Many of my posts include some high quality infographics produced by a colleague, Raymond Inauen of RIC-Communications. In 2024 because of other pressing time demands, Raymond discontinued the website he set up to host the infographics. This post is to announce that he has now reactivated the website up for the public to access a series of infographics regarding CO2 and climate science.
The Website content is:
The World of CO2
Readers will be aware of previous posts on the four themes to be discovered. Raymond introduces this resource in this way:
WELCO₂ME
Would you like to learn more about CO₂ so you can have informed conversations about climate policy and future energy investments? Or would you rather pass judgment on CO₂ after learning about the basics? Then this is the website for you.
There are 29 infographic images that can be downloaded in four PDF files. Thanks again, Raymond for your interest and efforts to make essential scientific information available to one and all. PDF links are in red.
There are 29 infographic images that can be downloaded in four PDF files. Thanks again, Raymond for your interest and efforts to make essential scientific information available to one and all. PDF links are in red.
At that website the high resolution infographic PDFs can be downloaded at no charge with no restrictions on use. There are also informative videos and FAQ pages, as well as links to contact with questions, comments or additional suggestions. There is also a link to support this work if you are so inclined.
A comprehensive new study extending the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) record back to 1899 finds that both hot and cold temperature extremes across the contiguous United States have declined over the past 127 years. The research, performed by Dr. John R. Christy, Alabama State Climatologist (retired) and professor of atmospheric and Earth science at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, analyzed more than 40 million daily temperature observations to provide the most complete long-term view to date of U.S. extreme heat and cold. The paper is published in Theoretical and Applied Climatology. Excerpts below with my bolds and some added images.
Abstract
Knowledge of temperature extremes, and their potential changes within a climate system of increasing greenhouse gases, is of vital interest for humans and the infrastructure which supports them. To produce a better understanding of how daily extreme temperatures have changed over time in the conterminous US (CONUS), the United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) database was extended back to 1899 and forward to 2025. The original 1,218 stations, selected in the 1980s by NOAA as capable of addressing climate concerns, have since been neglected – almost half of the stations have closed since 2000. Incomplete station records were supplemented with nearby stations with high correlation and removeable biases to provide time series for 1,211 of the stations with at least 92% of data present. Extreme temperature metrics for summer daily maximum temperatures and winter daily minimum temperatures were calculated. The general result is that metrics for extreme summer heat, e.g., hottest values, number of heatwave days, etc., show modest negative trends since 1899. Extreme cold temperature metrics also indicate a decline in their occurrences especially since the 1990s. In sum, instances of both hot and cold extreme metrics have declined since 1899. To demonstrate an application of this dataset we examined the claims of one source regarding changing temperature extremes, The National Climate Assessment 5.
This metric determines for each day of the season the particular year in which the hottest (coldest) TMax (TMin) occurred. There are 153 (122) days in the May-Sep (Dec-Mar, leap year) for which a daily record will be achieved. The number of extremes occurring in each year is calculated per station then geographically interpolated as discussed above. This metric is more robust than the single All-Time metric above as each station contributes 153 (122) values to the time series rather than just one. This also provides an indication of the incidence of multiple hot and cold records to help identify periods of excess heat (cold).
The expected value for a purely random process for the number of daily TMax (TMin) records would be 1.20 (0.96) in a given year per station for a 127-year record (i.e., 1.20 = 153/127 and 0.96 = 122/127). The results (Fig. 4) indicate again that 1936 contributed the most daily hot records for the CONUS at 6.7 per station but followed more closely by other years, with 1934 (5.3), 1931 (3.4) and 1911 and 1925 (3.3) completing the top five.
The number of coldest records occurred in 1899 (3.7) in association with February 1899 event. The following years experienced extreme cold as well, 1917 (3.3), 1989 (2.9), 1924 (2.4) and 1936 (2.4). Thus, 1936 was a year with many extremes on both ends of the thermometer.
Comparing the two metrics in Figs. 10 and 11 produces Fig. 12 which displays the sum and the difference, year-by-year of the 15-yr running means. The sum of days in extreme heat/cold declined from over 120 in the 1930s to about 75 since 1960. The conclusion here would be that the CONUS has experienced a decline of around 30% of these durative extreme events in the past 100 years. Along with this decline has been an increase in heatwave days vs. cold wave days since the 1970s, mainly due to the increase in heatwave days in the West (Fig. 10) and the decline in cold wave days overall.
Discussion
Overall, our project indicates that extremes in summer heat-related metrics for the CONUS as defined in the four questions above do not show increasing trends, but rather modest negative trends, and thus appear to be substantially affected by other forcings such as natural variability in addition to GHGs. There are positive TMax metric trends in western regions which are countered by larger negative trends elsewhere.
The number of cold extreme events has declined in the past 30 years too and this is likely, in part, related to the development of infrastructure around the stations which disturbs the nocturnal boundary layer, inhibiting the formation of the cold, shallow layer in which TMin is observed. Additionally, this result may be an early sign of atmospheric warming of the coldest air masses by the added GHGs (e.g., Krayenhoff et al. 2018), though this hypothesis has not been confirmed as a direct result of GHGs (e.g., Huang et al. 2023). Observations of the deep atmospheric temperature in the polar region north of + 60° latitude indicate a warming trend of + 0.47 °F (+ 0.26 C) decade− 1 since 1979 compared with a global trend of + 0.27 °F (+ 0.15 C) decade− 1 (Spencer et al. 2017). This would suggest Arctic air intrusions into the CONUS may be slightly warmer now than in the past century or so (for whatever reason) and thus consistent with the results shown here for a lessening of the magnitude of cold events in recent decades. However, we note the same area in the southern hemisphere shows virtually no warming (+ 0.05 °F (+ 0.03 C) decade− 1).
Conclusions
In the field of climate change, attention has been drawn to extreme metrics occurring in the last several years as evidence for human influences through increasing GHGs (e.g., USGCRP 2017; Seneviratne et al. 2021; Jay et al. 2023). Examining this aspect of climate and weather is appropriate since human thriveability is often constrained by the magnitude of the extremes that we experience. We describe here a dataset constructed to examine the occurrence through time of extreme temperature metrics in the CONUS for the coldest winter and hottest summer days since Dec 1898. The dataset is based on the 1,218 USHCN stations 1,211 of which have been supplemented to be “complete”, i.e., each station having at least 92% of days available for analysis.
