Climate Media

Why Climate Alarm is Fading (Matt Ridley)

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Matt Ridley explains the demise of climatism in his recent video The Great Climate Climbdown is finally here – How can we undo the Damage Caused? For those preferring to read, there is a transcript below with my bolds and some helpful images.

I’m going to try and give you my perspective on which arguments have made the difference in terms of changing people’s minds on climate, and therefore the kinds of evidence and arguments that we should be pushing in order to try to win this battle. The genesis for this was this article I wrote in The Spectator saying that I really do think the climate emergency talk has peaked, and we are seeing a significant change. If you live in the British Isles, that’s not immediately apparent.

Climate Lemmings

It’s still a huge issue in Britain and Ireland, and most of Europe. But if you spend any time in America now, or even in Asia, you are seeing a very, very different debate where the affordability of energy is much more important than decarbonisation, where the demands of AI, etc., have trumped the requirement to cut carbon dioxide emissions. I think Britain and Ireland are getting left behind here, and we need to get with the conversation that’s happening elsewhere.

I think the images are covering the latter half of that graph, so you can’t see, but there has been a decline in newspaper coverage. There’s all sorts of straws in the wind, like I mentioned Bill Gates closing down the advocacy office, the Banking Alliance for Climate Change has closed down. A lot of companies are tiptoeing away from this issue, and it therefore is a moment when it might die out.

More likely, it will go quiet for a while, and then we’ll have more air pumped into the balloon at some point in some form or other. There’s such a gigantic vested interest these days in climate alarm that one can’t ever write it off completely. But here are 10 reasons I think why it’s fading, and I’ll run through them in more detail, but I’ll just quickly list them here.

I think it’s important not to underestimate the degree to which the COVID pandemic has left people mistrustful of science and of experts, and that has significantly damaged trust in science, and that is infecting the climate debate. Of course, over-claiming and some degree of fraud have been a problem in the climate science arena for even longer, but I think you are getting traction now because of COVID. Most important, of course, is that we were told that the decarbonization of the world energy system would pay for itself, would be profitable.

That is clearly not the case. It’s proving costly, inconvenient, and regressive in that poor people are paying more than rich people for this transition, and that I think is why a lot of ordinary people are beginning to see through the alarm. The transition to wind and solar, which I call unreliable because there are lots of renewable energies, but the distinguishing feature of wind and solar is that you can’t rely on them.

The transition to them is simply failing to materialize, I will argue. I don’t fully understand why, if you’re worried about what’s happening to climate change, you are automatically passionately in favor of wind and solar power. It just doesn’t necessarily follow, in my view.

I think it’s important not to underestimate how much the shale revolution has changed everything. Until 15 years ago, it was still easily possible to talk about oil and gas running out and therefore getting more expensive, and that would therefore necessitate a switch from hydrocarbons. That changed with the discovery of how to get gas and oil out of shale, and the effect on America’s position as a gas and oil producer and as an energy consumer is extraordinary, I think, and many people outside America just don’t realize this.

We’re so indoctrinated with the idea that the big energy transition of our time is windmills and solar panels that we don’t notice that the big energy transition of our time is actually shale. The fact that the AI industry needs reliable, affordable power has led much of tech to become much more realistic and pragmatic about energy, and getting it from shale gas power stations is now the top priority for most of the companies rushing into AI and data centers.

On the science, I’m somebody who thinks it is getting warmer.  Springs are getting nicer, winters are getting milder, summer’s not much different, but I don’t think it’s getting worse, and I think that is what most people are now beginning to realize after 50 years of being told that the future is going to be horrible. We’re living in that future, and it ain’t too bad. One of the reasons for that is because the models are still running too hot and have been consistently, because they’re assuming higher climate sensitivity than the science now supports.

I think that there is now so much evidence that the recent past, by which I mean the current interglacial, the Holocene period, starting about 9,000 years ago, has been much, much warmer in its first half than it is today. That evidence is getting harder and harder to hide, deny, or ignore. Therefore, we are a long way from living in unprecedented temperatures.

The fact that we’re unprecedented compared with the 19th century is not really the relevant comparison. For me, one of the big stories is that the effect of carbon dioxide on green vegetation is much greater than scientists expected or predicted. They did not think it was a limiting factor in most ecosystems, and yet it’s turning out to be an enormous effect, much more measurable, actually, than the effect of carbon dioxide on warming.

If carbon dioxide is a problem, we ought to be able to measure its cost and then tell ourselves how much this generation should pay for a cost that’s going to fall on a future generation, how much we discount the future. That calculation, it seems to me, if done honestly, is more and more playing against alarm. Just to the first point about overclaiming and fraud, which is damaging trust in science, the record of predictions about what’s going to happen in the climate and the chickens that are coming home to roost on this are more and more helpful, I think, to the argument.

Al Gore is known now more for predicting that the Arctic would be ice-free within five years in 2009 than he is for some of the other things he’s said. It has damaged the reputation of people like that. I enjoyed this quote from Ted Turner, that within 30-40 years, no crops will grow, most people will have died, and the rest of us will be cannibals.

It’s quite extraordinary what people have been getting away with saying in order to get noticed in this debate. The UN Secretary General standing up to his knees on a beach in Tuvalu makes great cover for Time magazine, but I think this kind of thing no longer cuts through to people, partly because people now realize that islands like Tuvalu are not sinking, they’re actually gaining land area because of wave action. You can’t see it because it’s on the corner there, but I’ve included Andrew Montford’s hockey stick delusion here because I do think that the hockey stick story is one of significant scientific malpractice, and that ought to be better known.

This picture just sums up a lot of what went wrong in recent years, and I don’t think you’re going to see this kind of uniparty consensus again. Here is the environment secretary or shadow secretaries of the British government, the Tory party, the Liberal Democrat party, and the Labour party all standing up and giving a round of applause to Greta Thunberg. Greta Thunberg is saying, unfortunately I can’t quite read what she’s saying because it’s hidden behind the thing for me, I hope it is for you, but that we’re setting off an irreversible trend that will end civilization by 2030.

That’s what she actually said in parliament in Westminster that day. Michael Gove, the Tory, said your voice is still calm, it’s the voice of our conscience, we feel great admiration, and Ed Miliband said you’ve woken us up. So this kind of political consensus has been a huge problem.

The fact that no party has been prepared to rock the boat, that is changing even in Britain now. We have the Reform Party and the Conservative Party both being much more skeptical on climate and energy issues. The degree to which electricity and gas prices have exceeded those in America now, in Europe and in the UK in particular, and in Ireland, is more and more striking.

Figure 4 – International Domestic Electricity Prices (p per kWh). UK has the highest domestic electricity prices in the IEA.

And paying four times as much for your energy, whether it’s gas or electricity, is not compatible with remaining competitive. And we are seeing Britain losing its fertilizer, chemical, pharmaceutical, motor, steel, many many other industries at a terrifying rate. Not only that, we are cutting ourselves off from being able to take part in a significant way in the AI industry and some of the other industries of the future, some of the robotics industries and so on.

So this really is where it’s going to hurt ordinary people to have been so far ahead of everyone else in trying to decarbonize our economy. The electric car revolution has been forced on consumers, it’s relatively unpopular for lots of reasons, reliability, cost, charging times. And if you do the analysis on a Chinese electric grid, it’s hard to see how they save any emissions at all, because it’s basically a coal car when you’re running an electric car in China.

Less so in Europe, where most of the electricity comes from gas. But even there, it takes many tens of miles before you’ve really saved any emissions at all, or saved significant quantities of emissions. And at that point, the battery is probably nearly dead anyway, so you’re about to replace it.

So to replace a functioning industry, quite a successful industry in the UK, the motor industry, with one that is really struggling, is a bad thing in itself. And to do so at significant cost and inconvenience to the consumer really is an own goal. I’d say the same kind of thing about heat pumps, replacing gas-fired boilers, fine if it’s a new-build house, much harder if you’re adapting an existing house and have to change the insulation and everything.

And even if it works for the same price, you’re removing a system before the end of its useful life and replacing it with one that’s no better. Therefore, there is no growth in economic terms, and you are effectively stranding assets in doing that. And refusing to build a third runway, trying to limit how much people fly, and telling people that they shouldn’t eat meat is not only counterproductive in political terms, this is backfiring quite significantly even in Europe, much more so in Asia and America.

The big one, as far as the electricity system is concerned, is of course the dash for renewables, for unreliables, in particular solar and wind, where it’s not just the unreliability, the intermittency, but the extreme cost of a system based on that. Britain is producing, well, it has the capacity to produce 21% more electricity now than 15 years ago, but it consumes 24% less electricity than 15 years ago. Now, doing less with more is the very definition of degrowth or impoverishment, and that is a real problem that we are creating for ourselves in this country.

You can’t see the end of this chart, but the global direct primary energy consumption is still vastly dominated by the hydrocarbons around the world. That has not changed. They’re all still breaking records, all three of them.

And if you zoom in to the top corner of that graph, you can just about see the contribution that solar and wind are making to the world economy. It is infinitesimal, and yet it’s around 6%, I think, now if you add them both up, and yet the coverage of the energy industry is dominated by these two rather medieval technologies. Talking of medieval, this is a book about the crop yields of the manors belonging to the Bishop of Winchester in the 1300s.

You may wonder why I brought it up, but if you zoom in on it, you’ll see that most of these manors were producing between one and four grains of wheat per grain they sowed in the ground, an energy return on energy invested of about between one and four. And of course, you’ve got to keep one grain back to sow next year’s crop. So in a year when you only produce one grain, you’ve got almost nothing to feed people with.

And that is the motor for most of the work done in society by people, and in terms of oats, the same for horses. On my farm in Northumberland today, I would expect to get about 100 grains of wheat for each grain that I sowed in the ground. This energy return on energy invested calculation is, I think, an absolutely critical one, and the one that the unreliable industry is really, really struggling on.

Again, you can’t see the right-hand side of the graph, but you can see this is a calculation of the energy return on energy invested. And if you buffer it by reliability, by the fact that you have to back up wind and solar, it’s hard to see how these reach the economic threshold. Because if you’re producing four units for every unit of energy that goes in, then you’re effectively recreating the medieval economy.

EROI = Total Energy Output / Total Energy Input

And the problem with the medieval economy was that it could only make a few bishops rich, and nobody else could get rich at all. Because otherwise, when you get down to a ratio of three or four energy return on energy invested, a significant proportion of your industry has to be spent making energy. You don’t have much left over to do other things with.

