Aaron L. Nielson writes at Civitas Outlook regarding a possilble outbreak of scientifc chicanery by regulatory agencies in the wake of SCOTUS dismissing the Chevron deference to such bureaucrats.
The Court’s decision to overrule Chevron deference may have
the unintended effect of strengthening the
temptation to rely on the science charade.
What happens after the U.S. Supreme Court makes it harder for agencies to regulate? There are at least a couple of possibilities. Option One: an agency might just stop trying to regulate under that policy. Or Option Two: an agency might seek another path to achieve the same thing. The danger of Option Two may be one of the most important—but underappreciated—of the Court’s decision in Loper Bright, which overruled Chevron deference. My fear is that agencies will not simply give up but instead will lean into what Professor Wendy Wagner has dubbed “the Science Charade.”
Let’s start with some basics. Under Chevron, courts would defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation of ambiguous statutory language. The idea was that because agencies are more politically accountable than courts and have a better technical grasp of how complex statutory schemes work, when a statute administered by an agency is ambiguous, courts should get out of the way and let the agency act so long as the agency’s resolution of the ambiguity is reasonable. Chevron presented legal and conceptual problems (including why ambiguity should favor the agency rather than regulated parties, who may be punished—sometimes even criminally—for violating the agency’s view of the statute), but also a practical one that goes to the heart of administrative incentives. Because agencies could expand their power by finding ambiguities, agency officials, often responding to political demands, would unsurprisingly stretch to find them so they could pursue aggressive policies that Congress never authorized.
In Loper Bright, the Court essentially said “enough.” Under our Constitution, the legislature makes the law, and courts ensure that the executive stays within the law as written by Congress. After Loper Bright, courts decide the meaning of statutes, even statutes with some ambiguity. As Justice Clarence Thomas has, Article III’s vesting of the “judicial power” in the judiciary “calls for that exercise of independent judgment,” but “Chevron deference precludes judges from exercising that judgment,” thereby “wrest[ing] from Courts the ultimate interpretative authority to ‘say what the law is,’ and hand[ing] it over to the Executive.”
Loper Bright thus should be a welcome development for purposes of respecting the separation of powers, especially if agencies accept the limits of their authority. But there is a danger: What if they don’t? What if the same political dynamic that prompted agencies to stretch statutes in the first place may also prompt agencies to find alternatives to Chevron?
I have recently penned an articleabout one such alternative: the science charade. Wagner coined the term decades ago to explain an important dynamic within administrative law. As she observed, because judges often defer to agencies on questions of science, “the courts offer agencies strong and virtually inescapable incentives to conceal policy choices under the cover of scientific judgments and citations.” Rather than justifying the agency’s policy choice as a policy choice, agencies instead may dress-up their decisions as compelled by science.
To be sure, there are limits to the science charade. Agencies must engage in reasoned decision-making and justify their conclusions as not arbitrary or capricious. So if agencies push too hard, reviewing courts will sometimes catch on that a regulator’s policy choice has outrun its science. For example, I once worked on a where the National Marine Fishery Service used a “model [that] assumed that salmonids would be exposed to lethal levels of the pesticides continuously for a 96-hour period,” but never explained “why the 96-hour exposure assumption accurately reflected real-world conditions.” The appellate court didn’t buy it—but the district court did. This illustrates how difficult it can be to persuade a court to second-guess an agency’s invocation of science. (I often wonder what would have happened had the Environmental Protection Agency itself not criticized the National Marine Fishery Service’s “unreasonable” assumption.)
The intuition driving Wagner’s theory, thus, is impossible to brush aside. To be clear, I do not claim that agencies do this all the time. When we discuss the administrative state, we often focus on unusual occurrences rather than on an agency’s more banal, bread-and-butter operations. But that does not mean we should not worry about incentives or ignore the risk that unthinkable behavior may become more thinkable if bad incentives are not curbed. Agencies are filled with people who want certain policies. Human nature being what it is, people sometimes respond to incentives. So if the best way to get a policy through is to drape a policy decision in as much science as an agency can credibly muster, shouldn’t we expect regulators sometimes to succumb to the science charade’s temptation?
And that brings me to my thesis: Because agencies can no longer use Chevron to pursue policies that Congress has not allowed, their incentive to use the “science charade” should increase, again, at least at the margins.
As I explain in my article, suppose Congress has authorized an agency to “regulate Chemical X if it harms the public health.” Suppose further that agency officials want to restrict Chemical X because it harms birds, but it is unclear whether it has negative health effects on people. Under Chevron, the agency might have argued that the statute is ambiguous as to whether its authority is limited to protecting human health, so it can use the statute to protect birds, too. Of course, such a strained reading may have worked even before Loper Bright, but now agencies know that this interpretation won’t fly. So instead, the agency may lean into the science charade. Because generalist judges may be more comfortable deferring to scientific analysis than to overt policymaking, agencies may deduce that they should not say “we care about birds,” but instead should overstate what the science says about the effects of Chemical X on human health.
Using the science charade as a substitute for Chevron, may thus
allow them to protect birds under the guise of protecting human health.
This increased incentive to rely on faux science should be alarming for at least two reasons.One, the statute books overflow with delegations that are triggered when certain facts about the world exist—facts that require scientific or technical (e.g., economics) judgments beyond the ordinary experience of judges. Agencies may thus stop scouring the U.S. Code for ambiguities and instead scour it for delegations that kick in if certain scientific findings are made. And two, there is a “boy who called wolf” danger.
Good policy needs good science, but if agencies cannot be trusted,
skeptical courts may erroneously reject agency conclusions
that, in reality, are supported by good science.
Unfortunately, there is no great solution to the science charade. The reason why the charade can work is that judges are not scientists, and even if they have some scientific or other technical training, no one can know everything about everything. Generalist judges are simply not equipped to understand all the technical issues the administrative state presents. Although there are downsides, the best answer might be greater procedural formality in the regulatory process—complete with more extensive cross-examination of agency experts to create a record that may be more understandable to judges. (Of course, the dynamic effect of that prospect may be to dissuade bad science from the get-go.) As I have explained elsewhere, increasing procedural rigor is not costless, which is one reason the administrative state has largely moved away from procedural devices such as cross-examination. But for certain categories of regulatory action, it might make sense to head off bad incentives. Of course, some may argue (presumably, Wagner herself) that such costs are not worth it. But especially given the heightened incentive caused by Chevron’s demise, I’m not so sanguine.
Like most complex systems, the administrative state resists easy answers. It is important to think through incentives and unintended consequences. The Court’s decision to overrule Chevron deference addresses one incentive—the enticement to hunt for statutory language that agencies can claim is ambiguous. But it may have the unintended effect of strengthening the temptation to rely on the science charade. There is no silver-bullet solution; it is important to recognize why agencies act as they do and to create systems to best maximize the benefits of agency expertise while preventing its abuse.
Footnote: A Blast from the past warning about this very issue
On the subject, ‘How to get climate policy back on course’ , A panel of British professors included this observation:
“Climate change was brought to the attention of policy-makers by scientists. From the outset, these scientists also brought their preferred solutions to the table in US Congressional hearings and other policy forums, all bundled. The proposition that ‘science’ somehow dictated particular policy responses, encouraged –indeed instructed – those who found those particular strategies unattractive to argue about the science.
So, a distinctive characteristic of the climate change debate has been of scientists claiming with the authority of their position that their results dictated particular policies; of policy makers claiming that their preferred choices were dictated by science, and both acting as if ‘science’ and ‘policy’ were simply and rigidly linked as if it were a matter of escaping from the path of an oncoming tornado.
In the case of climate modelling, which has been prominent in the public debate, the many and varied ‘projective’ scenarios (that is, explorations of plausible futures using computer models conditioned on a large number of assumptions and simplifications) are sufficient to undergird just about any view of the future that one prefers. But the ‘projective’ models they produce have frequently been conflated implicitly and sometimes wilfully with what politicians really want, namely ‘predictive’ scenarios: that is, precise forecasts of the future.”
In the above presentation, Dr. Bernd Fleischmann cuts to the quick on the Issue: Is Climate hysteria scientifically refuted? In this provocative lecture, the speaker addresses current climate and environmental issues in the context of global warming and the political agenda. He criticizes the German Federal Constitutional Court’s climate rulingand questions the compatibility of fundamental rights with CO2 reduction measures. Furthermore, he refutes the tipping point theory and many climate models as unreliable, emphasizing the marginal influence of CO₂ on temperature in favor of natural factors.
He also addresses the unintended consequences of wind power and warns against a political agendathat allegedly seeks greater control over the population. The speaker appeals to the audience to critically consider the information disseminated. H/T NoTricksZone
I received today an email from Dr. Bernd Fleischmann acknowledging my effort to present an english version of his recent presentation. In order to have a more accurate and complete communication he sent me the set of english slides in a pdf embedded below. Along with several additional exhibits, this makes a much more powerful and accessible statement of his points regarding the notion of a Climate Crisis. You can either scroll through the exhibits embedded on this page, or download the pdf file by hitting the download button at the bottom. Link in red goes to post with english slikes.
The original language is german, but video settings allow for choice of language, both audio and closed captions. For those who prefer to read I provide below a lightly edited transcript with my bolds and added images consisting of the following themes:
Introduction to the Climate Issue
Ignorance as the Basis of Climate Policy
The Media and Their Responsibility
Propaganda in Climate Research
The Reality of the ‘Climate Crisis’
The Influence of CO2 on Plants
Wind Turbines and Their Unexpected Consequences
Redistribution Through Climate Policy
Conclusions and Personal Remarks
Introduction to the Climate Issue
The question is, of course, a rhetorical question, as you can imagine. But the topic is interesting and still very important. And you can see that, for example, in the climate decision of the Federal Constitutional Court. Most of you probably don’t remember it being published a few years ago. But the fewest know that we will be affected by it for the next few years. Because it was decided that for Germany a carbon dioxide budget of 6.7 gigatons is still available, so that we can save the global climate.
And we have already used half of that. And we will have used the remaining half in the next five years or so. And what comes next? The Constitutional Court already has a solution for this. It wrote at the time that behaviors that are directly or indirectly associated with CO2 emissions can only be allowed if the basic rights can be implemented in accordance with climate protection. But the relative weight of freedom of movement, i.e. not free time, but freedom of movement, i.e. eating a sausage, driving a car, these are freedom of movement, because all of this is harmful to carbon dioxide. They are then restricted.
And we have to be aware of that. In the decision that took place without oral negotiations and without listening to reasonable people, but only relied on the results of the IPCC and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research, only these, I would say, alarmist models were laid down. And now we have to ask ourselves, can you trust them? Can you trust the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research? It is the most influential climate institute in the world with almost 500 employees, which we all here finance, as far as we pay taxes.
And they, for example, they brought up the legend of the tipping points. There was a publication in 2008. And this is a picture from this publication without the arrows. I added the arrows. I may have to explain it briefly. Tipping points are elements of the Earth’s climate system. These are these colorful surfaces here that will tip when it gets a few degrees warmer. That’s the assumption. And they defined around a dozen of these tipping points at the time.
And eleven years later, in 2019, the five elements on which the arrows indicate, I added these arrows because they no longer appeared in the update in 2019. For example, the greening of the Sahara was a positive tipping point. The theory is, and it’s actually true so far, when it gets warmer, more water evaporates from the oceans. There are then clouds and then it rains more. And then the Sahara turns green. And as a tipping point, it was also defined that way because it stays green.
But because this is not alarmistic enough, this tipping point was thrown out. And the other tipping points don’t appear in the update either. This is a graphic from the update in 2019. Other tipping points are defined there. But they have long been contradicted by statistics and climate history. So the greening of the Sahara was no longer an issue.
And measurements contradict almost all these tipping points. And as alarmists, they pay for themselves. So you can’t trust the Potsdam Institute for Climate Follow-up Research.
At least, you can trust the World Climate Council. They wrote something right 13 years ago. Namely, if the CO2 content in the atmosphere doubles, i.e. 100% more, then the temperature rises by any value between 1 and 6 degrees. That was pretty honest. Especially because they also added with 10% more probability, with 5% less probability.
Ignorance as the Basis of Climate Policy
But ultimately, this tension between 1 and 6 degrees means that they don’t know. This is a sign of ignorance. And everything that is told to us, it is based on a mean value that they have taken, but which cannot be justified by the models. It is arbitrary.
If you look at CO2 alone, then it becomes warmer by a maximum of 1 degree, rather less. And everything that is added, it comes through feedback. And these positive feedbacks, these reinforcing feedbacks. A feedback, a positive one is, for example, if I hold the microphone towards the speaker, then it whistles. This is a reinforcing feedback.