The results indicate that extremes in heat-related metrics for daily TMax in the summer have not increased and in fact often show modest declines since 1899, due mostly to the early heat events during 1925–1954. This is consistent with Seneviratne et al. 2021 (IPCC AR6, their Fig. 11). Cold-related extreme events based on winter TMin show evidence of decreasing occurrences, two causes of which were proposed, (1) increasing human development around weather stations, and (2) an early response to increasing GHGs as they warm the coldest air first. When taken together, the occurrences of heat and cold extremes have declined over the past 127 years in the CONUS, i.e., the climate over the CONUS has become less impacted by temperature extremes to this point.
Relating this reduction of extreme events to increasing GHGs would be difficult
as the magnitude of the regional natural variability of weather and climate
is considerable in comparison to a small GHG-induced temperature rise.
Once the shifts were accommodated, the time series (Fig. 14) for Fresno 12-month running anomalies indicate very different results between TMax and TMin, which is a clear indication of the NCI of urbanization. The TMax time series indicates no trend through 2012 (slightly negative) but contains a relatively sudden rise in 2013 which is consistent with the entire western CONUS as seen in Figs. 5 and 10. The overall TMax trend is + 0.03 °F (+ 0.02 C) decade− 1. The trend in TMin is + 0.43 °F (+ 0.24 C) decade− 1.
The impact of Non-Climatic Influences (NCI) was considered in the temperature evolution of one USHCN station, Fresno California, as an example of a clear and large response to forcings unrelated to the increasing GHGs. In this case, the urbanization impact on TMin of 5 °F (~ 3 °C) is clearly apparent, while summer TMax (with urbanization) indicates a trend not significantly different from zero. Voluminous research has and will be performed on this aspect of surface temperature records as these types of influences need to be identified and removed so that changes in the background climate due to GHGs may be estimated with more confidence. We also demonstrated that one must be cautious when interpreting official statements about extreme weather events for the CONUS.
The interview above explores a world mostly unknown to middle-aged adults and seniors, a world where young people became convinced the world was doomed because of climate change. Lucy Biggers participated in that world as a skilled influencer, but now is a voice for reason and optimism. For those preferring to read, a transcript is below, lightly edited from the captions, with some added images. MS refers to comments by Maya Sulkin of Free Press. LB refers to Lucy Biggers. H/T Raymond Inauen
Confessions of a Former Climate Activist
MS: Lucy Biggers, head of social media at the Free Press and former climate activist, thank you for being here today. We’re going to talk about why you joined the climate movement, why you left, and what gave you the courage to do so. LB: Thank you so much for having me.
Today we’re going to talk about how you went from being a leader, really, in the climate movement to now being one of its most outspoken critics. So before I knew the Free Press, Lucy, you were fighting to ban plastic straws and you were, you know, homies with AOC. Hey Lucy, I hear you’re doing a video on the Green New Deal and I’m thrilled. What happened to you? How did you get into that movement in the first place?
LB: Yeah, so I spent half of my 20s really in the climate movement and it started about when I was 25. I’m 35 now, so I know I look younger, right? MS: You do really give a lot of Gen Z energy, which we’re going to talk about. Yeah, I cosplay as Gen Z, but I’m actually 35, so that’s important to know the timing.
So in 2015 I was 25 and I worked at this newsroom called NowThis News and I was a video producer there, so I was scrolling all the time on Facebook and sort of the beginning of like the scrolling that we know now and my algorithm was just feeding me up environmental stories and I just kind of bought into the climate movement narrative. Some of the things that first got me into it were just documentaries. Before the Flood, which is a Leonardo DiCaprio film, which now, I think why do I trust Leonardo DiCaprio on this topic, but I watched that.
Josh Fox is a big climate activist who’s done films like Gasland, which now I know are very biased. So it was the documentaries and then even in my feed seeing this thing called the Dakota Access Pipeline protest, which was really big in 2016 and activists would comment, cover Dakota Access Pipeline, cover Dakota Access Pipeline, and so I started covering this protest against a pipeline that was being built in North Dakota. The whole year of 2016 I did that and that was really like when I first got into the movement and then over the years after that I built up my social media following on Instagram, covering things like the Green New Deal, interviewing Greta.
What are the personal choices that you make to be more environmentally friendly? Always like being down on single-use plastics, all the normal ideas that you think of when it comes to like the climate movement, that is what I was pushing and at the peak of it I had 50,000 followers on Instagram, which I say it’s like follower inflation because that’s not that much now, but in 2016 or maybe 2018, that was a lot and yeah so I kind of just gained a persona. I got a lot of support for that and next thing you know I’m just like a gung-ho climate activist pushing all these ideas.
MS: So part of being, as you know, an influencer, especially in political spaces, is that it kind of becomes your identity. I wonder while you’re absorbing this information, you’re reporting on it, what kind of led you to say you know what I’m gonna like make this my life really and attached my face, my reputation to kind of pushing this movement forward?
LB: Yeah so in the 20-teens, climate change was not a topic that was covered by the news a lot. It was a very undercovered story and so I saw an opening where I could really be of service to these other activists who were talking and raising the alarm bells about this and cover it and so I felt like I was on the side of justice where you know the scientists are saying the world’s gonna end in 10 years. Why is nobody talking about this? Like I’m gonna start talking about it and also I will say at that time I was very very left-wing and so I was very progressive and my whole newsroom was like that too.
So we were all like Bernie supporters and like this is why the 20-teens, it’s like really important to put yourself in that mindset of what that ideology was like at the time and now when I reflect on it, I think it was this desire to like do good in the world. Like I wanted to make an impact and I thought I could be of service and at the same time a lot of this ideology that we know now really well as woke stuff and the oppressor versus oppressed mindset was coming into my newsroom.
So now it was not just like oh I’m a Bernie supporter and I want free college. It was like oh if you have white privilege you need to sit down. Like if you’re a cis person you need to sit down and so in my, I’m in my mid-20s looking around the newsroom going I’ve got a lot of like privilege. And so when I’m seeing at the same time these Native Americans saying there’s a Dakota access pipeline going on our reservation and it’s evil and we need help fighting it, I’m like great I can be a really great ally.
