Climate Ideology | Science Matters

Sea Level Rise Hype from Climatists Lying by Omission Again

From Inside Climate News comes this example, New Study Projects Climate-Driven Flooding for Thousands of New Jersey Homes.

Sea-level rise threatens coastal communities even if global emissions drop.

Of course the alarm is picked up everywhere:

As Summer Approaches, New Jersey’s Shore Towns Confront an Unrelenting Foe: Sea Level Rise Inside Climate News

US East Coast faces rising seas as crucial Atlantic current slows, New Scientist

Sea level rise creates a crisis at US coasts: What to know, USA Today

Map Shows US Cities Where Sea Level Rise Is Accelerating, Newsweek

Global sea levels are rising faster and faster. It spells catastrophe for coastal towns and cities, CNN

Etc., Etc., Etc.

Climatists Make Their Case by Omitting Facts

A previous post documented this pattern, of which we have this fresh example. Let’s start with the tidal gauge at Atlantic City, New Jersey.

It presents a long record of steadily rising levels for more than a century. The rate is 4.25 mm per year, or a rise of about 1 inch every six years. The lie is in attributing all of that to sea level rising, and adding in burning of hydrocarbons as the cause. What’s left out is the well known and documented subsidence of land along the US Eastern seaboard.

Vertical land motion (VLM) across the US Atlantic coast (a) Estimated VLM rate. The circles show the location of GNSS validation observations color-coded with their respective vertical velocities. (b) Histogram comparing GNSS vertical rates with estimated VLM rates. The standard deviation (SD) of the difference between the two datasets is 1.3 mm per year. (c) Land subsidence (representing negative VLM) across the US Atlantic Coast.

The black rectangles indicate the extent of study areas for Chesapeake Bay area and Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina (GA-SC-NC) area shown in Fig. 4. State Codes: ME Maine, NH New Hampshire, VT Vermont, MA Massachusetts, RI Rhode Island, NY New York, PA Pennsylvania, NJ New Jersey, WV West Virginia, OH Ohio, DE Delaware, VA Virginia, NC North Carolina, SC South Carolina, GA Georgia, and FL Florida. National, state, and great lakes boundaries in a, c are based on public domain vector data by World DataBank (https://data.worldbank.org/) generated in MATLAB.

Abstract from paper Hidden vulnerability of US Atlantic coast to sea-level rise due to vertical land motion

The vulnerability of coastal environments to sea-level rise varies spatially, particularly due to local land subsidence. However, high-resolution observations and models of coastal subsidence are scarce, hindering an accurate vulnerability assessment. We use satellite data from 2007 to 2020 to create high-resolution map of subsidence rate at mm-level accuracy for different land covers along the ~3,500 km long US Atlantic coast. Here, we show that subsidence rate exceeding 3 mm per year affects most coastal areas, including wetlands, forests, agricultural areas, and developed regions. Coastal marshes represent the dominant land cover type along the US Atlantic coast and are particularly vulnerable to subsidence. We estimate that 58 to 100% of coastal marshes are losing elevation relative to sea level and show that previous studies substantially underestimate marsh vulnerability by not fully accounting for subsidence.

A further reference to causes of land subsidence:

Land subsidence, in particular, deserves special attention because it can significantly magnify the relative sea-level rise (RSLR) to several times beyond the global average sea-level rise, which usually amounts to just a few mm/yr on its own (Shirzaei et al. 2021). Land subsidence results from various factors encompassing both natural processes and human activities that operate at local or regional scales (Ohenhen et al., 2023). Globally, groundwater extraction is the primary cause of land subsidence (Coplin and Galloway, 1999;Shastri et al., 2023).

Finally, we can observe that the Atlantic City sea level rise of 4.25 mm per year measured at the gauge is close to the subsidence rate shown in the right hand panel. So yes, authorities in that area need to address the problem with hydro engineering and zoning laws. But no, reducing CO2 emissions is not the solution.

See Also:

Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update

Again, There is No Right to a Stable Climate

Posted on June 1 by Ron Clutz

Announced this week was this from Inside Climate News: Trump Executive Orders Violate Young People’s Rights to a Stable Climate, a Lawsuit Alleges. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Twenty-two young people from across the country sued the
Trump administration over the executive orders,
which prioritize the expansion of fossil fuels.

The complaint, filed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Montana, challenges three executive orders: “Unleashing American Energy,” “Declaring a National Energy Emergency” and “Reinvigorating America’s Beautiful Clean Coal Industry.” The lawsuit argues that with the orders, the Trump administration knowingly is advancing an agenda that will increase greenhouse gas pollution that already is stressing the global climate to a dangerous extent.

The litigation argues the situation infringes on the young people’s constitutional rights to life and liberty, as well as falling afoul of other laws approved by Congress that protect public health and the environment. The plaintiffs want the court to declare the executive orders unconstitutional, block their implementation and reaffirm the legal limits on presidential power.

“From day one of the current administration, President Trump has issued directives to increase fossil fuel use and production and block an energy transition to wind, solar, battery storage, energy efficiency, and electric vehicles (“EVs”),” the lawsuit states. “President Trump’s EOs falsely claim an energy emergency, while the true emergency is that fossil fuel pollution is destroying the foundation of Plaintiffs’ lives.”

It’s the same argument from the same people (Our Children’s Trust) that was shot down in flames just a year ago. There were multiple attempts to undo the damaged legal maneuver to no avail. Below is why this latest litigation should be put out of its misery at once.

Appeals Court Rules Against Kids’ Climate Lawsuit, May 1, 2024

Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals grants Federal government’s petition for writ of mandamus in the case of Juliana v. United States, originally filed in 2015. Ruling excerpts are below in italics with my bolds. 20240501_docket-24-684_order

In the underlying case, twenty-one plaintiffs (the Juliana plaintiffs) claim that—by failing to adequately respond to the threat of climate change—the government has violated a putative “right to a stable climate system that can sustain human life.” Juliana v. United States, No. 6:15-CV-01517-AA, 2023 WL 9023339, at *1 (D. Or. Dec. 29, 2023). In a prior appeal, we held that the Juliana plaintiffs lack Article III standing to bring such a claim. Juliana v. United States, 947 F.3d 1159, 1175 (9th Cir. 2020). We remanded with instructions to dismiss on that basis. Id. The district court nevertheless allowed amendment, and the government again moved to dismiss. The district court denied that motion, and the government petitioned for mandamus seeking to enforce our earlier mandate. We have jurisdiction to consider the petition. See 28 U.S.C. § 1651. We grant it.

In the prior appeal, we held that declaratory relief was “not substantially likely to mitigate the plaintiffs’ asserted concrete injuries.” Juliana, 947 F.3d at 1170. To the contrary, it would do nothing “absent further court action,” which we held was unavailable. Id. We then clearly explained that Article III courts could not “step into the shoes” of the political branches to provide the relief the Juliana plaintiffs sought. Id. at 1175. Because neither the request for declaratory relief nor the request for injunctive relief was justiciable, we “remand[ed] th[e] case to the district court with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing.” Id. Our mandate was to dismiss.

The district court gave two reasons for allowing amendment. First, it concluded that amendment was not expressly precluded. Second, it held that intervening authority compelled a different result. We reject each.
The first reason fails because we “remand[ed] . . . with instructions to dismiss for lack of Article III standing.” Id. Neither the mandate’s letter nor its spirit left room for amendment. See Pit River Tribe, 615 F.3d at 1079.
The second reason the district court identified was that, in its view, there was an intervening change in the law. District courts are not bound by a mandate when a subsequently decided case changes the law. In re Molasky, 843 F.3d 1179, 1184 n.5 (9th Cir. 2016). The case the court identified was Uzuegbunam v. Preczewski, which “ask[ed] whether an award of nominal damages by itself can redress a past injury.” 141 S. Ct. 792, 796 (2021). Thus, Uzuegbunam was a damages case which says nothing about the redressability of declaratory judgments. Damages are a form of retrospective relief. Buckhannon Bd. & Care Home v. W. Va. Dep’t of Health & Human Res., 532 U.S. 598, 608–09 (2001). Declaratory relief is prospective. The Juliana plaintiffs do not seek damages but seek only prospective relief. Nothing in Uzuegbunam changed the law with respect to prospective relief.

We held that the Juliana plaintiffs lack standing to bring their claims and told the district court to dismiss. Uzuegbunam did not change that. The district court is instructed to dismiss the case forthwith for lack of Article III standing, without leave to amend.

Background July 2023: Finally, a Legal Rebuttal on the Merits of Kids’ Climate Lawsuit

As reported last month, the Oregon activist judge invited the plaintiffs in Juliana vs US to reopen that case even after the Ninth Circuit shot it down. Now we have a complete and thorough Motion from the defendant (US government) to dismiss this newest amended complaint. Most interesting is the section under the heading starting on page 30. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Plaintiffs’ Claims Fail on the Merits

Because Plaintiffs’ action fails at the jurisdictional threshold, the Ninth Circuit never reached—and this Court need not reach—the merits of the claims. . . Plaintiffs’ second amended complaint, which supersedes the first amended complaint, asserts the same claims that were brought in the first amended complaint, which this Court addressed in orders that the Ninth Circuit reversed. Defendants thus renew their objection that Plaintiffs’ claims fail on the merits and should be dismissed pursuant to Fed. R. Civ. P. 12(b)(6).

A. There is no constitutional right to a stable climate system.

The Supreme Court has repeatedly instructed courts considering novel due process claims
to “‘exercise the utmost care whenever . . . asked to break new ground in this field,’… lest the liberty protected by the Due Process Clause be subtly transformed” into judicial policy preferences. More specifically, the Supreme Court has “regularly observed that the Due Process Clause specially protects those fundamental rights and liberties which are, objectively, ‘deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.’” Plaintiffs’ request that this Court recognize an implied fundamental right to a stable climate system contradicts that directive, because such a purported right is without basis in the Nation’s history or tradition.

The proposed right to a “stable climate system” is nothing like any fundamental right ever recognized by the Supreme Court. The state of the climate is a public and generalized issue, and so interests in the climate are unlike the particularized personal liberty or personal privacy interests of individuals the Supreme Court has previously recognized as being protected by fundamental rights. “[W]henever federal courts have faced assertions of fundamental rights to a ‘healthful environment’ or to freedom from harmful contaminants, they have invariably rejected those claims.”. Plaintiffs’ First Claim for Relief must be dismissed.

B. Plaintiffs fail to allege a cognizable state-created danger claim.

The First Claim for Relief must also be dismissed because the Constitution does not impose an affirmative duty to protect individuals, and Plaintiffs have failed to allege a cognizable claim under the “state-created danger” exception to that rule.
As a general matter:

[The Due Process Clause] is phrased as a limitation on the State’s power to act, not as a guarantee of certain minimal levels of safety and security. It forbids the State itself to deprive individuals of life, liberty, or property without “due process of law,” but its language cannot fairly be extended to impose an affirmative obligation on the State to ensure that those interests do not come to harm through other means.

Thus, the Due Process Clause imposes no duty on the government to protect persons from harm inflicted by third parties that would violate due process if inflicted by the government.

Plaintiffs contend that the government’s “deliberate actions” and “deliberate indifference” with regard to the dangers of climate change amount to a due process violation under the state-created danger exception.