So I think this is the measure that really needs to be rammed home. But on solar, it is just worth pointing out that according to the World Bank, Britain is the second worst country in the world to build solar because of its cloud cover and the cost of land. The only worst country, I’m sorry to say, is Ireland.

Again, it’s disappointing that you can’t see this graph. I hadn’t realized that all these pictures would be on the right-hand side covering it. But the point of this graph is to show that America was a static or declining producer of gas until the early 2000s.  It is now by far the biggest gas producer in the world, equal to Russia and Qatar put together. That’s an extraordinary transformation. The same for oil.

Luckily, you can see it here. Everybody, it was said, and it was conventional wisdom, it was groupthink, that America was a played-out declining oil basin, that it would decline steadily from the 1970s onwards. And there was no gain saying that.

And then along came the shale pioneers and turned that around. America now produces more oil than Saudi Arabia and Iraq put together. That’s an extraordinary transformation.

So no one now talks about peak oil, about oil and gas running out in the rest of the world, and therefore about expensive oil. Yes, geopolitics can affect oil and gas prices, but usually only temporarily. The AI revolution is largely fueled by gas and coal with some nuclear.  Solar and wind are not the go-to uses for this power, as I mentioned.

What about the climate itself?  Well, it is getting warmer. These are early Humlum’s analysis of the five different ways of measuring global average temperature, going up at the rate of, well, going up pretty slowly, heading for about a degree of warming after about 50 years.

But do we believe the numbers?

Because I do think that we need to keep talking about the adjustments that are made to temperature records. I mean, here is a graph that early Humlum produces in which he points out that the GISS estimate of what the temperature was in January 2000 has been adjusted upwards, particularly in September 2013. Maybe that’s fair enough.  Maybe they had a reason for doing that. But in the same month, they adjusted the temperature for January 1910 significantly downwards. How can they possibly have had a good reason for doing that?

I think one is quite right to be suspicious of this.  Cooling the past in order to warm, in order to increase the rate of warming is just too tempting for the people who are in charge of these statistics. And I haven’t touched on the urban heat island effect and the unreliable thermometer stations and so on, but there’s plenty of those issues too. But the real point, as far as the man in the street is concerned, is the weather getting worse? Yes, it’s getting warmer, but is it getting worse? And no, it’s not.

The global tropical cyclones are not getting more frequent or more lethal. Drought is showing no trend in upwards or downwards, really. And as Roger Pielke has summarized, for most of the significant weather effects, except heat waves and perhaps heavy precipitation, then there is no detection or attribution as stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports.

This is from AR7, their latest report. And of course, the point which Bjorn Lomborg has made, among others, that higher temperatures, sorry, heat kills far more people, cold kills far more people than heat, and if we have higher temperatures, we will have slightly more people killed by heat, but a lot fewer people killed by cold. So we are genuinely saving lives through global warming.

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

Generally, deaths from climate change, as many of you will know, are down significantly, whereas deaths from earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanoes are not. That’s a remarkable statistic, which is not because weather’s getting safer, but because we’re getting better at forecasting, predicting and sheltering people from bad weather. People get very worked up about sea ice decline, but it’s slow.

And the Arctic hasn’t broken a sea ice low record since 2012. Antarctica has seen a recent slight downward trend, but there is no evidence that we’re getting anything like an Arctic, an ice-free period in the Arctic summer, which was quite routine 8,000 or 9,000 years ago.

Sea level rise, significant, but no sign of acceleration. The linear trend since 2010 is higher than the linear trend since 2005, but the linear trend since 2015 is lower again. So it’s going up and down, but it’s around a foot and a half per century, which is easily something we can cope with. I won’t go into the details, but I think Nick Lewis in particular and Judith Currie have done a very good job of showing in the peer-reviewed literature that the estimates of climate sensitivity that are going into the models have broadly been too high and they need to come steadily downwards.

And that would explain why the models have been running too hot compared with the global temperature. I think the Holocene Thermal Maximum is a very important point that we need to keep stressing because the temperature of Greenland and the Makassar Strait, two different datasets here, was significantly higher 6,000 BC, 8,000 years ago, than they are today. This data is coming in now from many different types of paleo temperature records showing the Holocene Climate Optimum.

Fig. 1. Climate change in the Holocene, adapted from Palacios et al. (2024a) and modified: warm periods are in yellow and less warm in pale yellow, and cold in blue; Bond Events are after Bond et al. (1997, 2001) and geochronology after Walker et al. (2019).

I was looking, for example, at evidence that in the Indian Ocean, sea levels were considerably higher than they are today. It used to be the consensus that they’d been going up steadily since the Ice Age, or rapidly and then steadily. It’s now reckoned that they may have been up to two meters higher in the period when the first pharaohs were already appearing in Egypt.  So that’s not that long ago. And that Holocene Optimum was a period of considerable wetness in the Sahara, lakes and hippos in the Sahara region. So this was a period within human history, in the early period of human history, when we were experiencing much warmer and damper temperatures.

But I think global greening is the big one. Here we have considerable evidence from a number of different directions that there’s 15% more green vegetation on the planet after 30 years because of carbon dioxide fertilization. And that is in all ecosystems, particularly arid ones, but in tropical ones and arctic ones as well, and in marine ones as well as terrestrial ones. That is a really significant effect. If you add the effect it’s had on agricultural yields alone, it comes to trillions of dollars of benefit for mankind. But then let’s add in the benefit for grasshoppers and gazelles and all the other creatures that eat green vegetation.

Now, I published an article about this in 2013, when I first got wind that the satellite data had been analyzed and was showing this global greening. Before then, there were other measures for picking up, but it hadn’t been analyzed from satellite data. And this annoyed the professor whose work I was reporting very much indeed, so much so that when he published his work, the press release from Boston University named me personally, along with Rupert Murdoch, as being the kind of person who mustn’t be allowed to misinterpret this result.

Well, I call that a win, actually, if I’m getting a name checked in the press release. Now, on the social cost of carbon, Britain doesn’t use the social cost of carbon. They can’t make it add up.  They simply can’t get an estimate of it that’s high enough to justify the money we’re spending on decarbonization. America did use a high one during the Biden administration, but Ross McKitrick has basically demolished the argument behind that. It largely left out the carbon dioxide fertilization effect.

And his own estimates of the social cost of carbon are that it’s pretty small, that it’s of the order of $5 to $10 per ton of carbon. That’s the total future harm done by each ton of carbon dioxide we produce today. Well, the cost of decarbonization is way higher than that.

So it just doesn’t make sense to pay a fortune for something that will save a penny. Worse than that, they are claiming to help wealthy future people by asking poor people today to make sacrifices, poor people within countries where energy policies tend to be regressive, between countries where we are on the whole denying cheap energy to many poor countries, and of course, between generations as well. I won’t look at those quotes.

So these are the five economic scenarios that IASA did for the IPCC showing what might happen to global GDP per capita. And it’s worth just looking at the one they call taking the highway fossil fuel development. This is the one in which we really let rip and continue to use hydrocarbons on a significant basis and end up with quite a lot of warming as a result.

It’s a scenario in which per capita income is roughly 10 times what it is today, 10 times. Globally, everybody on planet Earth is earning 10 times as much. Imagine what they could do with that, in which the Gini coefficient is down significantly from 0.6 to 0.1, which population falls faster than expected, whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, in which there is rapid technological progress, strong investment in health and education, effective management of ecological systems.

This is not a terrible world. It sounds like rather a good world. And if, yes, there’s a lot of warming, then we’re 10 times as rich to deal with it.  Surely the warming will have done economic harm. Yes, it will. How much harm? It will have reduced the wealth of your grandchildren. Instead of being 10.4 times as rich, they will be 9.8 times as rich. Is that really an existential catastrophe? There’s a reason why we use a discount rate. Lord Stern persuaded us in the mid-2000s that we should not use a discount rate about the future because we’re looking after our grandchildren.  We should care about them just as much as we care about ourselves. But if they’re going to be 10 times as rich, then it doesn’t make sense to hurt poor people today to make them not quite 10 times as rich.

So, just to end, what are we still up against?
Massive subsidies and funding for climate alarm.

You can’t underestimate the power of money. Widespread bias and censorship still in the media. Some doubling down on the point that solar power doesn’t come through the Strait of Hormuz.

Doesn’t this crisis prove that we should wean ourselves off fossil fuels? Climate is a very good excuse for politicians. Again and again you’ve seen people like the governor of California saying yes the Palisades fire burned a lot of people’s homes but there’s nothing I can do about it because it was caused by climate change. There was something you could do about it. You could have done prescribed burning but climate change gets you off the hook as a politician.

I do believe that it’s a mistake to go too far in skepticism and call it things like a hoax. That does tend to put people off.  But the problem with our side of the argument is we can’t be bothered to sit on these committees and get stuck into the detail and do all the really boring leg work and go to these awful conferences. And that’s what we ought to be better at. And that’s about the only thing I can say that we are the in criticism of the skeptical side of the debate. Thank you very much.

Footnote:  Is Climate Crisis a Hoax?

Insider Exposes Corrupt Climatism (Anika Sweetland)

 

 

Unfounded IPCC Claims about Rising Ocean Heat Content

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Alex Newman reports at Liberty Sentinel New Climate Study Debunks Key UN IPCC Dogma. Excerpts in italics with my added bolds and images. Discussion of the Study itself follows later below.

Breaking research reveals the key metric behind so-called global warming
is based on “physically meaningless” calculations. If true,
it could upend decades of climate science and policy.

Lead author Jonathan Cohler, a physicist, who worked with top scientists around the world including Dr. Willie Soon, explained that even though the U.S. government is leaving the IPCC under Trump, the UN continues to march on with its climate agenda. However, with more and more evidence and scientific papers dismantling the core “science,” the UN’s agenda appears to be on thin ice.

“The public has been told that the ocean is ‘warming’ and absorbing over 90% of ‘excess’ planetary heat,” explained Cohler. “But when we examined how these numbers are actually calculated, we found they represent computational artifacts rather than measurements of real physical energy rendering the entire process a category error.”

The analysis focuses on data from the international Argo float program, a network of approximately 4,000 autonomous floats that drift through the ocean measuring temperature and other data. These measurements form the backbone of modern climate assessments, including those by the IPCC. Even leaving aside the fundamental category error, for the sake of argument, this research nonetheless reveals multiple fundamental problems with how this data is processed, Cohler said.

Fig. 1. (left) Global mean OHC (Cheng et al. 2024a) for 0–2000 m relative to a base period 1981–2010 (ZJ). The 95% confidence intervals are shown (sampling and instrumental uncertainties). (right) Trend from 2000 to 2023 in OHC for 0–2000 m (W m−2). The stippled areas show places where the trend is not significant at the 5% level. Source: Distinctive Pattern of Global Warming in Ocean Heat Content by Trenberth et al (2025).