And so psychologically in retrospect looking back I think it was this desire to like atone for my privileged position that I had in the world and the way I could atone was by propping up these narratives. So it was very emotional, emotiondriven as well as psychologically driven. And then black and white thinking where it was like the Native Americans in this fighting this pipeline are the good guys and the fossil fuels and the American government and just capitalism in general are the bad guys. And so a lot of that was happening at a subconscious level but that is what first drew me to it and I kind of took it on as an armor and it gave me a lot of accolades within the group of my colleagues and in the movement where it was like wow she’s a great ally, she’s doing so good.
MS: I wonder in addition to the social rewards which we’ll talk more about and I think is really common, what were in that time for you the biggest wins? Like whether they were policy changes or people you got to meet or reforms that were made in that moment what were the things that you were realizing, wow I helped make this happen and I’m so happy I did.
LB: So I keep talking about Dakota access pipeline and I don’t know if people watching this would know what it is but it was like the topic of the time. I remember it. Yeah it was right before Trump got elected. Yeah you were like six. But it was right before Trump got elected. So like this was like the beginning of the modern era now with the Trump derangement syndrome and everything. And so this was actually happening Obama’s last year and I guess I keep bringing that up because that was a huge win for me because I got that issue to have 100 million views on Facebook, the videos that I did.
So there were activist Facebook groups that were getting like zero views and I would put them on the this page and they would get 100 million views and there was a point when like Shailene Woodley went up at an environmental rewards show and she said go to Standing Rock. Don’t just tweet about it. Don’t just feed off of me getting arrested. Go to Standing Rock. I made that go viral. It got tens of millions of views like in a day and people went to Standing Rock which was insane.
I went to Standing Rock. There was a snowstorm. It’s on a reservation and I slept on the floor of a of a casino when I was there because like it was insane. But we all went and it like it was just like anything that we’ve now seen with these movements many times pro-Palestine, BLM, this sort of very emotionally driven black and white thinking movement and that’s what the climate movement was in the 20 teens. And the way that we saw with BLM in 2020 and then pro-Palestine since 2023. And so that was like the example of it and I just got swept up into it and it became part of my identity.
MS: At the peak of this movement, I wonder if you can just tell us what like the core tenets of thinking were.
LB: Yeah so the core tenets would be that the world’s going to end in 10 years unless we basically keep fossil fuels on the ground. It’s American imperialist capitalism’s fault and all of the politicians who aren’t doing anything, they don’t care. They’re bought out by fossil fuel industry. Anyone who raises a question of questioning the narrative, they’re a fossil fuel shill or they’re paid off. It’s not just that we have to save the planet, but it’s that the systems we operate in now are inherently evil. And if we just got rid of them we could live in a utopia where everyone would be living peacefully off of the land and we would have harmony and you know so it’s again like very weird.
The warmth of collectivism. Yes, there’s a lot of communist and Marxist undertones which I think is intentional by the people who are organizing it. But I am just a useful idiot at the time and just going along with it. When you get pulled into a movement like this, you start off by thinking I don’t want plastic in a turtle’s nose to next thing being “Down with the West”. Later you wonder how did I get here? I don’t know but I was drawn in by the emotions of it and now two years later I’m pushing the green new deal with AOC that says like every American deserves a job and we need no more fossil fuels and things that if they actually got enacted would be devastating.
MS: Like you referenced with Israel, Palestine like with BLM a kind of defining feature of all of these movements is one a sense of nihilism but also a lack of questioning and people who question things are often demonized. I wonder if you can first talk about if there were people when you were part of the in crowd that started to question things that were maybe ostracized or if you ever had a moment where you said this is this is starting to get a little bit freaky for me.
LB: I don’t think I ever saw other people questioning it. I think that every time I would step out of line if I would say something like well this doesn’t really make sense you know. When you say it among people who are true believers I would then go home and and my anxiety would spiral. My god they would think am I not a good ally because I said that plastic has a lower carbon footprint than glass. Which is a fact you know and so there be inconvenient facts and if they were brought up in certain contexts I would just feel so insecure leaving a situation where I might have said something outside of the party line.
Mind you, everyone was actually lovely and nice and this was more a self-inflicted thing. It’s not like people were like putting gun to my head to push climate stuff. It was literally a self-imposed thing, an ideology. I look back on it think that my sense of self was sitting on sand and so it was just so would go with the winds of the group. So I didn’t have a solidness inside of myself. What are my core tenant beliefs and so I just was told well you know capitalism is evil and we’re all going to die from climate change unless we do something now. I’m like okay like I’m gonna buy this and and I didn’t have the the confidence in myself to question it and go against the group.
And so whenever I came up with an idea that was contradictory I would just dismiss it. At this time there were people who even quietly were saying like, hey actually I am not so sure if this is true. The science maybe points to other things.
How were those people talked about within the movement? I don’t think those people are even acknowledged or talked about that stuff never broke through. Even now in my research that I do continually in reading books, I’ll learn about something and think: Oh that study that I thought was true, you know 97 percent of scientists agree that climate change is a problem, that has been so thoroughly discredited. But it never broke through to me because again, anyone who questioned it is like a white privileged nut. The white privilege thing is like I you can’t kind of separate it because again if like there was a scientist who say their identity is like a white man maybe a classic white man like trying to hold up the system.
So even though it’s a scientific movement, it really was completely divorced from science. I never looked up the science of it which is so embarrassing. I didn’t know what percentage of the atmosphere was CO2 until 2019 and that was when I realized it’s 0.04 percent, which is not a lot, which is a good thing you should know. Again all these people that I followed were activists documentary films. And I would just watch that one thing and take it as fact you know and then never question it until years and years later.
MS: So you’re deeply ensconced in this and then when is the first time that you look around and think something is going on here and I need to learn more. And then how do you make the the quite courageous decision, especially as your public identity is tied to this thing, to start questioning.