First, Plaintiffs have identified no harms to their “personal security or bodily integrity” of the kind and immediacy that qualify for the state-created danger exception. . . But here, Plaintiffs allege that general degradation of the global climate has harmed their “dignity, including their capacity to provide for their basic human needs, safely raise families, practice their religious and spiritual beliefs, [and] maintain their bodily integrity” and has prevented them from “lead[ing] lives with access to clean air, water, shelter, and food.” Those types of harm are unlike the immediate, direct, physical, and personal harms at issue in the above-cited cases.

Second, Plaintiffs identify no specific government actions—much less government actors—that put them in such danger. Instead, Plaintiffs contend that a number of (mostly unspecified) agency actions and inactions spanning the last several decades have exposed them to harm. This allegation of slowly-recognized, long-incubating, and generalized harm by itself conclusively distinguishes their claim from all other state-created danger cases recognized by the Ninth Circuit.

Third, Plaintiffs do not allege that government actions endangered Plaintiffs in particular. . . As explained above, Plaintiffs’ asserted injuries arise from a diffuse, global phenomenon that affects every other person in their communities, in the United States, and throughout the world.

For all these reasons, there is no basis for finding a violation of Plaintiffs’ due process right under the state-created danger doctrine, and Plaintiffs’ corresponding claim must be dismissed.

C. No federal public trust doctrine creates a right to a stable climate system.

Plaintiffs’ Fourth Claim for Relief, asserting public trust claims, should be dismissed for two independent reasons. First, any public trust doctrine is a creature of state law that applies narrowly and exclusively to particular types of state-owned property not at issue here. That doctrine has no application to federal property, the use and management of which is entrusted exclusively to Congress. . .Consequently, there is no basis for Plaintiffs’ public trust claim against the federal government under federal law.

Second, the “climate system” or atmosphere is not within any conceivable federal public trust.

1. No public trust doctrine binds the federal government.

Plaintiffs rely on an asserted public trust doctrine for the proposition that the federal government must “take affirmative steps to protect” “our country’s life-sustaining climate system,” which they assert the government holds in trust for their benefit. But because any public trust doctrine is a matter of state law only, public trust claims may not be asserted against the federal government under federal law. . . The Supreme Court has without exception treated public trust doctrine as a matter of state law with no basis in the United States Constitution.

2. Any public trust doctrine would not apply to the “climate system” or the atmosphere.

Independently, any asserted public trust doctrine does not help Plaintiffs here. Public trust cases have historically involved state ownership of specific types of natural resources, usually limited to submerged and submersible lands, tidelands, and waterways. . . The climate system or atmosphere is unlike any resource previously deemed subject to a public trust. It cannot be owned and, due to its ephemeral nature, cannot remain within the jurisdiction of any single government. No court has held that the climate system or atmosphere is protected by a public trust doctrine. Indeed, the concept has been widely rejected.

For all these reasons, the Court should dismiss Plaintiffs’ Fourth Claim for Relief.

Background Post Update on Zombie Kids Climate Lawsuits: (Juliana vs. US) (Held vs Montana)

Shifting from Energy Scarcity to Energy Abundance

Posted on May 28 by Ron Clutz

Prior to the Paris COP in 2015, French scientists debunked the green agenda in a White Paper drawn up by the Société de Calcul Mathématique SA (Mathematical Modelling Company, Corp.) The battle against global warming: an absurd, costly and pointless crusade. The whole document is evidence-based, and on the second point concerning energy, they said this:

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

Finally, the world seems to be waking up to energy realities. The actual transition is away from the green imperative to make energy scarce, replaced by driving energy abundance. Kevin Killough writes, including commentary from Mark Mills of Energy Analystics, in his Just The News article: World moves away from ‘green gospel of scarcity’ and now embraces ‘energy abundance,’ experts say

“I think we’ve gone from scarcity to abundance — from the green gospel of scarcity and its Trinitarian ESG god — to the promised land of abundance guided by the values of affordability and reliability,” David DesRosiers, conference co-chair of the RealClear Energy Future Forum, said.

In 2019, Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg — then a high-school dropout — was invited to the U.N. Climate Action Summit in New York City. There, she would deliver her famous — or infamous, depending on who you ask — “how dare you” speech, to which legacy media responded with overwhelming enthusiasm. Thunberg claimed that we were at the start of a “mass extinction,” and she admonished the world for ignoring the alleged crisis while talking “about money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.”

What a difference six years can make. Voters elected a president in November who signed an executive order aimed at “unleashing American energy,” and Energy Secretary Chris Wright followed the president’s order with a directive to promote “energy abundance.”

This U-turn in views on energy isn’t limited to a change in administration in the U.S.

In May 2021, the International Energy Agency (IEA), which has been criticized for cheerleading emissions reductions, launched a roadmap to reach net zero by 2050, and IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol told The Guardian that “there will not be a need for new investments in oil and gas fields, or new investments in coal mines.”

At the March CERAWeek energy conference in Houston this year, Birol was calling for more investments in oil and gas.

This shift away from the de-growth fervor that was popular for over a decade was the overriding topic at the RealClear Energy Future Forum Monday. Panels of experts in engineering, data centers, mining, oil and gas, and the electricity grid discussed how this change of views has impacted various aspects of the world’s energy picture.

“I think we’ve gone from scarcity to abundance — from the green gospel of scarcity and its Trinitarian ESG god — to the promised land of abundance guided by the values of affordability and reliability,” David DesRosiers, conference co-chair and founder of the RealClear Foundation, said.

When reality hits

Mark Mills, conference co-chair and director of the National Center for Energy Analytics, discussed the role of increasing energy demand as a result of the growth of data centers and artificial intelligence. While many tech companies, such as Microsoft, embraced net-zero goals, Mills explained that the energy demands of data centers forced companies to contend with the reality that although fashionable in some circles, intermittent wind and solar power are not adequate.

“Eventually, reality rears its ugly head, and we recalibrate around what reality permits,” Mills said.

The IEA last month released an in-depth report on how the demand for electricity will be shaped by AI in the coming years. According to the report, a single data center uses as much electricity as 2 million households. Powering one of these data centers, Mills said, requires as much natural gas every day as a single Space X rocket launch.

“With myriads of data centers planned and announced, this means that lighting up the digital infrastructure will soon have the energy demands equivalent to reliably powering hundreds of millions of households,” Mills said.

Mills said, besides the energy to power these data centers, they will also require an abundance of materials. A skyscraper requires the same amount of materials to build a single giga-scale data center, which is a data center requiring 1 billion watt-hours of electricity every hour — the same amount of power consumed by approximately 1,100 homes in a month.

While some have argued that increased efficiencies will address the demand, Mills pointed out that a single smartphone operating at the energy efficiency of a 1984 computer would use more electricity than an entire city block. More efficiency won’t reduce demand for energy, he explained, it will only increase how much can be done with more energy.

The way the grid works

Energy abundance is not only producing more energy. The supply has to be reliable, the experts at the conference said. A few speakers pointed to the blackouts that gripped Spain and Portugal last month as an example of how dangerous an unreliable energy supply can be. Estimates place the death toll from the one-day event at seven people.

James Robb, CEO of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, said that the exact cause of the event is still under investigation, but there are facts that point to the overreliance on intermittent wind and solar.

At the time of the blackout, Robb said, there was little traditional generation — coal, natural gas, hydroelectric and nuclear — operating. To make wind, solar and battery power work on the grid, it has to go through an inverter, which doesn’t have the spinning inertia of generators powered by traditional sources. Grid operators need to maintain a certain frequency of power, and when there’s a disruption, spinning inertia can absorb some of the frequency changes until things stabilize.

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Mark Christie explained inertia as a 100-acre lake 6-inches deep. At one end is a river flowing into the lake, like power generated on the grid. At the other end is a river flowing out of the lake, which is the demand for power. To make the grid work, the water has to be kept 6-inches deep at all times.

“If that lake, at any point, becomes an inch deeper or loses an inch of depth, the lake ceases to operate. That’s the way the grid works. It has to be balanced at all times, and that’s the term frequency,” Christie said.

Robb said there are technologies that create synthetic inertia for wind and solar generators, but these are unproven at scale.

“They’re not without their issues there, and one of the big challenges we always have in the electric grid with any new technology is you can study something in the lab. You can deploy…a pilot [project] on a grid somewhere. But when you try to scale it to the level of the North American grid, which is a terawatt of generation, typically in that translation from pilot to terawatt, we discover things that we don’t understand,” Robb said.

Spain and Portugal Achieve Net Zero Accidently

Holding back

Despite many signs pointing to the overreliance on solar energy on the Iberian Peninsula grid as being the cause of the blackouts, other speakers noted that politics is often holding back more discussion on the problem of intermittency.

“It is very clear that the intermittency of wind and solar had a great deal to do with shutting down the grid, but you cannot admit that if you’re in power in Spain or Portugal. Because there are liabilities,” Terrence Keely, CEO of 1PointSix, LLC, a financial advisory firm, said.

Daniel Yergin, vice chairman of S&P Global, said that between 2022 and 2023, the world’s dependence on fossil fuels was down less than one half of one percent. Yet, he said there were still contradictions coming from leaders. As an example, he pointed to British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer who recently said that Britain would increase emission-reduction efforts to 2050.

“But he also said, ‘Oh, let me be clear with you, oil and gas are going to be in the mix for a long time.’ That really captures the struggle of people, of leaders, to kind of adjust to a reality that’s different from what has been the conventional wisdom,” Yergin said of Starmer.

As with any global shift in thinking on issues, some nations are slow to change — or reject it altogether. But the experts at the forum concluded generally that the so-called energy transition, and the de-growth attitudes that drove it for so long, are losing steam.

Antidote to Climate Doomsters

Posted on May 21 by Ron Clutz

At Quora someone posed this question: Will we avoid a climate catastrophe just in time (please be positive I need some hope)?

Paul Noel ,Former Research Scientist 6 Level 2 UAH (2008–2014) wrote this response. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

I have researched this issue in depth. As a good scientist I have gone deeply and gotten the facts. I have gotten:

the Satellite data on the global profiles,
the weather data.
the storm data and disaster data
the polar ice data.
the historical data.

I have looked in deeply on this issue. I have studied the physics too! I have studied the history too! I have studied the archeology and even the paleo geology and even the ice core data.

This isn’t easy to get because lots of people are producing lies on the topic. So I have worked very hard to get down to the facts. Then the job becomes one which is very hard. If I just tell you the answers I got , it is a case of if you believe me or not. If I tell you the science data it is likely to get way in over your understanding and that is back to if you believe me or not. This is a job of explaining to you very carefully what the data is using things you can see and understand.

So taking this from the top there are 2 ways I can go.
One way is to go into the advocates of the topic that are so scaring you deeply
and the other is to go into the science.

The explanation of the science is pretty easy and such but explaining to you the motives of people and their actions and methods is much harder. But I am going to start with the people.

Why are they scaring you about the climate?

Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer.

IPCC Official: “Climate Policy Is Redistributing The World’s Wealth”

This is what this is all about. There is no other motive. You may dispense with your worries here if you are worried for the world environment. But I will now switch to the facts and reality on the ground. Remember this alone should pretty much put an end to your worries. You are facing a very large deliberate well funded and most professionally constructed set of lies and propaganda designed to get you scared like you are. This is 5th generational warfare. It is not anything you are used to thinking about. That is why it is effective.

