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.
The interview above explores a world mostly unknown to middle-aged adults and seniors, a world where young people became convinced the world was doomed because of climate change. Lucy Biggers participated in that world as a skilled influencer, but now is a voice for reason and optimism. For those preferring to read, a transcript is below, lightly edited from the captions, with some added images. MS refers to comments by Maya Sulkin of Free Press. LB refers to Lucy Biggers. H/T Raymond Inauen
Confessions of a Former Climate Activist
MS: Lucy Biggers, head of social media at the Free Press and former climate activist, thank you for being here today. We’re going to talk about why you joined the climate movement, why you left, and what gave you the courage to do so. LB: Thank you so much for having me.
Today we’re going to talk about how you went from being a leader, really, in the climate movement to now being one of its most outspoken critics. So before I knew the Free Press, Lucy, you were fighting to ban plastic straws and you were, you know, homies with AOC. Hey Lucy, I hear you’re doing a video on the Green New Deal and I’m thrilled. What happened to you? How did you get into that movement in the first place?
LB: Yeah, so I spent half of my 20s really in the climate movement and it started about when I was 25. I’m 35 now, so I know I look younger, right? MS: You do really give a lot of Gen Z energy, which we’re going to talk about. Yeah, I cosplay as Gen Z, but I’m actually 35, so that’s important to know the timing.
So in 2015 I was 25 and I worked at this newsroom called NowThis News and I was a video producer there, so I was scrolling all the time on Facebook and sort of the beginning of like the scrolling that we know now and my algorithm was just feeding me up environmental stories and I just kind of bought into the climate movement narrative. Some of the things that first got me into it were just documentaries. Before the Flood, which is a Leonardo DiCaprio film, which now, I think why do I trust Leonardo DiCaprio on this topic, but I watched that.
Josh Fox is a big climate activist who’s done films like Gasland, which now I know are very biased. So it was the documentaries and then even in my feed seeing this thing called the Dakota Access Pipeline protest, which was really big in 2016 and activists would comment, cover Dakota Access Pipeline, cover Dakota Access Pipeline, and so I started covering this protest against a pipeline that was being built in North Dakota. The whole year of 2016 I did that and that was really like when I first got into the movement and then over the years after that I built up my social media following on Instagram, covering things like the Green New Deal, interviewing Greta.
What are the personal choices that you make to be more environmentally friendly? Always like being down on single-use plastics, all the normal ideas that you think of when it comes to like the climate movement, that is what I was pushing and at the peak of it I had 50,000 followers on Instagram, which I say it’s like follower inflation because that’s not that much now, but in 2016 or maybe 2018, that was a lot and yeah so I kind of just gained a persona. I got a lot of support for that and next thing you know I’m just like a gung-ho climate activist pushing all these ideas.
MS: So part of being, as you know, an influencer, especially in political spaces, is that it kind of becomes your identity. I wonder while you’re absorbing this information, you’re reporting on it, what kind of led you to say you know what I’m gonna like make this my life really and attached my face, my reputation to kind of pushing this movement forward?
LB: Yeah so in the 20-teens, climate change was not a topic that was covered by the news a lot. It was a very undercovered story and so I saw an opening where I could really be of service to these other activists who were talking and raising the alarm bells about this and cover it and so I felt like I was on the side of justice where you know the scientists are saying the world’s gonna end in 10 years. Why is nobody talking about this? Like I’m gonna start talking about it and also I will say at that time I was very very left-wing and so I was very progressive and my whole newsroom was like that too.
So we were all like Bernie supporters and like this is why the 20-teens, it’s like really important to put yourself in that mindset of what that ideology was like at the time and now when I reflect on it, I think it was this desire to like do good in the world. Like I wanted to make an impact and I thought I could be of service and at the same time a lot of this ideology that we know now really well as woke stuff and the oppressor versus oppressed mindset was coming into my newsroom.
So now it was not just like oh I’m a Bernie supporter and I want free college. It was like oh if you have white privilege you need to sit down. Like if you’re a cis person you need to sit down and so in my, I’m in my mid-20s looking around the newsroom going I’ve got a lot of like privilege. And so when I’m seeing at the same time these Native Americans saying there’s a Dakota access pipeline going on our reservation and it’s evil and we need help fighting it, I’m like great I can be a really great ally.
And so psychologically in retrospect looking back I think it was this desire to like atone for my privileged position that I had in the world and the way I could atone was by propping up these narratives. So it was very emotional, emotiondriven as well as psychologically driven. And then black and white thinking where it was like the Native Americans in this fighting this pipeline are the good guys and the fossil fuels and the American government and just capitalism in general are the bad guys. And so a lot of that was happening at a subconscious level but that is what first drew me to it and I kind of took it on as an armor and it gave me a lot of accolades within the group of my colleagues and in the movement where it was like wow she’s a great ally, she’s doing so good.
MS: I wonder in addition to the social rewards which we’ll talk more about and I think is really common, what were in that time for you the biggest wins? Like whether they were policy changes or people you got to meet or reforms that were made in that moment what were the things that you were realizing, wow I helped make this happen and I’m so happy I did.
LB: So I keep talking about Dakota access pipeline and I don’t know if people watching this would know what it is but it was like the topic of the time. I remember it. Yeah it was right before Trump got elected. Yeah you were like six. But it was right before Trump got elected. So like this was like the beginning of the modern era now with the Trump derangement syndrome and everything. And so this was actually happening Obama’s last year and I guess I keep bringing that up because that was a huge win for me because I got that issue to have 100 million views on Facebook, the videos that I did.