And every reinforcing feedback in a loss-free system leads to instability. And the climate would then be unstable if these models were correct. But the climate has been stable for the last 10,000 years, as we all know. The climate system is stable, the feedbacks are not reinforcing. And the measurements also confirm these reinforcing feedbacks.
Richard Lindzen is one of the advisors of Donald Trump. And he is an emerited professor. Almost everyone who dares to tell the truth is emerited these days, because they are no longer dependent on financial support. And he said, all models do not agree with the observations. So the positive feedback in the models is wrong. In the last IPCC report of 2021, this span was slightly reduced from 1 to 6 degrees.
But at the same time he wrote, our new models scatter more than the old ones. That is, it is actually a larger span that these models produce, which has nothing to do with reality. And from the new IPCC report is this graph.
I have to explain this now. This graph represents the reflected solar radiation. What comes down from the sun is reflected. From clouds, from everything that is on the earth’s surface, from ice and snow, of course, but also from plants, etc. And this graph, the black one, is supposed to be the measurement. And the colorful ones are models. And this graph shows that the reflection is increasing. So more is scattered back. And if more solar radiation is scattered back, it gets colder.
Figure 8. Comparison between observed global temperature anomalies and CERES-reported changes in the Earth’s absorbed solar flux. The two data series representing 13-month running means are highly correlated with the absorbed SW flux explaining 78% of the temperature variation (R2 = 0.78). The global temperature lags the absorbed solar radiation between 0 and 9 months, which indicates that climate change in the 21st Century was driven by solar forcing.
So this graph indicates that this cannot be a reason for the warming that we have found. And this is the original graph, the lower graph. From the CERES program, that is a satellite measurement program, you can call it. And the two graphs are exactly mirrored. So in fact, the reflected solar radiation, which is reflected by the sun, has become less over the last few years. And significantly less. And that explains the warming. That is, because the IPCC has shown the opposite, they have mirrored it. This cannot have been a coincidence.
Figure 10. This graph is the cloud fraction and is set forth on the left vertical axis. The temperature is on the right vertical axis and the horizontal axis represents the observation year. The information was extrapolated from figures prepared by Hans-Rolf Dubal and Fritz Vahrenholt [37]. Source: Nelson & Nelson (2024;)
The report has 3,000 pages, just the one from the Working Group 1, which deals with physics. And around this graph, there is about a third page, which deals with it and does not really thematize it. So, the increase in the absorbed solar radiation, it is less reflected, it is absorbed more, that explains the warming. And I calculated that, how the temperature development is. And I have taken this increase of the absorbed solar radiation into account.
The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.
And El Niño in the Pacific and the Niño phenomena in the Atlantic. These are ocean cycles, which are irregular, but occur again and again. They then cause, for example, for this warming 2010, 2016, 2024. So it has to do with the ocean cycles. And the linear trend since 2000 to 2025, it comes from the increase of the absorbed solar radiation. The blue curve is the temperature curve measured by satellites. And the orange curve, I hope this is also orange here, the orange curve is the temperature curve that I calculated.
Without greenhouse gases, only the effects, increase of the absorbed solar radiation and the ocean cycles in the Pacific and in the Atlantic. That’s it. That’s it to calculate how the temperature develops. The difference between the two curves is in the middle 0.05 degrees. And you will not finda climate researcher who, with the greenhouse theory, with CO2 and something else, comes to similarly good agreement. I have, as I said, completely ignored the greenhouse gases and come to a very good agreement.
CO2 plays a small role, in my opinion, but it is so small that it has been declining more or less in the rush for at least the last 25 years. So what the IPCC said in 2013, 1 to 6 degrees temperature range, this ignorance, that was the basis for the Paris climate agreement, for the EU Green Deal, for the Climate Decision of the Federal Constitutional Court and, as a result, for the destruction of industry in Germany, for the poverty of the population. You probably already feel it in your wallet. And for future freedom restrictions. All this is based on ignorance.
The Media and Their Responsibility
And the Germans are of course not the only ones who are on this wrong path. The UNO propagates it quite strongly. This figure here, this knight of the sad figure, this is Antonio Guterres, the UN General Secretary, and he spoke of the sinking planet. He is very good with his formulations. The sinking planet, it supposedly stands in the water in front of Tuvalu. This is an island group in the Pacific. Coral islands.
And the article in Time magazine is from 2019. A year earlier there was a publication that dealt with how the surface of Tuvalu develops. And they found that Tuvalu is growing. Coral islands adapt to the sea level. The corals form a rock. This is then partially ground up in the surf and lifted up to the island with the next storm. That is why they have not sunk in the last thousand years and will not do so when the sea level rises, which it does, but also much slower than many claim. It grows at almost all measuring stations only with 1-2 mm per year. So that was a lie that the planet is sinking.
Nonsense anyway. He then increased it with the statement that the era of global warming is over. We are now in the era of global cooking. I think that from 10 km above sea level the water boils at 40 ° C or so. But what he says is complete nonsense. I ask myself, how did this socialist become UN Secretary General? Who is pulling the strings? And the most important question that interests me the most is, what does this guy smoke? Time magazine definitely spreads lies.
When I read this headline it took me about 5 seconds to find out in Google what is really going on with Tuvalu. And they have to do that too. It is their duty as journalists to report truthfully.
Well, the Time magazine is not so great now, but we still have the Upper Bavarian Volkszeitung. Climate emergency, United Nations set alarm. This, of course, also comes from Guterres. And it says in the article I called it on April 20th. The article is from March 24th. And it says the past year was the second or third warmest since measured.
The second or third warmest, okay. But we know exactly that it was 1.43 degrees warmer than 150 years ago. So they know that by a hundredth of a degree. But not whether it was the second or third warmest. Questionable. Well, the reference period is 1850 to 1900. Guterres added other nonsense, load limits, etc. Of course I looked at it. I thought, okay, very interesting.
What measuring stations were there in 1850? I looked up at NASA. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies has several thousand measuring stations that are, I’m not allowed to say, manipulated, that design it creatively. But of course they didn’t do that for the time from 1850, because these are all measuring stations from the time until 1879.
They don’t need new glasses. There are none. This is a graph directly from the website of NASA GIS. And you can enter which period. I entered from 1879. So all stations that have been running continuously since 1879. And that’s exactly zero. Exactly zero. And then I looked at what it looks like on the other side of the globe. So it’s Pacific, Australia, Antarctica. And the period from 1880. There were the first measuring stations. And that’s a handful. A handful for half the globe. At that time there was not a single measuring station in Africa.
Not a single one. And in many other countries of the world there was not a single measuring station. And on 95% of the earth’s surface there were no measuring stations at all. There are still no measuring stations today that provide really meaningful values in most of Africa on an area of 20 million square kilometers. That’s twice as much as the area of Europe. There are no measuring stations.
And then they produce a temperature for the globe with an accuracy of one hundredth of a degree for a period when there were practically no measuring stations. That’s nonsense. Yes, down here in Argentina there is a measuring station. I looked at it. It shows a cooling down for the last 150 years. So how much warmer has it actually become? Certainly not 1.43 degrees since the end of the Little Ice Age.
Yes, the end of the 19th century. Yes, this reference period 1850 to 1900. That was the coldest phase of the Holocene of the last 10,000 years. The glaciers have advanced as far as never in the last 10,000 years. They have threatened villages in Switzerland. You can read that. It was the coldest phase.
And a warmer phase was, for example, the High Middle Ages about 1,000 years ago. And you know that it was about as warm as it is today. Otherwise, the Vikings would not have made their way to Greenland. Well, Greenland was not entirely green. It is not entirely covered by ice today. But Iceland was ice-free a few thousand years ago.
And my estimate for the temperature development in the last 1,000 years is 0 plus or minus 1 degree. So I don’t know it exactly. I don’t know if anyone knows it better. But this 0 plus or minus 1 degree is, let’s say, an engineer-like statement with an uncertainty.
Propaganda in Climate Research
1.43 degrees without uncertainty is propaganda. And propaganda is what the media can do best. Some of you may remember this hysteria from three years ago. Po river and Lake Garda are drying up. The editorial network Deutschland is one of almost 500 media where the SPD has the say. 500. I think they have a share in more media than not. But they were not the only ones.
Po river and Lake Garda are drying up. Lake Garda is only filled to 38%. The average depth of Lake Garda is 133 meters. Absolutely ridiculous. But news agencies like Reuters and EPA have spread the nonsense. The Süddeutsche Zeitung, Die Zeit and of course ARD and ZDF. And the fact is, the level was only 0.5 meters lower than usual at this time of year. A few months later it was higher than usual in the summer.
Yes, this is just normal variation. Therefore, my recommendation to the media and if a media representative is here, please turn on your brain before you spread nonsense.
The Reality of the ‘Climate Crisis’
So, there would be a climate crisis if it got colder. Yes, the little ice age, that was the phase of starvation, poverty, but also flooding. The largest part of the flood was 200 years ago in the little ice age, 1804. Not the one 5 years ago, in 1804 it was worse. And what you see here, this is the vegetation in North Africa. Once to the peak of the Holocene, that is, the current warm season, about 6000 years ago.
And there you see three little white spots up here. I don’t know if you can see them on the screen. Yes, you can still see them. These three little white spots, that was the desert 6000 years ago. Today it is almost the entire desert of North Africa because it has become colder. It was warmer back then and there were no glaciers on Iceland because it was warmer.
So there were not glaciers, but birch forests. And the lower graphic is for the last interglacial warm period 130,000 years ago. It was even warmer there. It was about 8 degrees warmer than today. And what happened? The Sahara was even greener. And all climate researchers know that it was warmer and greener back then.
That’s why you hear a lot, we had the hottest month, the hottest year since 125,000 years ago. Because 125,000 years ago the interglacial period came to an end and the ice age began. And the EME warm period was so warm without the four private jets of Bill Gates. He has four, two Bombardier, two Gulfstream and without our beautiful SUV.
The Influence of CO2 on Plants
Back to the topic of the climate crisis. More CO2 is of course also good. The plants need CO2 to grow. Everyone knows that. And the more CO2 is in the air, the better they grow. That’s why CO2 dioxide is often added. And this graph is from the Australian Environment Agency. This graph shows the growth of leaf coverings in the last 40 years. And green and blue areas show an increase in leaves and only the red areas show a decrease.
So where there is a fire, there is less fire. But especially in the semi-dry areas in the Sahel, that is the area south of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Indian ocean, it has become much greener. In India it has become much greener.
In Australia and other areas it has become much greener. That is why they do not belong to war zones. The population of the Sahel has tripled to quadrupled in all countries in the last 40 years. Because it has become greener, they were able to do that. The deserts are getting smaller. And the Sahel has benefited more than almost any other region in the world.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung has written the opposite. Where is the Sahel zone, whose inhabitants suffer the most from climate change? I think Dr. Weiss, the director of the Wissensredaktion, knows it better. I had a communication with the Süddeutsche three years ago. I showed them with scientific publications ten mistakes on their website . Within a few days I got an answer. They did not try to contradict me. They told me five other things, which were also wrong. These mistakes are still on the website. And I have a presentation on my website, in which the mistakes are shown and why they are mistakes. And because I drew the attention of the Süddeutsche Zeitung to the mistakes, it is no longer an accident or out of ignorance. They deliberately lie.
Is it better to be warm? Someone has to tell this to Karl Lauterbach, who annoys us with his heat protection killers. This is from a publication in Lancet. This is one of the most famous medical science journals. Unfortunately, the graphic is as it is. You can’t see what it says. This is an overview of all European countries, from southern Europe to northern Europe.
The blue bars are deaths from severe cold. The red bars are deaths from severe heat. It looks similar in size. It looks like this for you, because you can’t see the scale below. The ones in the front can see it. The scale is about 5 different.
And if you compare it with the same scale, it looks like the chart on the right. There are 5 to 10 times more deaths from cold than from heat Even in southern Europe, there are more deaths from cold than from heat. Even in the countries of Africa and Oceania, this was found in another publication.
Heat is not the problem. In Singapore, the average temperature is 17 degrees higher than in Germany. And people live 5 years longer. It even says on Wikipedia, there are different times, life expectancy, temperature. Of course, this is even on Wikipedia on different pages, life expectancy, temperature, but it is a fact. So five to ten times more deaths from cold than from heat.
Wind Turbines and Their Unexpected Consequences
So why are we doing all this with the wind turbines? Can we trust the wind turbine lobby? Of course, this is also a rhetorical question, the solution is coming.
