Last year Pope Leo spoke before a slowly melting chunk of glacial ice in Vatican City in his first address on climate change. The pontiff addressed a crowd of roughly 1,000 attendees and called on people all over the world to demand action on climate from their governments. Last October my post presented evidence the Arctic was already heeding his call, growing by leaps and bounds. /sarc. Now the ice is again abundant in October 2026.
The graph below shows October daily ice extents for 2026 compared to 20 year averages, and some years of note. The first 18 days showed large ice surpluses, then slowed to match average, before ending in some deficit. As a result the Monthly October average surpassed average. Note that concerns over the September Arctic minimum are eased every year with the October extents growing on average from 5.0M km2 to 8.4M km2
Why is this important? All the claims of global climate emergency depend on dangerously higher temperatures, lower sea ice, and rising sea levels. The lack of additional warming prior to 2023-24 El Nino, which after receding is warming slightly warming, as documented in a post August 2026 El Nino Drives Global UAH Warming.
Illustration by Eleanor Lutz shows Earth’s seasonal climate changes. If played in full screen, the four corners present views from top, bottom and sides. It is a visual representation of scientific datasets measuring ice and snow extents.
From 10.000 Years to 4: One Equation Falsifies the Entire IPCC CO₂ Narrative – by Jonathan Cohler
The video above is a recent presentation by Jonathan Cohler at EIKE ( European Climate and Energy Institute). The english audio is available. He does a complete and evidence-based destruction of IPCC “concensus” Climate Science. For those prefering to read I provide a transcript lightly edited from the captions, along with some bolds and key exhibits from the talk.
Just very briefly, I’m Jonathan Cohler. I’m a Harvard-trained physicist, AI researcher, software developer. I serve on the Heartland Institute’s Board of Policy Advisors, and I’m a member of the CO2 Coalition. And over the past year, I’ve authored six climate papers, both peer-reviewed and pre-print, with illustrious co-authors including Willie Soon, David Legates, Keston Green, and Ole Humlum.
Collectively, the papers falsify the entire IPCC framework.
I presented some of this at Heartland’s conference in Washington this April, but today at EIKE is the first public presentation of our newest paper on the bomb radiocarbon falsification of the IPCC CO2 attribution, and more. So I’m going to start here by sharing my screen with you so you can see the presentation. So for 38 years, numerous IPCC purported metrics and associated lies have been paraded before the world as settled science.
Today, I’m going to show you that none of them are true, and most aren’t even real. One note on language I use, I use the word lie in its plain sense, a statement that is not true. Intent is not part of the definition. Orwell’s 2 plus 2 equals 5 is a lie regardless of who says it or why. When I call an IPCC claim a lie, I’m stating it’s false.
That said, intent in this case is not in doubt. The IPCC has had 38 years of access to all the data and the resources of every major government on earth. It knows what it has been promulgating, it knows what it has been suppressing, and significant numbers of scientists know as well. I won’t name any individuals, they know who they are, but I will name the institution, the IPCC.
My presentation is based on five papers, my 2025 peer-reviewed paper, building on Essex et al., 2007, and proving again that global mean surface temperature, GMST, does not exist. Our 2026 peer-reviewed paper on the invalidity of Argo-based ocean heat content with co-authors Dave Legates, Keston Green, Ole Humlum, Franklin Soon, and Willie Soon. Our 2026 paper with co-author Willie Soon on the dominance of natural CO2 dynamics currently under review.
My pre-print proving my new physical tether theorem. And most recently, our paper with co-author Willie Soon analyzing 50 years of global bomb radiocarbon decay, falsifying the key assumptions of the IPCC carbon cycle framework. I want to acknowledge all my co-authors, and in particular, my mentor and dear friend Willie Soon, whose decades of courageous work made much of this possible. I also want to honor the truly seminal contributions of Christopher Essex and Demetris Koutsoyiannis, whose work laid the foundation for all my papers here.
So let’s start with the verdict. Every major public-facing claim of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, is scientifically invalid and categorically false. Not uncertain, not weakened, not in need of more research, false. I’ll prove this in the next 35 minutes or so by math, physics, and data. Words lie. Math does not. A statement is either derivable from its premises or not. There is no, quote, 97% of mathematicians agree nonsense. There’s proof or there isn’t.
For 38 years, the IPCC has paraded a framework draped in equations, satellite data, supercomputer models, academy awards, even Nobel Prizes. A snake eating its own tail. Each piece appears to validate the next. Once you see that the circle is empty, the entire framework collapses. Each lie leads to the next. None stand on their own.
GMST,Global mean surface temperature, the number that has purportedly risen 1.1 degrees since 1850, the number whose further rise to 1.5 or 2 degrees is, “catastrophic”, what some have called, “the most important number in the world”. CMIP, the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, those are the general circulation models tuned to reproduce GMST.
OHC stands for Ocean Heat Content,a physically meaningless global aggregate constructed by the same averaging machinery as GMST. EEI, Earth’s Energy Imbalance, the energy gain inferred from OHC overriding satellite radiation measurements. CO2, atmospheric carbon dioxide, the persistence and attribution modeled by Bern impulse response functions validated against CMIP purported driving force in the entire attribution chain.
And then the loop closes back on itself. GMST tunes the models. The models produce Bern. Bern produces the budgets. Budgets define the targets. Targets are written in GMST. Each of the five nodes is independently falsified by physics, data, and math.
Let’s begin. Node 1, GMST is physically meaningless.
It’s the anchor of every policy claim. The Paris Agreement is written in degrees of GMST. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is defined in GMST. Transient climate response is defined in GMST. Attribution regressions use GMST as a dependent variable. CMIP models are tuned to reproduce GMST trajectories.
But GMST was proven meaningless in a 2007 paper by Essex, McKitrick, and Andresen unrefuted in 19 years. Two months ago, my physical tether theorem paper established from axioms of classical science alone that GMST cannot exist in the real world. It’s completely physically meaningless.
You take valid local thermometer readings, average them, get a global average. Seems right. Why not? Think telephone numbers. Average the phone numbers of everyone in Boston and Halle. Then ask three simple questions. Whose phone number is it? Is it a phone number? Does it mean anything at all?
Temperature is an intensive property defined only under local
thermodynamic equilibrium in single connected systems, like a
phone number that applies to one point on a telecom network.
The Earth’s surface, oceans, and atmosphere are not in equilibrium. They’re an open-driven non-equilibrium system. Persistent gradients, persistent fluxes, in-homogeneity at every scale. Physics has no law for aggregating local temperatures into a global mean. Disconnected systems cannot affect each other. Unlike quantum mechanical spooky action at a distance, which Einstein doubted and my friend and colleague John Clauser proved real, there is no thermodynamics at a distance.
The temperature in Boston has zero effect on the temperature in Halle. Temperature is defined only in a connected equilibrium system, and it is precisely the partial derivative of U, internal energy, with respect to S, entropy. Every thermometer agrees.
For an aggregate of disconnected systems, there is no thermodynamics, period. The GMST formulas imposed by the IPCC, NASA, or NOAA are just made up. The output is a number, not a temperature. Not anything in the physical, real world. The 2007 Essex paper showed the consequences for averaging arithmetic, area weighted, mass weighted, fourth root, enthalpy weighted. They all yield different numbers and different trends from the same data.
The choice is arbitrary. This isn’t a quarrel over data adjustments. We’re not talking about urban heat islands, homogenization, data improvement. No amount of data improvements can fix a category error. No averaging convention can rescue it. My physical tether theorem states it formally.
An abstract math formula is scientifically valid if and only if it is connected to the physical world by a unique, physical law-governed objective link. For a connected, equilibrated system, that link exists. Temperature is precisely the partial derivative of U with respect to S, and every valid thermometer agrees. A unique mapping exists. For disconnected systems, no physics, no mapping, just arbitrary statistical aggregations with no unique operational definition. The outputs are meaningless numbers.
GMST is a number the IPCC has falsely labeled as a temperature. Consequences are immediate and total. The 1.5 degree C limit is not a physical threshold. It’s an arbitrary number with a fake label applied to a meaningless calculation. The claim that the planet is warm by 1.1 degrees C is not a measurement. The equilibrium climate sensitivity defined as a change in GMST per CO2 doubling is equally physically meaningless.
The AR5 attribution statement, “more than half of observed warming is anthropogenic”, is a regression on a dependent variable that doesn’t exist. Every claim built on GMST is null and void. And AR6 went further. They abandoned their own calibrated uncertainty language and declared human influence, “unequivocal”, and then proceeded to use the word at least 37 times.
Unequivocal is not a science word. Science does not produce unequivocal claims.
Math proofs do. Empirical science operates within probability and falsifiability. Karl Popper settled this long ago. By its own word choice, the IPCC has abandoned science. Node 1 falsified. Every quantity dependent on GMST collapses with it.
Node 2, CMIP models are tuned to a fiction.
Every IPCC projection comes from CMIP, the coupled model intercomparison project. The models are tuned so simulated GMST matches the numerically calculated and physically meaningless GMST. Remember, there is no observed GMST. Those are just Orwellian words that the IPCC uses. It is purely a calculation.
Models that fail to reproduce historical GMST are discarded or retuned. GMST is physically meaningless. The model tuning target is physically meaningless. The model extracted parameters are extracted against a physically meaningless target. This is not a small effect. Cloud feedbacks, radiative forcing, equilibrium climate sensitivity, transient climate response, every one is an emergent property of models optimized against a physically meaningless target.