So there were activist Facebook groups that were getting like zero views and I would put them on the this page and they would get 100 million views and there was a point when like Shailene Woodley went up at an environmental rewards show and she said go to Standing Rock. Don’t just tweet about it. Don’t just feed off of me getting arrested. Go to Standing Rock. I made that go viral. It got tens of millions of views like in a day and people went to Standing Rock which was insane.
I went to Standing Rock. There was a snowstorm. It’s on a reservation and I slept on the floor of a of a casino when I was there because like it was insane. But we all went and it like it was just like anything that we’ve now seen with these movements many times pro-Palestine, BLM, this sort of very emotionally driven black and white thinking movement and that’s what the climate movement was in the 20 teens. And the way that we saw with BLM in 2020 and then pro-Palestine since 2023. And so that was like the example of it and I just got swept up into it and it became part of my identity.
MS: At the peak of this movement, I wonder if you can just tell us what like the core tenets of thinking were.
LB: Yeah so the core tenets would be that the world’s going to end in 10 years unless we basically keep fossil fuels on the ground. It’s American imperialist capitalism’s fault and all of the politicians who aren’t doing anything, they don’t care. They’re bought out by fossil fuel industry. Anyone who raises a question of questioning the narrative, they’re a fossil fuel shill or they’re paid off. It’s not just that we have to save the planet, but it’s that the systems we operate in now are inherently evil. And if we just got rid of them we could live in a utopia where everyone would be living peacefully off of the land and we would have harmony and you know so it’s again like very weird.
The warmth of collectivism. Yes, there’s a lot of communist and Marxist undertones which I think is intentional by the people who are organizing it. But I am just a useful idiot at the time and just going along with it. When you get pulled into a movement like this, you start off by thinking I don’t want plastic in a turtle’s nose to next thing being “Down with the West”. Later you wonder how did I get here? I don’t know but I was drawn in by the emotions of it and now two years later I’m pushing the green new deal with AOC that says like every American deserves a job and we need no more fossil fuels and things that if they actually got enacted would be devastating.
MS: Like you referenced with Israel, Palestine like with BLM a kind of defining feature of all of these movements is one a sense of nihilism but also a lack of questioning and people who question things are often demonized. I wonder if you can first talk about if there were people when you were part of the in crowd that started to question things that were maybe ostracized or if you ever had a moment where you said this is this is starting to get a little bit freaky for me.
LB: I don’t think I ever saw other people questioning it. I think that every time I would step out of line if I would say something like well this doesn’t really make sense you know. When you say it among people who are true believers I would then go home and and my anxiety would spiral. My god they would think am I not a good ally because I said that plastic has a lower carbon footprint than glass. Which is a fact you know and so there be inconvenient facts and if they were brought up in certain contexts I would just feel so insecure leaving a situation where I might have said something outside of the party line.
Mind you, everyone was actually lovely and nice and this was more a self-inflicted thing. It’s not like people were like putting gun to my head to push climate stuff. It was literally a self-imposed thing, an ideology. I look back on it think that my sense of self was sitting on sand and so it was just so would go with the winds of the group. So I didn’t have a solidness inside of myself. What are my core tenant beliefs and so I just was told well you know capitalism is evil and we’re all going to die from climate change unless we do something now. I’m like okay like I’m gonna buy this and and I didn’t have the the confidence in myself to question it and go against the group.
And so whenever I came up with an idea that was contradictory I would just dismiss it. At this time there were people who even quietly were saying like, hey actually I am not so sure if this is true. The science maybe points to other things.
How were those people talked about within the movement? I don’t think those people are even acknowledged or talked about that stuff never broke through. Even now in my research that I do continually in reading books, I’ll learn about something and think: Oh that study that I thought was true, you know 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is a problem, that has been so thoroughly discredited. But it never broke through to me because again, anyone who questioned it is like a white privileged nut. The white privilege thing is like I you can’t kind of separate it because again if like there was a scientist who say their identity is like a white man maybe a classic white man like trying to hold up the system.
So even though it’s a scientific movement, it really was completely divorced from science. I never looked up the science of it which is so embarrassing. I didn’t know what percentage of the atmosphere was CO2 until 2019 and that was when I realized it’s 0.04 percent, which is not a lot, which is a good thing you should know. Again all these people that I followed were activists documentary films. And I would just watch that one thing and take it as fact you know and then never question it until years and years later.
MS: So you’re deeply ensconced in this and then when is the first time that you look around and think something is going on here and I need to learn more. And then how do you make the the quite courageous decision, especially as your public identity is tied to this thing, to start questioning.
LB: I think that the whole time I was part of the movement I always had doubts. And because as I said, my internal sense of self is built on sand, I would get really triggered or have anxiety when someone would bring something up that might like make me question the foundations of these beliefs around the climate. And even a few months after Dakota Access Pipeline happened, I remember having a few glasses of wine with people like at my apartment and feeling like it’s kind of bullshit. When I was covering the Dakota Access Pipeline I was in the role of an advocate for the climate activists and the Native American activists perspective. So I pushed that message: This pipeline is invasive on our land, and it’s going to destroy our drinking water, and that it can’t go through because of climate change.
It was just the party line of the activists, even though inside I could see that there was a lot of problems with the argument. For one, the fact that when you transport oil over a pipeline it’s actually safer and better for the environment than doing it over trains. Because trains can crash and they have a carbon footprint themselves. I would go onto the pipeline website, and I could see a graph they drew and explained how it was going to go under the river and it would not leak into the drinking water. And so I would see the nuance but I almost felt like that wasn’t my role to show it. I have a forward-facing persona: this is what I mean to say and do and even if I see counter information it’s too much of a headache to even include that. Why would I even go down that line because then people are gonna be questioning my loyalty to the cause.