This is unfortunately a complicated graphic, but it can be explained relatively well. Because it doesn’t cool down so well, more water evaporates from the ground. The soils dry out more with wind turbines. And if you plaster the whole world with wind turbines, if you switch the entire energy supply to wind and sun, then there is a Temperature increase that people have calculated. And the red curve down here, this is the temperature curve for the case that 40% of the total energy is generated by wind turbines, 4 seconds. 40% worldwide increases the temperature, I think you can see, by 1 to 3°, so more than carbon dioxide. Its a Chinese publication and Germany would then be a single windpark with hundreds of thousands of wind turbines.
Firstly, we don’t want to see that and, secondly,
we don’t want it for our soils and for the quality of life.
But not only the Chinese have found out, but there is a marine research center, the Helmholz-Zentrum Hereon. They have investigated this for wind turbines in the sea and they have found that these wind farms are changing the North Sea. They even change the ocean currents, they change the mixing on the surface and the reduction of the wind behind the wind farms. This can be measured up to 70 km behind the wind farm.
And then they wrote, so not me, but Helmholz-Zentrum Hereon, who live on taxpayers’ money, they were honest, they wrote that the changes show similar orders of magnitude as the suspected ones changes due to climate change. So, we want to prevent climate change and prevent a suspected and definitely create climate change with the wind turbines. So it really doesn’t get any dumber than that.
And we don’t just change the climate with wind turbines,
some people get sick with the infrasound of the wind turbines.
Not everyone may be so sensitive, but these infracircuits are the pulsed pressure changes that result from such a propeller blade passing the mast. This creates a pressure that spreads. You can’t hear it, but you can feel it. These are enormously high switching pressures and just like they are in the Discoen bass, you can feel it when you’re around. And sensitive people can still do that in 5 km distance, via petzo channels in our cells.
There are publications for this discovery, the Pzukanal even won the Nobel Prize in 2021. So that’s science, that’s not whirlwind. And the organ that suffers the worst from these pressure fluctuations is our brain. And maybe they want to make us stupid on purpose so that we continue to vote for the old parties. I don’t know. So, here are a few sources. There is much more. You can’t find the information on my website yet. I have them relatively new.
Redistribution Through Climate Policy
Okay, they trust Harald Lesch from his statements. He once said that there were temperature increases of more than 10° within a few decades. That’s right. That happened in the Ice Age. Today the argument says:
“Climate change is man-made, leads to catastrophic storms and thermal power plants increase the temperature through their waste heat.”
This is all wrong with the idea of the climate case He has a climate kit for the Ludwig Maximilian University which was distributed to all kinds of schools. When presenting this case, he made 30 false statements in one hour, which I was able to prove to him. 30, so one every 2 minutes. I won’t go into detail about it now, you can find a PDF on my website. If you see, hit me around the ears. Good.
So, who ultimately benefits? Ottmar Edenhofer said that 16 years ago, he is Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Research and he said that we are redistributing money and de facto destroying the world’s wealth. He did not say to whom it would be redistributed. However, he has admittedly, it has nothing to do with environmental policy. In any case, it doesn’t reach the poorest. And who benefits?
Yes, who has benefited from the Covid vaccination? Vaccination in quotation marks, of course. Some of you will probably think of this name here. Bill Gates has sent a letter to all participants of the last climate conference in Brazil and said that there are more important things than a certain temperature that we must not exceed. Feeding the world is more important and he did not say the medical care provided by the pharmaceutical companies he leads. I took a closer look at his letter.
He makes statements in various areas where we have to achieve net zero. He stands by his statement, we need net zero as soon as possible. and he named 36 companies in this letter. And I took a look at what kind of companies they are. They are all from Breakthrough Energy’s portfolio. This is an investment vehicle that he founded, in which Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Bloomberg Media’s Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires are involved.
Why did he write this letter? Because the USA has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement and all these companies are not viable, without subsidies and without regulations that applied in the USA and no longer apply. That was a battle letter to the other states. Make the motto: “Help me, otherwise I’ll get in trouble from my fellow billionaires.” And this energy transition in quotation marks with almost everything we do is a redistribution from poor to rich and super-rich and he actually admitted it himself.
Conclusions and Personal Remarks
So, I’m slowly coming to the end. I spoke a little slower so that I could be understood well. I hope this worked.
The question is, of course, why are other climate scientists not being heard? And there’s this email that was laid out as part of ClimateGate a few years ago, very revealing. The most influential climate scientist to the most influential climate scientist in the United States, saying we will publish and keep out of the IPCC report publications that do not correspond to their opinion. And if necessary, we will redefine what peer review, is. So they deliberately make propaganda.
Conclusion: There is no threat of a climate crisis.The greenhouse effect caused by carbon dioxide is marginal. Carbon dioxide is the gas of life. More carbon dioxide makes the world greener. The influence of the sun from clouds and ocean cycles determines the temperature.
Wind turbines raise the temperature. And they dry out the soils. To do this, they poison the environment with the glass fibers that are knocked out. They kill insects 5000 tons per year. It was once calculated in Germany. They kill feather mice and birds of prey.
Infrasound makes you sick and reduces plant growth. This is because plants also have these petzo channels in their cells and grow less well. Science agrees, it is a lie. I am the living example that it is a lie. And the energy transition is a redistribution of normal earners.
Never trust AD, ZDF, Süddeutsche Zeitung etc. So many of them have not known me to this day. I am not a well-known expert, because you only become a well-known expert if you support government policy, and I don’t do that. Thank you very much.
Milloy reads AI bias/climate riot act to IBM management at annual shareholder meeting. Here is the media release and audio presentation for the IBM shareholder proposal of the Free Enterprise Project of the National Center for Public Policy Research. The annual shareholder meeting is April 28, 2026. Text of press release below with my bolds and added images.
Press Release: IBM’s AI Model: Garbage In, Garbage Out
Washington, D.C. – At next week’s IBM annual meeting, shareholders will vote on a proposal from the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project (FEP) tackling potential bias within the company’s artificial intelligence models.
Proposal 7 (“AI Bias Audit”) requests “a report, within the next year, on the methods used to eliminate bias from the Company’s artificial intelligence (AI) models.”
At the April 28 meeting, FEP Executive Director Steve Milloy will cite climate alarmism as an example of where AI too often gets it wrong:
I am an AI user and it can be a great tool. But AI is subject to what 1950s IBM programmer George Fuechsel called “GIGO” – garbage in, garbage out. The Internet is full of amazing information. It is also full of amazing garbage. AI models often cannot distinguish between the two.
An example of garbage-in, garbage-out AI occurs in the controversial area of global warming and climate change. Here are three hardcore facts about climate:
♦ It cannot be scientifically demonstrated that greenhouse gas emissions have had
any effect on global climate.
♦ Emissions-driven climate models do not work.
♦ No emissions-based apocalyptic climate prediction has ever come true.
Despite these realities, if you query IBM AI on climate, you will get back gloom-and-doom climate hoax dogma. This happens because the Internet has been loaded for decades with bogus climate hoax claims and assumptions that are erroneous garbage.
Milloy believes IBM’s own website is partly to blame for this misinformation:
On IBM’s website, IBM’s chief sustainability officer says, for example, that:
Global warming is “leading to increased flooding, causing heat stroke and destroying farms and livelihoods. Insurance is becoming unaffordable.”
None of that is true. But it is what IBM AI is programmed with. Even IBM staff has been polluted with the climate. It is precisely the sort of garbage that George Fueschsel warned about.
The mindless parroting of climate hoax garbage to governments, businesses and the public has had devastating economic and societal impacts around the world – from wars to inflation to deadly energy failures to energy rationing to crop failures to deindustrialization to lost jobs to wasted taxpayer money to traumatized school children and beyond.
It has been estimated that world has wasted $10 trillion chasing the climate hoax narrative since 2015 alone. The list of harms from the climate hoax is endless. Yet IBM AI has learned the hoax and spreads the climate garbage on to users. Milloy will say:
“While IBM may be great at the computing part of AI, the world actually functions on realities that are often lost in the Internet dumpster,” “Management needs to be much more humble about all this. It needs to take the bias problem seriously. Touchy-feely videos on the IBM website just don’t cut it.”
IBM shareholders can support Proposal 7 by voting their proxies before Tuesday’s meeting.
Two things happened in February that will change the world. The first is the Iran War.
The second is an event so obscure most Americans don’t even know it happened — the Feb. 12 repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by the Trump Administration’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). This decision puts a knife into the kidney of all the major U.S. climate rules made under the Obama and Biden administrations. It was the legal underpinning for the Green New Deal.
Of the two events, the end of the Endangerment Finding is of a greater consequence, yet 21st Century conventional wisdom — curated and gatekept by social media, the most unwise medium ever invented — makes it hard to fit one’s head around this argument. But here goes.
The Iran War is costing about $1-2 billion a day in direct costs,and several times that in indirect costs from higher energy prices across most of Europe and Asia, though less so in the United States, which is increasingly energy independent.
Meanwhile, the 2009 Endangerment is one of those “regulatory state” workarounds when Congress doesn’t pass a law or the Supreme Court passes on a tough decision. This administrative decision is the foundation of ALL modern climate regulation and global climate diplomacy. Its reversal has the Trump administration crowing about the $1.3 trillion in savings over the next decade to American citizens through cheaper automobiles, among other things.
This has made a lot of the right people unhappy.
In an interview with The New York Times, Jody Freeman, director of Harvard Law School’s Environmental and Energy Law Program, who happened to design the Endangerment Finding for the Obama White House, said the Trump administration wants “to not just do what other Republican administrations have done, which is weaken regulations. They want to take the federal government out of the business of regulation, period.”
Speaking as someone who worked at the EPA during the first Trump administration, I know Freeman is wrong. Republicans don’t mind environmental regulation based on good incentives that don’t penalize industries that are politically disfavored through no fault of their own.
But there is a human cost to all regulation that is essentially unpriced,
and it is something Freeman and the Left never acknowledge.
Federal regulation itself was invented by the government to improve human lives — think the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Air Act, or the 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act that ended child labor. The problem is that future choices forgone, which economists call opportunity costs, are nearly impossible to quantify and constrain, thereby stifling innovation and invention in almost unfathomable ways.
Consider the following counterfactual.
If the U.S. Supreme Court had made privacy laws stricter in the late 1990s, sharing pictures of strangers without their permission would have been illegal. This would have disincentivized early camera phone makers, Sharp and Sanyo, from including cameras in the first smartphones in the early 2000s and would have slowed or even undermined Apple’s decision to build the iPhone.
Less than 25 years after the first U.S. camera phone was released, the total value of mobile technologies and services globally exceeds $7 trillion, representing more than 6% of global GDP. Much of these trillions of dollars of newly created wealth exists in the share price of Silicon Valley firms, and the retirement savings of nearly 100 million Americans and the U.S. economy writ large.
What the Endangerment Finding did was create a domestic legal predicate
to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.
That predicate, in turn, allowed Democratic administrations to commit America to the Paris Agreementand the broader U.N. climate regime that the U.S. Senate was fooled into accepting when it passed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 1992.
It’s quite possible that the global climate regime created under UN sponsorship had a similar effect on energy-intensive industries to that a strict privacy law would have had on smartphones, which became the entry point for billions of people into the digital economy.
And now it’s ending. By undoing the Endangerment Finding, you don’t just repeal a regulation; you repeal the regulatory superstructure that has saddled the United States with trillions of dollars in opportunity costs and billions in explicit costs every year.
Thus, however costly a short conflict with Iran would be, it hasn’t been
nearly as much as the unpriced opportunity costs of
the last 30 years under the UN Climate regime.
Once the U.S. is no longer legally bound at home, it can exit the international framework cleanly. And when America leaves, the dominoes fall in order. Russia, China, India, and Saudi Arabia — none of whom ever believed “the planet is dying” rhetoric anyway — will follow suit. They never saw the climate treaty as anything other than a wealth-transfer mechanism from the West, and now the jig is up for the American Left and the European establishment.
Instead of this transhumanist dystopia, we have the possibility of
returning meaningful heavy industry to the U.S.,
creating over a million good-paying craft jobs,
while still maintaining strong environmental laws.
Indeed, fears of environmental backsliding could be easily remedied by Congress if it were to pass the Affordable, Reliable, Clean Energy Security Act (ARC-ES), introduced in Congress late last year by Rep. Troy Balderson (R-OH). The ARC-ES bill would codify into law clear definitions of key terms like “affordable,” “reliable,” and “clean,” ensuring that investment risks are limited to cost-effective infrastructure projects only.