Equilibrium climate sensitivity, look at what IPCC actually means by this. ECS is defined as the change in GMST between models at 280 and 560 ppm CO2 both run to model equilibrium. But the earth is never in equilibrium. The fact that a model converges to equilibrium proves it isn’t modeling the earth. The equilibrium is a feature of the model, not the earth.
And even that’s not true. The CMIP model purveyors don’t actually run to that fictional equilibrium. They run 150 years or so, observe the drift, and extrapolate. They assume the model will reach an equilibrium that it never reaches.
ECS is an assumed extrapolation of an unreached state of a model
that fails reality at the level of being able to converge in the first place.
All to promulgate a number physically meaningless by definition. If A is meaningless and B is meaningless, then A minus B is meaningless. A and B are both meaningless GMST values. I know this is twisted IPCC Orwellian stuff, but follow me here because this is what is actually happening. Trillions of dollars of policy are calibrated to a number that does not exist in the real world, to a fake equilibrium state that never occurs in a model that fails to represent earth by virtue of having that equilibrium state in the first place.
And the model itself contains essentially none of the physics that drives earth’s permanent non-equilibrium state, namely meaningful cloud microphysics and feedbacks, real solar variability, turbulence, phase changes, biological dissipation, and more. Node 2, falsified.
Node 3, IPCC’s Argo-derived ocean heat content is physically meaningless.
You’ll notice I keep repeating those words. It’s not just a tick. My personal favorite from the circle of lies. Argo has deployed roughly 4,400 autonomous floats across the oceans. Each measures local temperature, salinity, and pressure as they drift.
And ocean heat content is a real physical concept and a physical
phenomenon, but what the IPCC presents as ocean heat content is not.
Orwell strikes again. Argo-derived IPCC OHC is a global statistical aggregate fabricated from local measurements through five layers of processing that destroy all physical meaning. This is the official Argo map, and it looks impressive, but it’s cropped to hide the poles and doesn’t differentiate deep from upper floats.
This is the real picture from NOAA showing every float that surfaced in the 12 days prior to March 25. Look at the poles. Virtually no floats beyond 60 degrees. And the entire deep Argo fleet has deployed only 230 floats to the bottom half of the ocean, below 2,000 meters, where literally half of the thermal energy resides. But the Argo program calls that, “nearly complete global coverage” in perfect Orwell style. Let that sink in for a moment.
Half the ocean’s volume sits below 2,000 meters, and it’s not sampled at all.Twenty-five percent of the surface is excluded entirely. Continental shelves, the Mediterranean, South China Sea, the Arctic, all ice-covered regions, add continental slopes and polar undersampling, and the IPCC interpolation scheme covers at most 40 percent of ocean volume.
Within the 40 percent, the volume actually sampled around the temperature sensors is one part per billion, 10 to the ninth. So here’s how each of the 4,200 non-deep floats works. They descend to 1,000 meters. They drift for nine days doing nothing. They drop down to 2,000 meters. They ascend slowly to the surface over 6 to 10 hours, collecting about 1,000 temperature measurements. Then they spend about 15 minutes at the surface to get a GPS time and location fix, transmit the measurements to a satellite, rinse and repeat for a few years until the battery dies.
Now, to be fair, that’s valid local data gathering,
but that’s also where reality ends.
Five steps destroy the physics. Number one, there is no subsurface positioning. Every measurement from the ascent is assigned to the one surface GPS time and location fix. Two, 12,000 profiles per month are extrapolated onto 45,000 grid cells using correlation scales up to 2,800 kilometers. Every single gridded value is calculated, not measured, and extrapolation does not increase information content. It decreases it. Number three, the same invalid process constructs a reference climatology over an arbitrary 15-year baseline, adding an entire other layer of invalid averaging.
Then anomalies are computed, which we like to call the ghost minus ghost trick, a discrete sum over these calculated meaningless anomalies, not an integral, which would require continuous data, multiplied by incorrectly assumed constant density and heat capacity.
EEI is then declared to be 0.7 plus or minus 0.2 watts per square meter
despite 60% of the ocean unsampled and true uncertainty easily
exceeding plus or minus 1 watt per square meter.
The actual result, EEI (Earth’s Energy Imbalance) is no different from zero. Even without thermodynamic nullification, at least seven independent uncertainty sources, mesoscale variability, deep ocean ignorance, sea level closure, framework bias, baseline bias, and more easily exceed plus or minus 1 watt per meter squared. The claimed signal of 0.7 is smaller than the noise. Now in 1998, the founding document designed ARGO for real-time forecasting, namely hurricane intensification, marine weather, search and rescue, ship routing, fisheries, ENSO outlooks, decision windows of hours to weeks. Neither ARGO nor land weather stations were designed for centennial energy accounting. The original ARGO objectives contained no mention whatsoever of global ocean heat content or earth energy imbalance because ARGO was never designed for global climate monitoring.
That idea was forced on the system more than a decade later during ClimateGate when Kevin Trenberth emailed hockey stick Michael Mann and the entire climate science hockey team. He wrote,
“We can’t account for the lack of warming, and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data shows there should be even more warming, but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate”.
What followed was a 12-year program to repurpose ARGO as the global energy accounting tool, force series to match ARGO, and codify the result into AR6 as EEI equals 0.7 plus or minus 0.2. Our OHC paper published on March 10th this year agrees with Trenberth’s 2009 assessment. His response a few days later, he said, “It is absolute nonsense. I don’t want to waste my time on it”. Clearly, we’re over the target. Node 3 falsified. ARGO derived OHC is physically meaningless.
Node 4, Earth’s energy imbalance is indistinguishable from zero.
First, look at the name, Earth’s energy imbalance. Watts are power, not energy. The correct name would be net radiative flux or power balance at the top of the atmosphere. But honesty is not an IPCC concern. The IPCC’s founding mandate charges them with assessing, “the risk of human-induced climate change”. Not whether humans are causing it, but that humans are causing it. The conclusion is built into the question.
EEI is computed in one of two ways.First, from CERES top of atmosphere satellite measured net radiation flux. And second, from ARGO derived OHC growth divided by Earth’s surface area and elapsed time. The CERES team itself admitted in Loeb et al. 2018 that its instruments cannot measure the absolute energy budget. And yet AR6 figure 7.2 went ahead and reported EEI as 0.7 plus or minus 0.2 watts per square meter with no caveat. Notice, by the way, that the number sits down at the surface on the ocean, not at the top of the atmosphere.
Hmm. Where does that number come from? CERES quietly reports an absolute imbalance of 4.3 watts per square meter, then silently adjusts it to match the ARGO derived 0.7. The matched values are then cited as independent confirmation of each other. AR6 page 935 documents the adjustment openly. Circular reasoning, not validation. The signal is indistinguishable from zero. Node 4, falsified.
Node 5, bomb radiocarbon falsification of the carbon cycle.
My newest paper with Willie Soon titled, One Equation Reproduces 54 Years of Bomb Radiocarbon Decay and Challenges Central Assumptions of the IPCC Carbon Cycle Framework. We extracted two atmospheric time scales precisely from the data. It falsifies every Bern IRF model the IPCC has published. It shows post-industrial CO2 rise is natural. And it closes every standard IPCC and consensus escape hatch, including the Suess effect.
Between 1955 and 1963, atmospheric thermonuclear, aka hydrogen bomb testing, roughly doubled atmospheric carbon-14, known as radiocarbon. After the 1963 test ban, the excess decayed. We have measured that continuously for over 50 years. This is the most precise impulse response experiment ever done. We created the pulse. The atmosphere gave us the response. No model, no tuning, a direct measurement of nature’s eeigenvalue.
The IPCC has had this data set for 40 years and never used it to check,
validate, or falsify any of its carbon cycle claims.
They ignored it. We don’t. Start with two definitions from AR6 glossary, page 2237. Number one, “carbon dioxide is an extreme example. Its turnover time is only about four years” because of the rapid exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean and terrestrial biota. Number two, “response time or adjustment time is the time scale characterizing the decay of an instantaneous pulse into the reservoir”. Both are measured atmospheric quantities.
The global measured turnover time given by atmospheric inventory divided by gross output flux is 3.8 plus or minus 0.12 years. Computed two independent ways. First, snapshot mass balance from AR6 figure 512 and refined reservoir routing on Mauna Loa data. They agreed to better than 1% supported by dozens of peer-reviewed studies over 40 years. Even the IPCC quotes about four years.
The adjustment time, the decay of an instantaneous pulse is exactly what the radiocarbon experiment measures. The 1955 to 63 nuclear tests were the pulse. The answer, decay time scale is 18.383 plus or minus 0.015 years. Single exponential R squared 99.998% over 54 years.
Using the IPCC’s own AR6 definitions, the two atmospheric time scales are 3.8 years for CO2 turnover and 18.383 years for bomb radiocarbon adjustment time linked by the bridge equations shown on the slide. Not 1,000, not 10,000, not hundreds of thousands. That’s what the data says. Now, look at what the IPCC has published. The Bern IRF model is the carbon cycle equation underlying every IPCC CO2 projection, every global warming potential, every CO2 equivalent number, every remaining carbon budget, every net zero pathway. The IPCC labels its time scales as policy relevant, then applies the Bern IRF models at 100, 200, 500, and even 1,000 year horizons.