MS: Was there a moment before though when you really did think all of this was true?
LB: I could tell even the way I was covering stories, but I wasn’t covering them honestly or fully. It would almost be like an iceberg and I would show the tip of the iceberg and below the iceberg there’d be nuance and complexity. Or maybe part of it would throw cold water on the theory that I was pushing around this stuff. I would just ignore it and I remember always kind of feeling my coverage is so one-sided and it and it kind of hurt my heart a little bit. But again the cost of going against the group and trying to think of standing on my own I was too much to bear. So I’m just gonna put my trust in the group even though I’m seeing these contradictions. Other people know more than me.
MS: Did you just go with the calculus, I’m a vehicle for this movement and therefore I can only show the tip of the iceberg that they deem acceptable because doing otherwise would ostracize me. Or did you still fundamentally believe that, yes there’s all this other stuff that I’m not portraying in what I’m putting out there, but it’s kind of a distraction from the ultimate end which is creating an awareness or momentum behind this.
LB: I think that’s what it is, and I think that activists still do this. It’s like we don’t have time for nuance, we just have to push for the most extreme narrative because this is a fire alarm situation and the planet is going to be destroyed. We don’t have time to think about the downsides of solar and wind, we have to just keep pushing forward because this is existential.
And that was in 2019!
When you subscribe that this is an existential threat and we don’t have time to like look at the details, then we just have to get people to care and to be afraid. Because if they’re afraid they’re going to change their habits. But again the logical thinking was not there. Psychologically I was in such an insecure place with the group think and being in that work environment, the activist environment, that I didn’t use my logical thinking to the end. I would always stop thinking and then give up my autonomy to the group which was saying this this is an existential thing don’t ask questions.
MS: So when does this small hint of doubt are you slipping into something at like a drunk wine night turn you into this complete breakup?
LB: So the timeline is that I was at now this from 2015 to 2021 and so I was there through the COVID stuff too. I was visible, I was an on-camera person the whole time I was there, so the whole world shut down at the peak of COVID. We saw a 17 percent reduction in our carbon emissions with the peak of COVID. And I’m thinking to myself, wait a minute the climate movement wants 100 percent reduction in our carbon emissions. What is it going to extract from our society. We’re literally locked in our home not doing anything and we still have carbon emissions. That was the first moment where I go hold on. I don’t know if I want to live in a world where we have zero carbon emissions because I’m kind of depressed right now at home. This sucks and we have no freedoms and so what does the climate movement mean if you take it to its logical conclusion. No big deal except it’s going to require people to give up their freedoms to lower carbon emissions
So that was one thing and then the other thing was I was very anti-plastic and all of a sudden like the PPEs everywhere the masks the plastic barriers between every table at a restaurant and when you’re checking out your food at the grocery store and I’m like wait a minute I’ve been sweating about single-use plastic straw for the last five years and now we’ve proliferated more plastic in the last few months than I’ve seen in my lifetime and and also looking around we seem like we’re fine it looks like our society was able to absorb that plastic and the world has not ended
That was 2020 and then in 2021 I left my job and so I didn’t really say anything publicly while I was still there because I was in a public role. Then I was at a a non-profit for a year in a behind the scenes role before I came to the free press. I came to the free press end of 2022 I’m behind the scenes now two and a half years and I just started making content this past May. And that was the reason why I went from being behind the scenes that whole time was I was like I’m too afraid, and then my younger son turned one in April and that was when I kind of had a light bulb come back on. And I was like wait a minute like let me reconsider this. Do I really want to go to my grave never talking about the climate stuff that I have issues with, and what actually need to be said about weighing the cost analysis of doing this.
I just made a decision inside myself in May that I was going to make content and so I started making daily content on TikTok in May and then in June I went back to my Instagram where I’d had the following. So that was scarier. I made content there and then from there I’ve just continued to go all year you kind of internally before you go public with this depart from this way of thinking yeah
MS: I wonder if there was any personal confusion or loss of identity you had attached yourself in a public way to something and then even though it was quiet at first walked away right did you have an identity crisis of sorts?
LB: Yes I did because when I was in the climate movement I got my identity from being a good person and from being on the right side of history and so I identified with that. And so good people don’t question the climate movement you know, good people don’t listen to fossil fuel shills or defend fossil fuels, good people don’t question the climate narrative. This identity of being good and I talked a little bit about this idea of atoning right, because everyone’s obsessed with the white privilege and everything. I’m realizing that I’m an oppressor by being a white woman in from America and so I need to atone for my sins by pushing and being part of this movement and that is what makes me good. So if I’m going to leave this I’m no longer going to be seen as good and I’m no longer a good person.
So who am I and then that’s when you have to start doing the work of building up yourself your sense of self and identity in that internal world which again it took me again five years between questioning and leaving that job and then posting this past year.
MS: One thing I think about is like when you’re speaking about COVID and you’re saying we’re producing all this plastic and the world is fine yeah where does like the the agreement on scientific fact kind of end and conspiracy begin? In other words is there an actual downside to producing that much plastic and even if the world will be okay and we can innovate and adapt from it like is that a good thing for us to do, should we still be trying to limit it? Yeah, what are the facts that we should be operating under?
LB: Where I come down on this now is that the traditional environmental movement that was founded in conservation and protecting animals and getting pollution out of our environment is still very solid. But that’s not what the climate movement is. The climate movement is trying to change our energy system from reliable fossil fuels to unreliable solar and taxing us to do it. And getting us to worry about our carbon emissions and all these things.