What are the climate facts on the ground?

The fact on the ground are that if the changes you are supposing to see are real they should be obvious. They should be something you can see, feel, hear and touch. That is where we are going right now!

If the world is warming up the paleo-climate data says that the polar regions warm first. That is what you are being told about arctic ice melting and sea level raise. If you go to the Denmark Polar Portal on the web you can get the data.

Greenland Ice Sheet is not Melting Away

Because these people have to comply with the IPCC they put in all kinds of disclaimers trying to keep you scared of melt down etc.. The reality is we are solidly into the melt season and the ice is not melting down more than usual.

Arctic Sea Ice Is Not Going Away

The polar ice is at normal levels. I can go on and on here but the reality is that there is no emergency.

Global Warming is Not Accumulating

The data from UAH which is technical showed from January 1995 to January 2023 the global temperature did not increase at all. And from 2016 actually went down (-0.7C) . That isn’t some melting or Global Warming or some Climate Catastrophe. It just is not.

CO2 Is Rising But Far Below Its Optimum

Is CO2 rising it sure is and it isn’t even to the maximum level that occurred in the last maximum in the last interglacial period of earth. CO2 is not 1% it is 0.042%. The earth has thrived with maximum life at 1% CO2 there are no melt down periods.

Is the climate variable, You bet it is. We have seen in the last 2000 years it go up and down in temperature and we are actually near the bottom of that period. The reality is that we have been up to 10C warmer and guess what that time mankind did his very best. We don’t thrive on cold.

Warming Has Been Beneficial and More Would be a Good Thing

Now let’s look at the trends and in a way you never imagined. I have looked into this matter because Alabama where I live has a cute lovely vacation town called Orange Beach. I highly recommend Orange Beach for a vacation it is beautiful. Orange Beach was named in 1898 when the US Post Office (Now the USPS) opened a new post office there. The unincorporated town’s principal business was raising oranges commercially. Alabama used to raise oranges up to about Evergreen Alabama or almost to Montgomery Alabama the state capitol.

Production of Oranges Limited by Freezing Temperatures in SE US

No commercial orange production exists in Alabama at this time. The reason is simple. The growing season in Orange Beach Alabama went from 365 days a year to 268 days a year. The orange trees froze out. Now they have new varieties that can grow in the colder weather but even they are severely limited in Alabama. The orange trees have frozen out almost to Orlando Florida now.

Orange beach would be right next to North Florida along the Gulf of Mexico. Literally Florida is just across the Perdido River from Orange Beach.

The Gulf Stream Makes Climate Change in the North Atlantic

The reality is the climate from 1898 to the present has gotten colder in the USA. This is significant to the whole earth for a very important reason.

You see the heat from the whole earth gets aimed directly at Alabama! We cool down so is the rest of the world. The whole circulation for the whole earth focuses on the Gulf of Mexico and Alabama.

This by the way is why Greenland has so much ice. You see it is the warm water from the Gulf Stream that generates the steam that freezes and comes down as snow. You have to make the steam to make the ice.

Sea Level Depends on Land Buoyancy, not CO2

Now on to sea level rise. First of all if you believe that the sea level is rising and such it is only reported to be rising in the order of the thickness of 2 US 5 Cent coins per year. So if you believe it is happening it is no emergency and no real problem. It isn’t worthy of losing sleep over. The stories of melting sea ice are silly. First of all even if they melt they will have absolutely no effect on the sea level because they are floating. But there is another thing these people don’t tell you about.

The sea level is not the product of the amount of water in the ocean. It is in fact the product of a large sum of buoyancy issues and the gravity of the earth. The continents are where they are because they have less gravity than the other areas. The seafloor is a zone of higher gravity. Because the continents are floating that means that their level above the sea is determined by the laws of buoyancy. If Greenland were to melt off, the resulting reality would cause the area to buoy up because it would weigh less. At the same time the water added to the oceans would simply sink the sea floor deeper.

Continents Can Sink to Form New Seas

But to illustrate this you must learn about the Great Rift Valley of Africa. That valley is a place where the base continental rocks have spread apart. The land is sinking there and has already sunk to form the Red Sea! A new ocean is forming in Africa. This is what has sunk the continental shelves of the continents. The edge of the continents tinned out and lost the thick granite below that floats on the magma and they sunk. So sea level is not in any way related to ice melting. Sea level is related to this continental buoyancy issue. So nothing in their story not melting ice nor rising seas is happening. But I will show you this in pictures because we have these now.

Many Coastlines Show Water Receding Rather than Rising

Tell me if you see any sea level rise in the past 246 years now. (None!)

[Since we are looking in New England:]

This is just about due south of London–Pevensey Castle.

It was started construction in about 203 AD. It was built right on the sea on a coastal island. Such a fort only has value as far as an archer can shoot an arrow. It guarded the entrance to Pevensey Bay. The bay doesn’t exist it is nearly 30 meters above sea level now. Lots of people just refuse to see them. The fort itself is 110 feet above sea level and 5/8 mile from the sea.

If it isn’t clear yet that you have been hoaxed into a panic I don’t know what I can do. I have shown you that it got colder not warmer. That the ice is not melting. That the seas are not rising. Shall I go on?

CO2 Is Plant Food not a Pollutant

How about the real truth of CO2 and what it is doing on our earth. Look at these pictures carefully they tell the truth beyond any possible doubt.

C3 photosynthesis plants are growing 800% better than they were. Our C4 plants are doing 650% better.

The whole earth is growing better and the forests are growing because of CO2. Sorry this isn’t a “doom and gloom” story here.

Wild fires are down too!

The fact is that in 1960 the world was running out of food because our plants and farms were at their limits. Today we are run over with food and 45% of our crop land has been turned back to the forests. We are not at the limits. This has led to an explosion of wildlife too!

Life is Thriving Not Facing Extinction

There literally is no mass extinction going on. We are in the largest bloom of life on earth that has been seen in the past 10,000 years.

The human race is on the edge of unlimited energy, unlimited food, unlimited technology and we are sitting here in terror of some imaginary doom and gloom hating the very system that is feeding mankind and building him up.

Everything is quite literally the opposite of what you are told!

In Sum;

The only catastrophe would be ill-advised climate policies willfully destroying
our energy platform and economic supply processes out of irrational CO2 hysteria.

Media’s at Fault for Liberals’ Climate Anxiety

Posted on April 7 by Ron Clutz

Linnea Lueken explains in her Climate Realism article Liberals May Be Suffering from Climate Anxiety, but if So, It’s The Media’s Fault. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

A recent article at the Washington Free Beacon, titled “Great News for Humanity: Depressed Liberals Are Increasingly Suicidal Due to ‘Climate Anxiety,’ Study Finds,” takes a humorous approach (black humor, to be sure) to discussing a study that found liberals are increasingly suffering from climate anxiety and depression, leading the climate-anxious to refrain from having children and even contemplating and, in some cases, committing suicide. The article makes light of it, but it is a widely reported trend. Since climate change does not threaten human existence or flourishing, and extreme weather is not worsening, their fears and anxiety are unjustified by the actual state of the climate. Unfortunately, climate alarm has been foisted upon people, especially on children and mentally unwell adults, despite evidence indicating climate change is not anything to be alarmed about.

The Washington Free Beacon reports:

“Negative psychological responses related to the observed and anticipated impacts of climate change, such as climate anxiety, eco-anxiety and climate-related guilt have … emerged as a potential risk factor for poor mental health and suicide-related behaviors,” the authors wrote last month in Nature Medicine. “International surveys show that concern about climate change is associated with feelings of despair, hopelessness, anger, frustration and guilt, especially among younger populations.”

The findings of this study, published in Nature, are not unique. Other research has come to similar conclusions: a study conducted by Save the Children found that 70 percent of kids they surveyed struggle with what they dubbed “climate anxiety,” as discussed in this Climate Realism post. Other surveys show similarly sad results.

Each time these results are presented, the media and the researchers involved frame the story as climate change and its impacts are causing fear and anxiety, and the lack of action is causing deep feelings of hopelessness and despair for people worried about climate change. Yet it is the false tales that the media, politicians, and green interest groups are telling about climate change motivating anxiety and mental distress, not the actual conditions of the planet.

For instance, in the media coverage of the Save the Children survey, the UK website Future Net Zero implies that without immediate societal scale action, the present generation of children “stand to inherit a deeply unequal world,” and that their terror is “warranted.”

Likewise, articles from The Hill and The Conversation discussing a study attributing adult PTSD to climate change assert that climate change is impacting people through increased wildfires and other disasters. This is false, the framing of their research is built on falsehoods.

Climate change is not causing worsening weather disasters. Data show that not only are events like wildfires not increasing, but the number of all climate-related deaths are declining because of improvements to infrastructure, healthcare, technology, and yes, better climatic conditions. (See figure below)

The real reason so many impressionable people are depressed and anxious about climate change is because the media and governments relentlessly push and promote false and alarming misinformation and fake news about extreme weather and climate change. It is no wonder that children are afraid, when their teachers are telling them that the world will end in short order unless dramatic global reforms are made. When people don’t see the supposedly climate saving reforms being made, they are left hopeless and despondent. But it is an unnecessary misery – there has never been a safer time period for humans to live in.

The Washington Free Beacon made light of the situation, but it is no laughing matter. Children in particular are being traumatized by adults in their lives over the climate issue. Climate change is not harming mental health, but climate alarmism, built on falsehoods, hysteria, and hyperbole, certainly is.

R.I.P. Climate Back Radiation

Posted on March 8 by Ron Clutz

Beware false and misleading Cartoons.

A brief recent video by Markus Ott explains why the notion of “back radiation” in Earth’s climate should be laid to rest. I provide a transcript text in italics with my bolds and key exhibits.

Ott/Shula: The second law of thermodynamics and the greenhouse effect

This is the first of a short series of physics videos. This series is intended to be a follow up to Tom Shula’s presentation in which we can take more time to go into the fundamentals and derivations of our results. Since Tom and I are attacking the foundations of modern climate science, it makes sense to start with the thermodynamic aspects of the greenhouse effect.

In this video I will not talk about greenhouse gas molecules. I will look at the Green House Effect from the perspective of classical thermodynamics. Classical thermodynamics describes matter as a continuum and does not care about the atomic or molecular structure of matter. The laws of thermodynamics have proven to be universally valid hypotheses, and theories that contradict the laws of thermodynamics have always proved to be wrong

In connection with the greenhouse effect, the second law of Thermodynamics is particularly interesting. There are various equivalent formulations for the the second law of thermodynamics which states that thermal energy cannot be completely converted into other forms of energy. Rudolf Clausius was the first to formulate the second law in the form that heat does not flow spontaneously from cold to hot bodies. Later in 1865 he developed on that basis the concept of entropy.

Those who believe in thermodynamics categorize this statement as an eternal truth and therefore find it very difficult to understand how the greenhouse effect is supposed to work. How can the atmosphere which is mostly colder than the Earth’s surface heat the Surface by means of back radiation, and by as much as 33°C? Greenhouse effect believers like to refer to Carl Schwarzschild’s 1906 paper About the equilibrium of the solar atmosphere to answer this question.

