Scafetta: Climate Models Have Issues

Posted on by Ron Clutz

On June 18, 2025 Nicola Scafetta published Detection, attribution, and modeling of climate change:  key open issues.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) global climate models (GCMs) assess that nearly 100% of global surface warming observed between 1850–1900 and 2011–2020 is attributable to anthropogenic drivers like greenhouse gas emissions. These models also generate future climate projections based on shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), aiding in risk assessment and the development of costly “Net-Zero” climate mitigation strategies.

Figure 1. Anthropgenic and natural contributions. (a) Locked scaling factors, weak Pre Industrial Climate Anomalies (PCA). (b) Free scaling, strong PCA Source: Larminat, P. de (2023)

Yet, as this study discusses, the CMIP GCMs face significant scientific challenges in attributing and modeling climate change, particularly in capturing natural climate variability over multiple timescales throughout the Holocene. Other key concerns include the reliability of global surface temperature records, the accuracy of solar irradiance models, and the robustness of climate sensitivity estimates. Global warming estimates may be overstated due to uncorrected non-climatic biases, and the GCMs may significantly underestimate solar and astronomical influences on climate variations.

The equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) to radiative forcing could be lower than commonly assumed; empirical findings suggest ECS values lower than 3°C and possibly even closer to 1.1 ± 0.4 °C. Empirical models incorporating natural variability suggest that the 21st-century global warming may remain moderate, even under SSP scenarios that do not necessitate Net-Zero emission policies.

These findings raise important questions regarding the necessity and urgency of implementing aggressive climate mitigation strategies. While GCMs remain essential tools for climate research and policymaking, their scientific limitations underscore the need for more refined modeling approaches to ensure accurate future climate assessments. Addressing uncertainties related to climate change detection, natural variability, solar influences, and climate sensitivity to radiative forcing will enhance predictions and better inform sustainable climate strategies.

Discussion

Scientific challenges in climate detection, attribution, and modeling stem from three primary issues:

1. the inherent uncertainty of what measurements really indicate complicates the detection of climate change and its causative factors;
2. the anthropogenic contribution is superimposed to natural climate variability, necessitating comprehensive understanding and accurate modeling of the latter;
3. key physical processes, such as cloud formation and solar contributions to climate dynamics, remain poorly characterized.

Figure 1:

(A) Compilation of the radiative forcing functions utilized in the CMIP5 GCMs (adapted from IPCC,2013, Figure 8.18).
(B) Variations in observed global surface temperature (black) alongside the CMIP3 and CMIP5 model simulations incorporating only natural forcing and combined natural-anthropogenic forcing (adapted from IPCC, 2013, FAQ 10.1, Figure 1).
(C) Compilation of the radiative forcing functions utilized in the CMIP6 GCMs (adapted from IPCC, 2021, Figure 2.10).
(D) Observed global surface temperature variations (black) alongside the CMIP6 model simulations incorporating only natural forcing and combined naturalanthropogenic forcing (adapted from IPCC, 2021, Figure SPM.1).

Notably, in both (B) and (D), the observational data necessary
to validate the GCM predictions that consider only natural forcings
are not reported because they do not exist.

While all available GCMs indicate that the positive feedbacks surpass the negative ones thus amplifying the effects of radiative forcing, large uncertainties associated with crucial feedback mechanisms — particularly those related to water vapor and cloud formation — remain substantial.

Feedback mechanisms include:

• Water Vapor Feedback — A positive feedback governed by the Clausius-Clapeyron law, which links ocean vaporation rates to temperature increases;
• Albedo Feedback — A positive feedback arising from changes in surface reflectivity due to ice and snow
cover variations;
• Cloud Feedback — Particularly challenging to quantify, as cloud formation, type, and distribution are sensitive to warming; certain clouds cool the surface by reflecting solar radiation, while others trap emitted
heat, making their net contribution highly uncertain;
• Lapse Rate Feedback — A negative feedback involving modifications to atmospheric temperature vertical
gradients;
• Carbon Cycle Feedback — Activated by warming-induced CO2 release from soils and oceans (per Henry’s law), further increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations;
• Vegetation Feedback — Temperature and precipitation changes alter vegetation cover, which influences
carbon storage and surface albedo.

The CMIP6 GCMs are also employed to simulate future climate scenarios based on hypothetical radiative forcing functions derived from Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). The ones mainly adopted in the IPCC AR6 are:
• SSP1-2.6 — low greenhouse gas emissions, with robust adaptation and mitigation measures leading to
Net-Zero CO2 emissions between 2050–2075;
• SSP2-4.5 — intermediate emissions, where CO2 levels remain near current levels until 2050 and subsequently decline without achieving Net-Zero by 2100;
• SSP3-7.0 — high emissions, with CO2 concentrations doubling by 2100 under minimal policyintervention;
• SSP5-8.5 — very high emissions, with CO2 levels tripling by 2075 under a worst-case scenario devoid of
mitigation measures.

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).

Conclusion

Over the span of approximately three decades, from the publication of the First Assessment Report (FAR, IPCC, 1990) to the Sixth Assessment Report (AR6, IPCC, 2021), the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has significantly advanced  marked up its understanding of the role of anthropogenic emissions in driving global warming.

In the 1990s the IPCC posited that both natural mechanisms and human activities could have contributed roughly equally (∼50% each) to the observed warming of the 20th century. However, since the years 2000s the prevailing scientific opinion has shifted, and the IPCC (AR6, 2021) now asserts that human activities are almost exclusively responsible (∼100%) for the global warming and climate change observed from 1850–1900 to 2011–2020.

The most recent assessment reports IPCC (2021, 2023) underscore this conclusion with striking clarity. As shown in Figure 2, the average contribution of natural factors — solar and volcanic forcing and internal natural variability — to global warming during the aforementioned period is estimated to be approximately 0°C.  Consequently, from the CMIP GCM perspective, concerns about future climate warming due to additional anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are well-founded. However, this conclusion depends on the reliability of global surface temperature records and the robustness of the physical science underpinning global climate models (GCMs).

The findings outlined above underscore significant uncertainties in climate modeling, climate data, solar records, and solar-climate interactions, leaving unresolved the key question of whether observed warming is primarily driven by anthropogenic factors, natural processes, or their interplay. Empirical methodologies, such as those utilized by Scafetta (2023a, 2024) and Connolly et al. (2023), highlight this ongoing ambiguity.

Concerns are mounting regarding the limitations of the CMIP GCMs employed by the IPCC in its assessment reports from 2007, 2013, and 2021. These models appear unable to accurately replicate natural climate variability across different timescales, highlighting critical unresolved issues in fundamental climate dynamics.Also the magnitude of solar variability across temporal scales requires further investigation, particularly given the strong correlations identified between solar proxy records and climate patterns throughout the Holocene. Schmutz (2021) argued that such strong correlations challenge the validity of the low-variability TSI models, such as those proposed by Matthes et al. (2017), Kopp et al., 2016 and Wu et al. (2018). Since these models serve as solar forcing inputs for the CMIP6 GCMs, their choice needs to be reconsidered.

Climate science remains far from settled, yet trillions of dollars continue to be allocated toward policies aimed at mitigating extreme hypothetical warming scenarios based on potentially flawed GCM outputs. Historically, atmospheric CO2 levels have been 10 to 20 times higher than current concentrations during approximately 95% of Earth’s history since complex life emerged 600 million years ago (Davis, 2017). Notably, CO2 concentrations often lag temperature changes across different timescales, suggesting temperature fluctuations may drive CO2 variations rather than vice versa (Shakun et al., 2012; Koutsoyiannis, 2024).

Advancing climate science requires directly confronting uncertainties in detection, attribution, and modeling. Further research on unresolved issues is critical for improving climate risk assessment and developing more effective strategies for addressing future environmental challenges.

 

2025 Evidence of Nature’s Sunscreen

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Greenhouse with adjustable sun screens to control warming.

2025 Updated Report on Global Dimming and Brightening Worldwide and in China 

Martin Wild et al published April 2025 A Perspective on Global Dimming and Brightening Worldwide and in China. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Worldwide radiation records suggest that the amount of sunlight received at the Earth’s surface (surface solar radiation, SSR) has not been stable over the years, but underwent significant decadal variations, popularly also known as “global dimming and brightening”. These variations have been particularly evident in China, where the SSR substantially declined from the 1960s to the 1990s (dimming), with indications for a trend reversal in the 2000s and a slight recovery (brightening) in recent years. This perspective/review paper will discuss recent updates and remaining challenges regarding our knowledge of the magnitudes, causes, and implications of these variations in SSR worldwide, with a particular emphasis on the developments in China.

Fig. 1. Qualitative tendencies in decadal SSR changes over theperiods 1950s to 1980s, 1980s to 2000, and post-2000 in different world regions that are well covered by historic SSR records.

Recent developments include the use of machine learning methods to spatially and temporally augment the limited worldwide in-situ SSR observational records (Yuan et al.,2021; Jiao et al., 2023). These methods generate spatially complete SSR datasets over the entire land surface (Fig. 2). Figure 2 shows some characteristic features of SSR trends during the 1985−2019 “brightening period”, such as the substantial brightening over Europe and the continuous dimming in India. It remains a challenge to fully assess the reliability of the trends of these machine learning-based estimations, particularly in regions that lack the constraints of in-situ radiation observations.

