Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Nearly all of the alleged anthropogenic link to climate change can be removed simply by exchanging and/or replacing biased temperature and solar activity data sets.
Nearly all of the alleged anthropogenic link to climate change can be removed simply by exchanging and/or replacing biased temperature and solar activity data sets.
A new study authored by 37 scientists in the journal Climate finds using rural-only Northern Hemisphere temperature data (i.e., removing artificial, non-climatic urban heat effects) reduces the post-1850 warming trend from 0.89°C per century to 0.55°C per century.
Further, using a total solar irradiance (TSI) dataset neglected by the IPCC (Hoyt and Schatten, 1993, updated to present) allows TSI to explain up to 87% of modern warming.
Variations in cloud cover, albedo, and natural ocean circulations may also be factors arising from internal climate variability that could explain modern climate changes.
In summary, then, much of modern global warming’s alleged link to human activity may have been formulated by selecting data that align with the hypothesis, and neglecting or dismissing data which do not.
The Washington Post (WaPo) ran a so-called fact check on presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s claim during the recent Republican debate that “The climate change agenda is a hoax … The reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change,” ruling his claims false. WaPo’s “Fact Checker” analysis is almost certainly wrong, since real world data shows a significant decline in deaths linked to non-optimal temperatures and extreme weather events.
The Washington Post (WaPo) ran a so-called fact check on presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy’s claim during the recent Republican debate that “The climate change agenda is a hoax … The reality is more people are dying of bad climate change policies than they are of actual climate change,” ruling his claims false. WaPo’s “Fact Checker” analysis is almost certainly wrong, since real world data shows a significant decline in deaths linked to non-optimal temperatures and extreme weather events. Also, most of the deaths in developing countries that Ramaswamy was referring to are preventable, but the poor in developing countries continue to die unnecessarily, in part, because of Western governments and institutions climate policies discouraging and preventing the expanded use of fossil fuels for transportation and reliable electricity.
In the WaPo story, “Vivek Ramaswamy says ‘hoax’ agenda kills more people than climate change,” so-called fact checker, Glenn Kessler, wrote:
Many have interpreted Ramaswamy’s comment that the “climate change agenda is a hoax” as a flat statement that climate change is a hoax. But that doesn’t seem accurate, because a moment later he referred to deaths from “actual climate change.” Instead, he appeared to be suggesting that policies used to stem climate change don’t deliver what they promise and thus are a hoax.
Ramaswamy, a business entrepreneur, is a fan of fossil fuels — in his closing statement he asserted that “fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity” …”
At The Fact Checker, we’re interested in numbers; in discussing climate change, Ramaswamy offered a big one. He asserted that more people were dying of bad climate policies than climate change itself. What’s that about?
So far, so good. In fact, numbers are precisely how one can best assess premature mortality claims attributed to climate change in comparison to green energy policies. Yet rather than going to the numbers, some of which do exist, Kessler asked purported “experts,” what they thought of Ramaswamy’s claims.
The first expert Kessler quoted obfuscated the issue by suggesting that the woefully mistitle, Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), is relatively new with little of its policies being fully enacted. This is true, but laughably beside the point. The IRA is hardly the first law or treaty adopted in the United States, in developed countries, or by international institutions like the United Nations and various “development” banks, to impose restrictions on fossil fuel use and promote expensive and the use intermittent alternative energy technologies instead. Such policies have been common, in the United States and around the world since the U.N Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was first adopted in 1992, 31 years ago. Thousands of policies and programs discouraging or forcibly limiting fossil fuel use, have been adopted since then, and hundreds of billions of dollars, possibly trillions have been spent fighting climate change.
When looking at deaths “threatened” by climate change, Kessler, in lieu of referencing existing trends grounded in hard data for people dying from, for example, malaria, heat exposure, and childhood undernutrition, he refers to climate model generated projections for the future used by the World Health Organization. Why look at future projections when real world data is available? After all, Ramaswamy was speaking about what has happened, not what might happen based on some computer model scenario.
As Climate Realism has repeatedly pointed out in previous posts, here, here, and here, for example, climate models have gotten neither the basic projection they make, the global average temperature and its rate of rise, right, nor the trends in weather events and their real world impacts. If climate models don’t accurately portray the past and the present correctly without adjustments to basically force them to do so, why should their projections of the future be trusted by anyone, especially by a presumably educated, science savvy person like Kessler.
To be fair, Kessler seemingly recognizes that he should be looking at data concerning past when fact checking Ramaswamy’s claim. He writes:
That’s the future. Looking backward, the World Meteorological Organization in May concluded that extreme weather, climate and water-related events caused 11,000 reported disasters between 1970 and 2021, resulting in just over 2 million deaths. Nine out of 10 deaths took place in developing countries. Economic losses amounted to $4.3 trillion.
Whether all of these deaths are the result of climate change could be subject to dispute. Many of the highest death tolls from extreme weather took place decades ago; better weather forecasting and improved disaster response have helped reduce death tolls. The highest death tolls listed by WMO are 300,000 from a 1983 drought in Ethiopia and 300,000 from a 1970 storm in Bangladesh.