The bill would help America’s most affordable, reliable, and environmentally-friendly energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, remain part of the energy mix — a crucial requirement for American households and businesses.
The fact that neither the ARC-ES nor the Endangerment Finding’s reversal of fortune is anywhere in the news tells you everything you need to know about the current state of global journalism.
This is no slight to the news coverage concerning Iran, which is compelling, but all over the place. It just shows how incentives for informing the public in the 21st century about what truly matters in their lives are weak and getting worse. Perhaps one day someone will invent a better medium for information.
William Murray is a former speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the past editor of RealClearEnergy from 2015 to 2017, and currently the chief speechwriter for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC).
The Biden administration’s obsession with climate change has contributed to the housing affordability challenges Americans face today, and there are many harmful green policies that need to be undone. The Trump administration is taking an ax to several of them, and it just received a big boost when a U.S. District Court repealed a measure burdening low-income and first-time home buyers.
Specifically, on March 5th, an Eastern District of Texas decision vacated a 2024 requirement from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) that new homes qualifying for federally-backed mortgages must comply with the 2021 International Energy Conservation Code (IECC). Thankfully, the court in Utah v. HUD found the agency’s actions in violation of the law.
The IECC is a spare-no-expense assault on residential energy use – for example, by requiring far more insulation than makes sense and necessitating costlier appliances. A number of environmental organizations advocated for the IECC’s building code dictates, saying they would ensure that “low-income homeowners and residents are prioritized in a climate-aligned future.”
And mind you, this was HUD – not the Environmental Protection Agency – an agency whose core mission is to make housing more affordable. Yet it was trying to impose these expensive environmental requirements on the very Americans who need federal help to qualify for a mortgage. In fact, over 80% of HUD-backed mortgages have gone to first-time buyers with lower credit scores and smaller down payments than those served by conventional lenders.
Tilak Doshi explains how formerly empirical economists have been captured by climatist ideology, betraying their profession and public trust. His Clintel article is UK economist says high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
[Note: “In the old Soviet Union, the Communists allegedly used the term “useful idiot” to describe Westerners whose naïve political views furthered the Soviet agenda, even though these Westerners didn’t realize that they were being exploited in such fashion. It is in this context that I confidently declare that American economists have been useful idiots for the green socialists pushing extreme climate change policies.” Robert Murphy]
A UK economist recently said the quiet part out loud: high energy prices are ‘good for the climate’. This is not an aberration, says Tilak Doshi, but symptomatic of modern economists. “The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.”
When petrol prices rocket because of supply shocks—such as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the rerouting of oil tankers—one might have expected a discussion of geopolitics, market signals and the obvious supply-side remedies. Of which there has been plenty, some competent and even masterly, some not so competent by “instant expert” talking heads in social and mass media. But a recent article by an economist in The Conversationoffered a solution so perversely tone-deaf it could have been lifted from a Babylon Bee satirical script.
Citing research that a 10 per cent rise in UK petrol prices can cut demand by up to 5 per cent, the piece solemnly declared that “high prices are a way of adjusting consumption to cope with the lower supply.” The subtext was unmistakable: with refined products suddenly scarcer, the proper response is not to produce more fuel if the country were blessed with domestic fossil fuel resources (like the UK) or to import more from sources outside the Strait of Hormuz or both. Instead, the advice from Christoph Siemroth, Senior Lecturer in Economics, University of Essex, is to make what little remains even costlier—so that the hoi polloi drive less, take the bus and hasten the glorious transition to net zero.
Clueless and Insidious
One is reminded of Marie Antoinette’s famous cake remark, betraying aristocratic cluelessness. But The Conversation article is something far more insidious: the capture of economics itself by the green ideology that now rules our institutions from the BBC to the Treasury, from Oxbridge common rooms to the UK Met Office service. The discipline that once stood as the last redoubt against the Frankfurt School’s long march through the social sciences has fallen. Frank Knight, Gary Becker, George Stigler, Milton Friedman et al held the gates against postmodern gibberish for a generation. No longer. The barbarians are inside the citadel, wearing lanyards from the oxymoronically named Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, chanting “sustainability” like a secular rosary.
Consider the elementary logic that every first-year economics student once absorbed before the PPE types at Oxford and Cambridge began their higher education in Gaia worship. When the price of a good rises because of scarcity—whether from a blockade in the Persian Gulf or an OPEC production cut—the signal is unambiguous: produce more, explore more, innovate more. Britain sits atop some of the richest hydrocarbon resources in Europe. North Sea oil and gas reserves are not physically exhausted; they are made economic infeasible in the face of Miliband’s punitive tax rates.
Onshore shale, barely scratched after a decade of regulatory vandalism,
could transform our energy security if the
“precautionary principle” were not treated as holy writ.
Higher prices should, in any sane world, trigger precisely that response: more drilling, more fracking, more investment in refining capacity, more imports of oil and gas from diversified suppliers. Instead, our green economists prescribe the economic equivalent of putting a feverish patient into a sauna. Demand must fall. Prices must stay punishingly high. The suffering is the point.
Taxes
The Conversation piece is exemplary in its genre. Price caps are correctly dismissed as distortionary, leading to physical shortages and queues as a means of rationing. One needs to only remember the long lines at gas stations in the US under Jimmy Carter’s price controls after the 1979 oil price shock.
Roughly 50–55% of the UK retail price for both petrol and diesel currently go to the government as taxes.But fuel duty cuts are rejected because they are untargeted and cost the Exchequer revenue—fuel duty, after all, is nearly 2 per cent of government income, a nice little earner for the net-zero industrial complex.
The preferred remedy? One-off cash transfers to low-income car owners, modelled on Germany’s 2022 gas rebate which provided a temporary fuel tax cut in 2022 to ease soaring petrol and diesel prices during the energy crisis triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The beauty of this, we are told, is that it preserves the “price signal” while letting households “profit” by leaving the car at home. Translation: we will bribe you to stay poor and immobile, all in the name of the planet. Meanwhile, the authors of such wisdom never feel the pinch. They lecture the white van plumber, carpenter or electrician going about his work and the hard-pressed mother doing the school run that their higher fuel bills are a feature, not a bug.
Luxury Beliefs and Intellectual Corruption
These are luxury belief-inspired energy policies which “confer status on the upper class at very little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes”. As Victor Davis Hanson has so often pointed out, leftist policy elites in Democrat-run states suffer little from the consequences of their own policies. The metropolitan elite’s enthusiasm for open borders stops abruptly at the high walls of their own villas (Nancy Pelosi anyone?)
The same applies to energy. Inhabitants of the liberal metropolitan bubble can afford the £12-an-hour parking in Covent Garden, the retrofitted Victorian terrace with an air-source heat pump the size of a small car, and the Tesla whose real environmental cost is buried in Chinese lithium lakes and in artisanal cobalt mines using Congolese child workers. For them, “sustainability” is a lifestyle brand. For the rest of the country—pensioners choosing between heating and eating, hauliers facing bankruptcy, farmers unable to run their tractors—it is economic sadism dressed up as virtue.
Buddhist economist
The historical parallel is instructive. E.F. Schumacher — the “Buddhist economist” — told us, “small is beautiful” and that giant power stations were somehow spiritually corrosive. One wonders what he would make of the fact that a modern combined-cycle gas plant needs to be at least 200 MW to be remotely efficient, or that industrial civilisation runs on economies of scale, not backyard steel furnaces.
Yet today’s green establishment is repeating the Maoist folly in Western drag: decentralised “community energy”, intermittent wind and solar that require massive subsidies and backup gas plants, and an ideological insistence that the optimal size of an economy is whatever fits the carbon budget decreed by “climate modellers” in Exeter or East Anglia. The Soviet Union tried to create the New Soviet Man—selfless, collective-minded, liberated from base material desires. The project failed spectacularly. Its successor is the New Green Man, who measures his carbon footprint, cycles to the vegan restaurant, and cheers when Ed Miliband shuts down another North Sea field. The totalitarian impulse remains; only the Orwellian vocabulary has changed from “proletarian internationalism” to “just transition” and “climate justice”.
The intellectual corruption runs deep. Paul Krugman, a Nobel laureate in trade theory, now produces columns that read like press releases from the Church of Climate. Marginal costs of natural gas? Not so relevant when policy costs—carbon taxes, renewable obligations, network charges, capacity market payments—make up some 60% of your bill. As Kathryn Porter,David Turver and others have documented with forensic clarity, the “energy price crisis” is largely a net-zero policy-induced crisis. The wholesale cost of electricity is only part of the story; the rest is the deliberate layering of green levies and taxes that no classical economist would recognise as market-based. Yet we are told, with straight faces, that the “97 per cent consensus” demands we accept this as settled science. The same consensus, one notes, that once assured us the pause in global temperature increase was impossible, that polar bears were doomed, and that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035.
Tyranny
Rupert Darwall’s Green Tyranny provides an insightful exploration into the origins of the climate industrial complex. The green movement’s roots lie not in empirical ecology but in a Malthusian revulsion against industrial modernity and a quasi-religious yearning for control. What to eat (less meat), how far to travel (fewer flights), what temperature your thermostat may reach (no more than 19°C if Whitehall has its way)—these are not technical questions but moral ones, policed by the new priesthood of economists who have traded the parsimony of Occam’s Razor for the abusive use of the precautionary principle (“better safe than sorry”). Uncertainty is weaponised asymmetrically so that minor or hypothetical risks (e.g., induced seismicity from fracking) trigger regulatory paralysis, while the far larger risks of alternatives are downplayed. The precautionary principle becomes a de-facto veto tool for ideological opposition to hydrocarbons, not genuine risk management.
Homo economicus, the rational maximiser embedded in cultural norms that Adam Smith understood in both The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, has been replaced by Homo Climaticus: a creature whose every decision must be subordinated to the carbon ledger.
The consequences are not abstract. Britain’s energy prices are among the highest in the developed world precisely because we have chosen ideology over geology. While China adds coal-fired capacity equivalent to the entire UK grid every few years and India builds out its fossil infrastructure without apology, the West hectors the Global South about net zero and wonder why BRICS+ nations hedge their “policy commitments” to UN forums such as the COP30 conference in Brazil last year. The multipolar realignment is not just geopolitical; it is energetic. The Rest have noticed that the West’s net-zero experiment is self-inflicted economic suicide. They intend no such folly.
Glimmers of Hope or Barbarians At The Gates?
Yet there are glimmers of hope. The tide is turning, as Matt Ridley explains in his recent Clintel lecture “The Climate Parrot is almost dead.” Mr. Ridley argues that public and political momentum behind the “climate emergency” narrative is weakening. Indeed, public tolerance for green virtue-signalling has limits when the bills arrive. The on-going protests in Ireland over the cost of fuel by farmers, contractors and others have been massive, leading the government to place the army on “standby” as nationwide fuel protests continue to cause significant disruption and threaten critical supplies across the country. The military’s potential involvement comes as blockades outside major fuel depots intensify, prompting a dangerous government shift towards an “enforcement” phase in response to the escalating crisis. There are indications that these protests are spreading to Norway and France, as farmers and truckers there block arterial roads with tractors and trucks.
Populist movements across Europe and the United States are demanding energy realism: all-of-the-above policies that include nuclear, gas, and yes, even beautiful, black coal, where geology and economics dictate. The Chicago School may have been breached, but it is not yet razed. Rigorous economists—those still willing to follow the data rather than the grants—continue to point out that adaptation and technological progress have always outpaced apocalyptic forecasts. The “climate emergency” that justifies Soviet-style rationing by price is, on closer inspection, a political choice, not a scientific imperative.
Barbarians
Economics was once the most parsimonious of the social sciences, cutting through trite views with marginal analysis and revealed preference. When it abandons that discipline for the higher calling of Gaia worship, it ceases to be economics and becomes propaganda. The article in The Conversation is not an aberration; it is a symptom of a discipline that has exchanged truth for tenure and rigour for righteousness. The barbarians did not storm the gates. The Western elites invited them in, gave them chairs, and asked them to redesign the curriculum.
The corrective will not come from more white papers or behavioural nudges. It will come when voters—those whose lived experience of green policy is higher bills, colder homes, and slower journeys—demand an end to the experiment. Ireland is in tumult as we speak. Energy abundance is not a luxury; it is the foundation of modern civilisation. To pretend otherwise is not sophistication. It is civilisational self-harm. And the bill, as always, lands on the people least able to afford the eco-crucifix.
The above video includes a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg and Scott Bessent at the annual IIF gathering (Institute of International Finance). The introduction by IIF CEO Tim Adams starts about 11 minutes in. For those who prefer reading, below is a lightly edited transcript of comments back and forth, along with some added images. TA refers to Adams, BL to Lomborg and SB to Bessent.