In order to clarify this question of faith we will take a closer look at this much cited and probably rarely read article which was written in a German adequate to a highly educated man. I posted a manual translation of the text on my substack page. Without going into the details of his calculations we will look at how Schwarzschild comes to the conclusion that the sun’s atmosphere not only radiates outwards into space but that a significant proportion of radiation is also directed inwards towards the base of the sun’s atmosphere.

Such an inward or downward back radiation can also be measured at the bottom of the Earth’s atmosphere. This observation is taken as a reason to postulate a similar radiation equilibrium in the Earth’s atmosphere. The greenhouse effect is said to be the result of that back radiation.

The starting point for Schwarzschild’s article is the observation that the brightness of the visible solar disc is not evenly distributed. The brightness decreases towards the edge. The diagram shows the observed brightness distribution as a blue line. Schwarzschild compares two conceivable mechanisms of heat transport through the solar atmosphere in order to determine the cause of this brightness distribution. Heat transport through radiative transfer which requires a radiative equilibrium in the Solar atmosphere, and heat transport by convection with an adiabatic equilibrium in the Solar atmosphere.

He calculates how the brightness distribution on the solar disc should be for these two cases. Because his results for the radiative equilibrium Orange Line in the diagram matched the observed brightness distribution Blue Line better than his results for the adiabatic equilibrium Gray Line, he assumes that a radiative equilibrium prevails in the Solar atmosphere. We will disregard his description of the adiabatic equilibrium here, and restrict ourselves to his description of the radiative equilibrium.

Kirchhoff’s law of radiation plays a central role in Schwarzschild’s model. Kirchhoff’s law of radiation describes the relationship between absorption and emission of a real body in thermal equilibrium. It states that radiation absorption and emission correspond to each other for a given wavelength. A body that absorbs well also radiates well. This can be visualized as follows: We consider a body 2 that is located in a cavity of another body 1. Vacuum prevails in the intermediate space. If both bodies have the same temperature the radiant power absorbed by Body 2 must be the same as the radiant power emitted by it because otherwise the temperature of body 2 would change. This means that in thermal equilibrium Kirchhoff’s law of radiation represents a kind of radiation energy conservation law for body 2.

The layout of Schwarzschild’s radiative transfer model of the solar atmosphere is quite simple. An unknown heat source in the core of the Sun generates heat; a possible liquid outer core transports this heat by convection to the bottom of the solar atmosphere; the heat is then transported outwards into space solely by radiative transfer. He does not go any further into the properties of the sun’s core. He only assumes that the core heats the solar atmosphere evenly at its boundary surface. It is very important that this heating occurs so evenly that convection currents do not form in the Solar atmosphere.

In Schwarzschild’s model the solar atmosphere is assumed to have the following properties:

♦ the solar atmosphere is stably stratified without convection;
♦ temperature and density increase continuously from the top of the atmosphere to the ground
♦ the vertical profile of temperature is smaller than the adiabatic vertical profile;
♦ each layer of the sun’s atmosphere absorbs and emits radiation without loss;
♦ the energy flow which flows from an unknown source inside the Sun through the solar atmosphere into the outer space is in a steady state.

Since a downwelling radiation is also measurable on the ground of Earth’s atmosphere, modern climate science assumes that Schwarzschild’s radiation transfer model is also applicable to our atmosphere. Now let’s take a look at the applicability of Schwarzschild’s model to the Earth’s atmosphere.

It is striking that Schwarzschild has practically constructed his model around Kirchhoff’s law of radiation. He has to make a number of not particularly plausible assumptions in order to create a local thermal equilibrium between the layers of his solar atmosphere. As mentioned before most of these assumptions serve to prevent convection in his model. This is critically important because as soon as convection comes into play, the condition of local thermal equilibrium is no longer fulfilled. The vertical convection currents and the associated turbulence destroy Schwarzschild’s homogeneous stratification of the atmosphere. Large local temperature jumps occur Kirchhoff’s law of radiation is therefore no longer applicable.

To summarize and formulate this somewhat more abstractly: In order to create the conditions for Pure radiation transport through the solar atmosphere Schwarzschild must construct an atmosphere with a very high degree of order. In liquid or gaseous systems even minor disturbances will cause such a state to change into a disordered convective State. Under convective conditions Kirchhoff’s law of radiation and thus the radiative transfer equation are not valid.

This transition to the convective state takes place with a large entropy gain. It is therefore spontaneous and irreversible. Accordingly, there should be no radiative transfer and no greenhouse effect in our troposphere since it is dominated by convection currents.

Look at a volume element under convective conditions such as those that prevail in our troposphere. The volume element absorbs radiation and converts the radiation energy into heat. Before it can convert the heat back into radiation it is caught by a convection current and lifted. This causes it to move into areas with lower ambient pressure. It expands and performs volume work in the process. It draws the energy for this volume work from its heat content and therefore cools down. The amount of heat that the volume element has converted into volume work can no longer be converted back into radiation. The conservation of radiation energy is therefore no longer given.

Kirchhoff’s law of radiation can no longer be applied to the volume element. The entropy of the volume element increases, the process is irreversible lifting and acceleration. Work performed by the volume element derives their energy from the heat content of the volume element and also contribute to the irreversibility of radiation absorption under convective conditions. Global circulations also affect these processes but that will be discussed in another video.

I would like to point out that radiation absorption and emission are irreversible processes. In themselves the reemission of radiation from an excited molecule occurs randomly in any direction. This means that the information about the direction of the previously absorbed radiation is lost during emission The emitted Photon transfers part of its momentum to the emitting molecule. Its energy and therefore also its frequency are therefore different from that of the previously absorbed Photon. Schwarzschild also excludes these effects through his choice of boundary conditions: steady state radiation flux and frequency independence of absorptivity and emission.

In one of my previous videos I made fun about the fact that the 33° greenhouse effect is calculated by assuming that the solar Radiance is homogeneously distributed over the Earth’s surface with 240 W per square meter. Now with a deeper understanding of Schwarzschild’s model we get an idea about the origin of this rather strange assumption. In his radiation transfer model the base of the solar atmosphere is heated internally and homogenously by the solar core. This homogeneous heating is very important since an inhomogeneous heating would cause convection which is incompatible with Kirchhoff’s law of radiation and would spoil his model. In a rather hapless attempt to apply Schwarzschild’s radiation transfer model, the same is done to the externally and unevenly heated surface of the Earth.

To summarize briefly the irreversibility of radiation absorption in air under convective conditions makes back radiation and thus the greenhouse effect impossible. This statement seems to be in direct contradiction to the observation that a downwelling atmospheric radiation can be measured at the bottom of the Earth’s atmosphere. The diagram here shows the measured values from a measuring station near Munich. In the next video I will show that back radiation is not what most people think of it to be, and how it is compatible with the laws of thermodynamics.

The most important takeaway from this video is that Kirchhoff’s law of radiation presents a kind of radiation energy conservation law, and that this radiation energy conservation is not given under convective conditions. As far as I know all radiation transfer models assume a universal validity of Kirchhoff’s law of radiation. The only exception is at very high altitudes where the air molecules only very rarely collide with each other. Since the results of the radiation transfer models are based on this false basic assumptions, they are wrong.

That is not to say that Carl Schwarzschild’s work is nonsense. His original idea is very applicable to transparent systems without convection; for example in the production of large telescope mirrors. The cooling behavior after the glass mass has solidified can be described very well using radiation transfer methods.

Footnote Regarding Observation of Downwelling IR near Earth Surface

Figure 1. This is a plot of the outgoing radiation spectrum from Earth. Within the normal IR thermometer and scanner range of 7.5 to 14 micrometers, only ozone (O3), which is mostly above cloud level absorbs and emits significant radiation. Within the 15 μm CO2 “divot” nearly all surface emissions are absorbed within 1.5 meters of the surface, at the edges of the divot, emissions are absorbed within 690 meters. There is very little absorption and emission by GHGs in the IR thermometer range in the troposphere, aka the atmospheric window.

From Andy May Beyond CO₂: Unraveling the Roles of Energy, Water Vapor, and Convection in Earth’s Atmosphere

Because the humid lower atmosphere is nearly opaque to most surface emitted radiation that is outside the atmospheric windows, surface emissions are absorbed by GHGs very close to the surface. According to Heinz Hug, at sea level, with a CO₂ concentration of 357 PPM and 2.6% water vapor, 99.94% of all surface radiation in the main CO₂ frequency band at about 15 μm is normally absorbed in the lower 10 meters of the atmosphere (Hug, 2012). Even at the edges of the deep CO₂ frequency band (see figure 1, as well as figures 4 & 5 here) where any increase in the CO₂ effect would be observed, 99.9% of the surface radiation is absorbed in the first 690 meters (Hug, 2000).

Heinz Hug goes on to say that is why climate change caused by CO2 cannot be measured directly in the laboratory and can only be modeled. In our opinion, the effect of CO2 is so small it will likely never be measured. In a similar fashion, any “back radiation” that makes it to the surface, outside atmospheric windows, is from the lower 10 meters of the atmosphere, the remaining emissions from the lower 10 meters of the atmosphere are captured by other greenhouse gases, almost always water vapor molecules.

Surface emissions in the frequencies that cannot be absorbed or emitted by GHGs, those in the so-called “atmospheric windows” are not captured, these are the frequencies utilized by IR thermometers and scanners, typically 7.5 to 14 micrometers as shown in figure 1. Water vapor is often a very weak absorber and emitter in portions of these windows. Carbon dioxide strongly absorbs and re-emits IR at two key frequencies: around 4.26 μm (microns) and 14.99 μm. The common vanadium oxide (VOx) based microbolometer long-wave infrared detectors cover wavelengths from 8-14 µm range. So, both CO2 absorption bands are outside the range of the common hand-held infrared thermometer/bolometer.

The radiation seen when IR thermometers and scanners are pointed at the sky is surface radiation scattered by atmospheric particles and clouds. The radiation seen by IR thermometers and scanners cannot be emitted by greenhouse gases or clouds because neither GHGs nor clouds emit in frequencies that can be detected by the devices. As noted in van Wijngaarden and Happer (2025) scattered longwave IR originates only in water droplets or ice or other particulates, there is negligible scattering of IR by molecules, especially in the atmospheric windows.

Background Paper with complete discussion

Missing Link in the GHE, Greenhouse Effect, by Thomas Shula – Markus Ott, USA – Germany
2024.

IR-Active Gases: H2O Potent, CO2 Feeble

Posted on March 4 by Ron Clutz

Demetris Koutsoyiannis published this paper in November 2024 Relative importance of carbon dioxide and water in the greenhouse effect: Does the tail wag the dog? Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Abstract

Using a detailed atmospheric radiative transfer model, we derive macroscopic relationships of downwelling and outgoing longwave radiation which enable determining the partial derivatives thereof with respect to the explanatory variables that represent the greenhouse gases. We validate these macroscopic relationships using empirical formulae based on downwelling radiation data, commonly used in hydrology, and satellite data for the outgoing radiation. We use the relationships and their partial derivatives to infer the relative importance of carbon dioxide and water vapour in the greenhouse effect.

The results show that the contribution of CO₂ is 4% – 5%, while water and clouds dominate with a contribution of 87% – 95%. The minor effect of carbon dioxide is confirmed by the small, non-discernible effect of the recent escalation of atmospheric CO₂ concentration from 300 to 420 ppm. This effect is quantified at 0.5% for both downwelling and outgoing radiation. Water and clouds also perform other important functions in climate, such as regulating heat storage and albedo, as well as cooling the Earth’s surface through latent heat transfer, contributing 50%. By confirming the major role of water on climate, these results suggest that hydrology should have a more prominent and more active role in climate research.