What’s in dispute is whether any of these deaths resulted from human caused climate change, much less all of them.
Most of the deaths cited by Kessler were tied to extreme weather occurred when the earth was in a cooling period, when many scientists were warning of a possible pending ice age, before the modest recent warming now labeled dangerous and attributed to recent causes. One cannot determine whether climate change caused any particular event, but one can look at trends over time so see whether deaths related to extreme weather and temperatures are increasing and coincide with change in climate. Doing so, the evidence is clear and should be convincing to anyone with an open mind, though you wouldn’t know that from reading Kessler’s WaPo article.
Kessler provided a very narrow selection of numbers. What data shows is that during the period of recent warming, deaths related to extreme weather events have declined by more than 99 percent over the past 100 years, as discussed in Climate Realism posts, here and here, for example. Extreme weather events killed nearly 500,000 people annually in the 1920s, but by 2021 only 7,790 deaths were attributable to extreme weather events. Concerning deaths related to extreme temperatures, multiple large scale peer reviewed studies in top journals, perhaps most prominently in The Lancet, show that cold temperatures kill far more people each year than hot temperatures. They also demonstrate that as temperatures have modestly warmed, the number of deaths tied to non-optimum temperatures has declined.
Concerning hunger and malnutrition, research cited in more nearly 200 articles posted at Climate Realism show that as carbon dioxide levels have risen, crop production has boomed for almost every crop one cares to discuss, in nation after nation spanning all parts of the globe. Agronomy explains that a large part of the reason for the crop production and yield increases is due to the improved fertilization effect of rising carbon dioxide levels, a decline in late season frosts, longer growing seasons, generally improved moisture conditions in the worlds major growing regions, and plants’ improved abilities to use water efficiently. Neither Kessler nor the experts he spoke with provided any reason for believing any of these conditions will worsen should the Earth continue its modest trajectory of warming in the foreseeable future.
This CO2 induced increase in crop production has not eliminated hunger and malnutrition, but research shows it has diminished it considerably. Forty-four percent of the world’s population lived in absolute poverty in 1981 – 42 years of global warming ago. Since then, the share of people living in such poverty fell below 10 percent by 2015. And although 700 million people worldwide still suffer from persistent hunger, the United Nations reports the number of hungry people has declined by two billion since 1990 – 33 years of global warming ago.
Let’s talk about the second part of Ramaswamy’s claim, that climate policies are killing more people than climate change.
Just as it is impossible to link any particular death to “climate change,” it is equally impossible to link any particular death to a specific climate policy, so hard “data,” which Kessler suddenly places at a premium, is necessarily lacking.
However, common sense and research strongly suggest that policies that slow the introduction and use of modern high yield farming techniques and technologies in developing countries, like restrictions on fossil fuel use and the use of fertilizers and pesticides made from oil and natural gas, result in lower yields and growth, and this contributes to hunger, malnutrition, and in extreme cases deaths from starvation. While we don’t know how many lives of the hundreds of millions of people still suffering from persistent hunger or facing starvation would be saved by improved agricultural production, it is certainly orders of magnitude more than the less than 10,000 who died as a result of extreme weather events in 2021.
How many people died unnecessarily in 2021, and during the more than three decades years since the UNFCCC was adopted, in developing countries due to climate policies that prevented or slowed the construction and operation of modern medical facilities with dependable 24/7 electric power there. Power that is provided best by coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants. How many women’s and children’s lives were lost during or near birth due to the absence of modern medical facilities and the hundreds of energy intensive technologies and products used daily at hospitals in developed countries, which oil and gas either power or are component parts of. No regular refrigeration keeping medicines and foods usable, no nighttime lighting or power for emergency surgeries and difficult births. When people die due to lack of modern medical care as a result of energy poverty, that’s a death attributable, in many instances in this day and age, to climate policies and restrictions adopted by governments, and international institutions like the United Nations and the World Bank.
Then there is air quality. Indoor air quality is a leading cause premature death in poor countries accounting for more than 2.3 million preventable deaths per year, writes Our World Data, discussing findings from the World Health Organization. Our World Data attributes the cause to the use of renewable fuels in the home, writing:
Indoor air pollution is caused by burning solid fuel sources – such as firewood, crop waste, and dung – for cooking and heating.
The burning of such fuels, particularly in poor households, results in air pollution that leads to respiratory diseases which can result in premature death. The WHO calls indoor air pollution “the world’s largest single environmental health risk.
How many lives would be saved each year if the impoverished households currently burning renewable but dirty wood and dung were plugged into a modern electric power system, fueled by the cleanest, coal, natural gas, or even nuclear plants. Emissions from modern coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants don’t threaten ill health or premature death. They are certainly cleaner sources of heat and light than wood and dung, and they are more reliable than wind and solar.
In short, energy poverty is a killer and climate policies maintain energy poverty in developing countries, while forcing more lower income people into energy poverty due to higher energy prices in developed countries. All things considered, Ramaswamy is almost certainly correct to claim climate policies kill more people each year than climate change, and thus, contrary to Kessler’s assessment, merited no “Pinocchios,” rather than the four Kessler assigned.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
They knew, of course, that it was not the hottest on record, because they have the Central England Temperature series, and this dates back further their UK records.