[Note:  The graph showing zettajoules can be misleading.  Ocean heat graphs labelled in Zettajoules make it look scary, but the actual temperature changes involved are microscopic, and impossible to measure to such accuracy in pre-ARGO days. And as this post shows, ARGO measurements are also unreliable.]

Since 2004, for instance, ARGO data shows an increase of about two hundredths of a degree.

Cohler et al. (2029) is IPCC’s Earth Energy Imbalance Assessment is Based on Physically Invalid Argo-Float-Based Estimates of Global Ocean Heat Content. 

Abstract
Global ocean heat content (OHC) anomalies and derived Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) estimates, central to contemporary climate assessments including IPCC AR6, are constructed through processes that violate the scientific method. These metrics rely almost exclusively on temperature data from the Argo profiling float array. Their validity and reliability hinge on several critical but herein refuted assumptions about measurement representativeness, interpolation/extrapolation methods, the physical meaning of anomalies, and integration conventions.

Core Argo and Biogeochemical Argo floats deliver discrete, point measurements of intensive properties like temperature along irregular, untracked three-dimensional trajectories during ascent from 2000 m to the surface. This samples only the upper ocean, excluding roughly 50% of total ocean volume and thermal energy. Horizontal positions are recorded only at surface intervals ~10 days apart, leaving subsurface locations entirely unknown. All data from each ascent are arbitrarily assigned to the surfacing position, introducing unknown horizontal offsets (up to 50 km) and temporal offsets (up to 10 hours) for the deepest measurements.

Anomalies are computed by subtracting values from statistically derived reference climatologies based on sparse historical data over arbitrary baseline periods. Measured temperatures are then interpolated onto global 3D grids using prescribed covariance functions. These anomalies represent numerical differences without physical meaning as temperature deviations, because temperature, an intensive property, is not additive across non-equilibrium spatial or temporal domains (Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018).

IPCC AR6 Earth Energy Budget fig. 7.2

The integrated OHC scalar depends heavily on arbitrary averaging and interpolation rules, producing computational artifacts rather than measures of actual ocean energy uptake or planetary radiative imbalance. Derived EEI values, such as the 0.7 ± 0.2 W m⁻² in IPCC AR6 Figure 7.2, inherit these biases and stem from circular methodology: CERES satellite top-of-atmosphere radiative flux measurements (absolute uncertainties ± 3–5 W m⁻² or higher) are adjusted via least squares to match Argo OHC-derived estimates, rather than offering independent validation.

We rigorously quantify major uncertainty sources, including unresolved mesoscale variability (± 0.9 W m⁻²), deep ocean ignorance bounds (± 0.35 W m⁻² from sparse Deep Argo), polar undersampling (± 0.1 W m⁻²), Nyquist-Shannon aliasing in sparse deep ocean and polar sampling, sealevel budget closure discrepancy between satellite altimetry/gravimetry and Argo OHC (±0.33 Wm-2), arbitrary baseline choices (± 0.2 W m⁻²), Eulerian-Lagrangian discrepancies (± 0.25 W m⁻²), and untracked trajectories and positional assignments.

Although the concepts of OHC and EEI are thermodynamically well-defined physical quantities, the numerical values produced by current Argo-based methodologies are physically meaningless computational constructs that do not validly represent those quantities. We conclude that EEI uncertainties reach >± 1 W m⁻² at 95% confidence, roughly an order of magnitude larger than the uncertainty that IPCC AR6 reports, rendering current OHC change and EEI estimates statistically indistinguishable from zero.

Conclusions

EEI estimates that depend on Argo-derived global OHC lack physical validity and reliability as measures of ocean thermal energy change or planetary radiative imbalance. The final OHC scalar is a computational artifact produced by assigning sparse intensive temperature measurements to arbitrary positions, subtracting them from a non-physical climatological reference, and integrating interpolated values that dominate the unsampled ocean volume. These operations destroy thermodynamic interpretability, rendering the resulting scalar sensitive to methodological choices rather than to any conserved physical quantity.

The widely cited claim that ~90–93% of the observed planetary heat gain is stored in the ocean, and that ~85–93% of oceanic uptake resides in the upper 2000 m (as adopted in Forster et al., 2021, Chapter 7, based on von Schuckmann et al., 2020, 2023), rests on this invalid calculation and is non-compliant with the scientific method. The claimed vertical partitioning is not empirically robust; given the structural uncertainties quantified herein, alternative distributions including a physically plausible 50-50 split between upper and deep ocean remain consistent with the flawed observational constraints and cannot be scientifically excluded.

The fundamental thermodynamic invalidity of averaging intensive temperature measurements across non-equilibrium spatial and temporal domains (as detailed in Section 1.2; Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018; Cohler, 2025) renders global temperature metrics physically meaningless numerical abstractions. Without a physically meaningful, thermodynamically valid global metric for ocean energy change or planetary imbalance, current assessments of anthropogenic climate forcing and future projections lack an empirical foundation (see also Cohler et al.,2025, for independent evidence that the anthropogenic CO₂-global warming hypothesis lacks empirical substantiation due to natural dominance and model failures).

 

Be Not Alarmed about Sea Level Rise

Posted on by Ron Clutz

First, Current Legacy and Social Media Scare Stories

Sea Levels Might Be Higher Than We Thought, Putting Millions of People in the Path of Coastal Flooding Sooner Than Expected– Smithsonian Magazine

A deadly climate change effect is even worse than feared, study finds–USA Today

Sea Levels Are Already Higher Than Many Scientists Think, New Study Shows–NY Times

Sea Level Rise Accelerating 2026 Study–Instagram

How melting ice and warming oceans are driving sea level rise faster than most people realize–MSN

Etc., etc. etc.

Sea Level Facts on the Ground

What the nearby Tidal Gauge Reports:

What Climate Alarmists Predict vs. Observed Trend

The Global History of Sea Level 

No Acceleration Since the Pilgrims Landed in Massachusetts

Background Report

Observed vs. Imagined Sea Levels 2023 Update

The Hottest Year Shell Game

Posted on by Ron Clutz

When it comes to climate science, always keep eyes on the prize.

The Distorted Reporting of Global Average Temperature 2025 and its relevance to the Paris Agreement

The video by Philosophical Investigations uncovers some misleading claims by people who should know better. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcript with my bolds and added images.

With the end of year 2025, the crucial questions to be answered by climate scientists were:

♦  how much has global average temperature increased since the pre-industrial period 1850 to 1900, and
♦  how does this increase compare to the Paris Agreement overarching goals?

These goals being to hold the increase in the global average temperature less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Note the relevance of the term pre-industrial.

The IPCC uses the reference period 1850 to 1900 to represent pre-industrial temperature. The period 1850 to 1900 and the term pre-industrial are to a large extent interchangeable in the discussion that follows. We can now provide examples of how the global average temperature at year end 2025 was reported.

Berkeley Earth reported that in 2025 the global annual average temperature was estimated at 1.44 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The WMO reported that the global average surface temperature was 1.44 degrees Celsius above the 1850 to 1900 average. The UK Met Office reported that 2025 was 1.41 degrees Celsius above the 1850 to 1900 global average.

NOAA reported that 2025 exceeded the pre-industrial 1850 to 1900 average by 1.34 degrees Celsius. All these figures appear to measure the amount of global warming as being very close to the Paris Agreement lower limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Just to double check this channel calculated global warming using the standard IPCC methodology and the official published NOAA data, the global average temperature anomaly 1850 to 1900 equals minus 0.165 degrees Celsius.

The global average temperature anomaly for the 30 year period 1996 to 2025 equals plus 0.751 degrees Celsius. Therefore, the global average temperature has warmed by 0.916 degrees Celsius since 1850 to 1900. This is a large discrepancy from the NOAA 2025 report of 1.34 degrees Celsius.

To be specific, it is a discrepancy of 46.28%. So, how did such a large discrepancy come about?

A brief background and analysis will reveal a somewhat disturbing answer. The 2016 Paris Agreement did not specify how to measure any increase in global average temperature, nor did it specify what precisely was meant by pre-industrial levels. To correct this lack of scientific clarity in the Paris Agreement, the IPCC walked its readers through the process of defining global warming.

First, it specified that the reference period 1850 to 1900 is to be used to represent pre-industrial temperature. Once scientists had defined pre-industrial, the next step is to calculate the amount of warming at any given time relative to that reference period. Warming is defined as the increase in the 30-year global average of combined air temperature over land and water temperature at the ocean surface relative to the 1850 to 1900 pre-industrial period.

[Note:  One important reason that the period 1850-1900 serves as a useful baseline of climate utopia is that almost no one has any idea what the climate looked like back then, much less the climate impacts experienced. Most modern climate records start in the 20th century, and to the extent that the IPCC considers pre-20th climate it is in terms of physical quantities and not impacts or risks. 

Estimated decadal deaths related to weather and climate for four decades: 1870s, 1920s, 1970s, and 2020s (estimated based on deaths over the past decade). These estimates are highly uncertain and 1870s and 1920s numbers are certainly underestimates. They should be interpreted as orders of magnitude and not as precise figures. Sources: Davis 2017, Our World in Data

The figure above shows estimated decadal deaths related to weather and climate extremes for four decades, each separated by a half-century, starting with the 1870s.]

Why 30 years? The 30-year time span accounts for the effect of natural variability, which can cause global temperatures to fluctuate from one year to the next. An earlier report had also emphasised that due to natural variability, trends based on short records that are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates, do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. That covers the necessary background.

Now, the analysis of the critical question. Why does the IPCC methodology give a calculation of 0.916°C but NOAA reports 1.34°, WMO reports 1.44°C, UK Met Office reports 1.41°C, Berkeley Earth reports 1.44°C? It is disturbing to highlight that the reason for the discrepancies involves a certain amount of guile leading to misinformation. On the one hand, it seems as if we are being informed of the increase in global average temperature since 1850-1900 as related to the Paris Agreement goals.

But in fact, we are merely being informed of a comparison of the global average temperature of the single year 2025 with the global average temperature of the 51-year period 1850-1900. A comparison which is absolutely irrelevant with respect to the Paris Agreement goals. And quite emphatically, does nothing to answer the questions how much has global average temperature increased since the pre-industrial period 1850-1900 and how does this increase compare to the Paris Agreement overarching goals?

This is because, instead of comparing a 30-year global average temperature
with the 51-year period 1850-1900, these organisations have
compared a single year 2025 with 1850-1900.