So it’s very like convoluted, it’s like the demon spawn of environmentalism honestly. Obviously we should always reduce, reuse and recycle like the classic thing we learned in third grade. But that’s not really what the climate movement’s saying. The climate movement’s is guilting you for living a modern life; the climate movement is taxing and over-regulating reliable forms of energy and trying to get us to be dependent on solar and wind which we import those materials from China. The EU now has an energy crisis because of the green movement and so there’s so many negatives about the climate movement that go beyond just conservation and and don’t even get me started on the mental health stuff with the young people.
MS: Well that’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. But first I want to say it also seems like a core tenant actually goes against solutions or innovation. I think about the people that the movement idolizes, and that’s maybe AOC or Greta Thunberg. But they’re very much opposed to someone like Elon Musk for instance who in the creation of EVs has probably made something that’s affordable for people to lower their carbon footprint, whereas most people cannot afford to put solar panels on the top of their house.
LB: Right, part of it is actually anti-innovation, it’s very anti-innovation anti-human and the fact that the 14 year old Greta became the symbol of this movement should have been a red flag for me back in 2018. Why are we idolizing a 14 year old which shows you it’s not a rational movement, it’s an emotional movement. It has spiritual undertones, they’re kind of putting her up as this prophet. Ultimately from being in the movement for so many years, I realized that it’s an anti-human movement. They would say, well we can’t just innovate our ways out of this, we need to be consuming less and we need to not be using so much energy. So it’s we can’t innovate our way out of this, and you’re thinking, well we’ve innovated our way out of every other thing. You know there used to be piles of horse manure in New York City and now we have cars. Right it’s what humans do, we innovate our way out of everything.
But again this movement is like a lot of group think, they always have something to keep you in and keep you depressed about the state of the world. And I will say another thing that woke me up from it is that we naturally work together. You know I’m a very positive optimistic person and I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for a life, and this is a very negative movement that basically makes you feel guilty for being alive and living a modern human life. As if we can choose when we’re born, as if oh I had a choice over being born in a modern time. And so that was another thing of self preservation for me where my nature was coming up against a very nihilistic movement and I had to get out for self-preservation.
MS: I want to ask you about one of the things that we’ve touched on, the way this doomerism has affected young people especially. My grocery store is in the building where there’s a climate clock above it saying there’s a countdown until everything’s going to implode. I think it’s one in five young people don’t want to have kids because of climate fears. I wonder if the nihilism is core to the movement and how you’ve seen this affect young people especially. Because it seems like this very convenient thing where you can feel like a good person for speaking out about it, but there’s not really anything that you can do. Because at the end of the day the clock is counting down and that’s what it is.
Yeah it’s so nihilistic and that is the thing that pushed me to start talking about this. Because I realized how young people are impacted, the wasted human capital that is happening because of how they’re taught this. You probably were taught it more than I was in school, but when I was in high school in 2006 we watched Al Gore’s movie Inconvenient Truth, and that one day was enough for me to like be freaked out. And I know now it’s even more really part of a the curriculum. Yeah for sure.
Actually one of our co-workers Sasha said to me after seeing one of my videos she was saying,oh my god I loved your video. Even if I didn’t know you, I would have loved seeing one of your videos. Because even when my friends and I are having a good time, there’ll be a pause and someone will say, but the planet’s burning. And I’m thinking, wow, you’re not even activists going anywhere. You just have a subconsciously held belief that you do not question, it is a law that the world is burning. Yeah I think that’s true for most young people. Yes people just assume that the world is burning and that is like common knowledge among younger generations. I don’t think older generations fully realize that.
MS: No it’s actually really random, but I was reporting a story about why young people were getting tattoos so much. And the most common thing all these Gen Z people said to me was: The world is burning. I’m going away, I may as well just get the tattoo I want because like nothing lasts forever. That was their answer.
LB: And these aren’t people who gluing their hands to a highway or covering themselves in paint. These are just normal people and that is the the cohort that I really care about. Because it’s just so sad when people walk through the world believing the world is going to end because of this when it’s so not true.
MS: So what do you think of Greta and AOC? They’re still kind of on this soapbox about maximalist climate doomerism. Why and and what do we make of that?
LB: I actually think they’ve fallen off of it a bit. Honestly AOC doesn’t talk about it as much like she was pushing the Green New Deal in 2019. And it was all about transitioning our electricity to 100% renewable within 10 years and guaranteeing a job for every American, which is hilarious. And then Greta’s gone for the pro Palestine. So they’ve backed off of it but without having a mea culpa, saying I was wrong. I think that’s a problem I had when the life I lived for many years where I had changed all my opinions but I never like corrected the record. So I just kind of faded away and that is also why I have a responsibility to set the record straight. And to counter this fear because I played a part in pushing it.
And we’re seeing the impacts now with these really poorly thought out green policies. Even in New York we know like it’s like electrify the heating here by 2030 and that’s going to cost these small business owners like millions of dollars to electrify apartment buildings or whatever it may be. That’s real world now, working class and middle class people who are now going to be on this bill like or be left to foot the bill for this climate ideology. And it’s really, really destructive even in Africa the World Bank up until a few years ago wasn’t lending to natural gas projects even though natural gas is the cleanest other than nuclear energy. And best way to get people out of poverty is to get them reliable energy. You want to give them natural gas and the world bank wouldn’t fund those projects because of climate change.
MS: Speaking of people like you who have said they were wrong, I’m really astonished by the delta of time between someone saying one thing and another. Especially in the case of Bill Gates who with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was funding immense amount of research on climate change. She was very outspoken about it, and then a few months ago he basically said in the New York Times: Actually it’s all fine, this isn’t a real threat. It’s okay everyone, it’s gonna have an impact but it’s not deadly, it’s not the world ending. So I wonder, this is someone who is untouchable whose personal and public life will not really be affected by him changing his mind the way that it was for you. Why is someone like Bill Gates taking so long after we know the science of what is more true now. Why does it take him a decade basically?