The IPCC’s published Bern IRF models take a specific mathematical form, a permanent fraction, A0, plus a sum of exponentials. AR2 used five exponentials, AR3 through 6 used three exponentials. Now, look at the E folding time, T sub 1 over E. AR5 and 6 say it’s 165 years, AR4 says it’s 96 years, AR3 says it’s 46, and AR2 says it’s 41. Look at the permanent fraction, A0. AR5 and 6 say it’s 22%, AR4 says it’s 22, AR3 said it was 15, and AR2 said it was 14%. Very strange.
Now, look at the tau 1, which is the longest time constant. AR5 and 6 said it was 394 years, AR4 said it was 173, AR3 said it was 171, and AR2 said it was 372. Real physical impulse responses don’t double and halve and double again as modeling groups update their codes.
The bomb radiocarbon record was a single exponential decay the whole time. Bern was not. Now, look at all four Bern IRFs against the actual data. Everyone diverges within the first year or two. The Bern models predict 33 to 48% of a pulse will remain after 54 years. The data at 54 years says 4%.
The divergence from reality grows dramatically, a factor of 10 by 2020, a factor of 90 by 100 years, and a factor of 18,500 at 200 years. What does the IPCC say? AR5 box 6.1, multiple residence times for an excess of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, stating, “15 to 40% of CO2 emitted until 2100 will remain in the atmosphere longer than 1,000 years”.
Now, step back for a moment. Why are they using this functional form at all? Why a sum of exponentials with a permanent constant added? The multi-exponential family is the natural function class for linear relaxation processes. That part is correct mathematics. But the family is general. The simplest member of the family, which is one exponential with no permanent fraction, decays to zero with a single time constant. Exactly what the data shows, 18.383 years, permanent fraction zero.
The data picks the simplest answer within the IPCC’s own function class. But the IPCC doesn’t allow that answer. Their published forms require permanent fractions from 14 to 22%. They require three or more exponentials. And neither of those requirements comes from physics or reality.
There are constraints imposed on top of the function class
to purposely exclude the single exponential point.
Why? The single exponential has no permanent fraction. The permanent fraction is the entire policy payload. It’s what creates the multi-thousand year residence result. It is the lie buried in the math. It justifies cumulative carbon budgets, net zero targets, the claim that an emission today is committing the atmosphere for a thousand years or more. All lies. Set the permanent fraction to what the data shows, i.e. zero, and the cumulative emissions framework collapses. Set the number of modes to what the data requires, i.e. one, and the long tail disappears. The function class is correct, but its constraints were chosen to to preserve a predetermined political conclusion.
Bern is parallel. Reality is serial. We call this the parallel serial fallacy. A sum of exponentials is the impulse response of independent parallel reservoirs each draining directly on its own time constant. That is how the Bern IRF manufactures the long tails.
But reality is serial. Carbon flows from the atmosphere to
the surface ocean. Surface ocean to the thermocline
to the deep ocean. Each stage feeds the next.
The deep ocean is not a parallel drain on the atmosphere. It is the end of a serial pipeline. Parallel and serial systems are governed by entirely differential equations with different solution spaces. No parameter choice in the parallel family produces the serial answer.
The actual physical serial cascade observed from upstream collapses to a single dominant fast mode. Exactly what the bomb radioarbon data show. Wrong differential equations, wrong solution space, wrong functional form, structural falsification.
Now, we play Whack-a-Lie, the thousand-year defense.
So, where does the thousand-year tale come from? What’s the evidence? Answer: There is none. Not from measurement, not from observation, not from math, only neverending popup assertions.
The first one that always pops up is 14 C is just a tracer. It’s not the bulk. We proved the operator equivalence theorem OE and it it closes that completely.12 CO2 and 14 CO2 are exchanged by the exact same physical processes. Their mass balance operators are identical up to a small fractionation factor. Identical linear operators have identical eigen values. The bulk and the tracer decay with the exact same time constants.
Whack that one and out pops, the bomb pulse is too small. So the Revel nonlinearity kicks in at larger amplitude. The the OE closes that too. eigenvalues are intrinsic to the linear operator, not the input amplitude. And there is no evidence of a global ocean sink slowing ever.
Whack that and we get revel plus slow deep ocean circulation manufactures the tail. Bern is parallel. Reality is serial. Rapid cycling to the thermocline drains the surface. The deep ocean is downstream, not in parallel. Whack that. You’ve now whacked all three. and they cycle back to tracer versus bulk as if you never mentioned it.
Now, one other defense I didn’t put on the slide. They’ll come and say, “But the surface ocean is observed to be saturating.” What they’re talking is about is there are three subtropical gyre stations between 22 and 32° north. One is called HOT in Hawaii,BATS in Bermuda, and ESOC in the Canary Islands. The combined area of those three points in the ocean is less than 1 millionth of the ocean surface.
The only regimes where revel buffering could show up first because gyres have the lowest exchange flux and the surface is only half the story. To slow that drain, the entire water column below down to the abyss would have to be saturated too with DIC (Dissolved Inorganic Carbon) . There is no such measurement. Argo OHC is meaningless. DIC sampling is even sparer. No global time series at policy precision.
And the IPCC’s claimed 2 and a half gigaton per year ocean sync isn’t measured at all. It’s a budget residual. Emissions minus atmospheric growth minus an alleged land sink. Even granting them their imaginary 2 gigaton per year ocean sink. The ocean holds 38,000 gigatons of carbon. That’s 0.66% per year below the precision of a single DIC measurement. That would be 666% per century. Saturation on any policy relevant time scale is mathematically impossible.
The bomb radiocarbon record proves it directly. Eight independent fit windows
across 50 years return the same value to within four parts in a thousand.
The global atmospheric sink rate has not slowed anywhere ever.
This is Whack-a-Lie. Each retreat has zero supporting evidence. When closed, another pops up. When they’re all closed, the cycle starts over again. They fail Popper’s criterion. The thousand-year claim is unfalsifiable by their own standards.
IPCC airborne fraction confusion.
The IPCC reports a “stable airborne fraction” of “about 44%” cited as evidence that the ocean sink will saturate. But there are two distinct quantities both commonly called airborne fraction totally contradictory and both used by the IPCC imperfect Orwellian double speak lock step.
First is called ABF subL where L stands for logical. That’s the fraction of cumulative anthropogenic mass still airborne exactly as in IPCC’s own glossary definition. Under mass balance with the 3.8 year residence time, ABF subL is approximately 5.3% not 44%.
The second is called ABF subC. C is for crazy. That’s my word. I think Koutsoyiannis called it computational, but I prefer crazy. The the annual ratio of atmospheric increase to anthropogenic emissions, that’s a year-by-year number. And from 1966 to 2019, it ranges between 18 to 77%. Up and down.It’s not like uniformly increasing or anything. It’s just randomly up and down between 18 and 77, a range factor of four.
The Orwellian “stable 44%” doesn’t exist. That arises only from unmentioned 15 to 30 year smoothing windows and then the constancy is a property of the smoothing operator. The variance collapses by a factor of two at a 4-year smoothing independently supporting our tow of 3.8 years.
The atmospheric CO2 inventory is rising. There is a net input of CO2. So what’s the signature of that net input? Note, I’m not talking about the signature of the atmosphere, but the signature of the net input to the atmosphere over the instrumental years. Koutsoyiannis measured it directly using the standard Keeling plot intercept method that you see on the screen. He calls the number delta 13 C subi meaning for input. Koutsoyiannis computed it across the 40 plus years from 1978 to 2022 at four clean air stations both hemispheres. The result -3.2 plus or minus.3 per mill constant no trend no drift.
Proxy reconstruction extended the analysis back 500 years to the little ice age. Same value invariant minus3. If fossil fuel carbon at 28 per mill were a significant fraction of the net input, the flux weighted signature would have to have drifted more negative values. It doesn’t. Fossil fuel carbon is below the detection threshold as a quantitative driver of the observed CO2 growth. Period.
The Suess effect that declining total atmospheric delta is evidence of fossil fuel dilution is completely falsified by this finding alone. The decline of total delta 13C by about 2 per mill is consistent with natural CO2 being added at the natural signature. But the constant net input signature of -3.2 per mill is not consistent with fossil fuel dilution. Suess effect al falsified. These three independent lines converge on the same verdict. The bomb radioarbon value which is 18.383 the constant delta 13 C subi which is -3.2 and the direct mass balance. Different physics, different data, same answer. The atmospheric rise of CO2 over 62 years is natural. The human contribution to the rise is negligible. Node 5 falsified.
The loop is closed. I’ve walked the circle of lies. GMST is not a physical quantity. It’s falsified by the physical tether theorem and Essex et al. CMIP is tuned to a fiction. OHC is an untethered global average over a non-equilibrium fluid. EI is indistinguishable from zero. Bern IRF mathematically incompatible with single exponential.
The rise is natural. The five nodes do not stand independently. GMST tunes the models. The models project OHC and EEI. The Bern IRF preserves the energy budget. The budget preserves GMST. Remove any node. The others lose their bases. Remove all five. The framework is gone. Every downstream quantity collapses with them. Every 1.52° threshold, every global warming potential, every CO2 equivalent number, every remaining carbon budget, it’s all void.