LB: I think that the whole time I was part of the movement I always had doubts. And because as I said, my internal sense of self is built on sand, I would get really triggered or have anxiety when someone would bring something up that might like make me question the foundations of these beliefs around the climate. And even a few months after Dakota Access Pipeline happened, I remember having a few glasses of wine with people like at my apartment and feeling like it’s kind of bullshit. When I was covering the Dakota Access Pipeline I was in the role of an advocate for the climate activists and the Native American activists perspective. So I pushed that message: This pipeline is invasive on our land, and it’s going to destroy our drinking water, and that it can’t go through because of climate change.
It was just the party line of the activists, even though inside I could see that there was a lot of problems with the argument. For one, the fact that when you transport oil over a pipeline it’s actually safer and better for the environment than doing it over trains. Because trains can crash and they have a carbon footprint themselves. I would go onto the pipeline website, and I could see a graph they drew and explained how it was going to go under the river and it would not leak into the drinking water. And so I would see the nuance but I almost felt like that wasn’t my role to show it. I have a forward-facing persona: this is what I mean to say and do and even if I see counter information it’s too much of a headache to even include that. Why would I even go down that line because then people are gonna be questioning my loyalty to the cause.
MS: Was there a moment before though when you really did think all of this was true?
LB: I could tell even the way I was covering stories, but I wasn’t covering them honestly or fully. It would almost be like an iceberg and I would show the tip of the iceberg and below the iceberg there’d be nuance and complexity. Or maybe part of it would throw cold water on the theory that I was pushing around this stuff. I would just ignore it and I remember always kind of feeling my coverage is so one-sided and it and it kind of hurt my heart a little bit. But again the cost of going against the group and trying to think of standing on my own I was too much to bear. So I’m just gonna put my trust in the group even though I’m seeing these contradictions. Other people know more than me.
MS: Did you just go with the calculus, I’m a vehicle for this movement and therefore I can only show the tip of the iceberg that they deem acceptable because doing otherwise would ostracize me. Or did you still fundamentally believe that, yes there’s all this other stuff that I’m not portraying in what I’m putting out there, but it’s kind of a distraction from the ultimate end which is creating an awareness or momentum behind this.
LB: I think that’s what it is, and I think that activists still do this. It’s like we don’t have time for nuance, we just have to push for the most extreme narrative because this is a fire alarm situation and the planet is going to be destroyed. We don’t have time to think about the downsides of solar and wind, we have to just keep pushing forward because this is existential.
And that was in 2019!
When you subscribe that this is an existential threat and we don’t have time to like look at the details, then we just have to get people to care and to be afraid. Because if they’re afraid they’re going to change their habits. But again the logical thinking was not there. Psychologically I was in such an insecure place with the group think and being in that work environment, the activist environment, that I didn’t use my logical thinking to the end. I would always stop thinking and then give up my autonomy to the group which was saying this this is an existential thing don’t ask questions.
MS: So when does this small hint of doubt are you slipping into something at like a drunk wine night turn you into this complete breakup?
LB: So the timeline is that I was at now this from 2015 to 2021 and so I was there through the COVID stuff too. I was visible, I was an on-camera person the whole time I was there, so the whole world shut down at the peak of COVID. We saw a 17 percent reduction in our carbon emissions with the peak of COVID. And I’m thinking to myself, wait a minute the climate movement wants 100 percent reduction in our carbon emissions. What is it going to extract from our society. We’re literally locked in our home not doing anything and we still have carbon emissions. That was the first moment where I go hold on. I don’t know if I want to live in a world where we have zero carbon emissions because I’m kind of depressed right now at home. This sucks and we have no freedoms and so what does the climate movement mean if you take it to its logical conclusion. No big deal except it’s going to require people to give up their freedoms to lower carbon emissions
So that was one thing and then the other thing was I was very anti-plastic and all of a sudden like the PPEs everywhere the masks the plastic barriers between every table at a restaurant and when you’re checking out your food at the grocery store and I’m like wait a minute I’ve been sweating about single-use plastic straw for the last five years and now we’ve proliferated more plastic in the last few months than I’ve seen in my lifetime and and also looking around we seem like we’re fine it looks like our society was able to absorb that plastic and the world has not ended
That was 2020 and then in 2021 I left my job and so I didn’t really say anything publicly while I was still there because I was in a public role. Then I was at a a non-profit for a year in a behind the scenes role before I came to the free press. I came to the free press end of 2022 I’m behind the scenes now two and a half years and I just started making content this past May. And that was the reason why I went from being behind the scenes that whole time was I was like I’m too afraid, and then my younger son turned one in April and that was when I kind of had a light bulb come back on. And I was like wait a minute like let me reconsider this. Do I really want to go to my grave never talking about the climate stuff that I have issues with, and what actually need to be said about weighing the cost analysis of doing this.
I just made a decision inside myself in May that I was going to make content and so I started making daily content on TikTok in May and then in June I went back to my Instagram where I’d had the following. So that was scarier. I made content there and then from there I’ve just continued to go all year you kind of internally before you go public with this depart from this way of thinking yeah
MS: I wonder if there was any personal confusion or loss of identity you had attached yourself in a public way to something and then even though it was quiet at first walked away right did you have an identity crisis of sorts?
LB: Yes I did because when I was in the climate movement I got my identity from being a good person and from being on the right side of history and so I identified with that. And so good people don’t question the climate movement you know, good people don’t listen to fossil fuel shills or defend fossil fuels, good people don’t question the climate narrative. This identity of being good and I talked a little bit about this idea of atoning right, because everyone’s obsessed with the white privilege and everything. I’m realizing that I’m an oppressor by being a white woman in from America and so I need to atone for my sins by pushing and being part of this movement and that is what makes me good. So if I’m going to leave this I’m no longer going to be seen as good and I’m no longer a good person.
So who am I and then that’s when you have to start doing the work of building up yourself your sense of self and identity in that internal world which again it took me again five years between questioning and leaving that job and then posting this past year.
MS: One thing I think about is like when you’re speaking about COVID and you’re saying we’re producing all this plastic and the world is fine yeah where does like the the agreement on scientific fact kind of end and conspiracy begin? In other words is there an actual downside to producing that much plastic and even if the world will be okay and we can innovate and adapt from it like is that a good thing for us to do, should we still be trying to limit it? Yeah, what are the facts that we should be operating under?