LB: Yeah I mean it makes a lot of sense since this whole climate system and all the non-profits and the business models and there’s so many people making money off of this now. So how do you turn that ship, it’s really, really hard. And then you’re around people saying that the consensus is the world ending. So to go against that takes a lot of courage. Just to say for people who don’t know, on my Instagram now I make content that says things like climate change is not dangerous, deaths from natural disasters are down 95 % over the last 100 years. So where’s the emergency here? Some people just like stuff that’s sort of against this common knowledge. And I also get people in my comments saying you’re a fossil fuel shill, this is fake news. It’s just being able to not take every comment so seriously that it like throws me off. Because in the end of the day I’m making the content for the mom who just had a kid and is like really freaked out. And those are the messages I also get saying: Thank you for making your content. I was actually really freaked out about this but I’m not going to worry about this anymore. Again they’re not activists, they’re just normal people and I’m just giving them a signal amongst the noise where they like don’t know what to believe. And I’m ssying, okay I’m just gonna lay out the facts.
MS: It’s something we write a lot about the free press which is like how certain fields academia, medicine, science, the list goes on, has kind of things that are really meant to be rooted in fact, but have completely departed from that. It’s been taken over by an ideology. And maybe it’s naive or too optimistic, but I really do think that each of those things will have a breaking point, or at some point someone will say no, this is not what I signed up for. Do you see what that breaking point might be within the climate movement? Has it already happened?
LB: So the climate realist, climate skeptic community has been saying this message since the year 2000. Like there are so many amazing scientists who have been pushed out of their jobs, censored, deplatformed like literally cases against them have been brought up at the universities where they work to like push them out for just saying, you know, climate is not world ending. So, I’m not the first person to say this. That movement has been sort of trying to say this for so long. But before Elon bought Twitter and before Mark Zuckerberg became more based and opened up on the censorship which is less harsh now, these people would just be deplatformed as climate deniers.
Yeah. And so those people have already existed like there’s been scandals for 25 years. And so I think that they are kind of thinking, when is the breaking point? We’ve been trying to say this forever and we are getting ostracized. But the difference is now the censorship has now gone down a bit and it allows my voice to be important in this.
So my videos actually do not get censored on Instagram or Twitter, which they would have 5 years ago, right? And also there’s the scientists who have been saying all this stuff and I read their books. There’s like Patrick Moore who is the head of the Greenpeace. He founded Greenpeace and he’s now like a huge climate skeptic. There’s just so many people to name, but I basically am translating their work that they’ve been saying for years to the online Tik Tok generation. And so I think I think when I talk to them, they say they’re more hopeful than they’ve ever been because of Bill Gates, and the censorship is going down. And then you have Trump and Chris Wright, who’s the Department of Energy, who are just saying like, we’re not dealing with this stuff anymore. We’ve withdrawn from a lot of climate organizations like the IPCC and all these different things like we’re just not in them anymore because the science has been so corrupted. And so everyone’s like thank god this is like finally happened.
So, I think there is a huge turning point, but I do think that there’s like a lack of breaking through to the everyday person who’s not up on it. And again, and then you come across my content and you might just immediately trigger a flag: she’s a climate change denier. She’s a fossil fuel shell, right? Because if you’re still in that group think, you’re dismissing what I’m saying because you just come up with a reason not to trust what I’m saying.
MS: What do the the climate skeptic experts say is actually happening and therefore how we should live our lives accordingly. Do they say buy all the plastic you want, it doesn’t matter? What are they saying?
LB: So I actually spoke to Steve Koonin who is a former energy secretary for President Obama. So this is not like some right-wing person. So I think that’s a really important person to quote and he wrote the book unsettled in that came out in 2022. That just goes into what we know and what is unsettled when it comes to the climate science. He said that we know the planet has warmed 1.3 degrees since 1850. So we know that that is a fact. We are going through a warming period. We also know that we have released CO2 into the atmosphere by burning oil and gas and coal. Now how much of that warming is naturally occurring and how much of it is because of the CO2?
That’s when you now have this debate and that’s okay. There isn’t actually a consensus. Obviously, alarmists are like, “It’s our fault. Everything’s our fault. We’re heading to doom.” But that is not a commonly held belief even among scientists who are still in the space. That’s a media narrative.
Someone like Koonin might say it’s warming. However, that’s not necessarily a factor that would lead to our demise, right? And I will say that warming periods historically, which I’ve just learned in doing more research on this, historically humans flourish during warming periods because you have longer growing seasons. So you can support a population in a city. And the term for this is climate optimum. So that’s actually what geologists and archaeologists and historians would call these periods.
MS: Well, you did one reporting video where you spoke to young people who were at a climate protest, which I loved, and it was quite startling how little they knew about the facts you presented them. But I wonder what you would say to them, or really to the the young people who are saying, “I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want I feel really nihilistic about the future because of this, what do you say to them?”
LB: The number one fact I like to share because it’s just unequivocally true, is that deaths from natural disasters have gone down 99% in the past 100 years. So even with climate change, even let’s say the planet is warming, it’s so scary. Deaths have gone down 99%. So we’re safer than ever. Even with climate change, like we’ve we’ve seen 1.3 degrees of warming, and we’ve seen at the exact same time. It’s almost the exact same chart. Temperatures have gone up, human prosperity, literacy, women’s rights, all of the things. We know this has happened the past 150 years, right? We’ve had this huge boom of prosperity that’s happened during 1.3 degrees of warming. So if climate change was really so dangerous, shouldn’t we see some negative impacts, why is humanity still thriving so much even in the midst of climate change?