This is an invalid methodology that produces the exact results these organisations have duly reported. This can be demonstrated quite easily by again using NOAA data but substituting the 30-year period 1996-2025 with the 1-year period 2025-2025. The global average temperature anomaly 1850-1900 remains the same at minus 0.165 degrees celsius.

The global average temperature anomaly for this single year 2025 equals plus 1.17 degrees celsius. The global average temperature was therefore claimed to have warmed by 1.335 degrees celsius, which rounds up to 1.34 degrees celsius, exactly as reported by NOAA. All these organisations underlined and previously quoted are guilty of using this invalid methodology.

Why would these seemingly august and respected organisations do this when they knew, as stated by the UK Met Office, that a 30-year period is more relevant than the average for a single or small number of years when considering the agreement on climate change? Could it possibly be that the figure of 1.34 sounds more alarming and much closer to the Paris Agreement of 1.5 than does the valid figure of 0.916? And that is why these organisations have deviated from the standard methodology. It is difficult to believe but it is a possibility. Whatever the answer to this elusive question may be, we now provide definitive answers to the crucial questions that were to be answered by climate scientists at end of year 2025.

How much has global average temperature increased since the pre-industrial period 1850-1900? 0.916 degrees celsius. How does this increase compare to the Paris Agreement overarching goals? It is 0.584 degrees celsius below the lower limit of 1.5 degrees celsius. That concludes the main points of this video but we could not resist a two-minute post-script.

It may be argued that the statement 2025 exceeded the pre-industrial 1850-1900 average by 1.34 degrees celsius was merely intended to give the reader a feel for how much warmer it is now compared to the 1850-1900 period. There are two points to make in such a case. The first point is that 1850-1900 was an unusually cold period.  It was in fact part of the Little Ice Age. The IPCC states that the Little Ice Age was characterised by multiple expansions of mountain glaciers worldwide. It was a roughly defined period but generally occurred between 1400 and 1900.

The second point is that it seems silly to compare the warm year 2025 to a cold average of 51 years.

Why not compare 2025 to some of the warmer years that took place during 1850-1900? For example 1878. In this case 2025 was 1.04 degrees celsius warmer than 1878. This difference is not close to the Paris Agreement 1.5 degrees celsius.  Or take 1877. In this case 2025 was 1.05 degrees celsius warmer than 1877. Again not close to the Paris Agreement 1.5 degrees celsius.

It could be surmised that perhaps this is why the single year 2025 was instead compared to the 51-year average of an unusually cold period. It may be very difficult to believe but it is a possibility that was the reason. Whatever the reason, there is no doubt that all the organisations underlined and quoted have ignored the scientific methodology and advice of the IPCC that short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not, in general, reflect long-term climate trends.

See Also:

1875 was coldest in 10,000 years, Warming A Good Thing

 

 

Shortage of Climate Comedians

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Chris Morrison provides examples of malarky from alarmist Jim Dale in his Daily Sceptic article Treasure Climate Comedian Jim Dale While You Can: We May Never See His Like Again.  Exerpts in italics with my bolds.  H/T Climate-science.press.

Climate comedy turn Jim Dale continues to tour the Gaiety Halls of broadcast media, delighting audiences with his own word-salad English and his knack for getting most facts wrong. Fans were not disappointed by an extended performance, here, start around 2hr 38 mins, last week on Mark Dolan’s TalkTV show when he falsely claimed Costa Rica had reached Net Zero and the polar ozone hole had closed. Readers might be advised not to organise drinking parties around Jim’s much-cherished appearances. If a shot is taken every time the great entertainer gets a climate or Net Zero fact wrong, you’d be Brahms and Liszt quicker than you could say Julia Hartley-Brewer.

A number of countries are already at Net Zero carbon emissions, claimed Dale, and he gave Costa Rica as an example. Sorry Jim, treble Guaro Sours all round: Costa Rica is nowhere near Net Zero. In fact, the Carbon Action Tracker notes that the current government is sending “worrying signals that the full implementation of the climate policies and measures necessary to meet Costa Rica’s own targets could be deferred”. Key electric public transport projects have been paused or downscaled, while the current President has announced his opposition to an oil moratorium, along with an intention to explore Costa Rica’s hydrocarbon reserves. For some time, Costa Rica has presented itself as a poster country for eco-tourism and sustainability, but it was never near Net Zero. There comes a time when all the virtue signalling has to stop.

Hard reality seems to have bitten the territory, as it has every other country
taking a serious look at the stupidity of the Net Zero fantasy.

Put down the liquor bottle (just for a very short while): our climate clot got it partly right when he said two or three countries had hit Net Zero. One country often mentioned is Bhutan, a landlocked territory the size of Belgium in the eastern Himalayas. Mountains give Bhutan huge hydroelectric power, while 93% of the land is covered in carbon-dioxide-absorbing forest. Meanwhile, about half the population of 800,000 is involved in subsistence farming. As a future model for Net Zero, it leaves a lot to be desired.

Perhaps Jim could explain on his next much-awaited guest slot why Bhutan, a Net Zero country seemingly perfect in every respect, requires foreign aid of $13.7 billion over the next decade for “mitigation” costs to keep it on the straight and narrow Net Zero path. Sustaining its contribution and ambitions are said in its third Nationally Determined Contribution report to the UN to require “continued and predictable” international financial support.

Of course it does. Not a bad little earner for a country with an annual GNP of just over $3 billion. The cynical might be forgiven for reading into its words a threat along the lines of: cough up or the trees get it.

Time to refresh our glasses again, as our comedic clown then told Mark Dolan that the South Pole ozone hole had closed or, to put it in Jim’s word-salad English: “The ozone layer was a perfectly tenable thing that occurred and the hole closed because we got out of aerosols that managed that actually.” Alas, the hole has not closed, despite a 35-year ban on aerosol-using chlorofluorocarbons (CFC) gases. The thinning, rather than a hole, appears to be a largely natural event that changes thickness on an annual, seasonal basis.

A recently published science paper by three New Zealand-based scientists noted that the three years 2020–2023 witnessed the re-emergence of large, long-lived holes over Antarctica. The scientists observed that in the eight years to 2022, five showed similarly large temporary holes occurring in the spring months. In 2023, the European Space Agency said the hole was one of the biggest ever recorded, measuring 26 million sq kms. Perish the thought that banning CFCs didn’t make much difference – surely all those Nobel science prizes were not handed out in vain for a totemic environmental scare that proved such an inspiration for all the subsequent attempts to induce mass climate panic? Except when Jim unwisely brings it up, you don’t hear much about the ozone hole these days, with activists quietly extending its supposed disappearance to around 2060.

The ozone over Antarctica is recovering. Here, the four globes show monthly-averaged total ozone over Antarctica in October. The graph shows each year’s October average minimum (white dots) over Antarctica. The red curve represents a smoothed version of the white dots. NASA qzonewatch

Your correspondent has a few tips to offer if readers ever need to handle Jim in a public debate. The first task is to stop him constantly interrupting and shouting over you. This is best done by first listening to what he has to say and, at the first sign of trouble, demanding the same courtesy be extended when it is your turn to speak. Last May, I found myself with him on TalkTV with the excellent ringmaster Ian Collins – here, the entertainment starts at around 35m 30s. It worked reasonably well, despite the overwhelming temptation at one point to burst out laughing when Jim claimed the source of his climate information was NASA, “who send people to the Moon and Mars”. Extra fun can be inserted into the proceedings by noting that Dale is on record as wanting to jail climate ‘deniers’. At my prompting, Ian Collins asked him if this was true and the ensuing word-salad explanation was a pure delight. Only Jim can explain in his special language that it is not quite like that, while at the same time suggesting that it is precisely like that.

The market for data-free climate scares is starting to dry up across mainstream media. Gone are the days when the BBC’s Esme Stallard could give us her “climate change could make beer taste worse”. No more shall we see Georgina Rannard make the obvious mistake of putting a date on impending doom as she did in 2023 with a ‘scientists say’ article warning that the Gulf Stream warm currents “could collapse as early as 2025”.

Perish the thought, but soon only Jim Dale might be left to keep the nation
amused with his carry on climate catastrophising routine.

Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” Decrepit at Age 20

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Kevin Killough describes the decay of Gore’s signature movie in his Just the News article Al Gore’s ‘Inconvenient Truth’ turns 20, and critics say biggest disaster is its failed predictions.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Twenty years ago “An Inconvenient Truth” received a standing ovation at the
Sundance Film Festival. Though it was full of predictions that never
came to pass, it was a key catalyst of the climate activist movement.

Twenty years ago Monday, former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,”  premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received a standing ovation. The 2006 documentary was released to theaters the following May and went on to gross over $25 million worldwide.

Gore’s film was a primary catalyst for the climate activist movement, and it generated a lot of concern about global warming following its release. The movie left audiences with the impression that the human race was hurtling toward a dystopian future on a planet baking in unbearable temperatures where extreme weather caused frequent disasters.

Almost 13 years to the day after its release, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was telling people the world would end in 12 years – presumably five years from now – because of the burning of fossil fuels.

Matt Wielicki, who writes about climate and energy on his “Irrational Fear” Substack, was once an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. In the early part of his academic career, he taught at a local college.

Al Gore with a version of the Hockey Stick graph in the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth

He told Just the News that he showed “An Inconvenient Truth” to his students. Over time, he began to question the “gloom and doom” narratives Gore presents in his film, he said.

“People took that as a starting point, and they just kept running further and further with it,” Wielicki said.

Gore’s film, however, was full of numerous predictions that turned out to be wrong, and it’s likely that the world will not end in 2031, as Ocasio-Cortez predicted. 

Stubborn ice

Among the predictions Gore made in the documentary is that Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro would have no more snow on it by 2016. In 2020, The Times reported that the snow on the 19,000-foot mountain remained, despite Gore’s predictions. But the documentary had caused some to rush to climb the mountain before the snow disappeared. Instead, the tourists are surprised to find glaciers still clinging to it.

Gore also predicted that Glacier National Park would be “the park formerly known as Glacier” after all the ice melted away in the blazing hot temperatures that were to descend upon the human race. The claim made a big mark, and federal agencies began looking closely at glaciers.

The U.S. Geological Survey predicted all the glaciers in the park would be gone by 2020. Signs were placed throughout the park warning visitors of the impending end of glaciers, which never happened. Instead, CNN reported, the signs had to be removed in 2020 when it was clear the glaciers remained.

Gore also connected Hurricane Katrina to global warming – later renamed climate change – and he predicted that these storms would become more frequent. The reality of human contributions to hurricane activity is far more nuanced and uncertain than Gore discusses in the documentary.