LB: Where I come down on this now is that the traditional environmental movement that was founded in conservation and protecting animals and getting pollution out of our environment is still very solid. But that’s not what the climate movement is. The climate movement is trying to change our energy system from reliable fossil fuels to unreliable solar and taxing us to do it. And getting us to worry about our carbon emissions and all these things.
So it’s very like convoluted, it’s like the demon spawn of environmentalism honestly. Obviously we should always reduce, reuse and recycle like the classic thing we learned in third grade. But that’s not really what the climate movement’s saying. The climate movement’s is guilting you for living a modern life; the climate movement is taxing and over-regulating reliable forms of energy and trying to get us to be dependent on solar and wind which we import those materials from China. The EU now has an energy crisis because of the green movement and so there’s so many negatives about the climate movement that go beyond just conservation and and don’t even get me started on the mental health stuff with the young people.
MS: Well that’s actually what I wanted to ask you about. But first I want to say it also seems like a core tenant actually goes against solutions or innovation. I think about the people that the movement idolizes, and that’s maybe AOC or Greta Thunberg. But they’re very much opposed to someone like Elon Musk for instance who in the creation of EVs has probably made something that’s affordable for people to lower their carbon footprint, whereas most people cannot afford to put solar panels on the top of their house.
LB: Right, part of it is actually anti-innovation, it’s very anti-innovation anti-human and the fact that the 14 year old Greta became the symbol of this movement should have been a red flag for me back in 2018. Why are we idolizing a 14 year old which shows you it’s not a rational movement, it’s an emotional movement. It has spiritual undertones, they’re kind of putting her up as this prophet. Ultimately from being in the movement for so many years, I realized that it’s an anti-human movement. They would say, well we can’t just innovate our ways out of this, we need to be consuming less and we need to not be using so much energy. So it’s we can’t innovate our way out of this, and you’re thinking, well we’ve innovated our way out of every other thing. You know there used to be piles of horse manure in New York City and now we have cars. Right it’s what humans do, we innovate our way out of everything.
But again this movement is like a lot of group think, they always have something to keep you in and keep you depressed about the state of the world. And I will say another thing that woke me up from it is that we naturally work together. You know I’m a very positive optimistic person and I have a lot of energy and enthusiasm for a life, and this is a very negative movement that basically makes you feel guilty for being alive and living a modern human life. As if we can choose when we’re born, as if oh I had a choice over being born in a modern time. And so that was another thing of self preservation for me where my nature was coming up against a very nihilistic movement and I had to get out for self-preservation.
MS: I want to ask you about one of the things that we’ve touched on, the way this doomerism has affected young people especially. My grocery store is in the building where there’s a climate clock above it saying there’s a countdown until everything’s going to implode. I think it’s one in five young people don’t want to have kids because of climate fears. I wonder if the nihilism is core to the movement and how you’ve seen this affect young people especially. Because it seems like this very convenient thing where you can feel like a good person for speaking out about it, but there’s not really anything that you can do. Because at the end of the day the clock is counting down and that’s what it is.
Yeah it’s so nihilistic and that is the thing that pushed me to start talking about this. Because I realized how young people are impacted, the wasted human capital that is happening because of how they’re taught this. You probably were taught it more than I was in school, but when I was in high school in 2006 we watched Al Gore’s movie Inconvenient Truth, and that one day was enough for me to like be freaked out. And I know now it’s even more really part of a the curriculum. Yeah for sure.
Actually one of our co-workers Sasha said to me after seeing one of my videos she was saying,oh my god I loved your video. Even if I didn’t know you, I would have loved seeing one of your videos. Because even when my friends and I are having a good time, there’ll be a pause and someone will say, but the planet’s burning. And I’m thinking, wow, you’re not even activists going anywhere. You just have a subconsciously held belief that you do not question, it is a law that the world is burning. Yeah I think that’s true for most young people. Yes people just assume that the world is burning and that is like common knowledge among younger generations. I don’t think older generations fully realize that.
MS: No it’s actually really random, but I was reporting a story about why young people were getting tattoos so much. And the most common thing all these Gen Z people said to me was: The world is burning. I’m going away, I may as well just get the tattoo I want because like nothing lasts forever. That was their answer.
LB: And these aren’t people who gluing their hands to a highway or covering themselves in paint. These are just normal people and that is the the cohort that I really care about. Because it’s just so sad when people walk through the world believing the world is going to end because of this when it’s so not true.
MS: So what do you think of Greta and AOC? They’re still kind of on this soapbox about maximalist climate doomerism. Why and and what do we make of that?
LB: I actually think they’ve fallen off of it a bit. Honestly AOC doesn’t talk about it as much like she was pushing the Green New Deal in 2019. And it was all about transitioning our electricity to 100% renewable within 10 years and guaranteeing a job for every American, which is hilarious. And then Greta’s gone for the pro Palestine. So they’ve backed off of it but without having a mea culpa, saying I was wrong. I think that’s a problem I had when the life I lived for many years where I had changed all my opinions but I never like corrected the record. So I just kind of faded away and that is also why I have a responsibility to set the record straight. And to counter this fear because I played a part in pushing it.
And we’re seeing the impacts now with these really poorly thought out green policies. Even in New York we know like it’s like electrify the heating here by 2030 and that’s going to cost these small business owners like millions of dollars to electrify apartment buildings or whatever it may be. That’s real world now, working class and middle class people who are now going to be on this bill like or be left to foot the bill for this climate ideology. And it’s really, really destructive even in Africa the World Bank up until a few years ago wasn’t lending to natural gas projects even though natural gas is the cleanest other than nuclear energy. And best way to get people out of poverty is to get them reliable energy. You want to give them natural gas and the world bank wouldn’t fund those projects because of climate change.
MS: Speaking of people like you who have said they were wrong, I’m really astonished by the delta of time between someone saying one thing and another. Especially in the case of Bill Gates who with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation was funding immense amount of research on climate change. She was very outspoken about it, and then a few months ago he basically said in the New York Times: Actually it’s all fine, this isn’t a real threat. It’s okay everyone, it’s gonna have an impact but it’s not deadly, it’s not the world ending. So I wonder, this is someone who is untouchable whose personal and public life will not really be affected by him changing his mind the way that it was for you. Why is someone like Bill Gates taking so long after we know the science of what is more true now. Why does it take him a decade basically?