Every single IPCC climate metric is physically meaningless
because they’re all built on the same falsified constructs.
More than 30 IPCC metrics gone. All physically meaningless.
And now we’re back to the empty circle.
Their Whack-a-Lie Orwellian defense is that they have multiple lines of evidence. But even that fails because 5 * 0 equals 0. 38 years. How many of the major public-facing claims of the IPCC survive? Zero. Every major public-facing claim of the IPC is scientifically invalid and categorically false. For 38 years, the IPCC has rewritten Western energy policy. Net zero by 2050, hundreds of trillions in projected expenditure, bans on combustion engines, natural gas, the cancellation of modern industrial civilization.
The IPCC never subjected its claims to proper falsification.
It declared them facts by repetition. “Unequivocal” 37 times in AR6.
We performed the falsification steps. They skipped. Five hypotheses flatly falsified. Direct empirical absolute. 38 years. All lies. Zero physical foundation. Words lied. Math didn’t. Math never lies. Galileo told us that God wrote two books, the Bible and the universe itself. He said, “Philosophy is written in this grand book, the universe, in the language of mathematics. The math is the universe speaking. We listened. The IPCC did not.”
This is the latest and greatest meme to scare the world of climate collapse, and it is gathering momentum and triggering followers. A sanity check is published at climatetippingpoints, despite they also being prone to CO2 Hysteria. The article is Fact-Check: have actuaries predicted that billions will die beyond 2 degrees? Excerpts below with my bolds and added images and comments.
Roger Hallam (the co-founder of climate activist groups like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil) has widely promoted this, repeatedly stating for example that “the British insurance sector once did an analysis showing that at 3 degrees Celsius of global warming, 4 billion people could die — and at 2 degrees, 2 billion lives could be lost. But that’s not even the full truth — it’s the minimum.” Hallam has also notedthat the trial of some Just Stop Oil activists (which resulted in acquittal) included the court taking “4 billion deaths at 3°C” as an “agreed fact“.
Based on this analysis, Hallam has co-founded a new campaign called ‘4 Billion Dead‘ (4BD), explicitly referencing the 3°C-based number in its name, connecting it to an outlier estimate of 3°C by 2050 (itself based on a linear extrapolation of just the last few years’ warming), and using it as the basis for planning and promoting a new civil disobedience campaign:
So where did these numbers come from then, and are they reliable?
[However, details in the Risk impact matrix give the game away–see below]
Does this confirm then that the Planetary Solvency report is predicting there’ll be 2 billion dead at 2°C or more, and over 4 billion deaths at over 3°C? It may seem like it, but the answer is actuallyno – the numbers in this dashboard and supporting appendix are labelled as illustrative (as flagged above both instances, including on the latter that it is “not a prediction or central scenario“).
This means these are justhypothetical numbers to show how such a dashboard would work, and not empirical predictions or projections based on some underlying analysis. This has been confirmed by speaking to one of this Planetary Solvency report’s authors, who agreed that these numbers aren’t based on a specific scientific analysis (with no associated calculations on death numbers presented in the report’s supplementary material either, unlike for GDP), rather being meant as a hypothetical illustration of a worst-case scenario to measure risk against, to be followed later with more detailed empirical analyses. Critically, the worst-case scenario here is implicitly part of a spread of many potential outcomes at 3°C, rather than 3°C itself being the worst-case scenario with these numbers the expected outcome if it is reached.
This means that even taking this report as it stands (leaving questions around the robustness of the magnitude of these death and GDP numbers to other posts), these numbers cannot be treated as predictions by actuaries (which implies an empirically-grounded expectation of the most likely future resulting from 3°C), in contrast to how they’ve been referred to in the earlier quotes, social media posts, and campaigns. Instead, they can at most be interpreted as (and for clarity should be communicated as) provisional expert ‘guesstimates‘ of a potential worst-case scenario, which was used to test-run a climate risk analysis methodology,
The UK insurance industry has not predicted mass death then, and four billion dead at 3°C is not an agreed fact but a misunderstood hypothetical worst-case scenario awaiting study. Some of the example reactions above could be down to an honest but widespread misreading, given that media outlets at the time reported these numbers like they were empirical estimates and lacked subsequent pushback (e.g.The Guardianarticle in January 2025), and skim-reading the report itself one might miss the “illustrative” labels.
It might be argued by some promoters that presenting this scenario as a prediction made by a respected body anyway is useful for promoting appropriately urgent action, but such misrepresentation runs the risk of fuelling scepticism or fatalism too. [You Think?]
An article at substack EnvironMental blows the whistle on the alarmists now deserving the label they long applied to climate realists and skeptics. The New Deniers.
It’s about time the climate cabal was forced to wear their own pejorative.
“The Church of Carbon” is a term Doomberg coined several years ago to describe the cabal of scientists, legacy media, environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs, aka non-profits), activists, celebrities and others who denominate every issue through the lens of CO2 emissions and “climate change.” Members have a variety of terms to describe anyone who challenges the prevailing view that “climate change” is a catastrophic problem for earth and humanity, and “flat earther” is not even close to the most derogatory.
More than twenty years ago, the Church’s most ardent and vocal priests
and apostles began to paint heretics with the term global warming “denier.”
The not-so-subtle term is an effort to shut down those who would dare question their religion.
The choice of term is not accidental. It attempts to liken climate religion heretics and apostates to those who deny that the Holocaust – the WWII stain on the history of humanity that killed six million Jews in the 1940s – ever occurred.
The deranged “logic” goes something like this: paint those who question what “the science” says with a term so ugly that they are simply beneath inclusion in any rational, civil debate over matters of such importance. “The opinions of people who deny things like “climate change” or the Holocaust are not worthy of consideration in the public discourse over policy,” or so it goes.
The now two-decade pattern of using the term “denier” in this matter is worse than ugly. It shamefully denigrates the death and suffering of millions, and with the subtle wink of an eye attempts to conflate the act of asking legitimate scientific questions with human atrocities.
Educated scientists, politicians and legacy media who should have known better than to believe using the term “denier” would allow them to avoid directly answering hard questions. The strategy was never going to succeed in the long run, and the history of science is replete with examples of its laughable failure. See the Catholic Church, Copernicus and Galileo and the earth-centric view of the universe, for starters.
Last month we published the news that the most apocalyptic scenarios of future GHG emissions used by the world’s climate scientists and research organizations have officially been tossed in the trash heap, deemed by the very cabal that created them as “implausible.”
…will the scientific community admit their errors and change course? Tens of thousands of research papers have relied on the now discredited high emissions BAU scenarios, including RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5, across all six emissions scenario frameworks. Will politically motivated climate scientists continue to push for their relevance as “reference” scenarios?
What about the legacy media? Having published tens of thousands and to possibly over a hundred thousand articles depicting these cremated scenarios as the “business as usual” trajectory the world was on, with every adverse weather event held as evidence of the forthcoming climate Armageddon, and fear their cheapest and easiest sell, will they admit that the truth was not what they chose to present?
It only took a bit more than a month after the news first broke before the answer became clear. What is the Church of Carbon and its priests, apostles and book publishers saying? How are the “implausible” scenarios being portrayed and even defended? Grab your giant soup spoon. It’s time to give some very deserving folks a dose of their own medicine.
The sky-is-falling scenarios were implausible from their conception because
they were grounded in unrealistic assumptions about energy, economics,
or demography (population/birth rates). And despite these clear errors, the people who built them and are now defending them know it.
But based on the reactions from most of the scientific establishment, explainer media, and climate‑policy world, you’d think the only reason the apocalyptic emissions scenarios known as RCP8.5 and SSP5‑8.5 are now “implausible” is because heroic climate policies and “cheap renewables” saved earth and humanity in the nick of time. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Global carbon intensity peaked in 1960 and has been steadily falling ever since, with no discernible change in the rate since any of these measures. If “climate policies and cheap renewables” have made a material impact, it cannot be seen in the graph above.
[In the last 25 years world energy consumption from oil, coal and natural gas has fallen a whopping three percentage points from 86.1% of total to 83.2%. That is why no changes in the trend of carbon intensity can be seen in the first graph above. Also bear in mind that in 2025 the light green Renewables energy is only 60% wind and solar, the rest mainly biomass.]
The message that “we saved ourselves from the worst case” is politically convenient even as it is scientifically laughable. It’s a two-step dance the very climate research community that portrayed the very same scenarios as “business as usual” might have gotten away with but for the tireless work of researchers like Justin Ritchie, Hadi Dowlatabadi, and Substack publisher Roger Pielke, Jr.
Put simply: Climate policy and “renewable” energy didn’t retroactively
make the high emissions scenarios RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 unrealistic.
They were never realistic from their conception.
This is the history the new “implausible thanks to renewables and policy” narrative is trying to omit. But it is the storyline put forth in most explainers that were rushed out to cover the high GHG emissions scenarios’ implosion. [ The article provides several examples of dismissive media stories, including a Michael Mann tweet, Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate Science, Marshall Shepherd at Forbes, and coverups at NY Times, Washington Post and AFP, all of which failed in the same way.]
Absent from all of their pieces was a candid reckoning with the fact that the “business as usual” path required energy, economic and demographic contortions that were never remotely likely, even without climate treaties or “renewable energy” subsidies.