Integrated Storm Activity Annually over the Continental U.S. (ISAAC). Value is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy from all storms over land.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a section on its website dedicated to the topic. The page reads.

“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming,”

Uncertainty and nuance

Meteorologist Chris Martz said that climate science is full of the kind of uncertainty and nuance you see on the NOAA website, which “An Inconvenient Truth” dismisses entirely. 

Since Gore’s film was released – which was given a sequel in 2017 – Gore has continued to make false predictions, the meteorologist said. In 2009, Gore stated that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer within five to seven years. As of today, the Arctic still has ice in summer.

“We look at the Arctic ice now and yes, it’s declined since 1979 when satellite records began … But over the last 18 to 20 years, there’s really been no trend. And this caught scientists off guard. The models never predicted this,” Martz told Just the News.

He also said there’s been multiple studies on Arctic ice, and while some predicted an ice-free Arctic, others find the ice extent in the region recedes or grows as a result of natural variability. 

Predictions of cataclysm stemming from climate change regularly get reported in the media, but there’s little reporting when the predictions fail. In 2022, NBC News was one of many outlets reporting that California and the American West were in the midst of a “megadrought,” which was the worst the region had seen in over 1,000 years.

Earlier this month, NBC reported that California is drought free for the first time in 25 years. The article makes no mention of the previously predicted “megadrought,” nor does it mention climate change.

Martz said that many of his critics respond to these failed predictions by arguing they weren’t made by scientists in peer-reviewed articles published in journals. Instead, they’re made by politicians or scientists in interviews. But most people don’t get their information from scientific journals. They get it from the media, Martz said.

“That communication is what’s more important in terms of public perception of what science is,” he said.

Listening to the experts

Though it had no scientific basis, there was a widespread belief that global warming could cause the human race to go extinct. 

A 2017 survey found that 40% of Americans believed there is a 50% chance of that happening. In fact, the number of people killed by natural disasters has never been lower, a fact largely ignored by the media.

My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT

People appear more likely to be influenced by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez than the scientific data on deaths from climate-related natural disasters.

Her statement that the world would end in 12 years was actually a misreading of a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted that the world would need to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 40-50% by 2030 and eliminate them entirely by 2050 to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees celsius above levels they were at before humans began burning a lot of fossil fuels.

There’s nothing in the report that predicts disaster after crossing that threshold, and some experts are estimating that we have already done so. The report estimates that under the worst-case scenario, the global GDP loses about 2.6%, but it would still be about 10 times larger than it is today. But people didn’t read the report. They just heard Ocasio-Cortez warning of end times.

The report, or at least Ocasio-Cortez’s understanding of it, led her to introduce the ambitious Green New Deal plan, a suite of progressive policies justified as presenting global disaster. It failed to get a single vote when it was brought to the Senate floor for a procedural vote, which would mean, according to Ocasio-Cortez, the world has five years until it ends.

Larry Behrens, communications director for Power the Future, told Just the News that AOC likely spent the seven-year anniversary of her prediction doing exactly what she does any other day.

“Because she knows it was nonsense when she said it, and it’s nonsense now,” he said. “Make no mistake, she’ll join the rest of the eco-left in their convenient climate silence, hoping voters forget their green crusade delivered record energy prices and crushing inflation. On this anniversary, ‘climate’ is the last word AOC and her allies want to utter because midterms are coming, and voters remember exactly who made life more expensive.”

UN Climatists Organized Assault Upon Dissenters

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Susan Quinn reports in her American Thinker article Climate change advocates at the UN launch new organized assault against free speech and information.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

For years, climate change “deniers” have been attacked and ridiculed because we don’t believe in the “science” of the left. Yet, invented “science” isn’t science, and too many scientists have cowed to it, incentivized by money or fear of being cancelled, and have climbed on the bandwagon.

More and more people, however, are realizing the scam
that’s been perpetrated and are speaking out.

And now, those who defend climate change caused by humans are furious and alarmed. To discourage dissenters to the progressive narrative, the UN stepped up to stop the “disinformation”, intending to ramp up the war against climate change “deniers”:

At the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30), held in Brazil in November 2025, several states endorsed the UN’s ‘Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change, an initiative recognizing and trying to combat the rise in climate disinformation in media and politics.’

The UN Declaration is professedly a pledge to ‘fight false information’ about climate change.

At first glance, the Declaration seems fairly innocuous. But if you read it carefully, it clearly condemns those who don’t agree with the UN agenda, demanding censorship of the opposition, largely through the media. Here is one of the listed commitments:

Promote and support the sustainability of a diverse and resilient media ecosystem through adequate policies to enable and ensure accurate and reliable coverage, specially, within this context, on climate and environmental issues, as well as policies on advertising transparency and accountability….

It is not the place of the UN to determine a limitation on discussion of climate change, or create a media network to censor opposing viewpoints or findings. And yet they persist in pursuing this agenda and insist that everyone fall in line. Desiree Fixler, an expert in sustainable finance and investment banking and a former member of the WEF’s Global Future Council on Responsible Investing turned whistleblower, identified the climate change crisis as a hoax:

Fixler, a whistleblower, used to work as a sustainability officer for Deutsche Bank, until she exposed their ‘greenwashing’ and was fired for it. Since then, she has been exposing the climate change narrative and the ‘net zero’ agenda as a scam. In a recent podcast, she explained how the UN and WEF agendas of net zero emissions and ‘stakeholder capitalism’ – a WEF concept – are means to gain control and implement socialism. ‘They’re lying to the public,’ Fixler recently said on the Winston Marshall podcast.

‘They’ve manufactured a climate crisis. There is climate change, but there is no climate crisis… asset managers, consultants, and governments… they’re all in on it because they all profit from it.’

Last year, Stanford University reported on a “rise” in new organizations pushing back against the left’s “climate change crisis” claims:

New Stanford-led research in PLOS One reveals a growing constellation of think tanks, research institutes, trade associations, foundations, and other groups actively working to oppose climate science and policy. The number of countries with at least one such ‘counter climate change organization’ has more than doubled over the past 35 years.

The researchers, in a roundabout way, recognize the aggressiveness of the left’s climate change policies in action to be a major factor for the pushback:

According to the Jan. 22 study, the two factors most closely linked to the formation of at least one counter climate change organization are the strength of a country’s commitment to protecting the natural environment and the level of formal organization in its social sector.

(As it turns out, people are less concerned with some unobservable boogeyman than they are with their utility bills and whether or not they can afford a car.)

An especially frustrating part of this story is that climate change adherents mischaracterize the position of the “deniers” who don’t deny that the climate is changing, but that there is inadequate scientific evidence to suggest that human beings are the source of those changes. This is a critical issue:

How can we consider stopping climate change when
we don’t have scientific data about what causes it?

All the warming since 1940s followed oceanic cyclical events.

Well-known scientists are finally speaking out against the UN censorship initiative:

Prominent voices, including Bjorn Lomborg, have criticized the UN’s stance, insisting that taxpayer-funded climate policies warrant thorough scrutiny, not censorship.

Lomborg contends that the UN’s agenda is not only misguided but runs the risk of economically damaging the very countries it claims to help, as evidenced by countries like Germany facing high energy costs amid aggressive climate goals.

We must take seriously the efforts of the UN to censor scientific debate, because the consequences could be dire:

The implications of this censorship extend far beyond the realm of energy policy, as it threatens foundational principles of democracy and free expression, calling into question the very nature of scientific and academic inquiry.

The controversy and debate must continue!

How the Kooky Climate Crisis Crumbles

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Historian Victor Davis Hanson explains the collapse of climate hysteria in his Daily Signal video AI is Challenging Climate Orthodoxy:

For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript from the closed captions in italics with my bolds and added images.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the daily signal. For most of my life, at least for the last 35 years, we have accepted the climate change orthodoxy. We used to be global warming and then when things were not always warming but they were cooling. They changed the name to climate change to suggest whatever the temperature extreme was it was all due to carbon emissions caused in general  by humans, but in particular westerners who were polluting the planet with heat.

That was the dominant narrative. I didn’t think in my lifetime that I would see an end to that dominance, even though there were inconsistencies. The planet is 4 billion years old and man has only been here for 300,000 years. And we only have accurate record keeping of temperature fluctuations for the last 150 years. And even within that period, we have cyclical changes between decades of abnormal temperatures, whether too hot or too cold.  And before the industrial revolution in some cases by tree rings and ice sampling in the Arctic.

So there was always debate but the dominant narrative said:
No we have to radically change our economy and move away from
fossil fuels to renewable and that was usually wind and solar.

And then something’s happened lately. King Gustaf the16th the hereditary monarch of Sweden, is a symbolic figure  not an actual person in power.   He’s known as a rabid environmentalist, but kind of mused openly the other day, saying essentially:  Why are we ruining the economy of Europe by having exorbitant power cost, electricity cost, when we only contribute to 6% of global warming worldwide?  Then Bill Gates shocked the world when said he never he no longer believes that there is an impending climate change crisis. This was followed by a lot of other people who said let’s take a different look at this.

And of course the second tenure of Donald Trump has people in energy, interior,  treasury who are saying, you know, we’re not going to subsidize this anymore. And this is collated with disasters that were caused by worries over climate change worries or global Armageddon.  There was the highspeed rail program in California that was supposed to replace automobiles, $15 billion, $20 billion, not one foot of track laid.  And the solar plant down in the desert of California that is being dismantled or the battery storage in Moss Landing near Monterey that has caught fire twice.

Moss Landing battery fire 02/2025

Moss Landing on fire 02/2025

I could go on. So there was a lot of skepticism both by individuals who were influential and by the general public for good cause. So what is causing this? Well,  in reference to Bill Gates the first thing is artificial intelligence. It’s going to require a unprecedented level of electrical generation. It takes huge amounts of electricity. We don’t have it and we will not get it by subsidizing wind turbines and solar panels.

There are 1000 Gigawatts in 1 Terrawatt.

Sam Altman, one of the pioneers of artificial intelligence said,  If the United States wants to achieve preeminence in the field, and this seems to be the greatest technological breakthrough since the industrial revolution,  we’re going to have to build plants producing AI of one gigawatt a week.  That’s the size of a large nuclear reactor, one thousand megawatts. We’re going to have to build, he says, a 100 per year or the equivalent of clean coal or natural gas.  So that influenced Bill Gates, that shook him up. That’s not compatible with his prior green idea that we’re going to supplant fossil fuels.

MW refer to 1,000,000 watts of power, rate of energy generated or consumed in an instant by a system, mechanical, thermal, etc. MWe refers specifically to Megawatts of electricity.