LB: Yeah I mean it makes a lot of sense since this whole climate system and all the non-profits and the business models and there’s so many people making money off of this now. So how do you turn that ship, it’s really, really hard. And then you’re around people saying that the consensus is the world ending. So to go against that takes a lot of courage. Just to say for people who don’t know, on my Instagram now I make content that says things like climate change is not dangerous, deaths from natural disasters are down 95 % over the last 100 years. So where’s the emergency here? Some people just like stuff that’s sort of against this common knowledge. And I also get people in my comments saying you’re a fossil fuel shill, this is fake news. It’s just being able to not take every comment so seriously that it like throws me off. Because in the end of the day I’m making the content for the mom who just had a kid and is like really freaked out. And those are the messages I also get saying: Thank you for making your content. I was actually really freaked out about this but I’m not going to worry about this anymore. Again they’re not activists, they’re just normal people and I’m just giving them a signal amongst the noise where they like don’t know what to believe. And I’m ssying, okay I’m just gonna lay out the facts.
MS: It’s something we write a lot about the free press which is like how certain fields academia, medicine, science, the list goes on, has kind of things that are really meant to be rooted in fact, but have completely departed from that. It’s been taken over by an ideology. And maybe it’s naive or too optimistic, but I really do think that each of those things will have a breaking point, or at some point someone will say no, this is not what I signed up for. Do you see what that breaking point might be within the climate movement? Has it already happened?
LB: So the climate realist, climate skeptic community has been saying this message since the year 2000. Like there are so many amazing scientists who have been pushed out of their jobs, censored, deplatformed like literally cases against them have been brought up at the universities where they work to like push them out for just saying, you know, climate is not world ending. So, I’m not the first person to say this. That movement has been sort of trying to say this for so long. But before Elon bought Twitter and before Mark Zuckerberg became more based and opened up on the censorship which is less harsh now, these people would just be deplatformed as climate deniers.
Yeah. And so those people have already existed like there’s been scandals for 25 years. And so I think that they are kind of thinking, when is the breaking point? We’ve been trying to say this forever and we are getting ostracized. But the difference is now the censorship has now gone down a bit and it allows my voice to be important in this.
So my videos actually do not get censored on Instagram or Twitter, which they would have 5 years ago, right? And also there’s the scientists who have been saying all this stuff and I read their books. There’s like Patrick Moore who is the head of the Greenpeace. He founded Greenpeace and he’s now like a huge climate skeptic. There’s just so many people to name, but I basically am translating their work that they’ve been saying for years to the online Tik Tok generation. And so I think I think when I talk to them, they say they’re more hopeful than they’ve ever been because of Bill Gates, and the censorship is going down. And then you have Trump and Chris Wright, who’s the Department of Energy, who are just saying like, we’re not dealing with this stuff anymore. We’ve withdrawn from a lot of climate organizations like the IPCC and all these different things like we’re just not in them anymore because the science has been so corrupted. And so everyone’s like thank god this is like finally happened.
So, I think there is a huge turning point, but I do think that there’s like a lack of breaking through to the everyday person who’s not up on it. And again, and then you come across my content and you might just immediately trigger a flag: she’s a climate change denier. She’s a fossil fuel shell, right? Because if you’re still in that group think, you’re dismissing what I’m saying because you just come up with a reason not to trust what I’m saying.
MS: What do the the climate skeptic experts say is actually happening and therefore how we should live our lives accordingly. Do they say buy all the plastic you want, it doesn’t matter? What are they saying?
LB: So I actually spoke to Steve Koonin who is a former energy secretary for President Obama. So this is not like some right-wing person. So I think that’s a really important person to quote and he wrote the book unsettled in that came out in 2022. That just goes into what we know and what is unsettled when it comes to the climate science. He said that we know the planet has warmed 1.3 degrees since 1850. So we know that that is a fact. We are going through a warming period. We also know that we have released CO2 into the atmosphere by burning oil and gas and coal. Now how much of that warming is naturally occurring and how much of it is because of the CO2?
That’s when you now have this debate and that’s okay. There isn’t actually a consensus. Obviously, alarmists are like, “It’s our fault. Everything’s our fault. We’re heading to doom.” But that is not a commonly held belief even among scientists who are still in the space. That’s a media narrative.
Someone like Koonin might say it’s warming. However, that’s not necessarily a factor that would lead to our demise, right? And I will say that warming periods historically, which I’ve just learned in doing more research on this, historically humans flourish during warming periods because you have longer growing seasons. So you can support a population in a city. And the term for this is climate optimum. So that’s actually what geologists and archaeologists and historians would call these periods.
MS: Well, you did one reporting video where you spoke to young people who were at a climate protest, which I loved, and it was quite startling how little they knew about the facts you presented them. But I wonder what you would say to them, or really to the the young people who are saying, “I don’t want to have kids. I don’t want I feel really nihilistic about the future because of this, what do you say to them?”
LB: The number one fact I like to share because it’s just unequivocally true, is that deaths from natural disasters have gone down 99% in the past 100 years. So even with climate change, even let’s say the planet is warming, it’s so scary. Deaths have gone down 99%. So we’re safer than ever. Even with climate change, like we’ve we’ve seen 1.3 degrees of warming, and we’ve seen at the exact same time. It’s almost the exact same chart. Temperatures have gone up, human prosperity, literacy, women’s rights, all of the things. We know this has happened the past 150 years, right? We’ve had this huge boom of prosperity that’s happened during 1.3 degrees of warming. So if climate change was really so dangerous, shouldn’t we see some negative impacts, why is humanity still thriving so much even in the midst of climate change?
And I would also say don’t look at the climate models that say in 10 years the planet’s going to be this, in 30 years it’s going to be that. Those are models that are just computer models. You can put any bit of data in there to get any outcome that you want to prove there’s an apocalypse. And the scientists who do those models are incentivized to find that outcome. And so they’re not solid science. And so I would never base having kids or your future and your outlook on life. Never base it on a computer model.
MS: Lucy, thank you so much for joining me. I learn something new from you every day. So thank you.
LB: Thank you for having me. It was so much fun.
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.