Fig. 2. Worldwide linear trends of the annual average SSR during the “brightening” period of 1985–2019 based on ground observations spatially augmented by machine learning methods [Reprinted from Yuan et al. (2021), © American Meteorological Society. Used with permission.]

Impacts in China

A number of studies have shown that changes in SSR have affected warming rates in China, particularly in terms of the mean and maximum 2-m air temperatures. Daily maximum temperatures were shown to increase less than daily minimum temperatures in China since the 1960s, particularly in the decades of strongest dimming, indicative of a dampening effect of SSR dimming, particularly on the daily maximum temperature warming rates most directly affected by SSR changes (Wang et al., 2012a; Du et al., 2017; Zhao et al., 2021). The evolution of daily maximum land surface (Ts-max) and 2-m air (Ta-max) temperatures averaged over China from the 1960s to 2003 is illustrated in Fig. 5 in terms of their annual means and the means of the warm and cold seasons (from Du et al., 2017).

Fig. 5. China-mean anomalies of daily maximum land surface temperature (Ts-max, blue line) and daily maximum air temperature (Ta-max, red line) for the (a) entire year, (b) warm season (May−October), and (c) cold season (November−April) with respect to the reference period 1961–90,based on 1977 stations [Reprinted from Du et al. (2017).]

Previous Post  Hard Evidence of Solar Impact upon Earth Cloudiness

Later on is a reprinted discussion of global dimming and brightness resulting from fluctuating cloud cover.  This is topical because of new empirical research findings coming out of Asia.  H/T GWPF.  A study published by Kobe University research center is Revealing the impact of cosmic rays on the Earth’s climate.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

New evidence suggests that high-energy particles from space known as galactic cosmic rays affect the Earth’s climate by increasing cloud cover, causing an “umbrella effect”.

When galactic cosmic rays increased during the Earth’s last geomagnetic reversal transition 780,000 years ago, the umbrella effect of low-cloud cover led to high atmospheric pressure in Siberia, causing the East Asian winter monsoon to become stronger. This is evidence that galactic cosmic rays influence changes in the Earth’s climate. The findings were made by a research team led by Professor Masayuki Hyodo (Research Center for Inland Seas, Kobe University) and published on June 28 in the online edition of Scientific Reports.

The Svensmark Effect is a hypothesis that galactic cosmic rays induce low cloud formation and influence the Earth’s climate. Tests based on recent meteorological observation data only show minute changes in the amounts of galactic cosmic rays and cloud cover, making it hard to prove this theory. However, during the last geomagnetic reversal transition, when the amount of galactic cosmic rays increased dramatically, there was also a large increase in cloud cover, so it should be possible to detect the impact of cosmic rays on climate at a higher sensitivity.

(The Svenmark Effect is explained in essay The cosmoclimatology theory)

How Nature’s Sunscreen Works (from Previous Post)

A recent post Planetary Warming: Back to Basics discussed a recent paper by Nikolov and Zeller on the atmospheric thermal effect measured on various planets in our solar system. They mentioned that an important source of temperature variation around the earth’s energy balance state can be traced to global brightening and dimming.

This post explores the fact of fluctuations in the amount of solar energy reflected rather than absorbed by the atmosphere and surface. Brightening refers to more incoming solar energy from clear and clean skies. Dimming refers to less solar energy due to more sunlight reflected in the atmosphere by the presence of clouds and aerosols (air-born particles like dust and smoke).

The energy budget above from ERBE shows how important is this issue. On average, half of sunlight is either absorbed in the atmosphere or reflected before it can be absorbed by the surface land and ocean. Any shift in the reflectivity (albedo) impacts greatly on the solar energy warming the planet.

The leading research on global brightening/dimming is done at
the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science of ETH Zurich,
led by Dr. Martin Wild, senior scientist specializing in the subject.

Special instruments have been recording the solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface since 1923. However, it wasn’t until the International Geophysical Year in 1957/58 that a global measurement network began to take shape. The data thus obtained reveal that the energy provided by the sun at the Earth’s surface has undergone considerable variations over the past decades, with associated impacts on climate.

The initial studies were published in the late 1980s and early 1990s for specific regions of the Earth. In 1998 the first global study was conducted for larger areas, like the continents Africa, Asia, North America and Europe for instance.

Now ETH has announced The Global Energy Balance Archive (GEBA) version 2017: A database for worldwide measured surface energy fluxes. The title is a link to that paper published in May 2017 explaining the facility and some principal findings. The Archive itself is at  http://www.geba.ethz.ch.

For example, Figure 2 below provides the longest continuous record available in GEBA: surface downward shortwave radiation measured in Stockholm since 1922. Five year moving average in blue, 4th order regression model in red. Units Wm-2. Substantial multidecadal variations become evident, with an increase up to the 1950s (“early brightening”), an overall decline from the 1950s to the 1980s (“dimming”), and a recovery thereafter (“brightening”).
Figure 5. Composite of 56 European GEBA time series of annual surface downward shortwave radiation (thin line) from 1939 to 2013, plotted together with a 21 year Gaussian low-pass filter ((thick line). The series are expressed as anomalies (in Wm-2) from the 1971–2000 mean. Dashed lines are used prior to 1961 due to the lower number of records for this initial period. Updated from Sanchez-Lorenzo et al. (2015) including data until December 2013.
Martin Wild explains in a 2016 article Decadal changes in radiative fluxes at land and ocean surfaces and their relevance for global warming. From the Conclusion (SSR refers to solar radiation incident upon the surface)

However, observations indicate not only changes in the downward thermal fluxes, but even more so in their solar counterparts, whose records have a much wider spatial and temporal coverage. These records suggest multidecadal variations in SSR at widespread land-based observation sites. Specifically, declining tendencies in SSR between the 1950s and 1980s have been found at most of the measurement sites (‘dimming’), with a partial recovery at many of the sites thereafter (‘brightening’).

With the additional information from more widely measured meteorological quantities which can serve as proxies for SSR (primarily sunshine duration and DTR), more evidence for a widespread extent of these variations has been provided, as well as additional indications for an overall increasing tendency in SSR in the first part of the 20th century (‘early brightening’).

It is well established that these SSR variations are not caused by variations in the output of the sun itself, but rather by variations in the transparency of the atmosphere for solar radiation. It is still debated, however, to what extent the two major modulators of the atmospheric transparency, i.e., aerosol and clouds, contribute to the SSR variations.

The balance of evidence suggests that on longer (multidecadal) timescales aerosol changes dominate, whereas on shorter (decadal to subdecadal) timescales cloud effects dominate. More evidence is further provided for an increasing influence of aerosols during the course of the 20th century. However, aerosol and clouds may also interact, and these interactions were hypothesized to have the potential to amplify and dampen SSR trends in pristine and polluted areas, respectively.

No direct observational records are available over ocean surfaces. Nevertheless, based on the presented conceptual ideas of SSR trends amplified by aerosol–cloud interactions over the pristine oceans, modeling approaches as well as the available satellite-derived records it appears plausible that also over oceans significant decadal changes in SSR occur.

The coinciding multidecadal variations in SSTs and global aerosol emissions may be seen as a smoking gun, yet it is currently an open debate to what extent these SST variations are forced by aerosol-induced changes in SSR, effectively amplified by aerosol– cloud interactions, or are merely a result of unforced natural variations in the coupled ocean atmosphere system. Resolving this question could state a major step toward a better understanding of multidecadal climate change.

Another paper co-authored by Wild discusses the effects of aerosols and clouds The solar dimming/brightening effect over the Mediterranean Basin in the period 1979 − 2012. (NSWR is Net Short Wave Radiation, that is equal to surface solar radiation less reflected)

The analysis reveals an overall increasing trend in NSWR (all skies) corresponding to a slight solar brightening over the region (+0.36 Wm−2per decade), which is not statistically significant at 95% confidence level (C.L.). An increasing trend(+0.52 Wm−2per decade) is also shown for NSWR under clean skies (without aerosols), which is statistically significant (P=0.04).

This indicates that NSWR increases at a higher rate over the Mediterranean due to cloud variations only, because of a declining trend in COD (Cloud Optical Depth). The peaks in NSWR (all skies) in certain years (e.g., 2000) are attributed to a significant decrease in COD (see Figs. 9 and 10), whilethe two data series (NSWRall and NSWRclean) are highly correlated(r=0.95).

This indicates that cloud variation is the major regulatory factor for the amount and multi-decadal trends in NSWR over the Mediterranean Basin. (Note: Lower cloud optical depth is caused by less opaque clouds and/or decrease in overall cloudiness)

On the other hand, the results do not reveal a reversal from dimming to brightening during 1980s, as shown in several studies over Europe (Norris and Wild, 2007;Sanchez-Lorenzoet al., 2015), but a rather steady slight increasing trend in solar radiation, which, however, seems to be stabilized during the last years of the data series, in agreement with Sanchez-Lorenzo et al. (2015). Similarly, Wild (2012) reported that the solar brightening was less distinct at European sites after 2000 compared to the 1990s.