And I would also say don’t look at the climate models that say in 10 years the planet’s going to be this, in 30 years it’s going to be that. Those are models that are just computer models. You can put any bit of data in there to get any outcome that you want to prove there’s an apocalypse. And the scientists who do those models are incentivized to find that outcome. And so they’re not solid science. And so I would never base having kids or your future and your outlook on life. Never base it on a computer model.
MS: Lucy, thank you so much for joining me. I learn something new from you every day. So thank you.
LB: Thank you for having me. It was so much fun.
Alex Newman reports at Liberty Sentinel New Climate Study Debunks Key UN IPCC Dogma. Excerpts in italics with my added bolds and images. Discussion of the Study itself follows later below.
Breaking research reveals the key metric behind so-called global warming
is based on “physically meaningless” calculations. If true,
it could upend decades of climate science and policy.
Lead author Jonathan Cohler, a physicist, who worked with top scientists around the world including Dr. Willie Soon, explained that even though the U.S. government is leaving the IPCC under Trump, the UN continues to march on with its climate agenda. However, with more and more evidence and scientific papers dismantling the core “science,” the UN’s agenda appears to be on thin ice.
“The public has been told that the ocean is ‘warming’ and absorbing over 90% of ‘excess’ planetary heat,” explained Cohler. “But when we examined how these numbers are actually calculated, we found they represent computational artifacts rather than measurements of real physical energy rendering the entire process a category error.”
The analysis focuses on data from the international Argo float program, a network of approximately 4,000 autonomous floats that drift through the ocean measuring temperature and other data. These measurements form the backbone of modern climate assessments, including those by the IPCC. Even leaving aside the fundamental category error, for the sake of argument, this research nonetheless reveals multiple fundamental problems with how this data is processed, Cohler said.
Fig. 1. (left) Global mean OHC (Cheng et al. 2024a) for 0–2000 m relative to a base period 1981–2010 (ZJ). The 95% confidence intervals are shown (sampling and instrumental uncertainties). (right) Trend from 2000 to 2023 in OHC for 0–2000 m (W m−2). The stippled areas show places where the trend is not significant at the 5% level. Source: Distinctive Pattern of Global Warming in Ocean Heat Content by Trenberth et al (2025).
[Note: The graph showing zettajoules can be misleading. Ocean heat graphs labelled in Zettajoules make it look scary, but the actual temperature changes involved are microscopic, and impossible to measure to such accuracy in pre-ARGO days. And as this post shows, ARGO measurements are also unreliable.]
Since 2004, for instance, ARGO data shows an increase of about two hundredths of a degree.
Abstract Global ocean heat content (OHC) anomalies and derived Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) estimates, central to contemporary climate assessments including IPCC AR6, are constructed through processes that violate the scientific method. These metrics rely almost exclusively on temperature data from the Argo profiling float array. Their validity and reliability hinge on several critical but herein refuted assumptions about measurement representativeness, interpolation/extrapolation methods, the physical meaning of anomalies, and integration conventions.
Core Argo and Biogeochemical Argo floats deliver discrete, point measurements of intensive properties like temperature along irregular, untracked three-dimensional trajectories during ascent from 2000 m to the surface. This samples only the upper ocean, excluding roughly 50% of total ocean volume and thermal energy. Horizontal positions are recorded only at surface intervals ~10 days apart, leaving subsurface locations entirely unknown. All data from each ascent are arbitrarily assigned to the surfacing position, introducing unknown horizontal offsets (up to 50 km) and temporal offsets (up to 10 hours) for the deepest measurements.
Anomalies are computed by subtracting values from statistically derived reference climatologies based on sparse historical data over arbitrary baseline periods. Measured temperatures are then interpolated onto global 3D grids using prescribed covariance functions. These anomalies represent numerical differences without physical meaning as temperature deviations, because temperature, an intensive property, is not additive across non-equilibrium spatial or temporal domains (Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018).
IPCC AR6 Earth Energy Budget fig. 7.2
The integrated OHC scalar depends heavily on arbitrary averaging and interpolation rules, producing computational artifacts rather than measures of actual ocean energy uptake or planetary radiative imbalance. Derived EEI values, such as the 0.7 ± 0.2 W m⁻² in IPCC AR6 Figure 7.2, inherit these biases and stem from circular methodology: CERES satellite top-of-atmosphere radiative flux measurements (absolute uncertainties ± 3–5 W m⁻² or higher) are adjusted via least squares to match Argo OHC-derived estimates, rather than offering independent validation.
We rigorously quantify major uncertainty sources, including unresolved mesoscale variability (± 0.9 W m⁻²), deep ocean ignorance bounds (± 0.35 W m⁻² from sparse Deep Argo), polar undersampling (± 0.1 W m⁻²), Nyquist-Shannon aliasing in sparse deep ocean and polar sampling, sealevel budget closure discrepancy between satellite altimetry/gravimetry and Argo OHC (±0.33 Wm-2), arbitrary baseline choices (± 0.2 W m⁻²), Eulerian-Lagrangian discrepancies (± 0.25 W m⁻²), and untracked trajectories and positional assignments.