Alex Newman reports at Liberty Sentinel New Climate Study Debunks Key UN IPCC Dogma. Excerpts in italics with my added bolds and images. Discussion of the Study itself follows later below.
Breaking research reveals the key metric behind so-called global warming
is based on “physically meaningless” calculations. If true,
it could upend decades of climate science and policy.
Lead author Jonathan Cohler, a physicist, who worked with top scientists around the world including Dr. Willie Soon, explained that even though the U.S. government is leaving the IPCC under Trump, the UN continues to march on with its climate agenda. However, with more and more evidence and scientific papers dismantling the core “science,” the UN’s agenda appears to be on thin ice.
“The public has been told that the ocean is ‘warming’ and absorbing over 90% of ‘excess’ planetary heat,” explained Cohler. “But when we examined how these numbers are actually calculated, we found they represent computational artifacts rather than measurements of real physical energy rendering the entire process a category error.”
The analysis focuses on data from the international Argo float program, a network of approximately 4,000 autonomous floats that drift through the ocean measuring temperature and other data. These measurements form the backbone of modern climate assessments, including those by the IPCC. Even leaving aside the fundamental category error, for the sake of argument, this research nonetheless reveals multiple fundamental problems with how this data is processed, Cohler said.
Fig. 1. (left) Global mean OHC (Cheng et al. 2024a) for 0–2000 m relative to a base period 1981–2010 (ZJ). The 95% confidence intervals are shown (sampling and instrumental uncertainties). (right) Trend from 2000 to 2023 in OHC for 0–2000 m (W m−2). The stippled areas show places where the trend is not significant at the 5% level. Source: Distinctive Pattern of Global Warming in Ocean Heat Content by Trenberth et al (2025).
[Note: The graph showing zettajoules can be misleading. Ocean heat graphs labelled in Zettajoules make it look scary, but the actual temperature changes involved are microscopic, and impossible to measure to such accuracy in pre-ARGO days. And as this post shows, ARGO measurements are also unreliable.]
Since 2004, for instance, ARGO data shows an increase of about two hundredths of a degree.
Abstract Global ocean heat content (OHC) anomalies and derived Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) estimates, central to contemporary climate assessments including IPCC AR6, are constructed through processes that violate the scientific method. These metrics rely almost exclusively on temperature data from the Argo profiling float array. Their validity and reliability hinge on several critical but herein refuted assumptions about measurement representativeness, interpolation/extrapolation methods, the physical meaning of anomalies, and integration conventions.
Core Argo and Biogeochemical Argo floats deliver discrete, point measurements of intensive properties like temperature along irregular, untracked three-dimensional trajectories during ascent from 2000 m to the surface. This samples only the upper ocean, excluding roughly 50% of total ocean volume and thermal energy. Horizontal positions are recorded only at surface intervals ~10 days apart, leaving subsurface locations entirely unknown. All data from each ascent are arbitrarily assigned to the surfacing position, introducing unknown horizontal offsets (up to 50 km) and temporal offsets (up to 10 hours) for the deepest measurements.
Anomalies are computed by subtracting values from statistically derived reference climatologies based on sparse historical data over arbitrary baseline periods. Measured temperatures are then interpolated onto global 3D grids using prescribed covariance functions. These anomalies represent numerical differences without physical meaning as temperature deviations, because temperature, an intensive property, is not additive across non-equilibrium spatial or temporal domains (Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018).
IPCC AR6 Earth Energy Budget fig. 7.2
The integrated OHC scalar depends heavily on arbitrary averaging and interpolation rules, producing computational artifacts rather than measures of actual ocean energy uptake or planetary radiative imbalance. Derived EEI values, such as the 0.7 ± 0.2 W m⁻² in IPCC AR6 Figure 7.2, inherit these biases and stem from circular methodology: CERES satellite top-of-atmosphere radiative flux measurements (absolute uncertainties ± 3–5 W m⁻² or higher) are adjusted via least squares to match Argo OHC-derived estimates, rather than offering independent validation.
We rigorously quantify major uncertainty sources, including unresolved mesoscale variability (± 0.9 W m⁻²), deep ocean ignorance bounds (± 0.35 W m⁻² from sparse Deep Argo), polar undersampling (± 0.1 W m⁻²), Nyquist-Shannon aliasing in sparse deep ocean and polar sampling, sealevel budget closure discrepancy between satellite altimetry/gravimetry and Argo OHC (±0.33 Wm-2), arbitrary baseline choices (± 0.2 W m⁻²), Eulerian-Lagrangian discrepancies (± 0.25 W m⁻²), and untracked trajectories and positional assignments.
Although the concepts of OHC and EEI are thermodynamically well-defined physical quantities, the numerical values produced by current Argo-based methodologies are physically meaningless computational constructs that do not validly represent those quantities. We conclude that EEI uncertainties reach >± 1 W m⁻² at 95% confidence, roughly an order of magnitude larger than the uncertainty that IPCC AR6 reports, rendering current OHC change and EEI estimates statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Conclusions
EEI estimates that depend on Argo-derived global OHC lack physical validity and reliability as measures of ocean thermal energy change or planetary radiative imbalance. The final OHC scalar is a computational artifact produced by assigning sparse intensive temperature measurements to arbitrary positions, subtracting them from a non-physical climatological reference, and integrating interpolated values that dominate the unsampled ocean volume. These operations destroy thermodynamic interpretability, rendering the resulting scalar sensitive to methodological choices rather than to any conserved physical quantity.
The widely cited claim that ~90–93% of the observed planetary heat gain is stored in the ocean, and that ~85–93% of oceanic uptake resides in the upper 2000 m (as adopted in Forster et al., 2021, Chapter 7, based on von Schuckmann et al., 2020, 2023), rests on this invalid calculation and is non-compliant with the scientific method. The claimed vertical partitioning is not empirically robust; given the structural uncertainties quantified herein, alternative distributions including a physically plausible 50-50 split between upper and deep ocean remain consistent with the flawed observational constraints and cannot be scientifically excluded.