In contrast, the NSWR under clear (cloudless) skies shows a slight but statistically significant decreasing trend (−0.17 Wm−2per decade,P=0.002), indicating an overall decrease in NSWR over the Mediterranean due to water-vapor variability suggesting a transition to more humid environment under a warming climate.

Other researchers find cloudiness more dominant than aerosols. For example, The cause of solar dimming and brightening at the Earth’s surface during the last half century: Evidence from measurements of sunshine duration by Gerald Stanhill et al.

Analysis of the Angstrom-Prescott relationship between normalized values of global radiation and sunshine duration measured during the last 50 years made at five sites with a wide range of climate and aerosol emissions showed few significant differences in atmospheric transmissivity under clear or cloud-covered skies between years when global dimming occurred and years when global brightening was measured, nor in most cases were there any significant changes in the parameters or in their relationships to annual rates of fossil fuel combustion in the surrounding 1° cells. It is concluded that at the sites studied changes in cloud cover rather than anthropogenic aerosols emissions played the major role in determining solar dimming and brightening during the last half century and that there are reasons to suppose that these findings may have wider relevance.

Summary

The final words go to Martin Wild from Enlightening Global Dimming and Brightening.

Observed Tendencies in surface solar radiation
Figure 2.  Changes in surface solar radiation observed in regions with good station coverage during three periods.(left column) The 1950s–1980s show predominant declines (“dimming”), (middle column) the 1980s–2000 indicate partial recoveries (“brightening”) at many locations, except India, and (right column) recent developments after 2000 show mixed tendencies. Numbers denote typical literature estimates for the specified region and period in W m–2 per decade.  Based on various sources as referenced in Wild (2009).

The latest updates on solar radiation changes observed since the new millennium show no globally coherent trends anymore (see above and Fig. 2). While brightening persists to some extent in Europe and the United States, there are indications for a renewed dimming in China associated with the tremendous emission increases there after 2000, as well as unabated dimming in India (Streets et al. 2009; Wild et al. 2009).

We cannot exclude the possibility that we are currently again in a transition phase and may return to a renewed overall dimming for some years to come.

One can’t help but see the similarity between dimming/brightening and patterns of Global Mean Temperature, such as HadCrut.

Footnote: For more on clouds, precipitation and the ocean, see Here Comes the Rain Again

It’s Summertime, Hottest Year Claims Ensue

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Matthew Wielicki explains the scientific malpractice in his Financial Post article Junk Science Week: The hottest year ever?.  Excerpts in italics wtih my bolds and added images

Advocates and the media claim 2024 was the hottest year ever.
Archeological data suggest it wasn’t,
while modern data suffer from biases

An image produced by NASA and used when it declared 2024 as the warmest year on record. Photo by NASA

In 2024, mainstream media and political leaders aggressively promoted the alarming narrative that Earth had just experienced its hottest year ever recorded. National Geographic dramatically proclaimed, “2024 was the hottest year ever … and the coldest year of the rest of your life,” while the Vancouver Sun declared unequivocally, “Scientists confirm 2024 was Canada’s and world’s hottest year on record.” Canadian political figures reinforced this narrative, with prime minister Justin Trudeau characterizing the year’s warmth as an urgent call for immediate climate action.

I’m an earth science professor-in-exile. Claims such as these
immediately provoke critical skepticism.

This persistent narrative, relentlessly advanced by a powerful climate-industrial complex comprising governments, activist organizations and the media, is designed not merely to inform, but to generate a state of perpetual urgency. As global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to rise despite decades of climate policy interventions, the need to claim climate conditions are increasingly severe becomes a strategic imperative, regardless of scientific accuracy or historical context. This approach not only distorts genuine scientific inquiry but fosters anxiety and despair, particularly affecting young people already inundated with predictions of catastrophe.

The answers to four fundamental questions expose the weaknesses and biases inherent in the mainstream climate narrative:

1. Can we accurately measure historical global temperatures?

Claims about unprecedented global heat depend heavily on comparing modern temperature records, which are gathered by instrument and capture annual or monthly fluctuations, to historical temperature estimates derived from proxy data such as ice cores, tree rings, sediment layers and coral reefs. But proxy data inherently smooths out short-term fluctuations, providing generalized temperature estimates spanning centuries or millennia. This mismatch between high-resolution modern data and low-resolution historical proxies inevitably exaggerates the perceived severity of contemporary warming.

For example, widely cited reconstructions and favourites of The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) explicitly acknowledge their inability to capture temperature variability occurring over periods shorter than 300 years. The rapid temperature changes of recent decades appear unprecedented when put side by side with these smoothed historical averages. This methodological flaw significantly undermines the credibility of claims asserting that current global temperatures are historically unique or alarming.

2. Was 2024 really unprecedentedly warm?

Extensive historical and geological evidence demonstrates significant natural warming vastly exceeding modern temperatures. The Holocene Thermal Maximum (five to nine thousand years ago) saw temperatures significantly warmer than today, including in Canada. Archeological evidence, such as ancient forests revealed by retreating glaciers in the Rockies, conclusively supports periods of substantial natural warmth.

During the Eemian interglacial period (115-130 thousand years ago), Greenland experienced temperatures three to five degrees C warmer than now, despite substantially lower CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere. These scientifically documented periods confirm that Earth’s climate naturally experiences considerable variability, rendering claims of unprecedented modern warmth scientifically untenable and historically uninformed.

3. Are we measuring the effects of CO₂ or urban heat islands

Most modern temperature records fuelling alarmist headlines originate from urban areas influenced by the Urban Heat Island Effect (UHIE). UHIE results from urban infrastructure, such as concrete, asphalt and buildings, retaining and radiating heat, significantly increasing local temperatures independent of broader climate trends. Toronto’s significant infrastructure growth has noticeably raised local temperatures, heavily skewing data. Similarly, Las Vegas’ highest recorded temperatures coincided with significant expansion around Harry Reid International Airport, illustrating the dominant role of urbanization rather than atmospheric CO₂ emissions.

Recent research indicates that up to 65 per cent of urban warming is from local urbanization rather than global greenhouse gas increases. Attributing urban heat predominantly to CO₂ emissions significantly misrepresents the true dynamics of local temperature increases.

4. Do rising CO2 levels really heat the oceans?

Recent alarmist coverage in outlets like the Financial Times highlights near-record ocean temperatures, linking them directly to rising CO₂ levels. The EU’s Copernicus programme noted that May 2025 ocean temperatures were the second highest ever recorded, with scientists raising concerns about the oceans’ diminishing capacity to absorb CO₂ and excess heat.

But this narrative critically overlooks fundamental scientific facts. Oceans possess a heat capacity orders of magnitude greater than the atmosphere. The notion that atmospheric CO₂ significantly heats ocean water directly is scientifically unfounded, as infrared radiation from CO₂ penetrates mere millimetres into the ocean’s surface, not nearly deep enough to meaningfully alter ocean temperature. Ocean temperature fluctuations are primarily driven by natural phenomena such as El Niño.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

Moreover, historical data on ocean temperatures is highly uncertain, relying predominantly on sparse measurements and indirect proxies. Claiming near-record ocean temperatures without acknowledging these substantial uncertainties misleads the public about the robustness and reliability of these measurements.

Critical conclusion: One thing remains certain: it will never be “too hot” in Canada, despite alarmist rhetoric suggesting otherwise. The exaggerated claims that 2024 was “the hottest year ever” are not grounded in rigorous scientific analysis but serve primarily as political and ideological propaganda. This relentless propagation of fear fosters anxiety, despair, and nihilism, especially among young people — serious consequences largely ignored by climate alarmists.

The scientific community, policy-makers and the public at large need to insist on transparency, rigour and honesty in climate discourse. Recognizing the motivations behind alarmist claims is essential to ensuring public trust and effective policy. Climate science should strive to educate, not frighten, promoting balanced understanding rather than catastrophic narratives disconnected from historical context and scientific rigour.

Matthew Wielicki, Ph.D. in geochemistry from UCLA, publishes the Substack site Irrational Fear, which provides data-driven critiques aimed at fostering a balanced and scientifically grounded understanding of climate science.

Rupert Darwall: World Leaders Took a Wrong Turn

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Rupert Darwall examines when and why the world has gone wrong this century, pinpointing a fundamental error needing correction. Excerpts of the transcript are in italics lightly edited with my bolds and added images. [MM refers to the interviewer, Maggie Miller, and RD refers to Rupert Darwall.]

MM: I’m joined now by Rupert Darwall, author of The Age of Error, Net Zero and The Destruction of the West. Thank you for joining me here today. Although you’re not a speaker here at this event I feel like your book speaks to what we are talking about. So it’s important to take some time to discuss this. For those who might be unfamiliar, would you talk about your book and what are the key takeaways?

RD: Yes, going back in time a bit, I had this sensation where I didn’t understand the way things were going in the world. Perhaps other people might have a a similar kind of feeling. And then the penny dropped. We live in an age of error. And once you understood that, everything started to fall in place. As a result of that, I decided to write a book on the age of error, which is essentially what the book’s about.

MM: When you think about the age of error, when do you think it began, can you set a date to that precisely?