Robin Horsley draws the implications from this and other recent papers. Transcript in italics with my bolds and added images.

For decades, we’ve been told that human generated CO2 emissions are the single most dangerous threat to our planet. Politicians, celebrities, and the mainstream media have united to amplify this alarm, warning of an impending climate catastrophe unless we act now.

But what if the story’s wrong? What if the very foundation of the theory, the idea that CO2 is the principal driver of global warming, Is flawed? What if the science we’ve been told is settled is actually far from settled?

This week I’ve been digging into this very provocative question looking at an extremely interesting recent report on the subject. And what I found might make you rethink a lot of what you thought you knew about climate change.

What If Everything You Thought About CO2 Was Wrong

For years we’ve been fed a simple story: Humans burn fossil fuels, releasing carbon dioxide – CO2 – Into the atmosphere. CO2 traps heat causing the planet to warm. The Greenhouse Effect as it’s known. The solution? Reduce CO2 to save the planet. But what if this narrative is overly simplistic or even fundamentally wrong?

At the recent international Clintel science conference in Prague leading climate experts gathered to scrutinise the dominant narratives around climate change. One of the most striking contributions came from Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis, a highly regarded climate scientist from the University of Athens. His research challenges the very core of our understanding of CO2’s role in the climate system. Professor Koutsoyiannis presented groundbreaking findings that question the long held belief that rising CO2 levels cause global temperatures to increase.

► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature. ► Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature. ► Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980. ► Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.

Instead, his research suggests it’s the other way around. Global temperature increases drive higher atmospheric CO2 levels. This isn’t an entirely new idea. For decades, scientists like Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace have pointed to evidence showing that historically rises in CO2 levels have followed, not preceeded, global temperature increases. Ice core data, spanning millions of years, apparently supports this claim.

If true, this challenges the foundation of the mainstream climate narrative.

Why would rising temperatures cause an increase in CO2

But why would rising temperatures cause an increase in CO2 levels? Professor Koutsoyiannis explains that when temperatures rise, the natural world responds. Plants and oceans release more CO2 than they otherwise would. Warmer temperatures lead to a thriving environment.

Now, I think this needs some explanation, because plants absorb CO2 and produce oxygen. Not release CO2, don’t they? Well, yes, plants sustain themselves and grow through the process of photosynthesis, which turns sunlight, water and CO2, which plants absorb, into glucose which enables plants to grow and which produces oxygen as a by-product which we and animals need to breathe.

Figure 22. Annual carbon balance in the Earth’s atmosphere, in Gt C/year, based on the IPCC estimates (Figure 5.12 of [30]). The balance of 5.1 Gt C/year is the annual accumulation of carbon (in the form of CO2) in the atmosphere (reproduced from [5].).

However Plants also release CO2 as part of a process known as cellular respiration during the day, and particularly at night, when due to a lack of sunlight, photosynthesis cannot occur. On balance photosynthesis typically outweighs respiration. So living plants typically absorb more CO2 than they release. But when that increasing number of plants die and decompose, micro-organisms break down the organic matter releasing retained CO2.

Oceans also release CO2 into the atmosphere when the water is warmer than the surrounding air. Warmer water holds less dissolved CO2. These natural processes account for the majority of CO2 emissions.
In fact, Koutsoyiannis argues that Nature contributes 96% of CO2 emissions leaving just 4% attributable to human activity.

Nature contributes 96% of CO2 emissions

Yes, burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere. However, the professor’s research suggests that human contributions are a mere drop in the ocean compared to natural emissions. Crucially, his data shows that the dominant greenhouse gases aren’t CO2. But water vapour and clouds. CO2, it seems, plays a much smaller role than we’ve been led to believe.

Additionally, the study challenges the claim that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for thousands of years. Instead, it finds that CO2 is rapidly cycled through the atmosphere oceans and land with an average cycle of just 4 years.

Figure 26: Contribution of (left) the three mechanisms responsible for the cooling of Earth’s surface and (right) the four mechanisms responsible for the warming of Earth’s atmosphere, based on the global energy balance by Trenberth et al. (2009). Koutsoyiannis (2024)

The paper also concludes based on the data gathered over the last hundred years, when the amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere increased from around 300 parts per million to just over 400 parts per million, that this increase has had no discernible effect on the greenhouse effect. It’s that small a factor.

If this research is accurate It doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real. But it does suggest we need a better understanding of what drives it.

The professor asks a number of pertinent unanswered questions at the end of his paper. The earth is currently, when viewed over hundreds of millions of years, going through a relatively cool period. What caused the huge increases in earth’s temperature in the past? The professor asks.

It wasn’t industrialisation, was it? These are crucial questions especially as Governments implement sweeping policies in the name of achieving net zero emissions by 2050. Policies that impact everything from energy prices to housing and transportation. Even the food that we eat.

The global cost of the Net Zero 2050 agenda is projected to be between $100 and $150 trillion dollars by 2050. Meanwhile, the world bank estimates that eradicating extreme poverty globally would cost just three to four trillion. Universal health care and education, defeating diseases such as malaria on a global basis would cost less.

What if we’re funding trillions into solving something that isn’t actually the main source of the problem? What if we should be spending more on other things that can limit global warming? What if we should instead be spending more money on mitigating the effects rather than trying to prevent it?

Shouldn’t we demand more scrutiny of the science driving these decisions? Could it be that the climate crisis narrative isn’t just about science but also about power, control and profit? Entire industries are heavily invested in the CO2 narrative. And millions of people, and much of the mainstream media are emotionally invested in the quest to reduce CO2 to save the planet.

But is that what we’re actually doing? Science thrives on debate and scrutiny. Science is never settled as such. It’s constantly evolving, particularly in complex areas such as global climate. Yet the CO2 science on which we’re proceeding is decades old, and many of the models on which it is based have failed to make accurate predictions.

Yet those who challenge the mainstream climate narrative are often dismissed as ‘deniers’ or attacked personally. But shouldn’t the truth welcome scrutiny? Shouldn’t we demand transparency and evidence that can stand up to rigorous examination?

This isn’t about denying climate change. It’s about questioning whether we’re focusing on the right solutions. As more scientists speak out, surely it’s time to demand open debate. And consider whether the trillions we’re spending on Net Zero might be better used elsewhere.

Now, I’m not a climate scientist. Perhaps this report is flawed. Perhaps it is complete nonsense even. But the professor who wrote it is not the only one who’s pointing out the first fundamental point that the mainstream narrative is fundamentally wrong, that by burning fossil fuels we’re producing CO2 that is warming the planet.

An increasing number of others are breaking ranks and saying exactly the same thing. That increasing CO2 is largely a consequence of increasing global temperatures not the cause. Yet we’re told that we’re facing a climate emergency. We must cast aside all caution. We must listen to Greta Thunberg, the climate change messiah.

To ask questions is heresy! Really? What do you think? Should we blindly follow the mainstream narrative, or should we dig deeper and ask tougher questions? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below. Thank you for watching.

Climate Scare Based on Lies

Posted on March 3 by Ron Clutz

link to video: Prof. William Happer – Climate Scare Is Based on Lies

Transcript in italics with my bolds and added images (HS is interviewer Hannes Sarv, WH is William Happer)

HS: If you read about climate in the newspapers or some talk about climate on television, it will be very, very far from the truth. We’re told that climate change is a direct consequence of human activity, particularly the burning of fossil fuels. Year after year, you are seeing the dramatic reality of a boiling planet.

And for scientists, it is unequivocal. Humans are to blame, we’re led to believe the climate is boiling. And the accumulated amount is now trapping as much extra heat as would be released by 600,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding. That’s what’s boiling the oceans. Which will have disastrous effects.

But is there really a scientific consensus on man-made climate change? Over a thousand scientists dispute the so-called climate crisis. Many of them are high-ranking experts in their fields. Among them, Dr. William Happer, a respected physicist with decades of groundbreaking research, an emeritus professor at Princeton University, and a leading expert in atomic and molecular physics. He has deep expertise in the greenhouse effect and the role of CO2 in climate change. Dr. Happer argues that the role of human activity and CO2 in global warming is based on flawed science and misinterpretations.

“You know, it’s dangerous to make policy on the basis of lies.”

In this interview, we’ll explore the evidence he believes has been overlooked and why it could transform our understanding of climate change.

HS: As we can see, Professor, you are still working daily in your university office. So what is it? Are you consulting younger colleagues or still involved in some research projects?

WH: Well, yes, I try to stay busy and I’m working now with a former student from Canada who’s a professor there now, William van Wijngaarden. And we’re working now on how water vapor and clouds affect the Earth’s climate, the radiation transfer details of those.

HS:So still very much involved in climate science.

WH: Well, you know, climate is very important. It’s always been important to humanity. It’s not going to change. I think it’s been having hard times the last 50 years because of this manic focus on demonization of greenhouse gases, which have some effect on climate but not very much.

HS: We’re going to absolutely get to that. But I wanted to start from actually, I was listening to one of your speeches and presentations you held back in 2023 at the Institute of Public Affairs. And what really I think resonated with me was that you started from the notion that freedom is important. And every generation has their own struggle for freedom and freedom is not free. So I actually wanted to start by asking you what is the state, the current state of freedom in your opinion in the world today?

WH: I think it’s really true that every generation has to struggle to maintain freedom, you know, because every generation has lots of people who don’t like freedom, you know. They would like to be little dictators, you know, and that’s always been true if you read history. And it’s not going to change.

And so I think it’s important that we educate our children to recognize that humans are imperfect and there will always be attempts to get dictatorial control over society. And, you know, our founding fathers in America represented recognize that. They just assumed that their fellow Americans would be not very perfect people, you know, with lots of flawed people, and they tried to design a system of government that would work even with flawed people. Some German philosopher put it right, you know, out of the crooked timber of mankind, no straight thing was ever made. So that’s the problem that we will always face.

HS: What about academic freedom in today’s world? I’m not only speaking about climate science, but in general.

WH: Well, you know, I think academia has always had a problem with groupthink, you know, because you’re typically all together in one small community, and your children and wives interact with each other. And so the temptations, the pressures to all think the same are very great. You know, if you don’t think the same, your kids suffer, your wife suffers, and that’s nothing new. It’s always been like that. You know, there’s a famous… American play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? But it’s about this topic and it goes back many, many decades, you know, long before the current woke problems that we’re having in America.

HS: So as we all know currently, there is a new administration in the United States. So what will happen now? Will the situation, in your opinion, improve or is it just, you know, the challenges are going to remain?

WH: Well, you know, we’ve just elected a new president, and he’s very vigorous and has lots of ideas, and I think that’s a good thing. We’ll see how successful he is. But, you know, our society and our government is designed to be cumbersome and unwieldy. That’s to prevent crazy things from happening too quickly. And so the president will have to deal with that. And if the Americans support him, if the Congress supports him, he’ll be successful.

HS: Let’s move to climate science. Is there any honest discussion left? It has become so political, in my opinion, that it is really hard to have an open, a normal discussion about it.