The ENGO’s fared no better. The Center for Progressive Reform – apparently tipped off to the upcoming van Vuuren et al paper announcing the new ScenarioMIP group’s dropping of the high emissions scenarios – said RCP8.5 (and by extension is successor, SSP5-8.5) “remains not only legitimate, but crucial..”
CPR argued that scientists using the high emissions scenarios “are not out to shock or deceive; they are simply following the best science.” Even if the pathway is implausible, the authors insist, using it “is not misleading.” This is a distraction from the reality that the implausible scenario was the basis “business as usual” rhetoric that scared the public into believing 4–6 °C of warming by 2100 was what happens if we don’t pass the next climate bill. And the one after that.
Carbon Brief also looked the other way. John Cook and Ken Rice at SKS accused critics of “bad faith” absent any admission that the assumptions embedded in RCP8.5 or SSP5-8.5 years earlier were erroneous.
If these actors were actually interested in doing so, they should explicitly acknowledge that RCP8.5/ SSP5‑8.5 were erroneous by specification – not just rendered implausible by virtuous policy. They would stop treating as bad‑faith actors legitimate critics who specified very precise plausibility concerns a decade ago (that turned out to be correct). And they would revise impact assessments, “Social Cost of Carbon” estimates, and financial sector stress‑test designs that were built on what the scenario designers themselves now call implausible futures.
We close by pointing out the delicious and unavoidable irony. For nearly two decades, all of these scientists, legacy media “journalists” and editors, and ENGOs have been screaming “denier” at anyone who challenges the prevailing narrative. Yet here we stand, with the UN’s own scenario development function deeming “implausible” the exceedingly high GHG emissions scenarios on which these people and institutions based their endless use of the pejorative term denier.
Consider the second and third order consequences of scaring the world with the always- farfetched, high GHG emissions scenario projections: Young people are declining to have children based on misplaced fears their kids will have no future. $5 trillion (and counting) has been spent on “solutions” that could not possibly fix an apocalyptic crisis that does not exist. Soaring electricity costs and two lost decades refusing the one electricity generation technology in the advanced world (nuclear) that is GHG emissions free while subsidizing “renewable energy” technologies instead.
The New Deniers™ are the actors that enabled all of these outcomes, are still pretending that RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5 are important, valuable, or relevant. In actuality, they were never anything more than climate porn and fear mongering, and that is as much anathema to the scientific method as the idea of scientific “consensus.”
Members of the European Parliament attend a session to vote on legislation to cut import duties for U.S. products in Brussels, March 26, 2026. (Yves Herman/Reuters)
Even as Democratic activists in the U.S. cool to the cause of climate alarmism, environmentalism maintains its political and economic grip on policymakers on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Years into a cost-of-living crisis, why is the European Union still so green?
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
00:12
02:00
Read More
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
00:12
02:00
Read More
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first place required truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The video player is currently playing an ad.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activists may be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
It may be easy to dismiss this as a case of fanaticism: Sure, American progressives may perhaps not have been truly sincere when they proclaimed their faith in the upcoming apocalypse and the gospel of Greta Thunberg, but maybe her fellow Swedes — and other Europeans — are true believers?
While “sincere” environment activistsmay be a more common breed in Europe, that does not explain the actions of policymakers and civil servants — technocrats who know for a fact that the “climate transition” was sold to voters by giving disproportionate publicity to worst-case scenarios, rather than the more likely, less catastrophic, and less headline-grabbing scenarios outlined by the likes of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Polish coal miners protest against liquidation of Polish coal mines.
Instead, one must first understand that the EU is a slow-moving beast. The legislative process is complicated and sluggish, with 27 countries and an often-equal number of different viewpoints all struggling to be heard. The rules of the union mean that a third of the countries are able to veto most legislation, and in some cases, unanimity is required. Passing the European Green Deal in the first placerequired truly draconian efforts of political willpower and coordination, and reversing or altering the deal would hardly be any easier.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
Making matters worse, the EU has driven past every conceivable off-ramp, events that would have allowed it to change course while saving face. Mere months after the European Green Deal was unveiled, the Covid-19 pandemic went on to turn the world upside down. Mass unemployment and government borrowing followed. At this point, the EU could have cited the pandemic as an excuse as to why climate goals had to be postponed, and some money earmarked for green projects instead used towards health-care or furlough programs.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
The next “off-ramp” was the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. With Europe suddenly needing to provide aid to Ukraine and rearm itself, policymakers could have made the case that the original timeline of the Green Deal was no longer feasible. Shortly thereafter, inflation would hit double digits in many EU member states, once again providing an excellent “excuse” to cancel a Green Deal that was negotiated in the bygone Zero Interest-Rate Policy (ZIRP) era, and whose ambitious goals assumed that this era would never end.
Now, policymakers are truly stuck with a project that virtually ensures the EU won’t see much of the global, energy-intensive AI boom, as prohibitive electricity prices cause data centers and tech firms to choose other locations. As slow and complicated as the legislative process in the EU is, that alone cannot explain why none of the off-ramps were taken.
It is also, as it so often is in politics, about power. Environmentalism is a convenient ideology for those who wish to transfer power to the state, as it provides justification for the state’s expansion. In Europe, however, environmentalism is chiefly not used to transfer power from the voters to the state, but from the states to the European Union. For a supranational organization whose founding treaty infamously states that it is to strive to be an “ever-closer union,” hardly any excuse for centralization is ever passed by.
And such an excuse was exactly what environmentalism provided: No single EU member can deal with climate change on their own, since none of them contributes to more than 0.7 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to fight this new threat, Brussels explained,was to do it together, under the benevolent direction of your friendly neighborhood eurocrat. Anyone who did not want to see the Swiss Alps underwater had no choice but to go along with the program.
That the EU as a whole only ever contributed 10 to 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions even before the first moves to transition were taken in the 1990s is the type of “inconvenient truth” voters rarely heard when the Deal was passed.
It is now down to less than 6 percent, yet Europe’s
green frenzy continues virtually unabated.
For the EU, the sunk cost has also been far greater than for America. Long before the European Green Deal, the EU made serious — and costly — efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Whereas American emissions wouldn’t peak until 2007, in the EU, they peaked in 1990, after which they have been on a steady decline. Total U.S. emissions were still more than 20 percent higher in 2024 at the end of Biden’s presidency than they had been in Europe in 1990.
Europeans have felt the pain of climate policies in the form of gas prices that (prior to the Iran war) averaged 2 to 3 times what American car owners paid. Higher electricity prices, tied to the shuttering of oil and coal but also nuclear power plants, have prevented air conditioning from taking off in Europe — ironically, this increases the number of Europeans who will suffer and even die as a result of rising global temperatures.
Already, more than 60,000 Europeans die of heat every summer.
More Europeans die from lack of AC than Americans do from gun violence.
Europeans have gritted their teeth and accepted that sacrifice, along with a large chunk of its traditional manufacturing sector — jobs that they were promised would be replacedby roles in “green” manufacturing and other “climate-friendly” industries the EU anticipated dominating on the world stage. That is not how things have turned out.
Instead, China has ascended as a dominating force in green industries
like solar panels and — worse for the EU — batteries and electric vehicles.
Automobile exports are now dropping fast. From 2008 to 2023, over 2.3 million European manufacturing jobs were lost, compared to “only” around 800,000 in the United States during that time period.
There is also no guarantee that lost manufacturing jobs would return and shuttered factories reopen any time soon even if Brussels were to pump the brakes now, much like how the coal mining jobs have so far failed to return despite Donald Trump’s reversal of Biden’s policies (they also declined under his first term).
For EU policymakers, climate transition initially looked like an easy win: First, you implement some harmless green policies. Then, when the prophesied climate apocalypse fails to take place, you can claim credit. It was not just great virtue-signaling, but also the perfect set-up for a “win” for those who wished to demonstrate the greatness of centralized EU efforts.
However, the “harmless” transition policies proved costlier, and voters turned out to be less invested in the project than the policymakers believed. On paper, most voters did support the idea of climate transition. But supporting an idea is different from actually paying the price at the pump and in the form of higher utility bills. (And let’s not forget those abominable paper straws.)
Lawmakers in the European Parliament agreed today, Nov. 13, 2025, to dramatic cuts to the EU’s sustainability reporting and due diligence laws, including significant reductions in the number of companies to be covered by the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (CSDDD), and the elimination of the obligation for companies to prepare climate transition plans. The vote, was 382 MEPs in favor and 249 opposed,
After all these sacrifices, few governments in the EU could afford to admit that it was all for nothing. Their position is made even more precarious as this would be the second such embarrassment: After the 2015–16 refugee crisis, most governments across Europe took steps toward restricting immigration, effectively conceding that the parties they had (and continue to) labeled “far-right” had been correct about the challenges caused by rising immigration numbers.
To give the same parties another win and concede that —
much like multiculturalism — climate transition too had turned out
to be a better idea on paper than in practice would simply be too much.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. economy has outgrown the economies of Western Europe, creating a growing wealth gap. As Europe continues down the path of chasing green dreams instead of greenbacks, this gap is only likely to continue to grow until the day its leaders are finally forced to admit that their policies only ever ensured future generations would inherit not a cooler planet, but a poorer continent.
The prevailing climate change narrative took a big hit in recent days, as scientists who comprise the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are backing away from more outlandish climate predictions for the 21st century.