RD: Yes I think I can. Because in 2006 there was the meeting of the G8 which was in St Petersburg hosted by Vladimir Putin. And the leaders of the west along with Vladimir Putin signed up to a document called the St. Petersburg Principles of Energy Security. In that document the leaders of the west said that that they needed to invest trillions of dollars across all the value chain, the whole oil and gas value chain.

We can see there in the summer of 2006, the leaders of the west understood energy realism. This was a realistic response to what was happening in the first decade of the 21st century. Oil prices had been rising quite strongly. Since the 1980s there had been a two decade run of falling energy prices that started to reverse. And higher energy prices were of course causing real concern to the economy and also to energy security.

So in 2006 we can say that was energy realism. People such as the leaders of the west had their heads screwed on straight. By 2009, after the global financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Barack Obama also in 2008, we then had the L’Aquila G8 meeting. And there the leaders of the west signed up to a green recovery and the realism that you’d seen three years earlier had completely gone. So yes one can date this really quite precisely.

MM: Sounds very interesting. What would you say is the biggest error that the west has made?

RD: I think the biggest error is personified by John Kerry. People like John Kerry believe that history is over, that is the history of the rise and fall and competition of great powers is over. And now the world together faces the prospect of climate catastrophe, a planetary catastrophe. So that the world must come together, bury their rivalries. We all come together at the Paris climate conference and we agree to decarbonize.

That to my mind is the biggest error of the age because history has not ended. Geopolitics still continues. We saw that in 2014 when Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, and most of all we saw that in February 2022 when he invaded Ukraine. And the error is that by believing in the catastrophe vision of the world, you will lose the geopolitics. Because there is no way that you can decarbonize your economy and still compete in a geopolitical world. You will basically lose, the west will lose to China.

MM: So what are the consequences for America and Europe?

RD: I would distinguish between America and Europe because after the financial crisis one thing that America had one thing going for it, which was a really really big thing, that was hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling– the shale revolution. And that turbocharged economic growth in the years following the financial crisis. It was driven a lot by falling energy prices and by the shale revolution.

Europe on the other hand has really strongly embraced net zero. It really believes that decarbonization is the path to economic growth and that is a complete fantasy. You can’t do both. You cannot have economic growth and at the same time starve yourself of of energy.

So I think America is in a different position because of the energy revolution, and moreover there’s always been a debate in America about climate change. So there’s always been a strong trend to towards energy realism, which obviously one sees now very strongly in in the Trump administration.  Figures like Chris Wright personify energy realism and and the energy opportunity.

Europe has real real deep, deep problems, since it has drunk from the well of net zero very deeply. And it’s going to take a lot to get it off. I mean by a lot, it’s going to take very high prices, very weak economy. It simply can cannot generate the resources it needs to defend itself from a more aggressive Russia.

MM: What are you looking forward to now, what have you set your sight on?

RD: In terms of the book, I’ve written 17 chapters and the book will be 20 chapters. I’m looking forward to putting finish on chapter 20 and submitting the manuscript. Getting the book out is important because I think it speaks very strongly to the current situation we’re in.

May 2025 Two Years of Ocean Cooling Persists

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The best context for understanding decadal temperature changes comes from the world’s sea surface temperatures (SST), for several reasons:

  • The ocean covers 71% of the globe and drives average temperatures;
  • SSTs have a constant water content, (unlike air temperatures), so give a better reading of heat content variations;
  • A major El Nino was the dominant climate feature in recent years.

HadSST is generally regarded as the best of the global SST data sets, and so the temperature story here comes from that source. Previously I used HadSST3 for these reports, but Hadley Centre has made HadSST4 the priority, and v.3 will no longer be updated.  HadSST4 is the same as v.3, except that the older data from ship water intake was re-estimated to be generally lower temperatures than shown in v.3.  The effect is that v.4 has lower average anomalies for the baseline period 1961-1990, thereby showing higher current anomalies than v.3. This analysis concerns more recent time periods and depends on very similar differentials as those from v.3 despite higher absolute anomaly values in v.4.  More on what distinguishes HadSST3 and 4 from other SST products at the end. The user guide for the current version HadSST4.1.1.0 is here.   The charts and analysis below is produced from the current data.

The Current Context

The chart below shows SST monthly anomalies as reported in HadSST4 starting in 2015 through May 2025. A global cooling pattern is seen clearly in the Tropics since its peak in 2016, joined by NH and SH cycling downward since 2016, followed by rising temperatures in 2023 and 2024.

Note that in 2015-2016 the Tropics and SH peaked in between two summer NH spikes.  That pattern repeated in 2019-2020 with a lesser Tropics peak and SH bump, but with higher NH spikes. By end of 2020, cooler SSTs in all regions took the Global anomaly well below the mean for this period.  A small warming was driven by NH summer peaks in 2021-22, but offset by cooling in SH and the tropics, By January 2023 the global anomaly was again below the mean.

Then in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak.  Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 12 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 8 months from its 1.3C peak in August, down to 0.8C in March and April.  Remarkably, April 2025 SST anomalies in all regions and globally are the coolest since March 2023.  May shows little change in the Global anomaly, with a SH decline offsetting an upward bump in NH.

Comment:

The climatists have seized on this unusual warming as proof their Zero Carbon agenda is needed, without addressing how impossible it would be for CO2 warming the air to raise ocean temperatures.  It is the ocean that warms the air, not the other way around.  Recently Steven Koonin had this to say about the phonomenon confirmed in the graph above:

El Nino is a phenomenon in the climate system that happens once every four or five years.  Heat builds up in the equatorial Pacific to the west of Indonesia and so on.  Then when enough of it builds up it surges across the Pacific and changes the currents and the winds.  As it surges toward South America it was discovered and named in the 19th century  It iswell understood at this point that the phenomenon has nothing to do with CO2.

Now people talk about changes in that phenomena as a result of CO2 but it’s there in the climate system already and when it happens it influences weather all over the world.   We feel it when it gets rainier in Southern California for example.  So for the last 3 years we have been in the opposite of an El Nino, a La Nina, part of the reason people think the West Coast has been in drought.

It has now shifted in the last months to an El Nino condition that warms the globe and is thought to contribute to this Spike we have seen. But there are other contributions as well.  One of the most surprising ones is that back in January of 2022 an enormous underwater volcano went off in Tonga and it put up a lot of water vapor into the upper atmosphere. It increased the upper atmosphere of water vapor by about 10 percent, and that’s a warming effect, and it may be that is contributing to why the spike is so high.

A longer view of SSTs

To enlarge image, open in new tab.

The graph above is noisy, but the density is needed to see the seasonal patterns in the oceanic fluctuations.  Previous posts focused on the rise and fall of the last El Nino starting in 2015.  This post adds a longer view, encompassing the significant 1998 El Nino and since.  The color schemes are retained for Global, Tropics, NH and SH anomalies.  Despite the longer time frame, I have kept the monthly data (rather than yearly averages) because of interesting shifts between January and July. 1995 is a reasonable (ENSO neutral) starting point prior to the first El Nino.

The sharp Tropical rise peaking in 1998 is dominant in the record, starting Jan. ’97 to pull up SSTs uniformly before returning to the same level Jan. ’99. There were strong cool periods before and after the 1998 El Nino event. Then SSTs in all regions returned to the mean in 2001-2.

SSTS fluctuate around the mean until 2007, when another, smaller ENSO event occurs. There is cooling 2007-8,  a lower peak warming in 2009-10, following by cooling in 2011-12.  Again SSTs are average 2013-14.

Now a different pattern appears.  The Tropics cooled sharply to Jan 11, then rise steadily for 4 years to Jan 15, at which point the most recent major El Nino takes off.  But this time in contrast to ’97-’99, the Northern Hemisphere produces peaks every summer pulling up the Global average.  In fact, these NH peaks appear every July starting in 2003, growing stronger to produce 3 massive highs in 2014, 15 and 16.  NH July 2017 was only slightly lower, and a fifth NH peak still lower in Sept. 2018.

The highest summer NH peaks came in 2019 and 2020, only this time the Tropics and SH were offsetting rather adding to the warming. (Note: these are high anomalies on top of the highest absolute temps in the NH.)  Since 2014 SH has played a moderating role, offsetting the NH warming pulses. After September 2020 temps dropped off down until February 2021.  In 2021-22 there were again summer NH spikes, but in 2022 moderated first by cooling Tropics and SH SSTs, then in October to January 2023 by deeper cooling in NH and Tropics.

Then in 2023 the Tropics flipped from below to well above average, while NH produced a summer peak extending into September higher than any previous year.  Despite El Nino driving the Tropics January 2024 anomaly higher than 1998 and 2016 peaks, following months cooled in all regions, and the Tropics continued cooling in April, May and June along with SH dropping.  After July and August NH warming again pulled the global anomaly higher, September through January 2025 resumed cooling in all regions, continuing February through April 2025, with little change in May.

What to make of all this? The patterns suggest that in addition to El Ninos in the Pacific driving the Tropic SSTs, something else is going on in the NH.  The obvious culprit is the North Atlantic, since I have seen this sort of pulsing before.  After reading some papers by David Dilley, I confirmed his observation of Atlantic pulses into the Arctic every 8 to 10 years.