WH: Well, I think if you go to a seminar, for example, at Princeton on climate, It’s often pretty good science. It’s not alarmist. But this is professors and students talking to each other. The further you get away from the actual research, the more alarmist and crazy it becomes.

So if you read about climate in the newspapers or listen to some talk about climate on television, it will be very, very far from the truth. And it won’t be the same thing that the professors at universities normally are talking about. But that said, you know, I think there’s been a lot of corruption because of all of the money available. You know, there are huge funds if you do research that supports the idea that there is a climate emergency which requires lots of government intervention. And if you don’t do that, you’re less likely to be funded, you know, you can’t pay your graduate students. So it’s a bad situation. It’s been very corrupting to this branch of science.

HS: Exactly how long has it been going on, this kind of situation?

WH: Well, I think it really got started in the early 90s. I was in Washington at the time as a government bureaucrat, and I could see it getting started. It was being pushed by Senator Al Gore and his allies. There were, at that time, still lots of honest scientists in academia who didn’t go along with all of the alarmism, but they’ve gradually died off and they’ve been replaced by younger people who’ve never known anything except, you know, pleasing your government sponsor with the politically correct research results that they expect.

HS: So basically they are not in a position, if they want to achieve anything in academia or make a career for themselves, they are kind of unable to stay honest even?

WH: They try to be honest, but it’s very difficult because you have to plan to educate your children. You have to maintain your family, and so that means you need money. And the only way to get money is to agree to this alarmist meme that has dominated climate scientists now for several decades.

HS: Of course it affects climate research. So what is the current state, let’s say, the current state of climate research? What’s the quality of it in your opinion?

WH: Well, I think many of the observational programs in climate science are very good. For example, satellite measurements of Earth’s properties, radiation, cloudiness, temperatures, and ground-based observations. They’re often very high-quality work, very useful, and we’re lucky to have them. There are good programs in both Europe and the United States and Japan, and China is becoming quite important nowadays, too.

I think where there’s still huge problems is in computer modeling. I don’t think most computer models mean anything. It’s a complete waste of money, but that’s what’s driving the public perception. So the public is unable to look at model results, which are not alarming at all. But instead what they see is graphic displays from computer computations which are not tied into observations. So I think the money that’s been spent on computers, and lots of it has been spent, has been mostly wasted.

HS: Let me just understand it correctly because I’ve come to understand that these computer models are something that our current debate or the climate alarm is all based on: That there’s going to be a warming of how many degrees and then the earth is going to be uninhabitable. And you’re saying that those models are not things that something like that should be based on.

WH: The Earth is always either warming or cooling. It’s a rare time when it’s got stable temperature. We’re in a warming phase now. But most of the warming is probably a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age when it was much, much colder all over the world. And it began to warm up in the early 1800s.

And it continued to warm, not very fast. No one knows how long this will last. If you look over the last 10,000 years, since the end of the last glacial period, there have been many warmings and coolings similar to the one that we’re in now.

And I think understanding that is quite important, but that understanding has been put back by many, many years because of the sort of crazed focus on greenhouse gases. It’s pretty clear that greenhouse gases don’t have very much to do with these warmings. Nobody was burning fossil fuels in the year 1200-1300 when the poor Greenlanders were frozen out.

They did some pretty good farming in the southern parts of Greenland in the year 1000, the year 1100. Before long, it became just too cold to continue to do that. The same thing happened in parts of my ancestral country of Scotland. You know, you used to be able to farm the uplands of Scotland, which you can’t farm now, it’s too cold. But they’re warming up at some point, maybe you can farm them again. So anyway, the climate is just famous for being unstable.

HS: Let’s talk about those greenhouse gases. Mainly climate change today in mainstream media or by those alarmist politicians, for example, is attributed to carbon dioxide. If someone has not looked into it, this gas might seem to have something even poisonous. What is carbon dioxide? Do we need it?

WH: Well, first of all, carbon dioxide is at the basis of life on Earth. We live because plants are able to chemically transform carbon dioxide and water into sugar. And a byproduct is the oxygen that we breathe. And so we should all be very grateful that we have carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You know, life would die without carbon dioxide. If you look over the history of… Life on Earth, carbon dioxide has never been very stable in the atmosphere. There have been times in the past when it’s been much, much higher than today. Life flourished with five times more carbon dioxide than we have today.

And there have been times when it’s been much lower, one-half, one-third, and those were actually quite unpleasant times for life. They were the depths of the last ice ages when carbon dioxide levels dropped to below 200 parts per million, quite low compared to today. We’re at around 400. So at the depth of the last ice age, it was about half what it is today. In some of the more verdant periods of geological history, it’s been four times, five times what it is today. So the climate is not terribly sensitive to carbon dioxide. It has some sensitivity to it.

More carbon dioxide will make it a little bit warmer. But carbon dioxide is heavily saturated, to use a technical term. You know, there’s so much in the atmosphere today that if you, for example, could double carbon dioxide, that’s 100% increase, you would only decrease the cooling radiation to space by 1%. So 100% change in carbon dioxide only makes a 1% change in flux. And that’s because of the saturation that I mentioned. And there’s not much you can debate about that. It’s very, very basic physics. It’s the same physics that produces the dark lines of the sun and the stars. So it’s quite well understood.

And so the question is, what temperature change will a 1% change of radiation to space cause? You know, that’s radiation flux, not temperature. And the answer is it will cause an even smaller percentage change of temperature. There’s really no threat from increasing carbon dioxide or any of the other more minor greenhouse gases like methane or nitrous oxide or artificial gases like anesthetic gases. It’s all a made-up scare story.

HS: Where did this scare story come from? Why this fixation on greenhouse gases? If you explain it this way, it seems a bit even absurd to be fixated on these gases all the time.

WH: Well, you know, I’m really good with instruments and differential equations, but I’m not so good at people’s motives. And so I don’t really understand myself exactly how this has happened. I think… There are various motives, some of them fundamentally good. For example, one of the motives has been it’s hard to keep people from fighting with each other, so if we could have a common enemy like a danger to the climate, we could all join forces and defeat climate change, and then we wouldn’t be killing each other off.

So there’s nothing wrong with a motive like that, except that you have to lie.
And so, you know, it’s dangerous to make policy on the basis of lies.

So I don’t know what drives it. It’s a perfect storm of different motives. Lust for power, good motives, lust for peace. All for that. Lust for money. But I’m much more comfortable talking about, as I say, the physics of greenhouse gases and the physics of climate than what drives people.

HS: Yeah, yeah. Well, you have said that this climate change or climate alarmism today is, what was it, you prefer scam, but you are willing to settle with a hoax, is it correct?

WH: Well, this is not too serious, but you know, when someone says hoax, I think of hoax as, to some extent, a practical joke. There’s a certain amount of humor in it. For example, the Piltdown Man was a famous hoax where some brilliant Englishman doctored up a I think it was a chimpanzee skull to make it look like a human skull. And this was not too serious, but lots of learned professors wrote papers about it, you know, and it was all nonsense. But this had no aim to make a lot of money, you know, or to gain power.

It was simply, you know, a great practical joke. That’s a hoax. A scam is different. A scam is where you are deceiving people to enrich yourself, to gain power, you know, and so I think that’s a better description of what’s happening with climate than a hoax. But it’s a small detail, I don’t mind calling it a hoax.

HS: Basically, Professor, there is a lot of money involved in climate change or climate alarmism. Would it be that money is driving this as well or what is your take on that?

Yes, those are trillions of dollars they are projecting.

WH: Well, I think it’s really true that the love of money has been the root of evil as long as humanity has existed. And here we’re talking about trillions of dollars. If you really went to net zero, the economic implications would just be enormous. People would have to lower their standard of living greatly. It would cause enormous damage to the environment. You cover the world with windmills and solar panels. So… And it’s driven by money. Lots of people are making lots of money. So it’s driven by money. It’s driven by power.

And then it’s driven by poor people who fundamentally believe, you know, and that they really have been misled into thinking that there is an emergency. And you have to be sympathetic to them, you know, who wouldn’t want to save the world if the world was in danger? It is not really in danger, but many people are convinced that it’s in danger. But, you know, there’s this old saying, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we’re on the road to hell with net zero.

HS: Yes. Well, like you already mentioned, this crisis is often said to be linked with, for example, extreme weather events. But I don’t know, is it even clear today that we have more extreme weather events because of the warming that is happening? Or is it so?

WH: Well, if you look at the data, there’s not the slightest evidence that there’s more extreme weather today than there was 50 years ago. Even the IPCC, you know, the UN body does not claim that there is an increase in extreme weather. They say there’s really no hard evidence for that. And in fact, the evidence is that it’s about the same as the weather has always been. In my country, for example, the worst weather we had was back in the 1930s when we had the Dust Bowl and, you know… people migrating from Oklahoma to California, you know, it was a terrible time. We’ve not had anything like that since.

HS: Of course, always to talk about floods, always to talk about hurricanes. And as I understand as well, the IPCC is not actually in their scientific reports. They are not actually saying that there are more. But they are saying something, right? So the question here is, what do you think? You have probably looked into them a bit more than I am. So is it solid science what’s in there? Or is it also motivated the IPCC scientific reports, politically motivated, for example?

WH: You know, there’s this saying in the communications business, if it bleeds, it leads. So if you’ve got a newspaper or a television business, you have to look for disasters because that’s what people pay attention to. And so part of the problem has been the mass media, which has to have emergencies, has to have extreme events. And the fact is usually hidden that there’s nothing unusual about an event. They try to deceive you into thinking that this has never happened.

For example, just yesterday they had four or five inches of snow in Corpus Christi, Texas. That’s a lot of snow for Corpus Christi. But, you know, if you look at the records of Corpus Christi, it’s not unusual every 20, 30 years as it happens. It’s been happening for thousands of years. But most people, you know, they’re not even 20 or 30 years of age, and so they’ve never seen this before. So it seems like the world is changing rapidly in front of their eyes, but it’s not changing really at all.

HS: Yes, they can look at it on the television, then it must be true when they are saying that it’s because of climate change, right? So this is the thing. One particular graph that is always talked about when climate is the issue is the famous Michael Mann hockey stick.

The first graph appeared in the IPCC 1990 First Assessment Report (FAR) credited to H.H.Lamb, first director of CRU-UEA. The second graph was featured in 2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR) the famous hockey stick credited to M. Mann.

WH: The graph is phony, and that’s been demonstrated by many, many people. It’s even different from the first IPCC graphs. It’s a graph of temperature versus time since about the year 2000. you know, about the year zero, you know, from the time of Christ to today. And what it shows is absolutely no change of temperature until the 20th century when it shoots up like the blade of a hockey stick. So that’s why it’s called the hockey stick curve. So the long, flat… Part of the hockey stick is the unchanging temperature. But that was not in the first IPCC report.

Climate reconstructions of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ 1000-1200 AD. Legend: MWP was warm (red), cold (blue), dry (yellow), wet

The first IPCC report showed that it was much warmer in Northern Europe and United States, North America, in the year 1000 than it is today. There really was a medieval warm period, which was what allowed the Norse to settle in Greenland. and have a century or two of successful agriculture there. It’s never gotten that warm again since. It may happen, but the hockey stick curve basically erased that, so it was… It’s like these Orwellian novels. 1984, there was this… They continued to rewrite history, you know, so what was history yesterday was not history today, you know. So it was rewriting the past. There clearly was a warm period.There is evidence from all around the globe that it was much warmer in the year 1000 than today. We still have not gotten as warm as it was then.