The fundamental thermodynamic invalidity of averaging intensive temperature measurements across non-equilibrium spatial and temporal domains (as detailed in Section 1.2; Essex et al., 2007; Essex & Andresen, 2018; Cohler, 2025) renders global temperature metrics physically meaningless numerical abstractions. Without a physically meaningful, thermodynamically valid global metric for ocean energy change or planetary imbalance, current assessments of anthropogenic climate forcing and future projections lack an empirical foundation (see also Cohler et al.,2025, for independent evidence that the anthropogenic CO₂-global warming hypothesis lacks empirical substantiation due to natural dominance and model failures).
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 since1850 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.
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.
Twenty years ago “An Inconvenient Truth” received a standing ovation at the
Sundance Film Festival. Though it was full of predictions that never
came to pass, it was a key catalyst of the climate activist movement.
Twenty years ago Monday, former Vice-President Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and received a standing ovation. The 2006 documentary was released to theaters the following May and went on to gross over $25 million worldwide.
Gore’s film was a primary catalyst for the climate activist movement, and it generated a lot of concern about global warming following its release. The movie left audiences with the impression that the human race was hurtling toward a dystopian future on a planet baking in unbearable temperatures where extreme weather caused frequent disasters.
Almost 13 years to the day after its release, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., was telling people the world would end in 12 years – presumably five years from now – because of the burning of fossil fuels.
Matt Wielicki, who writes about climate and energy on his “Irrational Fear” Substack, was once an assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama. In the early part of his academic career, he taught at a local college.
Al Gore with a version of the Hockey Stick graph in the 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth
He told Just the News that he showed “An Inconvenient Truth” to his students. Over time, he began to question the “gloom and doom” narratives Gore presents in his film, he said.
“People took that as a starting point, and they just kept running further and further with it,” Wielicki said.
Gore’s film, however, was full of numerous predictions that turned out to be wrong, and it’s likely that the world will not end in 2031, as Ocasio-Cortez predicted.
Stubborn ice
Among the predictions Gore made in the documentary is that Africa’s Mt. Kilimanjaro would have no more snow on it by 2016. In 2020, The Times reported that the snow on the 19,000-foot mountain remained, despite Gore’s predictions. But the documentary had caused some to rush to climb the mountain before the snow disappeared. Instead, the tourists are surprised to find glaciers still clinging to it.
Gore also predicted that Glacier National Park would be “the park formerly known as Glacier” after all the ice melted away in the blazing hot temperatures that were to descend upon the human race. The claim made a big mark, and federal agencies began looking closely at glaciers.
The U.S. Geological Survey predicted all the glaciers in the park would be gone by 2020. Signs were placed throughout the park warning visitors of the impending end of glaciers, which never happened. Instead, CNN reported, the signs had to be removed in 2020 when it was clear the glaciers remained.
Gore also connected Hurricane Katrina to global warming – later renamed climate change – and he predicted that these storms would become more frequent. The reality of human contributions to hurricane activity is far more nuanced and uncertain than Gore discusses in the documentary.
Integrated Storm Activity Annually over the Continental U.S. (ISAAC). Value is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy from all storms over land.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a section on its website dedicated to the topic. The page reads.
“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming,”
Uncertainty and nuance
Meteorologist Chris Martz said that climate science is full of the kind of uncertainty and nuance you see on the NOAA website, which “An Inconvenient Truth” dismisses entirely.
Since Gore’s film was released – which was given a sequel in 2017 – Gore has continued to make false predictions, the meteorologist said. In 2009, Gore stated that the Arctic would be ice-free in summer within five to seven years. As of today, the Arctic still has ice in summer.
“We look at the Arctic ice now and yes, it’s declined since 1979 when satellite records began … But over the last 18 to 20 years, there’s really been no trend. And this caught scientists off guard. The models never predicted this,” Martz told Just the News.
He also said there’s been multiple studies on Arctic ice, and while some predicted an ice-free Arctic, others find the ice extent in the region recedes or grows as a result of natural variability.
Predictions of cataclysm stemming from climate change regularly get reported in the media, but there’s little reporting when the predictions fail.In 2022, NBC News was one of many outlets reporting that California and the American West were in the midst of a “megadrought,” which was the worst the region had seen in over 1,000 years.
Earlier this month, NBC reported that California is drought free for the first time in 25 years. The article makes no mention of the previously predicted “megadrought,” nor does it mention climate change.
Martz said that many of his critics respond to these failed predictions by arguing they weren’t made by scientists in peer-reviewed articles published in journals. Instead, they’re made by politicians or scientists in interviews. But most people don’t get their information from scientific journals. They get it from the media, Martz said.
“That communication is what’s more important in terms of public perception of what science is,” he said.
Listening to the experts
Though it had no scientific basis, there was a widespread belief that global warming could cause the human race to go extinct.
My Mind is Made Up, Don’t Confuse Me with the Facts. H/T Bjorn Lomborg, WUWT
People appear more likely to be influenced by Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez than the scientific data on deaths from climate-related natural disasters.
Her statement that the world would end in 12 years was actually a misreading of a special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which predicted that the world would need to cut its carbon dioxide emissions by 40-50% by 2030 and eliminate them entirely by 2050 to keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees celsius above levels they were at before humans began burning a lot of fossil fuels.
There’s nothing in the report that predicts disaster after crossing that threshold, and some experts are estimating that we have already done so. The report estimates that under the worst-case scenario, the global GDP loses about 2.6%, but it would still be about 10 times larger than it is today. But people didn’t read the report. They just heard Ocasio-Cortez warning of end times.
The report, or at least Ocasio-Cortez’s understanding of it, led her to introduce the ambitious Green New Deal plan, a suite of progressive policies justified as presenting global disaster. Itfailed to get a single vote when it was brought to the Senate floor for a procedural vote, which would mean, according to Ocasio-Cortez, the world has five years until it ends.
Larry Behrens, communications director for Power the Future, told Just the News that AOC likely spent the seven-year anniversary of her prediction doing exactly what she does any other day.
“Because she knows it was nonsense when she said it, and it’s nonsense now,” he said. “Make no mistake, she’ll join the rest of the eco-left in their convenient climate silence, hoping voters forget their green crusade delivered record energy prices and crushing inflation. On this anniversary, ‘climate’ is the last word AOC and her allies want to utter because midterms are coming, and voters remember exactly who made life more expensive.”
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.
Science Matters 