Contemporary AMO Observations

Through January 2023 I depended on the Kaplan AMO Index (not smoothed, not detrended) for N. Atlantic observations. But it is no longer being updated, and NOAA says they don’t know its future.  So I find that ERSSTv5 AMO dataset has current data.  It differs from Kaplan, which reported average absolute temps measured in N. Atlantic.  “ERSST5 AMO  follows Trenberth and Shea (2006) proposal to use the NA region EQ-60°N, 0°-80°W and subtract the global rise of SST 60°S-60°N to obtain a measure of the internal variability, arguing that the effect of external forcing on the North Atlantic should be similar to the effect on the other oceans.”  So the values represent SST anomaly differences between the N. Atlantic and the Global ocean.

The chart above confirms what Kaplan also showed.  As August is the hottest month for the N. Atlantic, its variability, high and low, drives the annual results for this basin.  Note also the peaks in 2010, lows after 2014, and a rise in 2021. Then in 2023 the peak was holding at 1.4C before declining.  An annual chart below is informative:

Note the difference between blue/green years, beige/brown, and purple/red years.  2010, 2021, 2022 all peaked strongly in August or September.  1998 and 2007 were mildly warm.  2016 and 2018 were matching or cooler than the global average.  2023 started out slightly warm, then rose steadily to an  extraordinary peak in July.  August to October were only slightly lower, but by December cooled by ~0.4C.

Then in 2024 the AMO anomaly started higher than any previous year, then leveled off for two months declining slightly into April.  Remarkably, May showed an upward leap putting this on a higher track than 2023, and rising slightly higher in June.  In July, August and September 2024 the anomaly declined, and despite a small rise in October, ended close to where it began.  Note 2025 started much lower than the previous year and is headed sharply downward, well below the previous two years, now in May aligning with 2010.

The pattern suggests the ocean may be demonstrating a stairstep pattern like that we have also seen in HadCRUT4.

The purple line is the average anomaly 1980-1996 inclusive, value 0.17.  The orange line the average 1980-2024, value 0.38, also for the period 1997-2012. The red line is 2013-2024, value 0.67. As noted above, these rising stages are driven by the combined warming in the Tropics and NH, including both Pacific and Atlantic basins.

Curiosity:  Solar Coincidence?

The news about our current solar cycle 25 is that the solar activity is hitting peak numbers now and higher  than expected 1-2 years in the future.  As livescience put it:  Solar maximum could hit us harder and sooner than we thought. How dangerous will the sun’s chaotic peak be?  Some charts from spaceweatherlive look familar to these sea surface temperature charts.

Summary

 

The oceans are driving the warming this century.  SSTs took a step up with the 1998 El Nino and have stayed there with help from the North Atlantic, and more recently the Pacific northern “Blob.”  The ocean surfaces are releasing a lot of energy, warming the air, but eventually will have a cooling effect.  The decline after 1937 was rapid by comparison, so one wonders: How long can the oceans keep this up? And is the sun adding forcing to this process?

Footnote: Why Rely on HadSST4

HadSST is distinguished from other SST products because HadCRU (Hadley Climatic Research Unit) does not engage in SST interpolation, i.e. infilling estimated anomalies into grid cells lacking sufficient sampling in a given month. From reading the documentation and from queries to Met Office, this is their procedure.

HadSST4 imports data from gridcells containing ocean, excluding land cells. From past records, they have calculated daily and monthly average readings for each grid cell for the period 1961 to 1990. Those temperatures form the baseline from which anomalies are calculated.

In a given month, each gridcell with sufficient sampling is averaged for the month and then the baseline value for that cell and that month is subtracted, resulting in the monthly anomaly for that cell. All cells with monthly anomalies are averaged to produce global, hemispheric and tropical anomalies for the month, based on the cells in those locations. For example, Tropics averages include ocean grid cells lying between latitudes 20N and 20S.

Gridcells lacking sufficient sampling that month are left out of the averaging, and the uncertainty from such missing data is estimated. IMO that is more reasonable than inventing data to infill. And it seems that the Global Drifter Array displayed in the top image is providing more uniform coverage of the oceans than in the past.

uss-pearl-harbor-deploys-global-drifter-buoys-in-pacific-ocean

USS Pearl Harbor deploys Global Drifter Buoys in Pacific Ocean

Climatists’ Childish Reading of Polar Ice

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Vijay Jayaraj  explains in his Cornwall Alliance article Climate-obsessives’ Infantile Reading of Polar Ice. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Whenever “experts are shocked” they usually have marginalized or ignored altogether factors wrongly assumed to have no influence over their hypotheses, theories or beliefs.

Nowhere is this more evident than in climate science where changes in geophysical phenomenon continue to defy assumptions and forecasts presented by some of the most highly paid and influential scientists on the planet.

Among the most infamous examples is the failure of computer climate models to accurately predict real-world temperatures. This is predominantly due to the unscientific exaggeration of carbon dioxide’s (CO2’s) potency in warming the atmosphere.

Charts showing annual gains and losses of Surface Mass Balance (SMB) of Greenland Ice Sheet GIS. Note accumulations above the mean in these years. Note also that each year starts from zero, not showing additions from the previous year.

Now scientists have encountered more “shocks” as polar sea ice is refusing to behave as expected. Since September 1, 2024, an astonishing 579 billion tons of fresh snow and ice have blanketed the Greenland ice sheet, marking the most significant accumulation for that date in at least eight years—far surpassing the 1981-2010 average.

Meanwhile, both the North and South Poles are defying expectations, piling on more ice despite, as reported in hyperbolic headlines, “record-breaking” global heat. It’s a breathtaking, almost surreal twist in the story of our planet’s climate!

According to NASA, “Arctic sea ice reaches its minimum extent (the area in which satellite sensors show individual pixels to be at least 15% covered in ice) each September.”

In the post-2010 era, the September minimum extent of Arctic sea ice occurred in 2012, which was also the lowest since satellite measurements began in 1980. But ever since 2012, ice has been increasing or oscillating well above that year’s mark.

Likewise, the volume of sea ice has not significantly dropped since 2012 and there has been a nominal increase in volume since a low point of 2020.

So, why is the minimum coverage of Arctic sea ice holding above the level of 2012?

One of the most obvious reasons could be that CO2 is not as powerful a temperature control knob as claimed, which is a possibility that many well-funded scientists refuse to even take into consideration.

Also, remember that we are in the Holocene epoch, a warm geological phase between two glacial advances – one that ended about 10,000 years ago and the next expected to occur some number of thousand years hence. An upward tick in Arctic temperatures shouldn’t surprise us regardless of whether we emit CO2 or not. In fact, Arctic ice levels witnessed in the 17th century during the Little Ice Age were among the highest since continental glaciers blanketed Canada and extended into the lower 48 states to create the Great Lakes.

At one point, news media were abuzz with the unexpected gain in Antarctica’s ice mass. Antarctica gained ice from 2021 to 2023, with studies showing nearly 108 gigatons per year added, mainly due to increased snowfall in East Antarctica.

Data from Vostok and Concordia stations in East Antarctica indicate extremely cold temperatures in early May, with minimums of minus 106.6 degrees Fahrenheit at Concordia on May 12. With winter just beginning, the temperatures are likely to dive further.

As recently as 2023, Concordia station recorded one of its lowest temperatures for the current decade, a brutal minus 117.76 degrees. Similarly, at Western Antarctica’s Byrd Station, a likely all-time low of almost minus 50 degrees was recorded as recently as 2023. These numbers may be surprising, but they are in tune with the unpredictability of climate – and of nature in general. Let’s just admit it. Things are not as “straightforward” as crisis-obsessed scientists are making them out to be. The climate system is complex, and the science is not settled. Our understanding of climatic dynamics is in its infancy. And to suggest that changes –whatever the direction – in polar ice presage a catastrophe is infantile.

 

Meet Téa Johansson, Teenage Climate Realist

Posted on by Ron Clutz

For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript lightly edited from the closed captions with my bolds along with some of the exhibits and added images.

Life on Earth is in crisis crop failure, social and ecological collapse, mass extinction.  We have a moral duty to take action.  These statements made by Extinction Rebellion reflect the climate alarmist narrative that has continued to escalate across the Western world.  Hysteria over climate change can be seen throughout history, from the human sacrifices of the Aztecs to bring back rain, to the Salem witch trials to eliminate the women they blamed for crop failure during the little ice age.

Today the climate industrial complex is funded by trillions of dollars seeking to control what we buy, eat and where we are allowed to travel,  all in the name of sustainability and achieving net zero carbon emissions.  This fear campaign is rooted in the belief that we will not look into the data ourselves, but instead look to the governments and to the media to tell us what is true.

Today I will demonstrate that temperatures fluctuate and are not unprecedented, and that natural disasters are not getting worse. I will also highlight the unreliability of climate data and the role of CO2.  Ultimately I will present scientific evidence to show that we are not in a climate crisis.

Historical temperature records indicate that we are not in the climate crisis western governments claim.  We are looking at a graph of the past 65 million years from NOAA.  The Earth today seems to be in a particularly cool period; in fact the Earth is still coming out of an ice age. History demonstrates that life has existed and thrived in much warmer temperatures, and that temperatures have been much higher without the human influence of industrial CO2 emissions.  