HS: Yes, yes, and the warm period, as I understand, was followed by the Little Ice Age. So 19th century, the warming that started then is actually, it started at the end of this Little Ice Age.

Earth is still recovering from the Little Ice Age, which was the coldest period of the past 10,000 years, that ended about 150 years ago.

WH: That’s right, that’s right. For example, that’s very clear if you come to Alaska, And look at the Alaska glaciers. In particular, there’s a famous glacier bay in Alaska which was filled with glaciers in the year 1790 when it was first mapped by the British captain Vancouver. the ice came right out to the Pacific.

And already by 1800, it had receded up into the bay. Some of it was melting by 1800. And by 1850, most of the ice was gone. I’m talking about the 1800s, not the 1900s, not the present time. So it’s pretty clear from Glacier Bay that the warming began around the year 1800. And it’s just been steadily warming since then.

HS: I have been shown another graph many times which shows a correlation between the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the temperature rise during the last, let’s say, 150-200 years. Yeah, it’s a correlation, of course, but is there any causation as well? Because you pointed it out as well that there is a warming effect. Carbon dioxide has a warming effect in the atmosphere, but it’s not leading as I understand.

WH: Yeah, that’s correct. You know, you can estimate past CO2 levels by looking at bubbles in ice cores from Antarctica or from Greenland. And you can also estimate past temperatures by looking at the ratios of oxygen isotopes in the ice and the other proxies. So there are these proxy estimates of past CO2 levels and past temperature.

And they are indeed tightly correlated. When their temperature is high, CO2 levels are high, and temperature is low, CO2 levels are low. But if you look at the time dependence, in every case, first the temperature changes and then the CO2 changes. Temperature goes up, a little bit later CO2 goes up.

Temperature goes down, a little bit later CO2 goes down. So they are indeed correlated, but the cause is not CO2, the cause is temperature. So something makes the temperature change and the CO2 is forced to follow. That’s easy to understand. It’s mostly due to CO2 dissolving in the ocean. The solubility of CO2 is very temperature dependent.

So if the world ocean’s cool, they suck more CO2 out of the atmosphere. And if they warm, more CO2 can come back into the atmosphere. So there’s nothing surprising about that. The only surprise is nobody really knows why the temperature changes, but it’s certainly not CO2 causing it to change because the CO2 follows the change.

HS: It doesn’t precede it. Causes have to precede their effects. from the same 2023 presentation that I already mentioned, that I listened. And as a member of Jason in 1982, you were one of the authors of a scientific paper that aimed to measure the effects of CO2 to global warming. The first number you got was too small. Then you just arbitrarily increased it.

WH: You’re asking, the key question is how much warming would be caused if you double carbon dioxide. That’s sometimes called the climate sensitivity or the doubling sensitivity. And the first person to seriously try to calculate that theoretically was your neighbor across the Baltic, Svante Arrhenius. He was a Swede and a very good chemist, and he was interested in this problem. He was the first one to really work on it, and his first paper was written in 1896. So the first climate warming paper was 1896 by Arrhenius, and he estimated that doubling CO2 at that time would warm the earth by around six degrees.

It was a big number. He didn’t know very much, so it was not a bad number given what he knew at the time. As he learned more, he kept bringing that number down, so the last number he published was about four degrees, and it was still going down. So the number that we published was three degrees, this little Jason study. So it was only a little bit smaller than Arrhenius’ number. But that was because neither he nor we really knew enough about how the climate works to get a reliable answer.

And I think the only way to really get a reliable answer is from good observations over long periods of time. And we simply don’t have good enough empirical data right now to know what that is. But I’m pretty sure that doubling CO2 by itself is unlikely to cause warming of more than about one degree Celsius. You know, if you do the simplest calculation, you find that answer, it’s a bit less than one degree for doubling CO2.

And so three degrees, four degrees, the only way to get that is with enormous positive feedbacks. And so that’s what these computer models do that we’ve been talking about. They inject feedbacks in a very obscure way so you can’t figure out what they’ve done. But it’s a supercomputer, so how could it be wrong? It must be right, it’s a computer after all. But nevertheless, it’s giving these absurd positive feedbacks. And most feedbacks in nature are not positive, they’re negative.

There’s even a law called Le Chatelier’s Principle, which is that if you perturb some chemical system or physical system, it has feedbacks. And they try to reduce the perturbation. They don’t try to make it bigger. They try to make it smaller. So climate has turned that completely on its head. It says all feedbacks in climate are positive, and if it’s negative, forget about it. You won’t get your research grant renewed next year if you put that in your proposal. So it’s a mess, and it’s going to take a long time to clean this up.

Of course, if someone is not on the right side of this net zero debate, people are starting calling him names. He’s a climate denier or climate skeptic and so on. But those ad hominem arguments are what are used in the media to shut down the arguments of even scientists. One of them is that if you’re not a climate scientist, you’re not allowed to talk about climate. Well, of course, that’s nonsense. Climate is really all physics and chemistry. And so anyone with a good grounding in physics and chemistry can know as much about climate as a climate scientist.

In general, climate scientists are not well educated. When I look at American universities, maybe it’s better in Estonia, but you go to a class and your education consists on how do you organize a petition to your local legislator. So that’s your knowledge as a climate scientist. You don’t have to learn physics, you don’t have to learn chemistry, you don’t have to learn electromagnetics and radiation transfer. You have to learn how to work the political process. So it’s true that most physicists aren’t very good at that. You know, they’re quite good at physics, but they’re not very good at talking to the Congress or to the president.

HS: Yeah, yeah. So basically, climate science has become something more like a social science in that sense.

WH: Yeah, that’s right. It’s been very heavily politicized. There was something very similar to this in the Soviet Union in the field of biology. There was this Ukrainian agronomist, Lysenko, who… got the ear of the Communist Party and was supported for many decades with just crazy theories about biology, you know, you could grow peaches on the Arctic Circle if you just listen to him. All sorts of nutty things and that there was no such thing as genes, but he had a lot of political support and so he essentially destroyed biology for a generation in the Soviet Union. You know if you taught your class about genes, you know, Mendel’s wrinkled peas and smooth peas, you were lucky if you were only fired, you know, you could have been sent to a concentration camp and several people were condemned to death for teaching about genes. And so I think climate science is a lot more like Lysenkoism than it is normal science.

HS: Yes, well, yes, this is something that we should be able to learn from because this was the Stalin era, this was the craziest time period, absolutely. In Eastern Europe we also know a lot about that and it does seem to me as well that Löschenkism is something that is like gaslighting the public and ostracizing renowned scientists, for example, like yourself. This is something that has been done related to climate science. Or how do you feel that? Do you feel that you have been targeted by those activists, activist politicians or not?

WH: I don’t feel any pain. I don’t pay much attention to them because I have very little respect for them. The people that I respect, most of them agree with me. I’ve personally not suffered from it, perhaps just because I don’t pay attention to it. I’m older, I’m retired, so I’m not dependent on government grants. Younger people could not do this. So people in the middle of their career have a very serious problem because they’ll lose their research funding and they won’t be able to continue their career if they don’t sign up to the alarmist Dogma.

HS: And one of the things how they shut down criticism is simply by stating that 97% of climate scientists are saying that our climate change or global warming, it is anthropogenic and you cannot argue with 97%, can you? What do you think? Is science democracy?

WH: There are some small anthropogenic effects on climate. Any big city, for example, is quite a bit warmer than the countryside. If you go 30 kilometers outside of New York City, it’s cooler. Or any other big city. So those are called urban heat island effects. So it’s clearly caused by people.

But if you look at undisturbed areas far from urban centers, there the climate is doing what it has always done. It’s warmed, it’s cooled, it’s done that many, many times over history. And there’s not the slightest sign of anything different resulting from our generation burning fossil fuels.

My own guess is that fossil fuels may have caused about close to a degree, maybe three-quarters of a degree of warming, but that’s not very much. When I got up this morning, it was minus 10 Celsius. Here in my office, it’s quite a bit warmer. One degree, you can hardly feel it. My air conditioner doesn’t trip on and off at one degree, so it’s not a dangerous increase in temperature. Saving the planet from one and a half degree of warming is just crazy. Who cares about one and a half degree of warming? It won’t be that much anyway. But if it were, it wouldn’t matter.

HS: If the planet warms a bit, is it actually bad to us?

WH: No, of course it’s not bad. For example, I have a backyard garden, and I would welcome another week or two of frost-free growing season in the fall and in the spring. I could have a better garden, and that’s true over much of the world. And if you look at the warming, most of the warming is in high latitudes where it’s cold. It’s where you live in Estonia, where I live in New Jersey. It doesn’t warm in India. It doesn’t warm in the Congo or in the Amazon. Even, you know, the climate models don’t predict that. They predict the warming, when it comes, will be mostly at high latitudes near the poles. And that’s where actually the warming will be good, not bad.

HS: One more question about climate science. It is being told to us that there is a consensus on anthropogenic climate change. And my question actually here is that in science, can there be a consensus? What is a consensus in science even?

WH: Well, I think you know very well that science has nothing to do with consensus. Michael Crichton was very eloquent about this. And if you don’t know about his work, you should read it. But he says when someone uses the word consensus, they’re really talking about politics, not science.

Science is determined by how well your understanding agrees with observations. If you have a theory and it agrees with observations, then the theory is probably right. But it’s right not because everybody, all your friends agree with it, it’s because it agrees with observation. You make a prediction and you do an experiment to see whether the prediction is right. If the experiment confirms it, then the theory is probably okay. It’s not okay because everybody agrees with you that your theory is right. And so that’s what the climate scientists are trying to claim, that science is made by consensus. It’s not made by consensus. There really is a science that is independent of people. There is a reality that could care less what the consensus is. It’s just the way the world works. And that’s real science.

HS: What are your views on energy transition? Should we, you know, stop burning fossil fuels? And why, if so?

WH: Well, of course, we shouldn’t stop burning fossil fuels. We can’t stop, you know. It’s suicide. It’s economic suicide. And more than economic, it’s real suicide. People will die. You know, they tried something like that in Sri Lanka, you know, 15, 20 years ago when the extremist government came in and stopped the use of chemical fertilizer, you know, because it was unnatural. So everyone was supposed to go back to organic farming and the result was that, you know, the rice crop failed, the tea crop failed, you know, the price of food went up, people were starving in the streets. The same thing will happen if we go to net zero.

You can’t run the world without fossil fuels. We’re completely dependent on them, especially for agriculture, but transportation and many other things. There’s nothing bad about them. If you burn them in a responsible way, they cause no harm. They release beneficial carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide really benefits the world. It’s not a pollutant at all.

HS: There is the question of how much longer will fossil fuels last. There is a finite number and for years people have wondered when will they run out and what will we do when we run out of fossil fuels. And so that’s an interesting question that’s worth talking about.

WH: It’s not an immediate problem, but sooner or later it will be a problem. My own guess, we’re talking about a century or two, not decades. But I think our descendants will have to replace fossil fuels, and my guess is that they will make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. No one has ever discovered a better fuel than a hydrocarbon, you know. We ourselves, you know, store energy as hydrocarbons. You know, the fat on our belly, you know, that’s a hydrocarbon. You know, so it’s really good, you know. So we can make hydrocarbons ourselves from limestone and water if you have enough energy.