TA: Today we’re going to deepen the discussion with a conversation between Bjorn Lomborg who runs the Copenhagen Consensus and the author how to spend 75 billion to make the world a better place. I’ve had this book on my desk since it was published in 2014. It’s a great publication. If you haven’t read it, you should. I’m sure Bjorn will give you some copies. It really is how do we do development and a cost benefit assessment? How do we get the most bang for our buck? And that conversation is often missed in this town and other capitals. And of course, we’re delighted and honored to have the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent back today to join us at our spring meetings. So, ladies and gentlemen, please invite to the stage Bjorn and Secretary Scott Bessent.
BJ: Thank you very much. Tim, you kind of took away all our talking points. So, Mr. Secretary, it’s great to have a conversation here today about the World Bank and the IMF here at their spring meeting. The goals of these institutions, of course, is to accelerate global development, drive economic growth, and lift billions of people out of poverty. And these goals remain vitally important. Unfortunately, many development institutions now prioritize Western elite issues like gender, social topics, and climate change over what the world’s poorest people need and want: better education, healthcare, and reliable energy.
Nowhere is this disconnect more clear than in their climate fixation. In the latest year, 48% of the World Bank’s financing went to so-called climate finance, up from 44% the year before, exceeding their own uh 45% target. I suspect the reason why elites are so climate focused is because they correctly see the poor as more vulnerable to climate impacts. But remember, poor people are more vulnerable to every impact. They’re more vulnerable to disease, to hunger, to bad education, to corruption.
The World Bank and the IMF need to get back to making rational priorities. For instance, using cost benefit analysis. As Tim also just mentioned, these organizations used to lead the world in cost benefit analysis. As I’ve argued for a long time, and the reason I think we’re having this conversation now is that we need to scrap these climate targets and get the World Bank and IMF back to their core missions.
In your speech here last year at the IIF, you made this exact point and you called on the World Bank and the IMF to refocus on their core missions. In your view, how has the bank and the fund responded and what more do they need to do?
SB: Well, Bjorn, thank you and good good to be back here a year later to talk a little about a report card for the multilateral banks and to also say that the US leads the G20 this year and I can tell you that our agenda is growth. We believe in the US that the biggest risk to financial stability is a lack of growth.
When I look at the choices that Europe has made unable to follow the Draghy report from Mario Draghy on how to increase growth. The the EU was originally the European Economic Union and it was meant to facilitate trade among the members, make it more seamless, create more prosperity. And it turns out that it’s probably been a hint of the IMF and World Bank. I’m informed by Grace Hopper who was the first female Admiral in the US who was a big fan of it. She has some great sayings. Two of them, one is: The most dangerous words in the English language are “because we’ve always done it that way”. And the second is: “The way to get things done is to get things done.”
And I think we need to step back and look at the IMF and World Bank, their core missions. The IMF I believe the is global financial stability and stabilizing the countries that are in bad equilibriums and getting them back to a sustainable path an economically sustainable path. World Bank is to pull people out of poverty and we cannot have these kinds of elite beliefs get in the way. And I think a lot about this Nature magazine article that came out in April of 2024 that became the guiding principle for so much of the climate beliefs: that GDP was going to be 60% % lower by the turn of the century. So then it was the gospel for 18 months and then it was refuted.
So every everything was based on that. So you know I I don’t think that we can have this kind of short- termism. I think we have to stick with core principles and I do think we we are starting to see at at the World Bank. They are starting to take a tack more for energy abundance and all of the above. They have now gotten on board with nuclear energy. I’m not sure why it ever went away.
And then the IMF, I think, needs to lead by example, probably get rid of their golf course out in Maryland, which I said last year, and focus on global imbalances. Because I can tell you this slow motion buildup of global imbalances after a lack of sustainable growth, it is the the the biggest risk.
The the world cannot take a China with a trillion dollar trade surplus.
BL: And I think you’re absolutely right and one of those points that we we believe somehow that climate is so important that we need to do everything because the nature study that you mentioned that suggests that we could lose 60% of global GDP if we didn’t fix climate change. Which later turned out to be wrong, but of course the point is if that was really true, it should have been rich countries spending rich country money on dealing with climate change. But that’s not what’s happening. It’s mostly rich countries deciding to spend poor people’s money through the World Bank and the IMF badly. And this is not what the the world’s poor are telling us that they want.
So I I had the fortune to work together with Nobel laurate Tom Shelling and he often asked the very simple question, how do you best help poor people? Through development policy or through climate policy? Remember climate policy costs hundreds of trillions of dollars and it shaves off a tiny fraction of a degree in a century’s time. Development policy like avoiding death costs just billions or maybe even just millions of dollars and saves lives right now. And of course that is why development policy often is much much better if you actually want to help poor people.
And of course it also builds much more resilience. Look, a hurricane that hits poor Haiti kills hundreds of people. The same hurricane hitting rich Florida kills virtually no one because prosperity protects people. And so we need to get this conversation back and I think this is exactly where the IMF and the World Bank need to get back to their core missions.
SB: I think it has to be resiliency supply chains. Again, I think you know both the IMF and the World Bank have an important role in understanding this debt loop and downward spiral that many countries are in. Several countries, one in particular, have done the equivalent of a loan to own program. With a lot of these countries there’s a lot of undisclosed debt. There are a lot of tolling arrangements that are unfortunate and I think only the these multilateral banks can effectuate that.
But you know again I do want to congratulate them. The IMF was willing to say this time is different with Argentina and Argentina’s been a fantastic success. They’re accumulating reserves every day as we speak. Tens of millions of people there are being brought out of poverty. The government of Javier Milei, I’m very interested to see it was the poorest elements of Argentine society who voted for him this time around and the young people. So there there’s optimism there. And then you know that the IMF is working on bringing Venezuela back into making it look more like a normal economy, and I think will play a very important role there. And I think the World Bank leadership is back on a good trajectory in terms of energy and unlocking resources for the the very poorest countries.
BL: Yeah. If you don’t mind, I’ll pick you up on that energy point because last October you withdrew the United States from the Green Climate Fund. Because in your words, their goals run contrary to the fact that affordable, reliable energy is fundamental to economic growth and poverty reduction. I think that shows the general point we often forget, how energy really powers modern life. It warms us in the winter, it cools us in the summer, it transports us. I mean, look around this room and I think pretty much everyone is from somewhere else. And this is what energy does. Energy allows us to live better than kings of the past.
Energy really is prosperity. Yet, the climate fixation that we’ve been talking about means that both the World Bank and the IMF pushed for a rapid shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewables and for total ban fossil fuel investment. And I think they need a reality check. There is no transition that taking place globally. We use more renewables, yes, but we also use much more fossil fuels. The world still gets more than 80% of its total energy from fossil fuels. And the decline is so slow that on current trends, we will only get to 0% in 4 to 10 centuries.
Germany has spent famously 700 billion euros on its energy shift since 2002. Electricity prices more than doubled and yet Germany’s energy is still 79% fossil fuels. China produces most of the world’s solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars, but much of this of is produced with coal. China’s energy is still 87% fossil fuel. I would say a Chinese EV is a coal powered vehicle. Much of it is in China and of course especially in some places, for instance India, which are driven enormously on coal, they simply they emit more. But the real point is that poor countries want to get rich like China did. They want to use more energy and much of this will be fossil fuels. They don’t want to copy Germany and they don’t have 700 billion euros to blow on climate policies. So it is just simply hypocritical forcing poor nations into renewables that even rich Germany or China aren’t achieving.
In your IIF speech last year, you call on the World Bank to focus its efforts on expanding developing country access to reliable and affordable energy and you criticized its climate targets. You noted that the IMF devotes disproportionate time and resources on climate even though it’s not part of the fund’s mission. So, what have you seen from the bank and the fund in these areas since your speech? And what more do you expect from them?
SB: Again, as as I said earlier, I think the World Bank is has made a good pivot. They they are now pushing or they are a proponent of nuclear energy. I’m not sure how that wasn’t considered a renewable for for so many years. I mean, if if you look now, France is powering the European energy grid and their their reactors are running the full blast and it’s one of the cleanest. But when you think the Europeans got into this terrible recursive loop because they they decided to turn turn off their nuclear energy. The Germans became more dependent on Russian crude and then the Russians were selling them the crude to finance the war against them.
But you know I do think the World Bank is moving to an all of the above energy process and program and again is getting back to the core mission of lifting people out of poverty. And you know I would just say it’s very good to follow not only what people say but what they do. Bill Gates, who for a long time had pushed this climate agenda, has also changed tack. If you read his recent speeches he believes we’re going to innovate our way out of this. And the Gates Foundation has something like 13 billion of investment in energy innovation. Look no one’s expecting deos machina, one day and everything will be fixed. But in in the US we were going to run out of everything, going to run out of the crude and crude derivatives. And then fracking was invented and now that the the US larger reserves than Saudi and Venezuela.
On the other side, I think the IMF getting back to this message of stability, of monitoring global imbalances and stepping in early. You know I didn’t always agree with Ben Bernanke’s monetary policy, but I always admired Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke because he had a framework. And if you ask him a question, you could almost see him run it through his framework and everything was always consistent. And I think with the IMF and the World Bank the framework needs to always be consistent.
BL: On the Bill Gates point I think really two things stand out. First of all, the innovation point that you just made. I mean this is what has always solved the problem. Tim mentioned the green revolution that we had in the 1970s when we worried about running out of food. Remember, we didn’t fix the problem of the world not having enough food by telling everyone, “I’m sorry. Do you mind not eating as much?” And then we’ll send it down to whoever it is that we worry about. The point was that we innovated a way to generate much more food.
And of course, we’ll do the same thing with climate. We are going to solve big problems through innovation. That’s how we’ve always done it. But I think Bill Gates made another point which is incredibly powerful and useful when you talk about climate change. He said: “For so long we’ve been talking about climate as if the point is to cut carbon emissions or to reach a certain temperature limit. No, the point is to make the world better for humans. And there the question is do we make the world better for humans by cutting carbon emissions by whatever tons? Or do we make it better by for instance making it so small children don’t die or that in school there’s so many other ways we can also do this or that. This of course refers back on the IMF and especially the World Bank on what can be done and there are just so many incredible things that we can do first.
SB: Yeah, again, you know, I think keeping focus on the main thing and not getting distracted by what feels good, it’s convenient, it’s part of the the Davos consensus while much of the Davos consensus seems to have been shattered.
WEF’s Global Risks Perception Survey
BL: Yes. So I want to just take us to our third and and and last point and talk about tradeoffs. Because all international financial institutions need to get back to the core point of tradeoffs. Look,the money that the World Bank spent on a solar panels can’t be invested in healthcare or education. And the world’s poor tell us very clearly not to focus on climate first. When Africans are asked what worries them the most, climate change came almost at the bottom. A vast survey of more than 50,000 Africans across 39 countries found that climate change ranked 31 of 34. The top concerns are not surprising there. It’s unemployment, the economy, health, education, poverty, roads, electricity, hunger, and corruption. And then it goes on for a long time until you get to 31, which is climate change.
When your child might die tonight from a preventable disease, no family cares about shaving a fraction of a degree off global temperatures in a century from now. Elected leaders of poor countries tell us the same thing. In a large survey of low and low middle- income countries, they show climate ranks 12 of 16 issues. Even the World Bank’s own client surveys show climate ranks low. So international financial institutions should compact to focus on their strengths. As you’ve said, the World Bank should focus on poverty reduction and the IMF on macroeconomic stability, but the world’s poor are very clearly saying don’t focus on climate first.
So from your perspective as treasury secretary, how do you view the international financial institutions and their effectiveness in general and the bank and the fund specifically?
SB: You know I would also highlight that it’s not a unique survey item among the world’s poorest. Germany instituted very very strict remodeling and rebuild requirements for German households. So you had to spend I can’t remember it was 30 40 50,000 euros to upgrade to a a more green house and they’re all getting voted out. So like probation is not a good motivator. I do think,as I said last year, that we are determined with the multilateral financial institutions the US wants to be in it to win it. We want to be good partners. America first does not mean America alone. And we we want to go back to basics.
These banks were invented around Breton Woods which was post World War II Europe and Asia, and was a unique time in America and it led to incredible prosperity the across the world. So, you know, why can’t we do that again? And why can’t we focus on growth? Like what are the tools? What what what is hindering growth of these economies? Is it the unsustainable debt which is is the IMF concern?
Is it the poor infrastructure, health and hygiene, which is the World Bank role?