Another reason is geostrategic. People are starting to become aware that Russia is a bad actor and Iran is a bad actor.  Since they depend on oil exports, therefore the high price of oil to fuel their military ambitions. When the United States became the largest producer of fossil fuels during the first Trump administration, then Biden for all of his green rhetoric, pivoted in his third and fourth year so he could win the election and began pumping oil again. Donald Trump took that 12 to 13 million barrels and has increased it to 14 million.  And the price of world oil is going down,  and that hurts Iran and hurts Russia.  That benefits our allies like Europe and Japan that would like more liquefied national natural gas shipped from the United States.

And so there were geostrategic reasons. Let’s be frank. Everybody has sort of seen what China is doing. It’s playing the West. It talks a great game about global warming. You guys, we all have to reduce our emissions. And then what does it do? Two things. It subsidizes cheap export of solar panels and wind turbines below the cost of production to bankrupt competing industries in Europe, the United States, to get the West hooked on solar and wind even though it is a very expensive andunreliable source of electricity.  Meanwhile, as we get hooked on Chinese exports, they build two to three coal or nuclear plants per month. Affordable energy that will give them a competitive hedge over the west.

Then there’s the third world that has been telling us for the last 20 years that we are culpable for global warming even though the two greatest heat emission areas in the world are China and India. Nonetheless, governments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia say, “You people owe us because you started the industrial revolution in the mid-19th century, and you’ve been polluting the planet ever since.  And you create all of your industries and your affluent lifestyles by burning fossil fuels. And therefore, you should pay us, not we pay you.” And we don’t have to cut back. We’re late to the game.

We should say to them, “Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. We burned more fossil fuels in the past because we created the industrial revolution and we do today. We provide you the cars. We provide you the industrial plants. We provide you the plastics. If you want us to stop, we won’t export it to you and then maybe we’ll pay reparations and you can do your own industrialization. So then, don’t take stuff from us requiring fossil fuels, stuff that’s essential to your economies, and then tell us that we have to pay an added tax on it because we’re warming up the planet, as if it’s only for our purposes as well as yours.

Then there’s the hypocrisy, I guess we would call it. The people who have been the avatars of climate change never suffer the consequences of their own ideology. Barack Obama said the planet would be inundated pretty soon if we didn’t address global climate change. Why would he buy a seaside estate at Martha’s Vineyard or one on the beach of Hawaii, if he really did believe that the oceans would rise and flood his multi-million dollar investment? Why would John Kerry fly all over the world on a private plane and then tell the rest of us that we’re flying too much commercial, when his carbon imprint was a thousand times more than the individual Americans? Why would people on the California coast say we have to have wind and solar and we have to get electricity up to 40 cents a kilowatt because we want to use less fossil fuels.  Meanwhile, the temperature from La Jolla to Berkeley is between what, 65 and 75F year round, where here in Bakersfield or Fresno or Sacramento it can be 105 and poor people can’t afford to run their air conditioners.

Add it all up, the inconsistency of the global warming narrative, the self-interest in the people who promote it, and the logic that they have presented no convincing empirical evidence that we have to radically transform our economies on the wishes of a few elites that do not have the evidence, but do have a lot of hypocrisy in the process.

Thank you very much.  This is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal.

 

 

Scare du jour Marine Heat Waves

Posted on by Ron Clutz

If you watch legacy media, you must also be wondering after seeing all the current headlines about Marine Heat Waves raising the ocean to its boiling point.

Ocean heatwaves are breaking Earth’s hidden climate engine, Science Daily

The Pacific Ocean is overheated, making fall feel like summer, CBC

The ‘blob’ is back — except this time it stretches across the entire north Pacific, CNN

Record marine heatwaves may signal a permanent shift in the oceans, New Scientist

Global warming drives a threefold increase in persistence and 1 °C rise in intensity of marine heatwaves, PNAS

Etc., etc. etc.

The last one is the paper driving this recent clamor over Ocean SSTs Marcos et al. 2025 From the abstract:

We determine that global warming is responsible for nearly half of these extreme events and that, on a global average, it has led to a three-fold increase in the number of days per year that the oceans experience extreme surface heat conditions. We also show that global warming is responsible for an increase of 1 °C in the maximum intensity of the events. Our findings highlight the detrimental role that human-induced global warming plays on marine heatwaves. This study supports the need for mitigation and adaptation strategies to address these threats to marine ecosystems.

The coordinated media reports are exposed by all of them containing virtually the same claim:

As climate change causes our planet to warm, marine heatwaves are
becoming more frequent, more intense, and longer lasting. 

Animation shows locations of moderate to severe MHWs mid-month 2025 January to October. A marine heatwave is defined as one where the measured temperature is within 10% of the maximum values observed (i.e., above the Threshold (90th quantile) , for at least 5 consecutive days. For this, the intensity is compared to the difference between the climatological mean and the 90th percentile value (threshold). A marine heatwave intensity between 1 and 2 times this difference corresponds to a heatwave of moderate category; between 2 and 3 times, to a strong category; between 3 and 4 times, to a severe category; and a difference greater than 4 times corresponds to an extreme category.

First some background context on the phenomena (in italics with my bolds).

Background from perplexity.ai How Do Warm and Cool Ocean Blobs Circulate?

Warm and cool ocean blobs circulate through distinct oceanic and atmospheric processes, often linked to major currents and atmospheric patterns.

Warm ocean blobs, such as the “warm blob” in the northeast Pacific, form due to atmospheric circulation changes triggered by factors like Arctic warming. This leads to a high-pressure system over the region, weakening westerly winds and reducing ocean heat loss, causing surface waters to warm and creating persistent warm anomalies. The formation of these warm blobs involves a feedback loop between weakened winds, reduced ocean-atmosphere heat exchange, and ocean circulation, which retains heat in the mixed layer of the ocean.

Cool ocean blobs, like the North Atlantic “cold blob,” are influenced by weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). This circulation moves warm, salty water northward, which cools, sinks, and then the cooler deep water travels southward in a conveyor-belt style flow. The cold blob forms when excess freshwater from ice melt dilutes the salty water, reducing its density and sinking ability, weakening this circulation and causing cooler surface water to persist. This cooling also affects the atmosphere by reducing water vapor, which decreases greenhouse effect locally and amplifies the cold anomaly, creating a coupled ocean-atmosphere feedback loop.

In summary, warm and cool ocean blobs circulate through a combination of ocean current dynamics and atmospheric interactions. Warm blobs form where atmospheric changes reduce ocean heat loss and circulation shifts retain heat, while cool blobs occur where circulation weakens, allowing cooler, less dense waters to persist and affect atmospheric conditions as well.

Then a summary of the issues undermining the alarmists’ claim.

From perplexity.ai What are reasons to doubt climate change is increasing marine heatwaves?

There are several reasons to doubt that climate change is definitively increasing the frequency, intensity, duration, and spatial extent of marine heatwaves, based on some ongoing scientific debates and uncertainties.

Natural Variability and Other Factors

♦  Marine heatwaves are influenced by natural climate variability, such as El Niño, Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and other oceanic and atmospheric processes. These phenomena can cause fluctuations in sea surface temperatures independent of long-term climate change, leading to periods of warmer ocean conditions that may be mistaken for climate-driven trends.

♦  Some studies emphasize the role of internal ocean variability, which can cause significant short-term temperature anomalies without requiring a direct link to anthropogenic climate change.

Complexity of Attribution

♦  The attribution of marine heatwave trends specifically to climate change involves complex modeling and statistical analysis, which can have uncertainties. Certain models suggest that long-term temperature increases are the primary driver, but the contribution of natural variability remains significant and sometimes difficult to separate clearly from climate signals.

♦  Regional differences and localized oceanic processes can obscure the global patterns, leading some scientists to argue that not all observed phenomena are directly attributable to climate change, particularly in areas with strong natural variability.

Limitations of Climate Models

♦  Climate models predicting future marine heatwave conditions depend heavily on assumptions about greenhouse gas emissions and other factors. These models often have limitations in resolution and in capturing small-scale processes, which could lead to overestimations or underestimations of climate change impacts.

Data Gaps and Uncertainties

♦  Although current observations show increasing trends in marine heatwaves, data gaps exist, especially in remote or deep-sea regions, making comprehensive global assessments challenging. These gaps contribute to uncertainty regarding the full extent and causality of observed changes.

♦  The precise long-term ecological impacts and possible adaptation or resilience mechanisms of marine ecosystems also remain uncertain, complicating the understanding of climate change’s role versus natural variability.

Summary

While a considerable body of evidence supports the role of climate change in increasing marine heatwaves, skepticism persists due to the influence of natural variability, model limitations, regional differences, and data gaps. These factors suggest that attribution is complex, and ongoing research continues to refine our understanding of the relative contributions of human influences and natural climate fluctuations.

Finally, a discussion of a specific example revealing flawed methods supposedly connecting CO2 emissions to marine heatwaves.

Much Ado About Marine Heat Waves

The promotion of this scare was published in 2022 at Nature by Barkhordarian et al. Recent marine heatwaves in the North Pacific warming pool can be attributed to rising atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases.  This post will unpack the reasons to distrust this paper and its claims.  First the Abstract of the subject and their declared findings in italics with my bolds.

Abstract

Over the last decade, the northeast Pacific experienced marine heatwaves that caused devastating marine ecological impacts with socioeconomic implications. Here we use two different attribution methods and show that forcing by elevated greenhouse gases levels has virtually certainly caused the multi-year persistent 2019–2021 marine heatwave. There is less than 1% chance that the 2019–2021 event with ~3 years duration and 1.6 ∘C intensity could have happened in the absence of greenhouse gases forcing. We further discover that the recent marine heatwaves are co-located with a systematically-forced outstanding warming pool, which we attribute to forcing by elevated greenhouse gases levels and the recent industrial aerosol-load decrease. The here-detected Pacific long-term warming pool is associated with a strengthening ridge of high-pressure system, which has recently emerged from the natural variability of climate system, indicating that they will provide favorable conditions over the northeast Pacific for even more severe marine heatwave events in the future.

Background on Ocean Warm Pools

Wang and Enfield study is The Tropical Western Hemisphere Warm Pool Abstract in italics with my bolds.