Extreme forecasts of rising temperatures of 4 to 5 degrees, the scientists wrote in the journal Geoscientific Model Development, “have become implausible.” That means predictions of rapidly growing carbon emissions and higher temperatures, supposedly leading to fast-rising sea levels, floods, crop failures, and even human extinction scenarios, are finally being jettisoned.
This long-standing climate change narrative, always a house of cards designed to scare societies into submission, is collapsing — first gradually, now suddenly, to borrow a phrase from Ernest Hemingway.
Turns out even climate scientists on the U.N. dole have a modicum of self-respect such that they can no longer defend such lunatic predictions that were never plausible from the start.
“For the 21st century, this range [of future climate scenarios] will be smaller than assessed before,” they wrote. As a way of saving face, their scaling back of climate change doom comes from “[lower] costs of renewables, the emergence of climate policy, and recent emission trends.”
In fact, these scientists, in long-winded, technical jargon, are eating crow. Do they, or anyone else, really believe a few windmills and solar panelsscattered about like a handful of microscopic specks on the planet’s landmass — which itself is only 30% of the globe — affected anything?
These longtime scare tactics from the IPCC and its echo chamber of universities, NGOs, and government bureaucracies certainly had their effect, especially on young people. It reminds me of an encounter 18 months ago while attending the U.N. COP29 Climate Summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, as part of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow delegation.
CFACT President Craig Rucker and I took some time to visit the Old City. At this tourist enclave of Baku, we met three American college students from North Carolina who were also attending the conference. We struck up a conversation about climate change.
There was no arguing or acrimony, just a pleasant back-and-forth. Craig explained to them in his affable but thorough manner that the impact of climate change is emphatically not what the U.N. or the outgoing Biden administrationclaimed. It’s not an “existential threat,” climate doomsday predictions going back nearly 40 years have never panned out, it’s OK to have children, and so on.
Among the three students, one (the male) was not buying it, a second (female) had an unsure, quizzical expression, while the third (female) had a palpable countenance of relief, like the weight of the world was lifted from her. All three had been bamboozled on climate issues for their entire lives, perhaps starting with Saturday morning cartoons, to hypocritical Hollywood actors, corporate grifters seeking government contracts, and charlatan college professors drinking the same Kool-Aid.
With this latest from these IPCC scientists, the prevailing narrative from all these institutions should be coming unglued, as it can no longer withstand the scientific, planetary, and human realities before us.
The North Pole and Antarctica still have massive ice buildup in their respective winters. The Atlantic Ocean will not subsume Miami or the Obamas third (or fourth?) home on the shoreline of Martha’s Vineyard. New technologies like artificial intelligence and military hardware cannot operate now or ever on wind and solar power. Liquefied natural gas is abundant and spreading widely across the globe, courtesy of growing U.S. exports, and carbon-free (assuming it matters) nuclear energy is slowly but inexorably making a comeback.
The higher price of gas due to America’s war with Iran is also a tell. Americans detest gasoline at $4.50 per gallon, Californians hate it even more at $6-plus. This war has an end date, hopefully sooner rather than later, after which global oil markets will flow and gasoline prices will drop. But climate policies for so-called green energy can only survive and expand in a high-priced world of oil and gas, which is where the climate lobby wants it to stay indefinitely.
Except for the most craven, gullible politicians, most of the remaining elected officials are not going to tolerate — and risk blame for — permanently skyrocketing energy prices from imposing climate change energy policies, knowing their current unpopularity with the public.
Of course, the climate change industrial complex, spearheaded by the IPCC, is not going to disappear nor admit they were peddling climate nonsense. The beat will go on, but their credibility and decades of scaremongering under the false flag of “science” should never again be taken seriously.
Regarding that college student from North Carolina who felt enormous relief that climate change was not a threat to her future, I hope millions more will feel likewise as this colossal lie of climate change Armageddon continues to collapse under its own weight.
Milloy reads AI bias/climate riot act to IBM management at annual shareholder meeting. Here is the media release and audio presentation for the IBM shareholder proposal of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research. The annual shareholder meeting is April 28, 2026. Text of press release below with my bolds and added images.
Press Release: IBM’s AI Model: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Washington, D.C. – At next week’s IBM annual meeting, shareholders will vote on a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) tackling potential bias within the company’s artificial intelligence models.
Proposal 7 (“AI Bias Audit”) requests “a report, within the next year, on the methods used to eliminate bias from the Company’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.”
At the April 28 meeting, FEP Executive Director Steve Milloy will cite climate alarmism as an example of where AI too often gets it wrong:
I am an AI user and it can be a great tool. But AI is subject to what 1950s IBM programmer George Fuechsel called “GIGO” – garbage in, garbage out. The Internet is full of amazing information. It is also full of amazing garbage. AI models often cannot distinguish between the two.
An example of garbage-in, garbage-out AI occurs in the controversial area of global warming and climate change. Here are three hardcore facts about climate:
♦ It cannot be scientifically demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions have had
any effect on global climate.
♦ Emissions-driven climate models do not work.
♦ No emissions-based apocalyptic climate prediction has ever come true.
Despite these realities, if you query IBM AI on climate, you will get back gloom-and-doom climate hoax dogma. This happens because the Internet has been loaded for decades with bogus climate hoax claims and assumptions that are erroneous garbage.
Milloy believes IBM’s own website is partly to blame for this misinformation:
On IBM’s website, IBM’s chief sustainability officer says, for example, that:
Global warming is “leading to increased flooding, causing heat stroke and destroying farms and livelihoods. Insurance is becoming unaffordable.”
None of that is true. But it is what IBM AI is programmed with. Even IBM staff has been polluted with the climate. It is precisely the sort of garbage that George Fueschsel warned about.
The mindless parroting of climate hoax garbage to governments, businesses and the public has had devastating economic and societal impacts around the world – from wars to inflation to deadly energy failures to energy rationing to crop failures to deindustrialization to lost jobs to wasted taxpayer money to traumatized school children and beyond.
It has been estimated that world has wasted $10 trillion chasing the climate hoax narrative since 2015 alone. The list of harms from the climate hoax is endless. Yet IBM AI has learned the hoax and spreads the climate garbage on to users. Milloy will say:
“While IBM may be great at the computing part of AI, the world actually functions on realities that are often lost in the Internet dumpster,” “Management needs to be much more humble about all this. It needs to take the bias problem seriously. Touchy-feely videos on the IBM website just don’t cut it.”
IBM shareholders can support Proposal 7 by voting their proxies before Tuesday’s meeting.
A comprehensive new study extending the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) record back to 1899 finds that both hot and cold temperature extremes across the contiguous United States have declined over the past 127 years. The research, performed by Dr. John R. Christy, Alabama State Climatologist (retired) and professor of atmospheric and Earth science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, analyzed more than 40 million daily temperature observations to provide the most complete long-term view to date of U.S. extreme heat and cold. The paper is published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Excerpts below with my bolds and some added images.
Abstract
Knowledge of temperature extremes, and their potential changes within a climate system of increasing greenhouse gases, is of vital interest for humans and the infrastructure which supports them. To produce a better understanding of how daily extreme temperatures have changed over time in the conterminous US (CONUS), the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) database was extended back to 1899 and forward to 2025. The original 1,218 stations, selected in the 1980s by NOAA as capable of addressing climate concerns, have since been neglected – almost half of the stations have closed since 2000. Incomplete station records were supplemented with nearby stations with high correlation and removeable biases to provide time series for 1,211 of the stations with at least 92% of data present. Extreme temperature metrics for summer daily maximum temperatures and winter daily minimum temperatures were calculated. The general result is that metrics for extreme summer heat, e.g., hottest values, number of heatwave days, etc., show modest negative trends since 1899. Extreme cold temperature metrics also indicate a decline in their occurrences especially since the 1990s. In sum, instances of both hot and cold extreme metrics have declined since 1899. To demonstrate an application of this dataset we examined the claims of one source regarding changing temperature extremes, The National Climate Assessment 5.
This metric determines for each day of the season the particular year in which the hottest (coldest) TMax (TMin) occurred. There are 153 (122) days in the May-Sep (Dec-Mar, leap year) for which a daily record will be achieved. The number of extremes occurring in each year is calculated per station then geographically interpolated as discussed above. This metric is more robust than the single All-Time metric above as each station contributes 153 (122) values to the time series rather than just one. This also provides an indication of the incidence of multiple hot and cold records to help identify periods of excess heat (cold).
The expected value for a purely random process for the number of daily TMax (TMin) records would be 1.20 (0.96) in a given year per station for a 127-year record (i.e., 1.20 = 153/127 and 0.96 = 122/127). The results (Fig. 4) indicate again that 1936 contributed the most daily hot records for the CONUS at 6.7 per station but followed more closely by other years, with 1934 (5.3), 1931 (3.4) and 1911 and 1925 (3.3) completing the top five.
The number of coldest records occurred in 1899 (3.7) in association with February 1899 event. The following years experienced extreme cold as well, 1917 (3.3), 1989 (2.9), 1924 (2.4) and 1936 (2.4). Thus, 1936 was a year with many extremes on both ends of the thermometer.