There are ways to do that chemically. And so my guess is that in 200 years, that’s the way energy will be… handled. We’ll make it from inorganic carbon, limestone probably, and we’ll burn it the same way we do today. You know, we’ll make synthetic diesel, we’ll make synthetic gasoline, and continue to use internal combustion engines. No one’s invented a better engine than an internal combustion engine.

HS: But what about nuclear energy? What are your thoughts on that?

WH: Well, nuclear energy clearly works. It makes electricity, so you can’t run your automobile on nuclear energy unless you’re stupid enough to buy an electric car. So nuclear has had some of the same problems as fossil fuels. There are these ideological foes of nuclear energy And they have two main arguments. The first argument, and one that does worry me, is that it’s not that difficult to change a nuclear commercial enterprise into a weapon. And nuclear weapons really are very, very dangerous.

So that’s one of the oppositions. But the other is completely phony, is that we can’t handle the waste. That’s not a difficult problem, actually. It’s technically quite easy to handle the waste. For example, at a typical nuclear plant in the United States, there’s a dry cask storage yard, which is not as big as the parking lot. And it’s got a century worth of fuel. It’s perfectly safe. And you could leave it there for several centuries and nothing would happen to it. So there’s no need to process it. You can let it sit there and, you know, in a hundred years, maybe people will regard it as a useful mine for various materials. So nuclear is fine, and I think it will play an important role for a long time in human affairs.

You know, the big dream has always been fusion, nuclear fusion energy, where you combine deuterium and tritium, you know, and make power. That’s turned out to be much, much harder than we ever thought it would be. But my guess is it’s a problem that will eventually be solved.

Someone will have a really good new idea about how to do it. If we keep smart people working on it, someone will figure out how to do it. So I’m optimistic about the future for energy. I think humanity is going to do fine if they don’t self-destruct.

HS: Well, Professor, to kind of sum up, I would like to ask you about what is, in your opinion, what are the real problems? As I understand, and I tend to agree with you, climate change currently at least is not a real problem for humanity. But probably there are some. And what is your feeling? What are they?

Well, the problem has always been living together. How do you keep humanity from self-destructing? And that’s why I have some sympathy for the climate alarmists. They thought that having climate as a common enemy would be one way to prevent this. So you have to admit that that’s not such a bad motive.

I don’t think it’s true. I don’t think it will work. I think it’s worse than nothing. But I guess the question is how do we keep people in a civilized society indefinitely? And As I said, I’m a lot better with differential equations and instruments than I am with this sort of a question. But just speaking personally, I think everybody should have a feeling that they’re doing something significant with their lives. So I think anything we can do in society is to let young people feel like they’re significant and they’re doing something worthwhile and useful it would be good for the whole world.

It Must Be Climate Change

Posted on February 15 by Ron Clutz

Prager U video can be seen at this link: https://www.prageru.com/video/it-must-be-climate-change

Transcript is below in italics with my bolds and some added images.

Have you noticed that every extreme weather event is blamed on climate change formerly known as global warming?

Every. . . Single. . .One.

Can you think of an exception?

Too hot — climate change. Too cold – climate change.

Previously, cold spells were termed “Weather” in contrast to “Global Warming.” Now it’s all “Climate Change.”

Drought – climate change. Too much rainfall – climate change.

And there’s always a climate scientist at some university who’s willing to make a statement blaming the current catastrophe on our profligate use of fossil fuel.

Some years ago, on The Late Show with David Letterman, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow made the definitive statement on this issue. She said, “I think global warming probably means extreme weather events of all kinds.” Naturally, Dave agreed.

What’s behind all these confident assertions?

As a PhD in geochemistry, former member of the University of Alabama Department of Geological Sciences and someone who has written and lectured widely on the subject of climate and geology, I can tell you that it comes down to two things:

Obscure metrics and highly speculative models.

Mix these ingredients together and voila! You can get any result you want. The scarier, of course, the better. “Torrential rain” makes a much better headline than “heavy rain.”

To show you how this works, let’s look at a recent example.

Here’s the assertion: Climate change is making air turbulence more volatile and thus air travel more dangerous.

Scary, right? But is it true? No. Not if we look at the observable data; that is, hard data we can easily verify.

Here’s a chart of the number of turbulence-related accidents in the US from 1989 to 2018.

Despite the rise in annual US airline passengers from about 400 million in 1989 to nearly one billion by 2018, turbulence-related accidents have remained constant. If climate change were indeed making turbulence significantly worse, we would expect to see a corresponding increase in these accidents.

Yet, the data does not support this assertion. Instead, it suggests that the relationship between turbulence and climate change is either negligible or nonexistent.

In fact, the co-author of the original study cited in a BBC article admitted as much.

“When we add [data back to 2002] to the previous results, the statistical significance assigned to the…North Atlantic winter jet stream…disappears.”

This was conveniently left out of the BBC article.

This disconnect between obscure metrics and highly speculative models, and observable data is not limited to turbulence.

The broader climate crisis narrative is built on similar shaky foundations.

Let’s look at three more examples.

No Increase in Extreme Weather: The number of hydrological, meteorological, and climatological disasters has remained relatively flat since 2000. If climate change were causing more extreme weather events, we would expect to see a clear increase in these numbers. Instead, the data, again, reflects no such increase.

No Increase in Loss of Life: Deaths from meteorological, hydrological, and climatological disasters have not increased. This is a critical metric because it directly reflects the human impact of these events. Despite frequent claims that climate change is making weather more deadly, the data does not bear this out.

No Increase in Costs: Global weather losses as a percent of global GDP have not risen significantly. This is another crucial metric because it accounts for the economic impact of climate-related disasters. If climate change were truly making these events more severe, we would expect to see a rising trend in economic losses relative to global GDP.

We are left with this conclusion:

The reliance on obscure metrics and highly speculative models
to support the climate crisis narrative often serves
to cloud the truth rather than illuminate it.

By focusing on projections and models rather than observable data, environmental activists, climate scientists, attention-seeking politicians and click bait media make claims that are difficult to verify and easy to manipulate.

The fear that fuels the “climate crisis” is simply not justified by the data. That’s why — over and over again — end-of-the-world predictions don’t pan out.

This does not mean that we should ignore environmental issues. We live on the same planet. We all want clean air and water.

However, it does mean that we should approach claims of climate catastrophe with a healthy dose of skepticism and demand that assertions be backed up by observable, measurable data. Given that politicians and government agencies are spending tens of billions of our tax dollars every year to “save the planet” that would seem to be the least they could do: give us some hard facts, rather than unproven assertions.

And the hard facts are, turbulence-related accidents have not increased despite a massive rise in airline passengers. Extreme weather events, loss of life, and economic costs have not shown the dramatic increases that alarmists would have us believe.

By focusing on observable data we can have a more grounded, rational discussion about our environmental challenges and how best to address them.

That’s the way to practical, real-world solutions. The blame game — “it’s climate change” — gets us nowhere.

I’m Matthew Wielicki for Prager University.

No, Grist, MSN, et al: CO2 Is Not Making Oceans Boil

Posted on February 3 by Ron Clutz

The Climate Crisis media network is announcing a new claim that rising CO2 is causing recent ocean warming, proving it’s dangerous and must be curtailed. Examples in the last few days include these:

Finally, an answer to why Earth’s oceans have been on a record hot streak Grist

Ocean warming 4 times faster than in 1980s — and likely to accelerate in coming decades MSN

News spotlight: Fossil fuels behind extreme ocean temperatures, study says. Conservation International

Ocean temperature rise accelerating as greenhouse gas levels keep rising UK Natural History Museum

The surface of our oceans is now warming four times faster than it was in the late 1980s The Independent UK

Oceans Are Warming Four Times Faster as Earth Traps More Energy Bloomberg Law News

All this hype deriving from one study,
and ignoring the facts falsifying that narrative.

Fact: Historically, ocean natural oscillations drive observed global warming.

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

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

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles.

Fact: Recent rise in SST was driven by ENSO and N. Atlantic Anomalies.

And now in 2024 we have seen an amazing episode with a temperature spike driven by ocean warming in all regions, along with rising NH land temperatures, now dropping below its peak.

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

To enlarge, open image in new tab.

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

Now in 2023-24 came an event resembling 2015-16 with a Tropical spike and two NH spikes alongside, all higher than 2015-16. There was also a coinciding rise in SH, and the Global anomaly was pulled up to 1.1°C last year, ~0.3° higher than the 2015 peak. Then NH started down autumn 2023, followed by Tropics and SH descending 2024 to the present. After 10 months of cooling in SH and the Tropics, the Global anomaly came back down, led by NH cooling the last 4 months from its peak in August. It’s now about 0.1C higher than the average for this period. Note that the Tropical anomaly has cooled from 1.29C in 2024/01 to 0.66C as of 2024/12.

Fact: Empirical measurements show ocean warms the air, not the other way around.

One can read convoluted explanations about how rising CO2 in the atmosphere can cause land surface heating which is then transported over the ocean and causes higher SST. But the interface between ocean and air is well described and measured. Not surprisingly it is the warmer ocean water sending heat into the atmosphere, and not the other way around.

The graph displays measures of heat flux in the sub-tropics during a 21-day period in November. Shortwave solar energy shown above in green labeled radiative is stored in the upper 200 meters of the ocean. The upper panel shows the rise in SST (Sea Surface Temperature) due to net incoming energy. The yellow shows latent heat cooling the ocean, (lowering SST) and transferring heat upward, driving convection. [From An Investigation of Turbulent Heat Exchange in the Subtropics by James B. Edson]

As we see in the graphs ocean circulations change sea surface temperatures which then cause global land and sea temperatures to change. Thus, oceans make climate by making temperature changes.

Fact: On all time scales, from last month’s observations to ice core datasets spanning millennia, temperature changes first and CO2 changes follow.

Previously I have demonstrated that changes in atmospheric CO2 levels follow changes in Global Mean Temperatures (GMT) as shown by satellite measurements from University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). That background post is included in the posting referenced later below.

My curiosity was piqued by the remarkable GMT spike starting in January 2023 and rising to a peak in April 2024, and then declining afterward. I also became aware that UAH has recalibrated their dataset due to a satellite drift that can no longer be corrected. The values since 2020 have shifted slightly in version 6.1, as shown in my recent report Ocean Leads Cooling UAH December 2024.

I tested the premise that temperature changes are predictive of changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The chart above shows the two monthly datasets: CO2 levels in blue reported at Mauna Loa, and Global temperature anomalies in purple reported by UAHv6.1, both through December 2024. Would such a sharp increase in temperature be reflected in rising CO2 levels, according to the successful mathematical forecasting model? Would CO2 levels decline as temperatures dropped following the peak?

The answer is yes: that temperature spike resulted
in a corresponding CO2 spike as expected.
And lower CO2 levels followed the temperature decline.

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

Changes in monthly CO2 synchronize with temperature fluctuations, which for UAH are anomalies now referenced to the 1991-2020 period. CO2 differentials are calculated for the present month by subtracting the value for the same month in the previous year (for example December 2024 minus December 2023). Temp anomalies are calculated by comparing the present month with the baseline month. Note the recent CO2 upward spike and drop following the temperature spike and drop.

Summary

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

12/2024 Update–As Temperature Changes, CO2 Follows

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