Abstract

The Western Hemisphere warm pool (WHWP) of water warmer than 28.5°C extends from the eastern North Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and at its peak, overlaps with the tropical North Atlantic. It has a large seasonal cycle and its interannual fluctuations of area and intensity are significant. Surface heat fluxes warm the WHWP through the boreal spring to an annual maximum of SST and areal extent in the late summer/early fall, associated with eastern North Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activities and rainfall from northern South America to the southern tier of the United States. SST and area anomalies occur at high temperatures where small changes can have a large impact on tropical convection. Observations suggest that a positive ocean-atmosphere feedback operating through longwave radiation and associated cloudiness is responsible for the WHWP SST anomalies. Associated with an increase in SST anomalies is a decrease in atmospheric sea level pressure.

Chou and Chou published On the Regulation of the Pacific Warm Pool Temperature:

Abstract

Analyses of data on clouds, winds, and surface heat fluxes show that the transient behavior of basin-wide large-scale circulation has a significant influence on the warm pool sea surface temperature (SST). Trade winds converge to regions of the highest SST in the equatorial western Pacific. The reduced evaporative cooling due to weakened winds exceeds the reduced solar heating due to enhanced cloudiness. The result is a maximum surface heating in the strong convective and high SST regions. The maximum surface heating in strong convective regions is interrupted by transient atmospheric and oceanic circulation. Regions of high SST and low-level convergence follow the Sun. As the Sun moves away from a convective region, the strong trade winds set in, and the evaporative cooling enhances, resulting in a net cooling of the surface. We conclude that the evaporative cooling associated with the seasonal and interannual variations of trade winds is one of the major factors that modulate the SST distribution of the Pacific warm pool.

Comment:

So these are but two examples of oceanographic studies describing natural factors driving the rise and fall of Pacific warm pools.  Yet the Nature paper claims rising CO2 from fossil fuels is the causal factor, waving away natural processes.  Skeptical responses were already lodged upon the first incidence of the North Pacific marine heat wave, the “Blob” much discussed by west coast US meteorologists.  One of the most outspoken against the global warming attributionists has been Cliff Mass of Seattle and University of Washington.  Writing in 2014 and 2015, he observed the rise and fall of the warming blob and then posted a critique of attribution attempts at his blog.  For example, Media Miscommunication about the Blob.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Blob Media Misinformation

One of the most depressing things for scientists is to see the media misinform the public about an important issue.

During the past few days, an unfortunate example occurred regarding the warm water pool that formed over a year ago in the middle of the north Pacific, a.k.a., the blob. Let me show how this communication failure occurred, with various media outlets messed things up in various ways.

The stimulant for the nationwide coverage of the Blob was a very nice paper published by Nick Bond (UW scientist and State Climatologist), Meghan Cronin, Howard Freeland, and Nathan Mantua in Geophysical Research Letters.

This publication described the origin of the Blob, showing that it was the result of persistent ridging (high pressure) over the Pacific. The high pressure, and associated light winds, resulted in less vertical mixing of the upper layer of the ocean; with less mixing of subsurface cold water to the surface. Furthermore, the high pressure reduced horizontal movement of colder water from the north. Straightforward and convincing work.

The inaccurate press release then led to a media frenzy, with the story going viral. And unfortunately, many of the media got it wrong.

There were two failure modes. In one, the headline was wrong, but the internal story was correct. . . In the second failure mode, the story itself was essentially flawed, with most claiming that the Blob off of western North America was the cause of the anomalous circulation (big ridge over West Coast, trough over the eastern U.S.). (The truth: the Blob was the RESULT of the anomalous circulations.) That the Blob CAUSED the California drought or the cold wave in the eastern U.S. These deceptive stories were found in major outlets around the country, including the Washington Post, NBC News, and others.

Blob Returns,  Attribution Misinformation

When the Blob returned 2020-2021, Cliff Mass had cause to again lament how the public is misled.  This time misdirection instigated by activist scientists using flawed methods.  His post Miscommunication in Recent Climate Attribution Studies.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

This attribution report, and most media stories that covered it, suggested a central role for global warming for the heatwave. As demonstrated in my previous blog, their narrative simply does not hold up to careful examination.

This blog will explain why their basic framing and approach is problematic, leading readers (and most of the media) to incorrect conclusions.

For the heatwave, the attribution folks only examine the statistics of temperatures hitting the record highs (108F in Seattle), but avoid looking at the statistics of temperature exceeding 100F, or even the record highs (like 103F in Seattle). There is a reason they don’t do that. It would tell a dramatically different (and less persuasive) story.

In the attribution studies, the main technology for determining changed odds of extreme weather is to use global climate models. First, they run the models with greenhouse gas forcing (which produces more extreme precipitation and temperature), and then they run the models again without increased greenhouse gases concentrations. By comparing the statistics of the two sets of simulations, they attempt to determine how the odds of extreme precipitation or temperature change.

Unfortunately, there are serious flaws in their approach: climate models fail to produce sufficient natural variability (they underplay the black swans) and their global climate models don’t have enough resolution to correctly simulate critical intense, local precipitation features (from mountain enhancement to thunderstorms). On top of that, they generally use unrealistic greenhouse gas emissions in their models (too much, often using the RCP8.5 extreme emissions scenario) And there is more, but you get the message. ( I am weather/climate modeler, by the way, and know the model deficiencies intimately.)

Vaunted Fingerprinting Attribution Is Statistically Unsound

From Barkhordarian et al.

Unlike previous studies which have focused on linking the SST patterns in the North Pacific to changes in the oceanic circulation and the extratropical/tropical teleconnections2,12,17,18,20,24,26, we here perform two different statistical attribution methodologies in order to identify the human fingerprint in Northeast Pacific SST changes both on multidecadal timescale (changes of mean SST) and on extreme SST events on daily timescale (Marine Heatwaves). Evidence that anthropogenic forcing has altered the base state (long-term changes of mean SST) over the northeast Pacific, which is characterized by strong low-frequency SST fluctuations, would increase confidence in the attribution of MHWs27, since rising mean SST is the dominant driver of increasing MHW frequency and intensity, outweighing changes due to temperature variability1,2.

In this study, we provide a quantitative assessment of whether GHG forcing, the main component of anthropogenic forcings, was necessary for the North Pacific high-impact MHWs (the Blob-like SST anomalies) to occur, and whether it is a sufficient cause for such events to continue to repeatedly occur in the future. With these purposes, we use two high-resolution observed SST datasets, along with harnessing two initial-condition large ensembles of coupled general circulation models (CESM1-LE28,29 with 35 members, and MPI-GE30 with 100 members). These large ensembles can provide better estimates of an individual model’s internal variability and response to external forcing31,32, and facilitate the explicit consideration of stochastic uncertainty in attribution results33. We also use multiple single-forcing experiments from the Detection and Attribution Model Intercomparision Project (DAMIP34) component of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (CMIP635).

From Barkhordarian et al. References

 

The IPCC’s attribution methodology is fundamentally flawed

The central paper underpinning the attribution analysis was assessed and found unreliable by statistician Ross McKitrick’s published evaluation. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

One day after the IPCC released the AR6 I published a paper in Climate Dynamics showing that their “Optimal Fingerprinting” methodology on which they have long relied for attributing climate change to greenhouse gases is seriously flawed and its results are unreliable and largely meaningless. Some of the errors would be obvious to anyone trained in regression analysis, and the fact that they went unnoticed for 20 years despite the method being so heavily used does not reflect well on climatology as an empirical discipline.

My paper is a critique of “Checking for model consistency in optimal fingerprinting” by Myles Allen and Simon Tett, which was published in Climate Dynamics in 1999 and to which I refer as AT99. Their attribution methodology was instantly embraced and promoted by the IPCC in the 2001 Third Assessment Report (coincident with their embrace and promotion of the Mann hockey stick). The IPCC promotion continues today: see AR6 Section 3.2.1. It has been used in dozens and possibly hundreds of studies over the years. Wherever you begin in the Optimal Fingerprinting literature (example), all paths lead back to AT99, often via Allen and Stott (2003). So its errors and deficiencies matter acutely.

Abstract

Allen and Tett (1999, herein AT99) introduced a Generalized Least Squares (GLS) regression methodology for decomposing patterns of climate change for attribution purposes and proposed the “Residual Consistency Test” (RCT) to check the GLS specification. Their methodology has been widely used and highly influential ever since, in part because subsequent authors have relied upon their claim that their GLS model satisfies the conditions of the Gauss-Markov (GM) Theorem, thereby yielding unbiased and efficient estimators.

But AT99:

  • stated the GM Theorem incorrectly, omitting a critical condition altogether,
  • their GLS method cannot satisfy the GM conditions, and
  • their variance estimator is inconsistent by construction.
  • Additionally, they did not formally state the null hypothesis of the RCT nor
  • identify which of the GM conditions it tests, nor
  • did they prove its distribution and critical values, rendering it uninformative as a specification test.

The continuing influence of AT99 two decades later means these issues should be corrected. I identify 6 conditions needing to be shown for the AT99 method to be valid.”

In Conclusion,  McKitrick:

One point I make is that the assumption that an estimator of C provides a valid estimate of the error covariances means the AT99 method cannot be used to test a null hypothesis that greenhouse gases have no effect on the climate. Why not? Because an elementary principle of hypothesis testing is that the distribution of a test statistic under the assumption that the null hypothesis is true cannot be conditional on the null hypothesis being false. The use of a climate model to generate the homoscedasticity weights requires the researcher to assume the weights are a true representation of climate processes and dynamics.

The climate model embeds the assumption that
greenhouse gases have a significant climate impact.

Or, equivalently, that natural processes alone cannot generate a large class of observed events in the climate, whereas greenhouse gases can. It is therefore not possible to use the climate model-generated weights to construct a test of the assumption that natural processes alone could generate the class of observed events in the climate.

Advance Briefing for COP30 Belém 2025

Posted on by Ron Clutz

 

Overview from E Co. A summit at the crossroads

When the world gathers in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025 for COP30, it won’t be just another climate conference. It will be the first major summit after the Paris Agreement’s initial Global Stocktake at COP28, and the moment where climate ambition must decisively shift from words to delivery.

As many observers have begun to remark in the run-up to COP30, “Belém is where the climate community will be asked to prove that promises can become practice.”

What’s at stake at COP30

The Brazilian presidency has laid out a clear mandate: COP30 must focus on implementation, inclusion, and innovation. In practical terms, that means:

♦  A ‘Belém Package’ of outcomes across forests, finance, adaptation, just transition, and gender.
♦  The formal launch of the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), a proposed $125 billion results-based finance mechanism to incentivise forest conservation.
♦  Progress on a roadmap to mobilize $1.3 trillion annually in climate finance by 2035, building on the ‘Baku to Belém’ finance commitments made at COP29.
♦  New modalities for inclusive governance, such as Brazil’s proposed ‘Global Mutirão’, bringing Indigenous peoples, local governments, and civil society closer to the heart of climate decision-making .