Historical temperature records indicate that the temperature of the Earth naturally fluctuates over time as it has for the past 65 million years.  In just the past 2,000 years there have been two warm periods and two cold periods.  The Roman warm period, also called the Roman optimum, was known as a time of prosperity.  This of course goes against the entire narrative that warming threatens human life.  Following the Roman warm period came the cold dark age,  the medieval warm period, and the Little Ice Age.  The current warming from 1800 onwards is the warming of recovery from the Little Ice Age.  However temperatures are still cold compared to distant times and continue to visibly fluctuate.  

Given this evidence,  the claim by scientists and news pundits that 3° Fahrenheit is the end of civilization is not cause for alarm.  Because it is not unprecedented and because temperatures will continue to fluctuate today.  The argument for climate change is rooted in the belief that warmer weather and CO2 emissions have been causing natural disasters to become more frequent and more violent.   However after studying hurricane and wildfire data, it became clear that actual activity goes against this global warming narrative.

This graph from the bulletin of the American Meteorological Society shows the number of hurricanes in the US per year since 1900 showing a slight downward trend for the past 120 years.  The strength and duration of hurricanes shows a similar lack of crisis.  

A graph from the National Hurricane Research Laboratory illustrates the North Atlantic hurricane intensity from 1920 to 2016, where there is evidently no trend. However the data presented to the public by the 2014 National Climate Assessment of the United States is limited to the portion highlighted in red creating an illusory upward trend.

This graph starting in 1920 shows that the number of acres burned by wildfires in the US has been decreasing.  Similarly the number of acres burned globally since 1900 has steadily declined as well. Ultimately the presented evidence goes against the narrative that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have been making the weather worse.

To understand the science behind the climate crisis claims of today, it is necessary to highlight the unreliability of available data.  This is most evident in the disparity between climate model predictions and the observed data.  In this graph illustrating temperature change, the blue line representing data taken from weather balloons matches up well with the green line showing data taken from satellites. However the red line represents the climate models used by the UNIPCC to predict future global warming.  These observations show that actual warming is about one third of that predicted.

Temperature measurements are greatly affected by what is called the urban heat island effect.  Since concrete picks up heat, temperatures taken in cities are much higher than those taken in rural areas.  For example in a thermal radiation map of the city of Paris, the middle of the city produces a deep red color representing heat, while the rural areas around the city project a green to bluecolor representing milder temperatures.  

This gap represents one way that climate alarmists can instill fear by embellishing data to serve their agenda. Perhaps the greatest tool of the climate industrial complex is the supposed evil of CO2.  However CO2 is not the control knob for climate change mainly because it is only 0.04% of the atmosphere.  I’ll say it again:  CO2 is only 0.04% of the atmosphere.  A visual comparison of CO2 to the other atmospheric gases shows how barely negligible is the gas in comparison.  

Although the mainstream media has tried to alarm its consumers with the accelerating emissions of CO2, the Earth is actually in a CO2 famine.  Current levels are about 423 parts per million; however in the past they have been at least a thousand parts per million and have likely reached 8,000 parts per million.

While the narrative states that CO2 directly causes the rise in temperature, it has been found that quite the opposite is true.  The relationship between CO2 and temperature is not that more CO2 causes a rise in temperature, but that a rise in temperature causes an increase in CO2.   Carl Wunsch, professor of oceanography at MIT, found that when the ocean warms more CO2 is released into the atmosphere.  On the other hand when the ocean is cold, CO2 is absorbed into the water.  

In a graphical correlation between temperature and CO2, it is found that when a rise in temperature occurs, a rise in CO2 follows a few centuries later.  In this graph CO2 rose 800 years later in response to a surge in temperature.

Like everything else in the world, CO2 may have some small factor in climate, while there are countless of other factors affecting temperature.  Some examples are volcanic activity, cosmic rays, and the sun.  This highlights how if we were to limit CO2,  it would only stunt biodiversity while having almost no effect on temperature.  Because of the fact that it is only one small factor in a sea of greater causes.

Some call CO2 the gas of life because it plays an instrumental role in the process of photosynthesis. It comes as no surprise that most farmers use high levels of it in their green houses to produce a better crop.  In this picture four pine trees are shown growing at different levels of added CO2, from normal atmospheric CO2 to an added 150, 300, and eventually 450 parts per million.  More CO2 is evidently beneficial for plant growth.  Physicist Lubos Motl, former professor at Harvard, summarized the importance of CO2, saying “It is the key compound that plants need to grow, and indirectly every organism needs to have food.  At the end it is clear that CO2 is not, as the New York Times frighteningly put it, a tiny bit of arsenic or cobra venom.   Nor will it cause famine as many claim; if CO2 increases it will only green the planet and increase the food supply.

Across the western world climate change has been coined as an existential threat to mankind.  While this sentiment is not new over the course of history, as it can be seen through the Aztecs and even in the Salem witch trials.  It has once again become relevant in today’s culture with policies such as carbon taxes and individual CO2 budgets being proposed in our governments.  We are seeing the climate issue creep into every part of our lives.

This is why I I found it necessary to pursue the truth and the climate debate.  In my speech I presented the scientific evidence behind historical temperature change and natural disasters,  discovering the unreliability of climate data, the small role of CO2 in climate, and its essential role in biodiversity.   As a result I’ve concluded that the climate crisis is a hoax that we must arm ourselves against by pursuing the truth and by looking into the data ourselves.

Wacky New Climate Lawsuit: Wrongful Death from Heat Wave

Posted on by Ron Clutz

David Zaruk reports at Real Climate Science Climate Activists Sue Oil Industry for Wrongful Death.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Climate activists employing tort law firms have lost one lawsuit after another in their misguided crusade to bankrupt energy companies by blaming them for the effects of climate change. This isn’t about justice, for victims deserving or otherwise, but instead a nakedly unscrupulous effort to achieve progressive policy ends by ulterior means. 

But it hasn’t panned out, as a growing number of “public nuisance” cases–tried in liberal and conservative jurisdictions and adjudicated by Democrat- and Republican-appointed judges alike–have been dismissed or lost for abusing law, science, and common sense.

Rather than admit defeat and abandon this strategy, however, the lawyers and activists are trying a new approach: wrongful death suits. No longer are oil companies only at fault for statewide climate damages caused by everyone’s CO2 emissions—now the tactic is to make them responsible for specific, individual fatalities. At least that’s the fantastical argument they’re hoping to present in court.

The first such case was filed last month when Washington resident Misti Leon brought a wrongful death complaint in state court against seven major energy companies and a subsidiary pipeline firm claiming the greenhouse emissions from their products contributed to a 2021 heat wave that killed her mother, Juliana Leon. The victim was found dead after a long drive in a car without air conditioning during a record-breaking 108°F day in Seattle.

The lawsuit alleges these companies knowingly altered the climate,
failed to warn the public, and are liable for Juliana’s death by hyperthermia. 

While the tragedy of Juliana’s death is undeniable, this lawsuit is a scientifically preposterous and ideologically driven attempt to exploit personal loss for political gain, masquerading as a quest for justice. 

A flawed premise

The premise of the lawsuit—that oil companies’ emissions directly caused a specific heat wave and, by extension, an individual’s death—is a leap that collapses under even the slightest scrutiny. Climate science cannot pinpoint a single weather event as the direct result of any one company’s actions. CO2 emissions are a global, cumulative phenomenon, with contributions from countless sources—industrial, agricultural, and individual. Furthermore, there are so many other factors beyond CO2 emissions that could affect particular weather events.

When global warming skeptics employ this curious logic in the opposite direction, using specific weather events like heavy snowfall to debunk climate change, environmental activists rightly highlight the flawed logic: you can’t deny a global phenomenon based on regional weather events. “… [W]hat happens locally, or over short periods of time, is not necessarily representative of what’s happening nationally and globally,” Yale University’s Center for Environmental Communication explains.

Yet when Leon claims that “each Defendant is transacting or has transacted substantial business in Washington,” she is committing the same fallacy by trying to tie global phenomena to company-specific operations in a single state. As judges presiding over previous climate cases have concluded, the plaintiffs can’t have it both ways.

It’s simply untenable to allege a global corporate conspiracy
while demanding restitution for a local tragedy. 

The lawsuit’s reliance on attribution science, which estimates the likelihood that climate change made an event more probable, underscores this problem. It’s widely recognized within mainstream climatology that “Event attribution is not ready for a major role in loss and damage” claims, as a recent article in the prestigious journal Nature Climate Change observed. One of the key reasons for this conservative stance toward attribution science is that it’s based on complex models built on myriad assumptions about the atmospheric conditions across entire countries–and around the world.

Legitimate wrongful death claims require clear causation and foreseeability. Here, the chain is impossibly attenuated: emissions from multiple companies, mixed globally over decades, allegedly intensified a heat wave, which, combined with Juliana’s tragic personal circumstances (a long drive with no air conditioning, diagnosed comorbidities, and recovering from major surgery), led to her death. There is simply no reasonable way to leap from existing attribution studies to that conclusion. 