Comparing the two metrics in Figs. 10 and 11 produces Fig. 12 which displays the sum and the difference, year-by-year of the 15-yr running means. The sum of days in extreme heat/cold declined from over 120 in the 1930s to about 75 since 1960. The conclusion here would be that the CONUS has experienced a decline of around 30% of these durative extreme events in the past 100 years. Along with this decline has been an increase in heatwave days vs. cold wave days since the 1970s, mainly due to the increase in heatwave days in the West (Fig. 10) and the decline in cold wave days overall.
Discussion
Overall, our project indicates that extremes in summer heat-related metrics for the CONUS as defined in the four questions above do not show increasing trends, but rather modest negative trends, and thus appear to be substantially affected by other forcings such as natural variability in addition to GHGs. There are positive TMax metric trends in western regions which are countered by larger negative trends elsewhere.
The number of cold extreme events has declined in the past 30 years too and this is likely, in part, related to the development of infrastructure around the stations which disturbs the nocturnal boundary layer, inhibiting the formation of the cold, shallow layer in which TMin is observed. Additionally, this result may be an early sign of atmospheric warming of the coldest air masses by the added GHGs (e.g., Krayenhoff et al. 2018), though this hypothesis has not been confirmed as a direct result of GHGs (e.g., Huang et al. 2023). Observations of the deep atmospheric temperature in the polar region north of + 60° latitude indicate a warming trend of + 0.47 °F (+ 0.26 C) decade− 1 since 1979 compared with a global trend of + 0.27 °F (+ 0.15 C) decade− 1 (Spencer et al. 2017). This would suggest Arctic air intrusions into the CONUS may be slightly warmer now than in the past century or so (for whatever reason) and thus consistent with the results shown here for a lessening of the magnitude of cold events in recent decades. However, we note the same area in the southern hemisphere shows virtually no warming (+ 0.05 °F (+ 0.03 C) decade− 1).
Conclusions
In the field of climate change, attention has been drawn to extreme metrics occurring in the last several years as evidence for human influences through increasing GHGs (e.g., USGCRP 2017; Seneviratne et al. 2021; Jay et al. 2023). Examining this aspect of climate and weather is appropriate since human thriveability is often constrained by the magnitude of the extremes that we experience. We describe here a dataset constructed to examine the occurrence through time of extreme temperature metrics in the CONUS for the coldest winter and hottest summer days since Dec 1898. The dataset is based on the 1,218 USHCN stations 1,211 of which have been supplemented to be “complete”, i.e., each station having at least 92% of days available for analysis.
The results indicate that extremes in heat-related metrics for daily TMax in the summer have not increased and in fact often show modest declines since 1899, due mostly to the early heat events during 1925–1954. This is consistent with Seneviratne et al. 2021 (IPCC AR6, their Fig. 11). Cold-related extreme events based on winter TMin show evidence of decreasing occurrences, two causes of which were proposed, (1) increasing human development around weather stations, and (2) an early response to increasing GHGs as they warm the coldest air first. When taken together, the occurrences of heat and cold extremes have declined over the past 127 years in the CONUS, i.e., the climate over the CONUS has become less impacted by temperature extremes to this point.
Relating this reduction of extreme events to increasing GHGs would be difficult
as the magnitude of the regional natural variability of weather and climate
is considerable in comparison to a small GHG-induced temperature rise.
Once the shifts were accommodated, the time series (Fig. 14) for Fresno 12-month running anomalies indicate very different results between TMax and TMin, which is a clear indication of the NCI of urbanization. The TMax time series indicates no trend through 2012 (slightly negative) but contains a relatively sudden rise in 2013 which is consistent with the entire western CONUS as seen in Figs. 5 and 10. The overall TMax trend is + 0.03 °F (+ 0.02 C) decade− 1. The trend in TMin is + 0.43 °F (+ 0.24 C) decade− 1.
The impact of Non-Climatic Influences (NCI) was considered in the temperature evolution of one USHCN station, Fresno California, as an example of a clear and large response to forcings unrelated to the increasing GHGs. In this case, the urbanization impact on TMin of 5 °F (~ 3 °C) is clearly apparent, while summer TMax (with urbanization) indicates a trend not significantly different from zero. Voluminous research has and will be performed on this aspect of surface temperature records as these types of influences need to be identified and removed so that changes in the background climate due to GHGs may be estimated with more confidence. We also demonstrated that one must be cautious when interpreting official statements about extreme weather events for the CONUS.
Jason Isaac and Steve Milloy bring tidings of great joy in 2026 in their Washington Examiner article with the title as above.
Every April, like clockwork, a predictable ritual unfolds. Earth Day rolls around with the same tired apocalyptic sermon from the climate catastrophe cult.
The routine never changes: The planet is dying, humans are to blame, and only surrendering your freedom, your car, and your paycheck to the green elites will save it. Fifty-six years later, they’re still wrong.
The planet is fine. It’s the climate cult that’s cracked.
You’d think after all the busted prophecies, they’d tone it down. Instead, they double down.
Remember when the “experts” said the Arctic would be ice-free by 2013? The ice is still there, just as thick and stubborn as ever.
We were told hurricanes would grow “more frequent and more powerful.” Instead, there were near-normal seasons in 2023 and 2024.
So now they move the goalposts: Every weather event, hot or cold, wet or dry, is “caused by climate change.” It’s not science. It’s superstition plotted on graphs. They said snow would vanish from ski resorts — remember that “End of Snow” panic? Instead, skiers in the Northeast this year were digging out from record blizzards.
The 2023-2024 warming spike was caused by a natural El Nino. When the El Nino ended, the spike ended. February 2026 was cooler, in fact, than February 1998 despite a trillion tons of emissions.
Time after time, the “experts” predict apocalypse. And year after year, Mother Nature refuses to corroborate their stories.
Cleaner Air Than Ever Before
Air Quality – National Summary EPA
Meanwhile, the actual data tell a different story. U.S. air quality today is the cleanest it’s been in 50 years.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
Global deaths from natural disasters have plummeted over 90% since the early 20th century. Crop yields worldwide keep hitting records.
Humans are safer, wealthier, and more energy-secure than at any time in history.
The planet isn’t gasping for breath — it’s very healthy.
That’s exactly what George Carlin was getting at in his legendary bit, “The Planet Is Fine.” Over three decades ago, long before “climate anxiety” was a diagnosis, Carlin, perhaps the most famous comedian of his time, saw through the sanctimony.
The planet’s been through ice ages, asteroid strikes, and supervolcanoes — and it’s still spinning. Yet today’s enviroactivists think your SUV is going to do what Mount Tambora couldn’t? Please. Their arrogance is nauseating.
The self-appointed saviors of Earth don’t really care about the planet.
They care about control.
Earth Day has turned into a political holiday — a green May Day for those who want to remake society in their image. Their “solutions” invariably mean more regulation, higher taxes, and fewer choices.
Shut down the power plants, outlaw gas stoves, ban plastic straws while flying private jets to elitist conclaves dressed up as ‘‘climate conferences.”
It’s not about saving Earth. It’s about saving face.
When the predictions fail, the excuse shifts. Sea levels were supposed to swallow Manhattan, but the only thing underwater now is former Vice President Al Gore’s credibility.
Polar bears were “going extinct” until the population hit record highs. Every “climate emergency” gets debunked, but the headlines roll on because fear sells.
Carlin joked that people crave bad news. The legacy media just industrialized it.
And the public is getting wise. Net-zero mandates
are collapsing under their own absurdity.
Europe ran headfirst into the wall of “green reality” and came crawling back to coal and nuclear. Even California’s self-inflicted energy shortages have people asking whether energy policy should be based on cockamamie models or common sense.
The answer should be obvious: If your plan can’t keep the lights on, it’s not saving the planet — it’s sabotaging it.
“Follow the science” is their mantra. Fine.
The science says carbon dioxide is plant food.
The science says climate models have blown past reality for decades. The science says mankind thrives in warmer eras.
None of this fits the narrative, so it gets buried under the next climate scare of the month. The apocalypse never arrives — but the grant money does.
Here’s the part Earth Day activists really hate: The planet isn’t fragile — we are.
Nature doesn’t need our policies, our pledges, or our petitions. It will outlast every last panel discussion in Davos, Switzerland.
So instead of groveling over our collective “climate guilt,” maybe they should celebrate what we’ve actually accomplished: clean air, longer lives, record food production, and energy that works at the flick of a switch.
The planet doesn’t care about your compost bin or your latest electric car mandate. It’s been around for 4.5 billion years, and cooling for the last 485 million years, and it will still be here when the last climate model is rotting on an obsolete hard drive.
It’s humans who need perspective. As Carlin famously said, “The planet is doing great.” The hysterical people who keep screaming that it isn’t are the problem.
Tilak Doshi explains how formerly empirical economists have been captured by climatist ideology, betraying their profession and public trust. His Clintel article is UK economist says high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
[Note: “In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies.” Robert Murphy]
A UK economist recently said the quiet part out loud: high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. This is not an aberration, says Tilak Doshi, but symptomatic of modern economists. “The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.”
When petrol prices rocket because of supply shocks—such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the rerouting of oil tankers—one might have expected a discussion of geopolitics, market signals and the obvious supply-side remedies. Of which there has been plenty, some competent and even masterly, some not so competent by “instant expert” talking heads in social and mass media. But a recent article by an economist in The Conversationoffered a solution so perversely tone-deaf it could have been lifted from a Babylon Bee satirical script.