Although the concepts of OHC and EEI are thermodynamically well-defined physical quantities, the numerical values produced by current Argo-based methodologies are physically meaningless computational constructs that do not validly represent those quantities. We conclude that EEI uncertainties reach >± 1 W m⁻² at 95% confidence, roughly an order of magnitude larger than the uncertainty that IPCC AR6 reports, rendering current OHC change and EEI estimates statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Conclusions
EEI estimates that depend on Argo-derived global OHC lack physical validity and reliability as measures of ocean thermal energy change or planetary radiative imbalance. The final OHC scalar is a computational artifact produced by assigning sparse intensive temperature measurements to arbitrary positions, subtracting them from a non-physical climatological reference, and integrating interpolated values that dominate the unsampled ocean volume. These operations destroy thermodynamic interpretability, rendering the resulting scalar sensitive to methodological choices rather than to any conserved physical quantity.
The widely cited claim that ~90–93% of the observed planetary heat gain is stored in the ocean, and that ~85–93% of oceanic uptake resides in the upper 2000 m (as adopted in Forster et al., 2021, Chapter 7, based on von Schuckmann et al., 2020, 2023), rests on this invalid calculation and is non-compliant with the scientific method. The claimed vertical partitioning is not empirically robust; given the structural uncertainties quantified herein, alternative distributions including a physically plausible 50-50 split between upper and deep ocean remain consistent with the flawed observational constraints and cannot be scientifically excluded.
The fundamental thermodynamic invalidity of averaging intensive temperature measurements across non-equilibrium spatial and temporal domains (as detailed in Section 1.2; Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018; Cohler, 2025) renders global temperature metrics physically meaningless numerical abstractions. Without a physically meaningful, thermodynamically valid global metric for ocean energy change or planetary imbalance, current assessments of anthropogenic climate forcing and future projections lack an empirical foundation (see also Cohler et al.,2025, for independent evidence that the anthropogenic CO₂-global warming hypothesis lacks empirical substantiation due to natural dominance and model failures).
Twenty years after Al Gore’s apocalyptic movie “An Inconvenient Truth,” the Trump administration has put the final nail in the coffin of the lie that scared a generation into believing the planet was about to explode in flames if they kept using fossil fuels.
In what the White House calls “the largest deregulatory action in American history,” the EPA on Thursday will repeal an Obama-era proclamation that has mandated greenhouse-gas regulations for 17 years,
The 2009 “endangerment finding” has been the primary climate handbrake on American industry, forming the legal justification for increasingly punitive greenhouse-gas regulations.
Rescinding it would “save the American people $1.3 trillion in crushing regulations,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said this week, with the EPA projecting an average saving of $2,400 per vehicle and further savings on farm machinery, soon to be freed from the complex extra circuitry required to restrict emissions.
Yay! It’s about time that common sense returned to energy policy.
During the recent bone-chilling winter storm that hit 200 million Americans across more than 35 states, it wasn’t wind and solar that kept the lights on but fossil fuels.
Fueling US prosperity
According to the Florida Municipal Power Agency, 90% of power generation in the country at the height of the storm was natural gas, coal, nuclear or oil.
Cheap, abundant energy fueled America’s prosperity, but charlatans citing pseudoscience have conspired to send us back to the dark ages with hyperbolic predictions that keep falling apart.
As we keep sailing past the various doomsday deadlines set by climate shucksters from Gore to Greta Thunberg, the public has been waking up to the hoax.
A Gallup poll found in 2024 only 2 percent of Americans cite climate change or the environment as their main concern.
It’s telling that green activists have been relatively silent in the face of a full-scale assault by Trump and his Cabinet on climate shibboleths the past year. He lauded EPA administrator Lee Zeldin and his rapid fire deregulation moves as the administration’s “secret weapon” in his war against the “war on coal.”
“Biden and the radical left wanted to abolish coal,” Trump told the assembled group of coal miners in hard hats and hi-vis vests in the East Room.
“They did everything they could . . . but on Day 1 of this administration I ended the war on coal. We terminated the green new scam and we withdrew from the unfair, one-sided Paris climate deal.”
He also boasted that he has saved 74 coal fired power plants from extinction and announced that the Tennessee Valley Authority has just taken two coal plants off the chopping board.
Meanwhile, buoyed by falling electricity prices, the first American aluminum smelter in 50 years is now slated to be built in Oklahoma.
Net-zero policies adopted by in Europe, Canada and Australia, with their blind reliance on wind and solar, have failed. Add the huge new demand for power by data processing centers underpinning artificial intelligence, and the climate fiction has become impossible to sustain.
Now, policymakers and powerful influencers are hoping they can sidle away from the disastrous decisions they forced on us with false pretenses.
Climate activism out
Billionaire activistBill Gates has renounced climate alarm, declaring quietly last October that climate change “will not lead to humanity’s demise” and “the global temperature doesn’t tell us anything about the quality of people’s lives.”
Thank you, Captain Obvious. Maybe there are more pressing problems in the world that we could more usefully spend his money to solve.
On Wall Street, ESG (environment, social and government) stocks have fallen out of favor.
Public disillusionment is happening as the underpinnings of the climate hoax have collapsed.
In congressional testimony last week Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pointed to the “monumental retraction” of Nature magazine’s infamous paper on “The Economic Commitment of Climate Change” which claimed the cost of global warming would be $38 trillion per year by 2049. It was retracted two months ago because, Nature admitted, the errors were “too substantial for a correction.”
Bessent declared that the repudiation of the influential economic modeling “laid bare the radical left’s apocalyptic hyperbole on climate change . . .
“This fatally fraught paper, with errors far too substantial for correction, has been frequently used and abused to justify bad policymaking around the world, undermining both energy abundance and better living standards.”
These days, when Energy Secretary Chris Wright meets his European and Australian counterparts behind closed doors, they confide to him that he “may be right on the data,” but the public still “feels” climate alarm is real.