Because you know for a time we kind of skipped the foundational elements and tried to jump to something else, kind of luxury beliefs, instead of issues when a government was not able to fund itself or if people were not able to feed themselves. We’ve just got to get back to that. I I think Ajay and Kristalina have have gotten the message and are moving forward in a very very constructive way and I want to congratulate them.
BL: When you have to decide what to do obviously I’m I’m an advocate for cost benefit analysis so I’m going to be saying they should be looking at it. Really, if you think about it, the World Bank and IMF used to be world leaders in cost benefit analysis. And it makes sense if you only have limited money. If you have to think about trade-offs all the time, you have to ask yourself where can we spend scarce resources and do the most good in the world. And this is exactly what cost benefit analysis does for you. It allows you to pick out the really good policies and make it just much more likely that we can actually achieve all these goals that we’re talking about.
About Heather Exner-Pirot My research focuses on Indigenous and northern economic development, energy security, and resource politics and policy. I am currently the Director of Energy, Natural Resources and Environment at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, a Special Advisor to the Business Council of Canada, and a Research Advisor to the Indigenous Resource Network.
in the brief interview below she explains how Canada has squandered abundance, and is now facing an impending energy crisis. Her recent paper shown above (and linked later below) includes the background research for viewpoints expressed, and presented in the transcript with added bolds and images. JS refers to Jim Csek and HEP to Exner-Pirot.
Does Canada produce enough energy to sustain itself?
JS: British Columbia is now a net importer of electricity. You would think that would be almost impossible. And I remember a couple of years ago when Fortis applied in the Okanagan here to get a peaker plant, an LNG peaker plant, and they were denied and they seem to be going all in on at the time, all in on wind and solar. Now they’re kind of changing their focus to LNG.
The decisions that have been made over the past 10 years in Canada have put us in this place of energy dependence. Do you see light at the end of the tunnel? Do you see that we’re shifting? It’s been a year now with this new BC government, and they said they’re going to build at a speed like never seen before. Yet the NDP seems to be still stuck in its old ways. And we haven’t seen that speed yet.
HEP: No, we haven’t seen that speed. And maybe you saw I wrote a paper on electricity and our impending crisis that just came out last month. So when you say, you know, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, is it is it the light because we’re near death or is there actually some more electricity coming on board? And the one thing I think people don’t appreciate is that Canada’s electricity generation peaked in 2017. And I think everyone knows that we’ve added, I don’t know, six million people since then.
So on a per capita basis, our electricity generation is absolutely in decline. And this is happening as we’re pushing electrification of transportation, electrification of heating. And now we want to electrify everything that takes energy. We want to build more critical minerals production, do more smelting here. That takes electricity. We do not have the electricity to do all the things that we say we’re going to do.
And actually, this week, probably on Wednesday, the prime minister is going to announce a national electricity strategy. We’ll see how serious they are. If it’s all incentives for wind and solar and, you know, intertides from Nova Scotia to Quebec, I will say they’re not very serious. If there’s a lot of funding for nuclear and some carve-outs of the clean electricity regulations, I’ll say that they’re thinking about being serious.
But we’ve had such abundance in this country. In Canada, it always comes down to this, that we had time to squander it. We had way too much time to squander it. And we spent eight or 10 years squandering it. And just now we’re starting to worry. I always say, we’re like the frogs in the boiling water. We’re starting to notice it’s hot. But it’s been getting hot for many years.
And so now the question is, there’s real trade offs, Jim, as you know, in British Columbia, that for three years, actually, you’ve been a net importer of electricity. And now we want to build LNG Canada phase two and Ksi Lisims LNG. And you’re also doing wood fiber and you’re also doing cedar. And there’s also three mines that have been permanent or have expansions. And there’s not enough electricity for all of those things, not to mention all the people. And so it’s crazy that in a place like Kelowna the B.C. regulator is saying no more natural gas for home heating, you know, because we’ll miss our climate targets if we do that.
Meaning that people are being pushed with that scarce electricity for their home heating, whereas Kelowna is a beautiful place, but sometimes it does get to minus 25 occasionally. And that’s the exact time where you need to have enough electricity. And that tends to also be when, you know, when when hydro isn’t performing at its peak. And so we focus so much on sustainability and our electricity system these past 10 years that we really did it at the expense of reliability and affordability. And now it’s backtracking to try to balance those.
But I’ve been saying the next trade off is actually going to be between affordability and reliability. You’ll wish we could choose between sustainability and the other two. The choice you’re going to have to make is between affordability and reliability. And that’s not going to be a pleasant place for Canadians to be.
JS: Do you feel like sometimes you’re in a Monty Python skit when they talk about Canada needs to have an all EV mandate? And you know that there’s not enough electricity to do this. And it’s more of a pipe dream than a pipeline. Like, how do we how do we how do you square those two things? You got to drive EVs, yet there’s not enough electricity even for the stuff we have right now.
HEP: And it’s worse than that, Jim. You know, the the subsidies that went into heat pumps in Atlantic Canada, and Atlantic Canada is a big swing jurisdiction. You know, if the liberals can get can sweep Atlantic Canada, OK, they can get a majority. So that’s a very important jurisdiction for them. And they were on heating oil and heating oil is expensive. And heating oil does suck. They don’t have access to natural gas for some reasons of their own making. And so you do want to get off heating oil.
But they push on all these heat pumps and did nothing on the electricity generation side, and you can’t do one part of the equation. If you’re going to change a quarter of households to heat pumps, then you better think about how much electricity you’re going to need for that. Such that now we’ve had emergency applications from the Prince Edward Island utility and from New Brunswick saying we need a new natural gas generation immediately.
We need to be approved right away. This is an emergency. We already saw the cold snap that we had this year. They had to curtail some industrial use. I mean the utilities performed admirably under very difficult circumstances. But the actual situation in that cold snap was that we were not sending very much to the United States. We were importing from New England electricity produced from heating oil, and curtailing generation. And that can be very dangerous when when most of your households are on heat pumps and you have rotating brownouts. That is a very dangerous situation, actually.
Title is link to publication. Some important excerpts below in italics wtih my bolds.
The electricity abundance and affordability that Canada has enjoyed for decades are ending. Generation is down, exports are now imports, and investment is flat. This comes as electricity is increasingly scarce and its availability a competitive advantage. Canada’s impending electricity shortage is not just an affordability crisis; it is an economic and security one as well.
While electricity policy was largely driven by emissions reductions objectives for the past two decades, adequacy, reliability, and affordability are resurging as priorities. Governments that fail to address the issue will be punished at the ballot box: voters are ratepayers.
This paper has sought to outline the growing crisis in Canadian electricity production, describe the policy trajectory that contributed to this state of affairs, identify shifts in policy direction that Canadians should advocate, and understand how to gauge policy improvement, or lack thereof.
Canada’s electricity surplus diminished because we became complacent and took the resource for granted. The sector now demands our attention, and for the sake of all Canadians, we had better respond intelligently.
Although demand for electricity is growing, the forecasted growth in generation over the next five years is weak and will be accounted for wholly by intermittent renewables, the majority of which will come from wind. While renewables have their place in the energy mix, their power generation fluctuates based on weather and time of day, rather than conforming to electricity demand. This fundamental mismatch creates reliability, stability, and economic challenges for power grids, which are designed for constant, controllable base-load generation (see Sepulveda 2024). In fact, Canada’s Energy Regulator (CER 2025b) is forecasting that dispatchable capacity (i.e., sources of electricity that can adjust according to demand) will decline in Canada by 1.2 per cent by 2030.
In 2016, Canada sent as much as 64 TWh in net electricity exports annually to the US. However, that number has steadily dwindled due to a combination of drought and the growth in domestic demand. Canada became a net importer of electricity for the first time in modern history in Spring 2024. By the end of 2025, Canada had become a regular net importer of electricity (see Figure 5). In 2025 both BC Hydro and Hydro-Québec were net importers – a previously unthinkable outcome.
Introduced by Environment and Climate Change Canada in 2023 and finalized in December 2024, the CER (Clean Energy Regulations) set federal performance standards to achieve a near-zero emissions electricity grid by 2050 (a change from the initial 2035). The regulations set limits on carbon dioxide emissions from almost all electricity generation units that use fossil fuels beginning in 2035, phase out coal-fired generation, and impose strict limits on emissions from natural gas sources. The CER provides compliance options such as emission reductions at source, carbon credit purchases, and direct investment in clean generation projects. While the CER gives incentives for creating infrastructure for renewables and storage, it also introduces higher capital costs, regulatory complexity, and market uncertainty. With large hydro and nuclear projects becoming too expensive for governments and investors to afford, too longterm, or simply unavailable for many jurisdictions, the CER removed the last best source of firm (i.e. always available) power additions available to many jurisdictions: new natural gas-fired generating units.
Canada’s electricity crunch comes just when a surplus could have been directed to productive capacities. An LNG construction boom, increased oil and gas extraction, significant new mines and expansions in BC, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Yukon, Quebec, and Nunavut, and the implementation of a defence industrial strategy all require significant new generation and transmission. Canada will not reach its goals to double non-US exports without more and affordable electricity.
But the biggest opportunity is in data centres, and the cost of missing out is not only an economic risk, but a security one as well. Electricity is now being selectively rationed in Canada, with data centres facing enhanced scrutiny. This is a problem because data centres are not only at the forefront of global capital investment, but they are also increasingly integral to national security. They are critical infrastructure, essential for the smooth functioning and productivity of an advanced economy, but they are also drivers of economic and military competitiveness. Reliance on foreign infrastructure to train models, store sensitive datasets, or deploy AI systems makes countries vulnerable in much the same way that relying on competitors or adversaries for oil, natural gas, or critical minerals does.
The fact is that Canada’s principal goal guiding electricity policy for the past two decades has been to reduce emissions. Ensuring reliable and affordable electricity has taken a back seat. When those policies were implemented, there was enough abundance in the system that the normal concerns of regulators and producers could fall into the background. That is no longer the case.
The Carney government, which includes senior advisors and Cabinet members with direct experience in the electricity sector, seems better equipped and motivated to tackle the issue than the previous Liberal government, and at the time of writing had announced the imminent release of a National Electricity Strategy. The extent to which it addresses the nuts and bolts of our current dilemma – that the country must find a way to create the conditions to generate, transmit, and distribute more MW at a lower cost,versus investing public dollars in expensive and politically motivated vanity projects with no business case – will determine if, and how fast, we in Canada can extract ourselves from our electricity deficit.
At the World Prosperity Forum in Zurich—held alongside the World Economic Forum in Davos—climate scientist Anika Sweetland delivers a provocative and deeply personal address that challenges the foundations of modern climate orthodoxy.
Drawing on her own education and professional experience, Sweetland recounts how climate science training fostered fear, despair, and unquestioned consensus rather than open scientific inquiry. She argues that generations of students have been indoctrinated with alarmist narratives that distort climate history, suppress debate, and justify sweeping political and economic control.
In this speech, Sweetland examines:
♦ The psychological impact of climate alarmism on children and students
♦ Media-driven climate narratives and shifting doomsday predictions
♦ Historical climate cycles, ocean dynamics, and orbital forces
♦ The role of international institutions and the concentration of power
♦ Why carbon dioxide is portrayed as a villain—and why she disputes that claim
♦ How climate policy, finance, and governance have become tightly intertwined
Presented as a counterpoint to the centralized, collectivist worldview promoted at Davos, this talk embodies the mission of the World Prosperity Forum: to challenge prevailing narratives, defend sovereignty, and restore open debate on climate, energy, and economic policy. For those who prefer reading, below is a transcription with my bolds and added images.
My name is Annika Sweetland and I trained as a climate scientist and during my time in what was meant to be a world-class education, I learned the world was a fragile system on the brink of collapse and that we were practically doomed. What sets me apart from most climate scientists is this, I’ve realized I was indoctrinated. Going through my old lecture notes now, I see lie after lie after lie, painting a picture that does not and will not ever exist. I was that girl that ticked the box when booking a plane ticket to say yes, I’m willing to pay a higher price to make this an environmentally friendly transaction and offset my carbon emissions.
Airlines saving polar bears, sign me up. But of course the
consensus was always the same, there was nothing
I could really do to solve the climate crisis.
So let me take you through my journey from being a scientist in complete and utter despair to standing here before you today armed with the truth. Today I’m going to be telling you about the realities of climate education, so let’s start at the beginning of the climate merry-go-round, the indoctrination of school children. Do you realize the alleged consequences from climate change are actually similar to those of war? The child’s world is inherently unstable, after all due to extreme sea level rise and extreme weather events, their lives are at risk. But this is what we’re teaching our kids, that the world they live in is no longer a safe and stable environment, that ecosystems are collapsing and their world is on fire. This is an outrage, they promised this is the truth and if they question that narrative the school will write to their parents, no debate allowed. I have been told my whole life that there is impending doom in the form of climate change. It was in the news every day, my teachers schooled me on it, my friends were talking about it, there were even degrees in it.