Citing research that a 10 per cent rise in UK petrol prices can cut demand by up to 5 per cent, the piece solemnly declared that “high prices are a way of adjusting consumption to cope with the lower supply.” The subtext was unmistakable: with refined products suddenly scarcer, the proper response is not to produce more fuel if the country were blessed with domestic fossil fuel resources (like the UK) or to import more from sources outside the Strait of Hormuz or both. Instead, the advice from Christoph Siemroth, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Essex, is to make what little remains even costlier—so that the hoi polloi drive less, take the bus and hasten the glorious transition to net zero.
Clueless and Insidious
One is reminded of Marie Antoinette’s famous cake remark, betraying aristocratic cluelessness. But The Conversation article is something far more insidious: the capture of economics itself by the green ideology that now rules our institutions from the BBC to the Treasury, from Oxbridge common rooms to the UK Met Office service. The discipline that once stood as the last redoubt against the Frankfurt School’s long march through the social sciences has fallen. Frank Knight, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Milton Friedman et al held the gates against postmodern gibberish for a generation. No longer. The barbarians are inside the citadel, wearing lanyards from the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, chanting “sustainability” like a secular rosary.
Consider the elementary logic that every first-year economics student once absorbed before the PPE types at Oxford and Cambridge began their higher education in Gaia worship. When the price of a good rises because of scarcity—whether from a blockade in the Persian Gulf or an OPEC production cut—the signal is unambiguous: produce more, explore more, innovate more. Britain sits atop some of the richest hydrocarbon resources in Europe. North Sea oil and gas reserves are not physically exhausted; they are made economic infeasible in the face of Miliband’s punitive tax rates.
Onshore shale, barely scratched after a decade of regulatory vandalism,
could transform our energy security if the
“precautionary principle” were not treated as holy writ.
Higher prices should, in any sane world, trigger precisely that response: more drilling, more fracking, more investment in refining capacity, more imports of oil and gas from diversified suppliers. Instead, our green economists prescribe the economic equivalent of putting a feverish patient into a sauna. Demand must fall. Prices must stay punishingly high. The suffering is the point.
Taxes
The Conversation piece is exemplary in its genre. Price caps are correctly dismissed as distortionary, leading to physical shortages and queues as a means of rationing. One needs to only remember the long lines at gas stations in the US under Jimmy Carter’s price controls after the 1979 oil price shock.
Roughly 50–55% of the UK retail price for both petrol and diesel currently go to the government as taxes.But fuel duty cuts are rejected because they are untargeted and cost the Exchequer revenue—fuel duty, after all, is nearly 2 per cent of government income, a nice little earner for the net-zero industrial complex.
The preferred remedy? One-off cash transfers to low-income car owners, modelled on Germany’s 2022 gas rebate which provided a temporary fuel tax cut in 2022 to ease soaring petrol and diesel prices during the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The beauty of this, we are told, is that it preserves the “price signal” while letting households “profit” by leaving the car at home. Translation: we will bribe you to stay poor and immobile, all in the name of the planet. Meanwhile, the authors of such wisdom never feel the pinch. They lecture the white van plumber, carpenter or electrician going about his work and the hard-pressed mother doing the school run that their higher fuel bills are a feature, not a bug.
Luxury Beliefs and Intellectual Corruption
These are luxury belief-inspired energy policies which “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”. As Victor Davis Hanson has so often pointed out, leftist policy elites in Democrat-run states suffer little from the consequences of their own policies. The metropolitan elite’s enthusiasm for open borders stops abruptly at the high walls of their own villas (Nancy Pelosi anyone?)
The same applies to energy. Inhabitants of the liberal metropolitan bubble can afford the £12-an-hour parking in Covent Garden, the retrofitted Victorian terrace with an air-source heat pump the size of a small car, and the Tesla whose real environmental cost is buried in Chinese lithium lakes and in artisanal cobalt mines using Congolese child workers. For them, “sustainability” is a lifestyle brand. For the rest of the country—pensioners choosing between heating and eating, hauliers facing bankruptcy, farmers unable to run their tractors—it is economic sadism dressed up as virtue.
Buddhist economist
The historical parallel is instructive. E.F. Schumacher — the “Buddhist economist” — told us, “small is beautiful” and that giant power stations were somehow spiritually corrosive. One wonders what he would make of the fact that a modern combined-cycle gas plant needs to be at least 200 MW to be remotely efficient, or that industrial civilisation runs on economies of scale, not backyard steel furnaces.
Yet today’s green establishment is repeating the Maoist folly in Western drag: decentralised “community energy”, intermittent wind and solar that require massive subsidies and backup gas plants, and an ideological insistence that the optimal size of an economy is whatever fits the carbon budget decreed by “climate modellers” in Exeter or East Anglia. The Soviet Union tried to create the New Soviet Man—selfless, collective-minded, liberated from base material desires. The project failed spectacularly. Its successor is the New Green Man, who measures his carbon footprint, cycles to the vegan restaurant, and cheers when Ed Miliband shuts down another North Sea field. The totalitarian impulse remains; only the Orwellian vocabulary has changed from “proletarian internationalism” to “just transition” and “climate justice”.
The intellectual corruption runs deep. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in trade theory, now produces columns that read like press releases from the Church of Climate. Marginal costs of natural gas? Not so relevant when policy costs—carbon taxes, renewable obligations, network charges, capacity market payments—make up some 60% of your bill. As Kathryn Porter,David Turver and others have documented with forensic clarity, the “energy price crisis” is largely a net-zero policy-induced crisis. The wholesale cost of electricity is only part of the story; the rest is the deliberate layering of green levies and taxes that no classical economist would recognise as market-based. Yet we are told, with straight faces, that the “97 per cent consensus” demands we accept this as settled science. The same consensus, one notes, that once assured us the pause in global temperature increase was impossible, that polar bears were doomed, and that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035.
Tyranny
Rupert Darwall’s Green Tyranny provides an insightful exploration into the origins of the climate industrial complex. The green movement’s roots lie not in empirical ecology but in a Malthusian revulsion against industrial modernity and a quasi-religious yearning for control. What to eat (less meat), how far to travel (fewer flights), what temperature your thermostat may reach (no more than 19°C if Whitehall has its way)—these are not technical questions but moral ones, policed by the new priesthood of economists who have traded the parsimony of Occam’s Razor for the abusive use of the precautionary principle (“better safe than sorry”). Uncertainty is weaponised asymmetrically so that minor or hypothetical risks (e.g., induced seismicity from fracking) trigger regulatory paralysis, while the far larger risks of alternatives are downplayed. The precautionary principle becomes a de-facto veto tool for ideological opposition to hydrocarbons, not genuine risk management.
Homo economicus, the rational maximiser embedded in cultural norms that Adam Smith understood in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, has been replaced by Homo Climaticus: a creature whose every decision must be subordinated to the carbon ledger.
The consequences are not abstract. Britain’s energy prices are among the highest in the developed world precisely because we have chosen ideology over geology. While China adds coal-fired capacity equivalent to the entire UK grid every few years and India builds out its fossil infrastructure without apology, the West hectors the Global South about net zero and wonder why BRICS+ nations hedge their “policy commitments” to UN forums such as the COP30 conference in Brazil last year. The multipolar realignment is not just geopolitical; it is energetic. The Rest have noticed that the West’s net-zero experiment is self-inflicted economic suicide. They intend no such folly.
Glimmers of Hope or Barbarians At The Gates?
Yet there are glimmers of hope. The tide is turning, as Matt Ridley explains in his recent Clintel lecture “The Climate Parrot is almost dead.” Mr. Ridley argues that public and political momentum behind the “climate emergency” narrative is weakening. Indeed, public tolerance for green virtue-signalling has limits when the bills arrive. The on-going protests in Ireland over the cost of fuel by farmers, contractors and others have been massive, leading the government to place the army on “standby” as nationwide fuel protests continue to cause significant disruption and threaten critical supplies across the country. The military’s potential involvement comes as blockades outside major fuel depots intensify, prompting a dangerous government shift towards an “enforcement” phase in response to the escalating crisis. There are indications that these protests are spreading to Norway and France, as farmers and truckers there block arterial roads with tractors and trucks.
Populist movements across Europe and the United States are demanding energy realism: all-of-the-above policies that include nuclear, gas, and yes, even beautiful, black coal, where geology and economics dictate. The Chicago School may have been breached, but it is not yet razed. Rigorous economists—those still willing to follow the data rather than the grants—continue to point out that adaptation and technological progress have always outpaced apocalyptic forecasts. The “climate emergency” that justifies Soviet-style rationing by price is, on closer inspection, a political choice, not a scientific imperative.
Barbarians
Economics was once the most parsimonious of the social sciences, cutting through trite views with marginal analysis and revealed preference. When it abandons that discipline for the higher calling of Gaia worship, it ceases to be economics and becomes propaganda. The article in The Conversation is not an aberration; it is a symptom of a discipline that has exchanged truth for tenure and rigour for righteousness. The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.
The corrective will not come from more white papers or behavioural nudges. It will come when voters—those whose lived experience of green policy is higher bills, colder homes, and slower journeys—demand an end to the experiment. Ireland is in tumult as we speak. Energy abundance is not a luxury; it is the foundation of modern civilisation. To pretend otherwise is not sophistication. It is civilisational self-harm. And the bill, as always, lands on the people least able to afford the eco-crucifix.