As he points out, that’s because they’ve been lied to for a quarter of a century.
The truth hurts, but it’s better than the alternative.
Twenty years ago “An Inconvenient Truth” received a standing ovation at the
Sundance Film Festival. Though it was full of predictions that never
came to pass, it was a key catalyst of the climate activist movement.
Twenty years ago Monday, former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received a standing ovation. The 2006 documentary was released to theaters the following May and went on to gross over $25 million worldwide.
Gore’s film was a primary catalyst for the climate activist movement, and it generated a lot of concern about global warming following its release. The movie left audiences with the impression that the human race was hurtling toward a dystopian future on a planet baking in unbearable temperatures where extreme weather caused frequent disasters.
Almost 13 years to the day after its release, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was telling people the world would end in 12 years – presumably five years from now – because of the burning of fossil fuels.
Matt Wielicki, who writes about climate and energy on his “Irrational Fear” Substack, was once an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. In the early part of his academic career, he taught at a local college.
Al Gore with a version of the Hockey Stick graph in the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth
He told Just the News that he showed “An Inconvenient Truth” to his students. Over time, he began to question the “gloom and doom” narratives Gore presents in his film, he said.
“People took that as a starting point, and they just kept running further and further with it,” Wielicki said.
Gore’s film, however, was full of numerous predictions that turned out to be wrong, and it’s likely that the world will not end in 2031, as Ocasio-Cortez predicted.
Stubborn ice
Among the predictions Gore made in the documentary is that Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro would have no more snow on it by 2016. In 2020, The Times reported that the snow on the 19,000-foot mountain remained, despite Gore’s predictions. But the documentary had caused some to rush to climb the mountain before the snow disappeared. Instead, the tourists are surprised to find glaciers still clinging to it.
Gore also predicted that Glacier National Park would be “the park formerly known as Glacier” after all the ice melted away in the blazing hot temperatures that were to descend upon the human race. The claim made a big mark, and federal agencies began looking closely at glaciers.
The U.S. Geological Survey predicted all the glaciers in the park would be gone by 2020. Signs were placed throughout the park warning visitors of the impending end of glaciers, which never happened. Instead, CNN reported, the signs had to be removed in 2020 when it was clear the glaciers remained.
Gore also connected Hurricane Katrina to global warming – later renamed climate change – and he predicted that these storms would become more frequent. The reality of human contributions to hurricane activity is far more nuanced and uncertain than Gore discusses in the documentary.
Integrated Storm Activity Annually over the Continental U.S. (ISAAC). Value is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy from all storms over land.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a section on its website dedicated to the topic. The page reads.
“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming,”
Uncertainty and nuance
Meteorologist Chris Martz said that climate science is full of the kind of uncertainty and nuance you see on the NOAA website, which “An Inconvenient Truth” dismisses entirely.
Since Gore’s film was released – which was given a sequel in 2017 – Gore has continued to make false predictions, the meteorologist said. In 2009, Gore stated that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer within five to seven years. As of today, the Arctic still has ice in summer.
“We look at the Arctic ice now and yes, it’s declined since 1979 when satellite records began … But over the last 18 to 20 years, there’s really been no trend. And this caught scientists off guard. The models never predicted this,” Martz told Just the News.
He also said there’s been multiple studies on Arctic ice, and while some predicted an ice-free Arctic, others find the ice extent in the region recedes or grows as a result of natural variability.
Predictions of cataclysm stemming from climate change regularly get reported in the media, but there’s little reporting when the predictions fail.In 2022, NBC News was one of many outlets reporting that California and the American West were in the midst of a “megadrought,” which was the worst the region had seen in over 1,000 years.
Earlier this month, NBC reported that California is drought free for the first time in 25 years. The article makes no mention of the previously predicted “megadrought,” nor does it mention climate change.
Martz said that many of his critics respond to these failed predictions by arguing they weren’t made by scientists in peer-reviewed articles published in journals. Instead, they’re made by politicians or scientists in interviews. But most people don’t get their information from scientific journals. They get it from the media, Martz said.
“That communication is what’s more important in terms of public perception of what science is,” he said.
Listening to the experts
Though it had no scientific basis, there was a widespread belief that global warming could cause the human race to go extinct.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
People appear more likely to be influenced by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez than the scientific data on deaths from climate-related natural disasters.
Her statement that the world would end in 12 years was actually a misreading of a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted that the world would need to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 40-50% by 2030 and eliminate them entirely by 2050 to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees celsius above levels they were at before humans began burning a lot of fossil fuels.
There’s nothing in the report that predicts disaster after crossing that threshold, and some experts are estimating that we have already done so. The report estimates that under the worst-case scenario, the global GDP loses about 2.6%, but it would still be about 10 times larger than it is today. But people didn’t read the report. They just heard Ocasio-Cortez warning of end times.
The report, or at least Ocasio-Cortez’s understanding of it, led her to introduce the ambitious Green New Deal plan, a suite of progressive policies justified as presenting global disaster. Itfailed to get a single vote when it was brought to the Senate floor for a procedural vote, which would mean, according to Ocasio-Cortez, the world has five years until it ends.
Larry Behrens, communications director for Power the Future, told Just the News that AOC likely spent the seven-year anniversary of her prediction doing exactly what she does any other day.
“Because she knows it was nonsense when she said it, and it’s nonsense now,” he said. “Make no mistake, she’ll join the rest of the eco-left in their convenient climate silence, hoping voters forget their green crusade delivered record energy prices and crushing inflation. On this anniversary, ‘climate’ is the last word AOC and her allies want to utter because midterms are coming, and voters remember exactly who made life more expensive.”
Science Matters 