fossil fuels.

There is a view among most climate and clean energy advocates that the risk of climate change both demands and is necessary to justify a much faster transition toward cleaner energy technologies. But as a practical matter, there is no evidence whatsoever that 35 years of increasingly dire rhetoric and claims about climate change have had any impact on the rate at which the global energy system has decarbonized and by some measure, the world decarbonized faster over the 35 years prior to climate change emerging as a global concern than it did in the 35 years since.

Despite some tonal, tactical, and strategic differences, this basic view of climate risk, and corresponding demand for a rapid transformation of the global energy economy is broadly shared by the climate activists and the pragmatists. The impulse is millenarian, not meliorist.

Underneath the real politik, technocratic wonkery, and appeals
to scientific authority is a desire to remake the world.

For all its worldly and learned affect, what that has resulted in is the creation of an insular climate discourse on the Left that may be cleverer by half than right wing dismissals of climate change but is no less prone to making misleading claims about the subject, ignoring countervailing evidence, and demonizing dissent. And it has produced a politics that is simultaneously grandiose and maximalist and, increasingly, deeply out of touch with popular sentiment.

Judge Crushes Charleston Climate Case

Posted on by Ron Clutz

EID covers the legal thrashing visited upon Charleston plaintiffs seeking a judgment punishing Big Oil for their role in climate misfortunes. The article is Judge Shuts Down Charleston Climate Case, Warns of “Boundless” Liability.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A South Carolina judge has dismissed Charleston’s climate lawsuit,
delivering a decisive setback to the climate litigation campaign. 

Via a ruling on Wednesday, Judge Roger Young dismissed the case with prejudice – meaning Charleston cannot refile the claims – dealing a substantial blow for law firm Sher Edling and the Rockefeller-backed climate litigation campaign. This ruling follows a growing trend of similar dismissals in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland, reinforcing the principle that climate policy is a national and global issue, not something individual states or cities can reshape using state law:

“… the Court concludes that, although Plaintiff’s claims purport to be about deception, they are premised on, and seek redress for, the effects of greenhouse gas emissions.”

A Slippery Slope 

One of Judge Young’s most striking points was a clear warning about the “boundless” nature of the liability Charleston’s claims could create. If allowed to proceed, the city’s theory would open the floodgates for nearly limitless litigation – not just against energy producers, but a wide range of industries, including airlines, automakers, and agriculture: 

“Under Plaintiff’s theory, any emitters of or contributors to greenhouse gas emissions — such as airlines, automotive manufacturers, power companies, and agricultural companies—could be liable for contributing to global climate change… … As with the list of plaintiffs, the list of potential defendants thus appears boundless.” (emphasis added)

Similarly, Judge Young emphasized that allowing such lawsuits would create a precedent where every weather event would potentially trigger legal action: 

“Already, scores of states, counties, and municipalities have sued a hodgepodge of oil-and-gas companies for the alleged weather-related effects of climate change. If these lawsuits were successful, municipalities, companies, and individuals across the country could bring suits for injuries after every weather event.”

Time-Barred and Fundamentally Flawed 

Even Charleston’s claim under South Carolina’s Unfair Trade Practices Act did not survive – barred by the state’s three-year statute of limitations. Judge Young noted that public awareness of climate change and its connection to fossil fuel use has existed for decades, undercutting any claim of recent discovery: 

“Plaintiff’s Complaint is time-barred under South Carolina’s three-year statute of limitations because Plaintiff has long been on notice of the potential dangers of climate change and its connection to fossil-fuel use.”

The ruling also referenced constitutional limits and recent federal actions opposing these types of suits, specifically referencing President Trump’s April Executive Order targeting anti-energy lawfare.    

Notably, Judge Young flatly rejected comparisons to tobacco and opioid litigation, stating Charleston’s claims fundamentally differ because the alleged harm depends on cumulative, global emissions – not direct, localized actions:  

“A plaintiff smoking tobacco in South Carolina causes direct adverse health effects to that plaintiff in South Carolina. The City’s claims, by contrast, depend on interstate and international emissions allegedly causing global climate change, ultimately resulting in alleged in-state injuries caused by, for example, the weather. Because any alleged injury under Plaintiff’s claims necessarily relies on the cumulative effect of interstate and international emissions from global consumers, the claims are readily distinguishable from these other mass-tort cases and are uniquely precluded and preempted by federal law.”

BOTTOM LINE: This ruling sends a clear message: the courtroom is not the place to set national climate policy. As more judges reject these unfounded claims, the climate litigation campaign is losing both momentum and credibility. 

Footnote from the ruling by Judge Roger Young

“This Court thus joins the “growing chorus of state and federal courts across the United States, singing from the same hymnal, in concluding that the claims raised by [climate-change plaintiffs] are not judiciable by any state court” and that “our federal structure does not allow . . . any State’s law[] to address [these types of climate-change] claims.”

 

The case was CITY OF CHARLESTON, Plaintiff, v.
BRABHAM OIL COMPANY, INC.; COLONIAL GROUP, INC.; ENMARK STATIONS, INC.; COLONIAL PIPELINE COMPANY; PIEDMONT PETROLEUM CORP.; EXXON MOBIL CORPORATION; EXXONMOBIL OIL CORPORATION; ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLC; SHELL OIL COMPANY; SHELL OIL PRODUCTS COMPANY LLC; CHEVRON CORPORATION; CHEVRON U.S.A. INC.; BP P.L.C.; BP AMERICA INC.; MARATHON PETROLEUM CORPORATION; MARATHON PETROLEUM COMPANY LP; SPEEDWAY LLC; MURPHY OIL CORPORATION; MURPHY OIL USA, INC.; HESS CORPORATION; CONOCOPHILLIPS; CONOCOPHILLIPS COMPANY; PHILLIPS 66; and PHILLIPS 66 COMPANY,
Defendants.

ORDER GRANTING DEFENDANTS’ JOINT MOTION TO DISMISS PLAINTIFF’S COMPLAINT FOR FAILURE TO STATE A CLAIM AND FOR LACK OF PERSONAL JURISDICTION