Rehashing “Exxon Knew”

The lawsuit’s narrative hinges on the claim that these companies “knew” their products would cause “catastrophic climate disasters” yet misled the public. “Defendants have concealed their knowledge of and deceived the public about these risks,” Leon’s complaint alleges, “hooking consumers on fossil fuels without their understanding or consent to the risk of harm to themselves, others, and the planet.”

The gaping flaw in this logic was recently exposed by a Delaware judge presiding over a related climate suit, which also blamed specific damages in the state on the oil industry. As Firebreak’s analysis of that case pointed out, the “Exxon Knew” trope is based on the assumption that the effects of climate change have been “open and obvious” for decades. The plaintiffs, Ms. Leon included, are desperately trying to accuse the energy industry of successfully denying a phenomenon that everyone has been aware of for decades. The plaintiffs’ response to this criticism? Dead silence. As the Delaware judge observed in her decision: 

“There were reports and stories in The Washington Post and The New York Times that warned the public about global warming and the deception used by oil and coal industries … Defendants have provided evidence showing that the general public had knowledge of or had access to information about the disputes, regarding the existence of climate change and effects, decades prior …This information and evidence is unrefuted by the State.”

While it’s true that energy companies conducted internal research on the potential environmental impacts of their products–as all companies do as part of basic risk management scenario building–so did governments, universities, and other industries. What all of these groups have in common is that they wanted more information about the potential risks, and tradeoffs, of an extremely useful and civilizationally pivotal source of energy. 

Combined, these knowledge seekers built a gradual, evolving scientific consensus on global warming—which is far less alarmist than the public has been told. For instance, it’s now widely recognized by many experts (even if with a degree of disappointment) that a runaway warming scenario is highly unlikely.

The fact that energy companies contributed to this consensus about climate change isn’t scandalous—and it’s certainly no justification for a wrongful death suit. Internal industry documents from decades ago confirm that oil companies were studying long-term climate trends, but they certainly didn’t have a crystal ball that predicted the effects of warming half a century later.

Thanks for the cheap energy, see you in court 

The overarching problem with Ms. Leon’s claim is that fossil fuels power modern civilization with the literal and figurative “buy-in” of governments, businesses, and citizens. As willing consumers of abundant food, affordable electricity, life-sustaining and life-saving tools, and medical devices, we are, all of us, undeniably contributors to the effects of climate change, whatever they turn out to be. 

The lawsuit’s accusation of a grand conspiracy sidesteps this shared responsibility for social choices, painting oil companies as singular villains. We can’t build a sprawling, global civilization powered by oil and gas and then turn around and sue the industry that supplied us with so much inexpensive energy. Quite literally every plaintiff in these climate damage suits–every city, state, and now individual–has been and continues to be a longtime customer of the fossil fuel industry. The hypocrisy is off the charts.

Demand for justice or ideological crusade?

And while Leon’s complaint frames the suit as a quest for justice, her demands expose just how disingenuous the case is. Beyond unspecified damages, Misti Leon seeks to force these companies to fund “a public education campaign to rectify Defendants’ decades of misinformation.” This smacks of activism, not justice. It suggests the goal is less about compensating a loss than about scoring points in the culture war over climate policy. 

The Center for Climate Integrity, an advocacy group backing the case, frames it as a landmark effort to hold “Big Oil” accountable. Yet, their rhetoric—calling the lawsuit the first to tie an individual death to a “climate disaster”—reveals a strategy of emotional manipulation, leveraging Juliana’s death to galvanize public sentiment rather than establish legal merit. 

Ultimately, this lawsuit cheapens a genuine tragedy. Juliana Leon’s death should be mourned, not exploited. Climate change is a real challenge, but addressing it demands rigorous science, honest policy, and collective action. Frivolous lawsuits that clog courts don’t aid in those efforts. This case, like many before it, will likely falter under its own weight, a cautionary tale of zeal outpacing reason. 

NH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower May 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The post below updates the UAH record of air temperatures over land and ocean. Each month and year exposes again the growing disconnect between the real world and the Zero Carbon zealots.  It is as though the anti-hydrocarbon band wagon hopes to drown out the data contradicting their justification for the Great Energy Transition.  Yes, there was warming from an El Nino buildup coincidental with North Atlantic warming, but no basis to blame it on CO2.

As an overview consider how recent rapid cooling  completely overcame the warming from the last 3 El Ninos (1998, 2010 and 2016).  The UAH record shows that the effects of the last one were gone as of April 2021, again in November 2021, and in February and June 2022  At year end 2022 and continuing into 2023 global temp anomaly matched or went lower than average since 1995, an ENSO neutral year. (UAH baseline is now 1991-2020). Then there was an usual El Nino warming spike of uncertain cause, unrelated to steadily rising CO2 and now dropping steadily.

For reference I added an overlay of CO2 annual concentrations as measured at Mauna Loa.  While temperatures fluctuated up and down ending flat, CO2 went up steadily by ~60 ppm, a 15% increase.

Furthermore, going back to previous warmings prior to the satellite record shows that the entire rise of 0.8C since 1947 is due to oceanic, not human activity.

gmt-warming-events

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby.  These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event.  The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4.  This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C.  Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C.  Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate.  On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. And in 2024 we saw an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean air warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.

Chris Schoeneveld has produced a similar graph to the animation above, with a temperature series combining HadCRUT4 and UAH6. H/T WUWT

image-8

See Also Worst Threat: Greenhouse Gas or Quiet Sun?

May 2025 NH and Tropics Lead UAH Temps Lower banner-blog

With apologies to Paul Revere, this post is on the lookout for cooler weather with an eye on both the Land and the Sea.  While you heard a lot about 2020-21 temperatures matching 2016 as the highest ever, that spin ignores how fast the cooling set in.  The UAH data analyzed below shows that warming from the last El Nino had fully dissipated with chilly temperatures in all regions. After a warming blip in 2022, land and ocean temps dropped again with 2023 starting below the mean since 1995.  Spring and Summer 2023 saw a series of warmings, continuing into 2024 peaking in April, then cooling off to the present.

UAH has updated their TLT (temperatures in lower troposphere) dataset for May 2025. Due to one satellite drifting more than can be corrected, the dataset has been recalibrated and retitled as version 6.1 Graphs here contain this updated 6.1 data.  Posts on their reading of ocean air temps this month are ahead of the update from HadSST4.  I posted recently on SSTs April 2025 Two Years Ocean Warming Gone.  These posts have a separate graph of land air temps because the comparisons and contrasts are interesting as we contemplate possible cooling in coming months and years.

Sometimes air temps over land diverge from ocean air changes. In July 2024 all oceans were unchanged except for Tropical warming, while all land regions rose slightly. In August we saw a warming leap in SH land, slight Land cooling elsewhere, a dip in Tropical Ocean temp and slightly elsewhere.  September showed a dramatic drop in SH land, overcome by a greater NH land increase. 2025 has shown a sharp contrast between land and sea, first with ocean air temps falling in January recovering in February.  Then land air temps, especially NH, dropped in February and recovered in March. Now in May both land and sea temps are down in NH and Tropics, overwhelming slight rises of both in SH.

Note:  UAH has shifted their baseline from 1981-2010 to 1991-2020 beginning with January 2021.   v6.1 data was recalibrated also starting with 2021. In the charts below, the trends and fluctuations remain the same but the anomaly values changed with the baseline reference shift.

Presently sea surface temperatures (SST) are the best available indicator of heat content gained or lost from earth’s climate system.  Enthalpy is the thermodynamic term for total heat content in a system, and humidity differences in air parcels affect enthalpy.  Measuring water temperature directly avoids distorted impressions from air measurements.  In addition, ocean covers 71% of the planet surface and thus dominates surface temperature estimates.  Eventually we will likely have reliable means of recording water temperatures at depth.

Recently, Dr. Ole Humlum reported from his research that air temperatures lag 2-3 months behind changes in SST.  Thus cooling oceans portend cooling land air temperatures to follow.  He also observed that changes in CO2 atmospheric concentrations lag behind SST by 11-12 months.  This latter point is addressed in a previous post Who to Blame for Rising CO2?

After a change in priorities, updates are now exclusive to HadSST4.  For comparison we can also look at lower troposphere temperatures (TLT) from UAHv6.1 which are now posted for May 2025.  The temperature record is derived from microwave sounding units (MSU) on board satellites like the one pictured above. Recently there was a change in UAH processing of satellite drift corrections, including dropping one platform which can no longer be corrected. The graphs below are taken from the revised and current dataset.

The UAH dataset includes temperature results for air above the oceans, and thus should be most comparable to the SSTs. There is the additional feature that ocean air temps avoid Urban Heat Islands (UHI).  The graph below shows monthly anomalies for ocean air temps since January 2015.

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

After sharp cooling everywhere in January 2023, there was a remarkable spiking of Tropical ocean temps from -0.5C up to + 1.2C in January 2024.  The rise was matched by other regions in 2024, such that the Global anomaly peaked at 0.86C in April. Since then all regions have cooled down sharply to a low of 0.27C in January.  In February 2025, SH rose from 0.1C to 0.4C pulling the Global ocean air anomaly up to 0.47C, where it stayed in March and April. Now in May drops in NH and Tropics pulled the air temps over oceans down despite an uptick in SH. At 0.43C, ocean air temps are similar to May 2020, albeit with higher SH anomalies.