I can be forgiven for believing it. Why wouldn’t you believe what your teachers are telling you? They’re the ultimate authority at a young age. But the most significant point is this, it is the effect it has on our children.
They are scaring our children with these ghastly stories, they are shaping them to feel powerless because they can’t do anything about it and they are moulding them to be disillusioned and angry because the so-called people in charge don’t appear to be doing anything about it either. This is how you get the Greta Thunbergs of the world, that girl honestly believes her world is burning. Imagine for a second what it truly feels like to believe that.
I was at school in 1999 and this new emergency of global warming made me feel anxious and at that time three percent of school-aged children were diagnosed with anxiety.By 2023 this had escalated to more than 20 percent of school-aged children being diagnosed with anxiety. This is not a coincidence, the psychological impact of this story is crippling children’s mental health and it is simply unacceptable.
It is wrong, it is socially irresponsible and the minute they try and peddle that story on my child, well let me just make this clear, hell will have no fury like a mother who knows the truth and who is also a climate expert. Hell will not have enough fury and this is why I’m angry because I’ve seen the system from within and what I found at university wasn’t a debate, it was a script. So when I call climate change a narrative, I’m not being edgy, I’m being precise.
If you want a quick test for whether something is solid science or nonsense, just look for consistency and this consistency is exactly what’s missing. Firstly, the story keeps on changing. If it were a real story I guess the general facts surrounding it would probably remain the same but in the 60s and 70s the majority of scientists were predicting global warming but if you looked in the newspaper you’d think we’re heading straight into an ice age.
In 1974, Radio Times ran the headline, the ice age cometh. American media followed suit. Every cold weather event was sold as proof that there was an ice age approaching. Sound familiar? It should. It’s how the media still works today. A flood, a heat wave, a storm, completely normal weather, splash it across the front page, call it unprecedented and blame climate change. Everyday weather is rebranded as existential crisis. My point is this, it was never scientists telling the world an ice age was coming, it was the media with their use of selected experts. But why? Let’s dig deeper.
Newsweek warned governments were unprepared for climate driven food shortages and that planners were ignoring climatic uncertainty and that delay would make the coming crisis impossible to manage. This wasn’t just weather reporting, it was a script to create panic about hunger, global instability, they pull the lever for sympathy, for suffering in poorer countries and even today we see images of flooded villages, failed crops, desperate families, all offered up as proof of climate catastrophe and as justification for sweeping political action, urgent action with no time to consider the consequences.
In 1988, there was a rebranding exercise. The New York Times headline read, global warming has begun, expert tells Senate. I read this article, the evidence rests on five months of slightly warm weather and in climate sciences, a trend takes 30 years to establish, not just a season and worse still was the baseline they chose, 1950 to 1980. This is the very cooling period they had just used to scream ice age.
This is a classic case of data manipulation, you take a cold reference point and everything after that is going to look unusually warm. This was never ever science, there was never ever a global warming trend, it was data manipulated to tell a story. The ice age never came, first wrong prediction, but the story of the ice age, that did its job.
The media succeeded in creating a generation of fearful believers. In a speech to the Royal Society in 1988, Margaret Thatcher talked about the fear that people were feeling, the fear that humans were creating a global heat trap that could lead to climatic instability. This fear was gaslit by an NGO, the National Academy of Sciences, who promised the warming would cause a sea level rise of several feet over the next century.
The following year, another NGO, the UN, went on the record and promised entire nations will be wiped off the face of the earth due to climate change induced sea level rise by 2020. Well, we’re still here aren’t we? Second false prediction, none of this sea level rise has eventuated and it’s exactly the same story they preach today. Extreme sea level rise and climate change refugees are nothing but a myth designed to scare people into whatever policy response is waiting in the wings.
This is the first reason that the man-made climate change story is nothing more than a doomsday tale that has been evolving for the last 60 years. Think about it. These were arguably two of the world’s most powerful organisations. They’d had access to satellite data for 25 years, the best scientists, the most comprehensive data analysis in the world, plus the mainstream media at their fingertips. Was it really a coincidence that their story never came true? We now know that they would have known via satellites that the sea level was always rising steadily at 1.2 inches per decade, just like it does today. Plus, this sea rise actually brings sediment with it and increases the land mass at the same time, therefore rendering it impossible for islands to sink due to sea level rise.
However, because it was never a real story, they were never interested in the real data. They could clearly see that there was no unusual sea level rise, but they intentionally chose to mislead the public and put their fraudulent plan into action. They advised the World Meteorological Organisation, another NGO, to create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Now, here’s where it gets juicy. The IPCC is structurally identical to the single world government model I was presented with during my studies as a prescriptive solution to climate change. My professors in global governance assured me that a global problem requires a single world government to fix it, and I admit it. I believed them. I respected my professors. Most of them were published authors in respected journals, and I was promised a world-class education.
But the tragedy is this. They were never training scientists.
They were training socialists to enact their agenda.
And it’s been clear to me for a time now that there’s never been a problem with our climate system, just a smoke screen to establish power and create control. Welcome to the only crisis where their solution is always the same. More control, more taxes, and less debate.
Let me make it clear how the IPCC benefits from maintaining and creating generations of climate change believers. To start with, they sit at the very top of the climate change establishment, and when I say establishment, I simply mean a stable network of institutions that fund, credential, and publish the urgency of man-made global warming. Climate finance reached a record-breaking $1.9 trillion in 2023, and last year saw a record $2.2 trillion in clean energy investment.
That’s more than $4 trillion in a couple of years. Think about who are the main winners here. They’re the unelected officials that sit atop the IPCC hierarchy. These are the people selling, building, financing, and certifying the global transition to clean energy. They are making billions.
The financial victims, the United Kingdom is a victim.
Our economy is on the verge of recession after 30 years of big signatory to international climate agreements. What do we have to show for it? Not only are our energy bills the highest in the developed world, but the economy outside of London is closer to that of Bulgaria’s than Germany’s. Today, 18 to 30-year-olds are the first generation to earn less than their parents. We are getting poorer, both relatively and absolutely. My fellow countrymen are suffering, and this also makes me angry. Because of climate policy, because the IPCC says so, we’re not allowed to drill our own gas fields, which will make us completely reliant for others’ gas in the future.
We have the best quality gas in the world, and its exploration has just been made illegal. For existing projects, for every dollar made, the company is taxed upwards of 78 cents due to unnecessary climate taxation. Let’s take a really good look at just how much power the IPCC have created for themselves. They act as a global risk allocation engine. They determine which technologies reduce subsidies, which activities become legally constrained, which investments are encouraged or stranded.
In the UK, we only have four oil refineries left. These are the basic building blocks of the modern industrial economy, but any company that comes in will not make a profit because the taxes are too high. The IPCC is making us poorer, both as nations and as individuals. Recent blackouts across Europe are just a glimpse into the dystopian future which awaits us.
As long as they continue to make us believe that man-made climate change is going to end life as we know it, we will keep filtering trillions of dollars throughout their organisation without questioning a thing. So what can we do? Firstly, I believe that the average person is more than capable of seeing a situation for what it really is. So please, tune in carefully as I seek to disprove the myth of man-made climate change once and for all.
I’ve got you on tenderhooks now, that’s a good thing. You’re still with me. Let’s bust the first myth. More carbon dioxide causes a warmer planet. Here’s the truth. A recent study by arguably two of the world’s leading atmospheric scientists, both Professor Emeritus, one from MIT, one from Princeton, I mean, these guys are not messing around. They have shown that there is a limit to the amount of heat that is able to be trapped by carbon dioxide and they call this the saturation point. We are at 99% of the saturation point. Relatively speaking, no matter how much carbon dioxide we pump into the air, it will not increase our global temperature. It is but a fallacy. Joe Rogan recently had those authors on his podcast, Dr. Linzen and Dr. Happer. Joe Rogan also wants people to stop drinking the Kool-Aid.
Now let’s bust the second myth, that carbon dioxide is bad for the planet. Guess what? Carbon dioxide is actually good for the planet. That’s right, I said it, the truth. Satellite data shows that plant growth has increased significantly over the last 35 years due to increased carbon dioxide. NASA measured a 10% greening of the earth between 2000 and 2020 alone. Meanwhile, at university, I was taught that trees would starve due to climate change.
They intentionally used the word starve to elicit an emotional response. What actually happens is that when there’s more carbon dioxide available, not only do plants grow faster, but they use less water. We know this because commercial greenhouses pump carbon dioxide to 1400 parts per million because it grows the best plants. It’s called carbon dioxide enrichment. Come on. Carbon dioxide enriches the earth.
And the third myth, carbon dioxide has a direct relationship with temperature. Al Gore was the person responsible for demonizing carbon dioxide, and he said carbon dioxide is the highest it’s ever been. It’s just another lie. It’s actually the lowest it’s been in the last 320 million years. Not only that, but some of the highest levels of carbon dioxide occurred during an ice age 340 million years ago, which just proves that carbon dioxide and temperature have no direct link whatsoever.
Of course, in my training, carbon dioxide and its rise or fall could explain everything that happened in our climatic history through some sort of feedback loop or time lag mechanism. And this is the whole basis of their argument. That more carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, the more the temperature will increase. The most important takeaway from this today is that is a lie. The truth is, the earth is just getting greener, and we are simply uneducated as to why the climate actually changes. Indeed, all of us are completely brainwashed to never question it.
So why do the IPCC have a conflict of interest with the truth? Let’s understand exactly how much power this unelected, undemocratic, unaccountable, non-governmental organization are protecting with their lies. The IPCC produce assessments that 195 governments around the world use as an authoritative reference for climate policy. They use IPCC scenarios to set emissions targets, justify carbon budgets. If countries argue for compensation or climate aid, they cite IPCC risk assessments.
The IPCC projections define which regions are at risk and therefore where the money flows. And what they really don’t want you to know is that the most powerful leverage is in financial markets. IPCC scenarios are used in ESG scoring frameworks,climate stress testing for banks, insurance risk models, central bank climate risk assessments, and investment screening criteria. In practice, this means that a company’s ability to access capital increasingly depends on whether its business model is aligned with IPCC-derived pathways.
They have a monopoly not only on the success of entire countries but on individual business interests. In effect, their projections now sit upstream of policy, regulation, infrastructure, and economic structure. And this here, this is why they carry so much power. This isn’t just undemocratic, it’s anti-democratic. I never voted for them to make these decisions. These are people that cannot be held to account by the electorate and that is an unacceptable structure. It is a socialist, globalist agenda that has been carried out right beneath our noses. And it is the spitting image of the one world government framework that was prescribed in my training.
So, with the whole world relying on their projections, with trillions of dollars on the line, you would think that their utmost priority should be the accuracy of those projections. It’s why the believers say, look at the data, you can’t ignore the data. Well, spoiler alert, the data is doctored, just like it’s always been, just like my textbooks were, just like my lecture notes were, this whole thing is indoctrination.
And here is the proof. Hackers leaked emails from IPCC assessment report authors which exposed them freely discussing their efforts in deleting and manipulating the real data because it didn’t quite fit with their doomsday story.
And I quote, I’ll maybe cut the last few points of the filtered curve as that’s trending down. They needed it to be trending upward to fit with their past projections. Another email says, I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick to hide the decline. These are real emails between the authors of the IPCC report. There are more than 2000 emails like this showing corrupt behavior and they are still the lead authors today. They are unelected, corrupt and have a conflict of interest with the truth. Trillions of dollars of spending rests on fabricated nonsense.
In the UK, if we don’t allocate our national budget to their satisfaction, we’re taken to court. Most recently, we were taken to the European Court of Human Rights because of failure to adequately prepare for extreme heat and flooding. And this, they say, violates fundamental human rights because we are not protecting people against man-made climate change. It is an outrage. So what can we do? It’s time to reclaim our sovereignty.
And we do this by formally leaving all agreements governed by the climate establishment, repeal the Climate Change Act, withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, withdraw from the UNFCC, leave the Paris Agreement. America withdrew from all United Nations architecture this month. It’s time for the rest of the world to follow suit.