COP30 will not be judged by the number of new pledges it produces. As several analysts have argued, it will be remembered “for whether the world found the tools to finally deliver on them.”

The main challenges Brazil faces

While Brazil has bold ambitions for COP30, turning them into concrete outcomes will not be easy. The presidency faces several challenges:

  1. Domestic contradictions: Despite progress under President Lula, agribusiness and mining interests remain powerful drivers of deforestation. Balancing economic pressures with climate leadership will test political resolve.
  2. Financing the transition: Brazil is pushing for massive climate finance scaling, but securing commitments for the $1.3 trillion annual target will be politically contentious, especially given donor fatigue and fiscal constraints in developed economies.
  3. Geopolitical polarisation: COP30 is the first climate summit taking place without strong U.S. engagement, given Washington’s announced withdrawal from the Paris Agreement in 2026 . This leaves Brazil trying to mediate between the EU, China, BRICS, and vulnerable countries, all with diverging agendas.
  4. Institutional fragility: While Brazil champions new governance ideas like a UN Climate Change Council, consensus on reforming multilateral processes is difficult. Many countries remain wary of ceding more authority to new structures.
  5. Logistics and credibility: Hosting COP30 in Belém is symbolically powerful but practically challenging. The Amazonian city faces infrastructure constraints, raising concerns about logistics, inclusivity, and whether Brazil can deliver an event of this scale smoothly.

“Brazil has set the bar high. But if expectations outpace deliverables, COP30 risks being remembered as another missed opportunity.”

My Comments

Since there is a big push on climate funding, maybe they could get to the bottom of this.

Maybe donors are put off by no one knowing who gets the money and for what it is spent.  And while they are investigating, how about understanding Energy Return on Investment (EROI): you know, the notion that an energy project is worth doing if the energy produced is greater than energy spent.  The poster at the top reminds of people dreaming of a world free of fossil fuels.

Why a COP Briefing?

Actually, climate hysteria is like a seasonal sickness.  Each year a contagion of anxiety and fear is created by disinformation going viral in both legacy and social media in the run up to the annual autumnal COP.  Since the climatists are especially desperate with the US outspokenly against the climate movement, we can expect the public will be hugely hosed with alarms over the next few weeks.  Before the distress signals go full tilt, individuals need to inoculate themselves against the false claims, in order to build some herd immunity against the nonsense the media will promulgate. This post is offered as a means to that end.

Media Climate Hype is a Cover Up

Back in 2015 in the run up to Paris COP, French mathematicians published a thorough critique of the raison d’etre of the whole crusade. They said:

Fighting Global Warming is Absurd, Costly and Pointless.

  • Absurd because of no reliable evidence that anything unusual is happening in our climate.
  • Costly because trillions of dollars are wasted on immature, inefficient technologies that serve only to make cheap, reliable energy expensive and intermittent.
  • Pointless because we do not control the weather anyway.

The prestigious Société de Calcul Mathématique (Society for Mathematical Calculation) issued a detailed 195-page White Paper presenting a blistering point-by-point critique of the key dogmas of global warming. The synopsis with links to the entire document is at COP Briefing for Realists

Even without attending to their documentation, you can tell they are right because all the media climate hype is concentrated against those three points.

Finding: Nothing unusual is happening with our weather and climate.
Hype: Every metric or weather event is “unprecedented,” or “worse than we thought.”

Finding: Proposed solutions will cost many trillions of dollars for little effect or benefit.
Hype: Zero carbon will lead the world to do the right thing.  Anyway, the planet must be saved at any cost.

Finding: Nature operates without caring what humans do or think.
Hype: Any destructive natural event is blamed on humans burning fossil fuels.

How the Media Throws Up Flak to Defend False Suppositions

The Absurd Media:  Climate is Dangerous Today, Yesterday It was Ideal.

Billions of dollars have been spent researching any and all negative effects from a warming world: Everything from Acne to Zika virus.  A recent Climate Report repeats the usual litany of calamities to be feared and avoided by submitting to IPCC demands. The evidence does not support these claims. An example:

 It is scientifically established that human activities produce GHG emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere and the oceans, resulting in warming of Earth’s surface and the oceans, acidification of the oceans, increased variability of climate, with a higher incidence of extreme weather events, and other changes in the climate.

Moreover, leading experts believe that there is already more than enough excess heat in the climate system to do severe damage and that 2C of warming would have very significant adverse effects, including resulting in multi-meter sea level rise.

Experts have observed an increased incidence of climate-related extreme weather events, including increased frequency and intensity of extreme heat and heavy precipitation events and more severe droughts and associated heatwaves. Experts have also observed an increased incidence of large forest fires; and reduced snowpack affecting water resources in the western U.S. The most recent National Climate Assessment projects these climate impacts will continue to worsen in the future as global temperatures increase.

Alarming Weather and Wildfires

But: Weather is not more extreme.


And Wildfires were worse in the past.
But: Sea Level Rise is not accelerating.

post-glacial_sea_level

Litany of Changes

Seven of the ten hottest years on record have occurred within the last decade; wildfires are at an all-time high, while Arctic Sea ice is rapidly diminishing.

We are seeing one-in-a-thousand-year floods with astonishing frequency.

When it rains really hard, it’s harder than ever.

We’re seeing glaciers melting, sea level rising.

The length and the intensity of heatwaves has gone up dramatically.

Plants and trees are flowering earlier in the year. Birds are moving polewards.

We’re seeing more intense storms.

But: Arctic Ice has not declined since 2007.

But: All of these are within the range of past variability.In fact our climate is remarkably stable, compared to the range of daily temperatures during a year where I live.

And many aspects follow quasi-60 year cycles.

The Impractical Media:  Money is No Object in Saving the Planet.

Here it is blithely assumed that the UN can rule the seas to stop rising, heat waves to cease, and Arctic ice to grow (though why we would want that is debatable).  All this will be achieved by leaving fossil fuels in the ground and powering civilization with windmills and solar panels.  While admitting that our way of life depends on fossil fuels, they ignore the inadequacy of renewable energy sources at their present immaturity.

An Example:
The choice between incurring manageable costs now and the incalculable, perhaps even irreparable, burden Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children will face if Defendants fail to rapidly transition to a non-fossil fuel economy is clear. While the full costs of the climate damages that would result from maintaining a fossil fuel-based economy may be incalculable, there is already ample evidence concerning the lower bound of such costs, and with these minimum estimates, it is already clear that the cost of transitioning to a low/no carbon economy are far less than the benefits of such a transition. No rational calculus could come to an alternative conclusion. Defendants must act with all deliberate speed and immediately cease the subsidization of fossil fuels and any new fossil fuel projects, and implement policies to rapidly transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels.

But CO2 relation to Temperature is Inconsistent.

But: The planet is greener because of rising CO2.

But: Modern nations (G20) depend on fossil fuels for nearly 90% of their energy.

But: Renewables are not ready for prime time.

People need to know that adding renewables to an electrical grid presents both technical and economic challenges.  Experience shows that adding intermittent power more than 10% of the baseload makes precarious the reliability of the supply.  South Australia is demonstrating this with a series of blackouts when the grid cannot be balanced.  Germany got to a higher % by dumping its excess renewable generation onto neighboring countries until the EU finally woke up and stopped them. Texas got up to 29% by dumping onto neighboring states, and some like Georgia are having problems.

But more dangerous is the way renewables destroy the economics of electrical power.  Seasoned energy analyst Gail Tverberg writes:

In fact, I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today. There are too many costs outside building the devices themselves. It is these secondary costs that are problematic. Also, the presence of intermittent electricity disrupts competitive prices, leading to electricity prices that are far too low for other electricity providers, including those providing electricity using nuclear or natural gas. The tiny contribution of wind and solar to grid electricity cannot make up for the loss of more traditional electricity sources due to low prices.

These issues are discussed in more detail in the post Climateers Tilting at Windmills

The Irrational Media:  Whatever Happens in Nature is Our Fault.

An Example:

Other potential examples include agricultural losses. Whether or not insurance
reimburses farmers for their crops, there can be food shortages that lead to higher food
prices (that will be borne by consumers, that is, Youth Plaintiffs and Affected Children).
There is a further risk that as our climate and land use pattern changes, disease vectors
may also move (e.g., diseases formerly only in tropical climates move northward).36 This
could lead to material increases in public health costs

But: Actual climate zones are local and regional in scope, and they show little boundary change.

But: Ice cores show that it was warmer in the past, not due to humans.

The hype is produced by computer programs designed to frighten and distract children and the uninformed.  For example, there was mention above of “multi-meter” sea level rise.  It is all done with computer models.  For example, below is San Francisco.  More at USCS Warnings of Coastal Floodings

In addition, there is no mention that GCMs projections are running about twice as hot as observations.

Omitted is the fact GCMs correctly replicate tropospheric temperature observations only when CO2 warming is turned off.

Figure 5. Simplification of IPCC AR5 shown above in Fig. 4. The colored lines represent the range of results for the models and observations. The trends here represent trends at different levels of the tropical atmosphere from the surface up to 50,000 ft. The gray lines are the bounds for the range of observations, the blue for the range of IPCC model results without extra GHGs and the red for IPCC model results with extra GHGs.The key point displayed is the lack of overlap between the GHG model results (red) and the observations (gray). The nonGHG model runs (blue) overlap the observations almost completely.

In the effort to proclaim scientific certainty, neither the media nor IPCC discuss the lack of warming since the 1998 El Nino, despite two additional El Ninos in 2010 and 2016, plus an unexplained spike in 2023-24, now cooling off.

Further they exclude comparisons between fossil fuel consumption and temperature changes. The legal methodology for discerning causation regarding work environments or medicine side effects insists that the correlation be strong and consistent over time, and there be no confounding additional factors. As long as there is another equally or more likely explanation for a set of facts, the claimed causation is unproven. Such is the null hypothesis in legal terms: Things happen for many reasons unless you can prove one reason is dominant.

Finally, advocates and IPCC are picking on the wrong molecule. The climate is controlled not by CO2 but by H20. Oceans make climate through the massive movement of energy involved in water’s phase changes from solid to liquid to gas and back again. From those heat transfers come all that we call weather and climate: Clouds, Snow, Rain, Winds, and Storms.

Esteemed climate scientist Richard Lindzen ended a very fine recent presentation with this description of the climate system:

I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

Summary:  From this we learn three things:

Climate warms and cools without any help from humans.
Warming is good and cooling is bad.
The hypothetical warming from CO2 would be a good thing.