Land Air Temperatures Tracking in Seesaw Pattern

We sometimes overlook that in climate temperature records, while the oceans are measured directly with SSTs, land temps are measured only indirectly.  The land temperature records at surface stations sample air temps at 2 meters above ground.  UAH gives tlt anomalies for air over land separately from ocean air temps.  The graph updated for May is below.

 Here we have fresh evidence of the greater volatility of the Land temperatures, along with extraordinary departures by SH land.  The seesaw pattern in Land temps is similar to ocean temps 2021-22, except that SH is the outlier, hitting bottom in January 2023. Then exceptionally SH goes from -0.6C up to 1.4C in September 2023 and 1.8C in  August 2024, with a large drop in between.  In November, SH and the Tropics pulled the Global Land anomaly further down despite a bump in NH land temps. February showed a sharp drop in NH land air temps from 1.07C down to 0.56C, pulling the Global land anomaly downward from 0.9C to 0.6C. In March that drop reversed with both NH and Global land back to January values, holding there in April.  Now in May, sharp drops in NH and Tropics land air temps pulled the Global land air temps back down close to February value.

The Bigger Picture UAH Global Since 1980

The chart shows monthly Global Land and Ocean anomalies starting 01/1980 to present.  The average monthly anomaly is -0.03, for this period of more than four decades.  The graph shows the 1998 El Nino after which the mean resumed, and again after the smaller 2010 event. The 2016 El Nino matched 1998 peak and in addition NH after effects lasted longer, followed by the NH warming 2019-20.   An upward bump in 2021 was reversed with temps having returned close to the mean as of 2/2022.  March and April brought warmer Global temps, later reversed

With the sharp drops in Nov., Dec. and January 2023 temps, there was no increase over 1980. Then in 2023 the buildup to the October/November peak exceeded the sharp April peak of the El Nino 1998 event. It also surpassed the February peak in 2016. In 2024 March and April took the Global anomaly to a new peak of 0.94C.  The cool down started with May dropping to 0.9C, and in June a further decline to 0.8C.  October went down to 0.7C,  November and December dropped to 0.6C. February went down to 0.5C, then back up to 0.6C in March and April driven by the bounce in NH land air temps, followed by May’s return to 0.5C.

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

Note on Ocean Cooling Not Yet Fully Appearing in UAH Dataset

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

TLTs include mixing above the oceans and probably some influence from nearby more volatile land temps.  Clearly NH and Global land temps have been dropping in a seesaw pattern, nearly 1C lower than the 2016 peak.  Since the ocean has 1000 times the heat capacity as the atmosphere, that cooling is a significant driving force.  TLT measures started the recent cooling later than SSTs from HadSST4, but are now showing the same pattern. Despite the three El Ninos, their warming had not persisted prior to 2023, and without them it would probably have cooled since 1995.  Of course, the future has not yet been written.

Climate Policies to What End?

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Oren Cass writes at Commonplace Who Is Climate Policy For?  Not workers. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I mostly stopped writing about climate change in 2018, when actual analysis lost all relevance to the increasingly unmoored claims of climate activists. The frequently cited estimates of catastrophic cost, I showed in published reports and congressional testimony, were simply nonsensical. One prominent model relied upon by the EPA predicted that heat deaths in northern cities in the year 2100 would be 50 times higher than they had been in southern cities in the year 2000, despite the northern cities never reaching the temperatures that the southern cities were already experiencing. Another study, published in Nature, predicted that warming would boost Mongolia’s GDP per capita to more than four times America’s. But no one cared; no one was held accountable.

When subsequent research flipped the claims on their head, no one even flinched. Here’s the New York Times, four years apart:

(Technically, the first chart is GDP loss, while the second is heat deaths. But as the Times explained, the main driver of GDP loss in that first chart is heat deaths: “The greatest economic impact would come from a projected increase in heat wave deaths as temperatures soared, which is why states like Alabama and Georgia would face higher risks while the cooler Northeast would not.”) [Note:  Observations actually show a “warming hole” in Southeast US, perhaps due in part to reforestation efforts.]

Discussion of solutions, meanwhile, became entirely performative. So many climate agreements were signed, none had the prospect of substantially shifting the trajectory of global emissions, which is driven overwhelmingly by growth in the developing world. The Biden administration spent four years trumpeting unprecedented investment in fighting climate change. Try to find a comment linking that action to a downward shift in future temperatures or a reduction in any of the purportedly existential harms repeated ad nauseum as the basis for the action. I’ll wait.

The climate lectures had become the equivalent of the parent telling his children to eat their vegetables, because children in Africa are starving.

So now I encounter climate change mostly in the context of discussions about how best to build a policy agenda that serves the interests of American workers, and the working class broadly. Along with the refusal to enforce immigration law and the passion for shoveling hundreds of billions of dollars into a higher education system that fails most young people, the obsession with fighting climate change is a quintessential tradeoff preferred by progressives that they are of course welcome to make, but that cannot be squared with a commitment to working-class interests.

Progressives tend not to appreciate this observation,
or the cognitive dissonance that it triggers.

As I wrote in The Once and Future Worker, “People know how they want society ordered and wish desperately for that same thing to be good for everyone else.” Our 20-year-old texter feels this strongly. Fighting the climate crisis and providing for working families are not mutually exclusive. But the belief in a mythological crisis goes forever unsubstantiated. What is the ongoing devastation of communities that Biden-style policy action will mitigate?

To be clear, when I say mythological crisis, I don’t mean that climate change is a myth. I think climate change is a very serious challenge with which the United States, and the world, must find ways to cope. I’d also like to see us pursuing aggressive public investment in next-generation nuclear technology, and in the industrial precursors to strong electric vehicle supply chains—both of which are smart industrial policy regardless of climate implications.

But in the broader scheme of a century of economic, technological,
and geopolitical changes and challenges, the gradual increase
in global temperatures does not rank high.

This is not my opinion, it is the conclusion of the climate models, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the analyses that attempt to translate these forecasts into economic impacts. Climate change is not one of the top challenges facing working families in America. Solving it, if we could, which we can’t, would do little to move the needle in helping them achieve middle-class security.

But what about the “Green New Deal”? It has “New Deal” right in the title, suggesting a clear commitment to improving economic opportunity! That’s true, as far as it goes. Indeed, we could launch a “Purple New Deal” dedicated to knocking down all buildings that are not purple and replacing them with purple ones, which would also have many jobs associated with it.  Unfortunately, that’s not good economic policy.

What the Green New Deal—and climate policy, generally—attempts to do is shut down the existing energy industry and much of the industrial economy that relies on cheap and reliable energy, and replace it all with new “green” jobs. This should not require saying, but apparently does: Supplanting an existing, robust energy sector and industrial economy that provides a lot of very good jobs outside of our knowledge economy and superstar cities, with a new set of industries that hopes to do the same, does not in fact deliver economic gains.

The stated goal of climate policy is to replace things we already have. Anything new it creates is an attempt to climb back out of a hole it has dug itself. And unfortunately, the new tends to be less good, economically speaking, than the old. That reality in the auto industry is what drove the UAW strike last year.

The best way to understand all this is with a simple hypothetical: Let’s say we didn’t have to worry about climate change. A neat little box sucked greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere for free; problem solved. Would anyone still propose the Green New Deal? No climate change to worry about, you need to propose an agenda to support working families, how high on the list is “spend trillions of dollars shutting down the industrial economy and attempting to replace it with a set of less efficient and unproven technologies in which the United States has a much weaker position”?

It’s nowhere on the list.
Because climate policy does not help the working class.

For whatever reason, the project of decarbonizing the economy captures the progressive mind like no other. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s Abundanceopens with a paragraph about waking up in the year 2050 in a cool bedroom powered by clean energy sources—a bedroom no cooler than the one you would wake up in today. Their abundant future is, first and foremost, not a more abundant one at all—merely one whose energy system they have transformed. Discussing scarcities, they start with, “We say that we want to save the planet from climate change.” When they enthuse that “new technologies create new possibilities and allow us to solve once-impossible problems,” they are thinking first of greenhouse gas emissions. “We worry,” first, “over climate change.” And “this book is motivated in no small part by our belief that we need to decarbonize the global economy.”

In my podcast with Klein, I asked him whether combatting climate change might represent a tradeoff in his agenda, rather than item one for bringing abundance to America. “For most, certainly, liberals who think about this and have studied this,” he responded, “the decarbonization is just central to the idea of what it would mean for our descendants to live a flourishing life.” Pitched this way, it fits perfectly the ideological template of most neoliberal missteps of the past 30 years: a purported win-win that serves the priorities of highly educated, high-income elites, who then instruct everyone else that the same thing should be their priority too. Like globalization, and unrestricted immigration, and free college.

Fool me once… Climate policy imposes massive costs, and damages the industrial economy, in pursuit of a specific goal: reducing carbon dioxide emissions. And if that’s your goal, that’s fine. Fight for it! Make the case for the tradeoff. But don’t pretend there’s no tradeoff, and certainly don’t tell the people you’re trading off that you’re really doing it for them.

 

See Also 

Eco-Loons War on Productive Working Class