I can already hear the objections, but if we don’t act, aren’t we doomed? As a climate scientist, let me reassure you. The climate is meant to change and it’s meant to change drastically. It is just its natural state and this is very much like the earth. We are in a natural period of warming called the Holocene. We’re still coming out of the Little Ice Age, which was between 1400 and 1900. Our earth’s climate gets warmer and cooler in 1500 year cycles. There is also an ocean pattern called El Nino Southern Oscillation, (ENSO) which drives huge temperature changes. Most global warming is in fact driven by changes in the ocean currents. Other changes are driven by orbital forcings called milankovitch cycles. These cycles change the position of our planet relative to the sun and historically produce an ice age every 100,000 years. There’s nothing man-made about it. There is only natural climate change.
But training experts that the world will listen to and who will enact their agenda is a crucial part of the IPCC’s strategy to retain control. Well, I’m a climate scientist. I’m an expert. So, listen to me. All man-made climate education in schools has to stop. It is not science. It is consensus which is very different to objective scientific fact.
Teach them natural climate change. Teach them about milankovitch cycles, the El Nino. Do not teach them lies that I have just proven wrong. I don’t want my child to gain an ideology. I want him to gain an education. The next generation must be clever. And for this to happen, they need to be learning factual information.
For anyone out there that has ever felt guilty or afraid due to climate change, I want to reassure you, you are not the problem. We have been brainwashed every day by the media. We are being lied to every day. And if we question it, we’re told we’re crazy. We are told we’re in denial because the climate establishment is afraid.
They will tell you that I’m the extreme one because I don’t believe the world is on fire. They will do everything they can to make us fearful. The world as we know it is ending, burning, boiling, to maintain control, constrain us in regulatory burden, and have us accountable to their courts if we spend our taxpayers money the wrong way.
The climate establishment targeted intelligent people who genuinely loved the environment. They taught us the earth was dying and on the brink of collapse. And I believed it. That is not stupidity. That is programming. Because my university lecturers who I respected and the institution of the university itself assured me this was the latest cutting edge research.
I mean I’m thinking I want my money back at this point. They told you it’s settled. They told you it’s urgent. They told you to comply. Well, I’ve told you what they haven’t. The climate is meant to change. The man couldn’t affect the climate system even if he wanted to. Carbon dioxide is good for the planet and will not increase the temperature any. And both children and university students are being brainwashed to blindly perform and enact their agenda.
Well, I am no puppet. For me, once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The choice of what to believe is now yours. But the establishment should be afraid because I am a climate scientist who knows the truth. Thank you. Thank you so much. I also just want to thank the Heartland Institute so much for having me speak at the inaugural World Prosperity Forum here in Zurich.
Drone footage shows hundreds of solar panels ripped apart and scattered across farmland after a powerful tornado tore through Wheatfield overnight. Homes in the area also suffered heavy damage as the violent storm carved a path of destruction. Photo credit Joemar Sombero
Energy Bad Boys draw the lessons from an Indiana tornado impacting power supply in their blog article Solar Scattered, Coal Still Standing. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
What an Indiana tornado revealed about the cost of fragile power
On Tuesday, March 10th, an EF-1 tornado destroyed the Dunns Bridge Solar I and II facilities owned by the Northern Indiana Public Service Company (NIPSCO). The facilities, located outside of Wheatfield, Indiana, had2.4 million solar panels, totaling 700 megawatts (MW) of power capacity, and reportedly cost $1 billion to construct—a little over $1,400 per kilowatt (kW).
The Chief Deputy of Jasper County Sheriff’s Department, Brandon Napier, noted, “Just the path of the tornado that came through, we have several large solar fields to the east of the town here it went right through the solar field and just ripped a lot of them out.”
While the solar panels were damaged by the tornado, we are not aware of any reports of damage at the nearby R.M. Schahfer Generating Station, a 950 MW coal facility that NIPSCO was planning to retire at the end of 2025. However, it is still running thanks to a 202(C) order issued by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) requiring the plant to continue operations. Click on the map below to explore the custom Google Map we made this week of the facilities.
To enlarge, open in new tab.
This article will explore the cost of the destroyed solar facility compared to the nearby R.M. Schahfer Plant, and explore how energy costs have changed in the NIPSCO service territory in response to changes in the company’s generation fleet, using some cool data from S&P Global.
According to S&P Global, the Dunns Bridge solar projects were built to “support Northern Indiana Public Service’s goal of becoming coal-free by 2028, reducing carbon emissions by more than 90 percent by 2030, compared to a 2005 baseline, according to the utility.”
The situation begs several questions:
If climate change is going to make the weather more extreme,how does it make any sense to shut down coal plants and build energy generation facilities, like solar, that are destroyed by extreme weather?
Are the company’s coal-free and emissions reduction goals increasing the company’s exposure to costs associated with weather events, and why should ratepayers be saddled with these additional costs?
Was there any damage to the R.M. Schahfer coal plant or the onsite battery storage facility at Dunns Bridge?
What type of insurance policy is in place for the solar facility, and what deductible would the company be required to pay, if any?
What liability, if any, does the company have for the cleanup of the site and surrounding areas?
How is any of this in the best interests of ratepayers?
The Cost of Tornado-Truncated Solar Facility
Let’s be incredibly uncharitable and look at the anticipated levelized cost of energy (LCOE) of the solar facility over its projected 25-year useful lifetime, and its actual, tornado-truncated lifetime.
Dunns Bridge I began generating power in June of 2023, producing a total of 1.3 million megawatt hours (MWh) up until December of 2025, the most recent month for which data are available. Dunns Bridge II began generating power in January of 2025, and through December, it produced 812,439 MW of power, which is good for a 21.3 percent capacity factor.
We calculated the LCOE over two time periods: a 25-year lifecycle, a standard assumption in the industry, and a 2-year lifecycle to account for the facility being destroyed very early in its lifecycle. The results are about what we would expect. Our estimated subsidized costs over 25 years are approximately equal to S&P Global’s reported PPA cost for the facilities, including subsidies.
Is this a fair comparison? Probably not, because the solar facility was almost certainly insured and will likely be rebuilt after the site is remediated. The question is: how much are the cleanup and replacement costs,and what is the insurance deductible for the damaged facility, and who has to pay them?
The Cost of the Nearby Coal Plant
In our upcoming LCOE study for Reliable Energy Inc. in Indiana, we found that the R.M. Schahfer plant was the most expensive coal plant in the state, due primarily to very high delivered fuel costs at the plant ($50 per MWh).
However, the December 2025 data from S&P Global, the most recent available, show the delivered fuel cost was about $27 per MWh, which substantially improves the economics of the plant, although this could possibly be the result of the company assuming the plant would retire at the end of the year, rather than being required to stay open.
At $70 per MWh, the Schahfer plant is competitive with subsidized solar
over a 25-year lifespan, cheaper than the unsubsidized cost over 25 years,
and a bargain compared with our admittedly uncharitable comparison
to the facility’s actual 2-year lifespan.
NIPSCO’s Changing Generation Profile
NIPSCO’s Dunns Bridge solar facilities are part of a larger trend away from coal-fired power generation toward natural gas, MISO market purchases, and increasingly, wind and solar ownership or power purchase agreements (PPAs).
This trend has coincided with a massive increase in the utilities’ estimated rate base. Data from S&P Global show NIPSCO’s rate base has more than doubled since 2016. You’ll notice that the rate base was essentially flat from 2000 to 2010 in non-inflation-adjusted terms. This is because electric companies are supposed to see their rate bases stabilize as their assets depreciate over time.
It’s also interesting to look at what’s causing the rate base growth. In the mid 2000s and 2010s, the growth in NIPSCO’s spending was driven by generation spending. However, transmission and distribution spending began to increase around 2018, and generation spending fell in 2021, but rebounded slightly in 2024.
Conclusion
There are lots of things that break when they get hit by a tornado,
but our power plants shouldn’t be one of them.
The demise of the Dunns Bridge I & II solar facilities by one of the weakest classifications of tornado should be a nudge to Indiana policymakers and utility regulators that shutting down dispatchable thermal plants in favor of flimsier wind and solar facilities is not a prudent course of action.
Frankly, the Trump administration should be lambasting companies like NIPSCO for continuing to pursue their voluntary decarbonization pledges when electricity bills are rising, and demand is soaring due to data centers. A few mean tweets might go a long way toward helping utility executives and their Wall Street investors understand they can no longer Green Plate the grid at the expense of everyday Americans.
Solar panels in field with the sun reflecting on the panels creating a glare. Source: Northern Indiana Public Service Company LLC (NIPSCO),
The assumed level three million years ago of CO2 was around 400 ppm, a convenient mark that has been used to explain the subsequent ice age and a drop to 250 ppm. Due to the recently published paper, this explanation has become more problematic and natural climate variation is correctly noted to have occurred with the temperature changes. Alas, similar explanations are mostly ignored in discussing today’s climate changes in the interests of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Some cling desperately to a dominant CO2 role, including one of the authors of the findings published in Nature. The co-author states that the results suggest even greater climate sensitivity to the warming effect of CO2. In short, there is a great deal of applying the laws of physics and chemistry to one era, but failing to extend the same courtesy to another.
Critics seeking to downplay ice core evidence often suggest it is too imprecise to provide a wholly accurate record of gas levels and temperature. But it is accurate enough to give a broad cyclical insight. It remains the source of some of the best data we have on the past climate. It is undoubtedly more accurate than most proxy evidence from millions of years ago. But whatever the evidence used, it is hard to detect any obvious and continuous link between CO2 and temperature across the entire geological record going back 600 million years to the start of abundant life on Earth. Certainly none to justify the political notion that humans control the climate thermostat by burning hydrocarbons.
In fact the evidence is so slim that Les Hatton, Emeritus Professor in Computer Science at Kingston University, was recently able to determine from ice core records that 100-year rises of 1.1°C in the current interglacial, which started 20,000 years ago, have occurred in one in six centuries. Going back 150,000 years, the frequency was around one in six to one in 20 centuries.
None of these findings suggest that current warming is either unusual or
primarily caused by human activity. Needless to say, none of these findings
trouble the headline writers in narrative-addicted mainstream media.
Much public discourse in global warming centres around the oft-quoted rise in temperature of approximately 1.1°C in global average temperature in the post-industrial period. This is considered in some quarters to constitute a “Climate Emergency” demanding “Climate Action”. In this paper we first dissect the background behind this number and what it means. Second, we use the Epica-Vostok Ice core dataset, a single proxy dataset for temperature data sampled every century for the last 800,000 years or so.
And ask the question “Is a 1.1°C temperature rise in a century unusual in this dataset?” The answer is surprising.
By considering interglacial onsets and decays as well as intermediating Ice Ages, it turns out that a rise of this amount would have been considered unusual more than 200,000 years ago, but this rise is not unusual in the current interglacial which started some 20,000 years ago with around 16% of all centuries since the last Ice Age exhibiting a temperature rise of at least 1.1°C. None of these could have anthropogenic components as they pre-dated the industrial era.
This result suggests that attempts to partition the current rise
into anthropogenic and nonanthropogenic components
are questionable given that it is not even unusual.
The last 20,000 years
It is important to note that we live in an Interglacial rise, a period of generally rising temperature. As can be seen in Fig. 2, temperatures have climbed by about 12°C since we emerged from the last Ice Age some 20,000 years ago. In other words, on average they have increased by about 12/200 = 0.06°C per century. Just after the Ice Age ended, the rate of increase was almost twice as high at around 0.1°C per century. Since then it has continued to rise but more slowly although with considerable century on century variability.
Conclusions
The Vostok Ice Core data contains numerous interesting features which can be confirmed by anybody as the data is open. We can conclude the following:
♦ A rise of 1.1°C in a century is not unusual in the current interglacial. In fact 16% of the centuries since the end of the last Ice age show a rise at least as big as the current century and none of these could have been affected by anthropogenic action.
♦ A rise of 1.1°C in a century would have been considered unusual any time more than 200,000 years ago. For some unknown reason nothing to do with us, the temperature has become more volatile in century on century changes in the last 200,000 years. Whether this is a physical effect or an artifact of isotopic smoothing with time is unknown although there is no evidence for the latter on the peaks of the last four interglacials and there is an abrupt change in magnitude of about 4°C in between the last 5 interglacials and the preceding 4 which is atypical of a continuous smoothing process.
♦ The current interglacial is nothing special. It is currently still more than 3°C cooler than the peak of the last one about 130,000 years ago (which was by assumption entirely free of anthropogenic effect) and the degree of variability in this data is much the same now as then.
Given then that a rise of 1.1°C is quite commonplace in this current interglacial and that none of the earlier occurrences could have been affected by anthropogenic activity, this raises the question of why we are trying to attribute the current rise to anthropogenic effects as if it was unusual.