It seems an age since we had a couple of weeks of nice weather in June, which naturally had the Met Office leaping up and down to blame on climate change:
June has been confirmed as the hottest on record for the UK.
A rapid study by Met Office scientists found the chance of observing a June beating the previous record of 14.9°C, like we have this year, has at least doubled since the period around 1940. The previous record of 14.9°C was recorded in 1940 and 1976.
They knew, of course, that it was not the hottest on record, because they have the Central England Temperature series, and this dates back further their UK records.
And according to CET, June 1846 was more than a degree hotter. It was also hotter in 1676, 1822 and 1826. That, of course, demolished their claims about global warming.
As I pointed out at the time, the average temperature in June was high because of the quirks of the calendar. Relatively warm, sunny weather pretty much lasted all month, before quickly disappearing at the beginning of July. At no stage however did temperatures reach unusually high levels.
The Met Office made a big play of the fact that June 2023 was hotter than 1976, part of the well-known summer of 1976.
It was grossly dishonest to even compare with 1976, because the heatwave only got going in the last week of June that year. When it did get going, temperatures peaked several degrees above this year, and the hot spell lasted well into July:
As we can also see, there was another long heatwave in August 1976.
And despite all of that global boiling in June, the summer of 2023 ended up pretty unexceptional, barely above the 30-yr average, no warmer than 1857 and 1859. There have been 38 years with summer temperatures as high or higher.
There is an unmistakeable takeaway from these charts. This is the fact that average summer temperatures continue to fail to beat 1976, even if hot summers have tended to become more common.
And there is a good reason for this – hot summers are the result of dry, sunny weather, not global warming.
Despite being implemented to improve air quality by restricting older vehicles, Glasgow’s Low Emission Zone has resulted in a 10% increase in traffic-related pollution levels.
Despite being implemented to improve air quality by restricting older vehicles, Glasgow’s Low Emission Zone has resulted in a 10% increase in traffic-related pollution levels. The Telegraphhas the story.
Pollution levels of gases linked to traffic rose by about 10% in the centre of Glasgow after the SNP set up a ‘draconian’ Ulez-style scheme, official figures show.
Nitrogen dioxide levels in the city’s Hope Street, which has repeatedly had the country’s worst air quality, were measured at an average of 34 micrograms per cubic metre between June and August this year.
This compared with a figure of 31mg in the same period last year, before the city’s low emission zone (Lez) was introduced – a rise of 9.7%. The legal limit is 40mg.
Levels of another pollutant from motor vehicles, known as fine particulate matter, surged by 11.5% over the same period, from 5.2mg to 5.8mg per cubic metre.
The SNP-run Glasgow City Council said the weather could be responsible for the surge, but the figures prompted further questions about whether cars should be included.
Experts said buses and coaches are the largest polluters and they have been subject to the Lez since the end of 2018. Enforcement of other vehicles started on June 1st this year.
One air quality expert, who did not wish to be named, told the Scottish Mail on Sunday: “Buses are the main polluters, hence the reason levels remain more or less the same as before, and therefore you have to question the point of banning cars given all the cost, disruption and inconvenience.”
An older car entering the zone each day would face penalties of £60, a penalty that doubles with each subsequent breach of rules up to a daily cap of £480 for cars and vans and £960 for buses and HGVs. The fine is reset to £60 if there are no breaches for 90 days.
It emerged last month that the city council was spending £100,000 on renting vehicles to replace those within its fleet that did not comply with the new rules.
It appears that fact-checking resorted to lies and omissions of pertinent information. Ideologically-blessed activist fact checkers with no scientific training give little confidence.
The article claims, “Neither Plimer nor the social media user responded when USA TODAY asked which “six great ice ages” they were referencing.”
That is a lie. USA TODAY did not contact me despite the fact that I am easily contactable.
USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Human greenhouse gas emissions, not El Niño, drive climate change”. Nowhere have I claimed El Niño drives climate change, and it has never been shown that human emissions drive global warming. If it could be shown, then it would also have to be shown that the modern warming is completely different from previous warming. This has not been done.
USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Greenhouse gases, not Milankovitch cycles, drives modern global warming”. This is contrary to data on the Earth’s orbit, solar activity and plate tectonics. Furthermore, it was never been shown that greenhouse gases drive climate change.
USA TODAY’s fact checks state that “Humans are responsible for a significant amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.” If one molecule of plant food in 83,333 molecules in the atmosphere is a significant amount, then I’m a monkey’s uncle. It would also have to be shown that the molecules of plant food of natural origin do not drive global warming.
USA TODAY’s rating of a talk I gave was “Partly false” regarding six major ice ages, and then played semantic games as to whether an ice age or a glaciation within an ice age could be considered an ice age.
The key points of my talk were not addressed. These were:
(a) Ice ages and glaciations were initiated when the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was far higher than today (e.g. Huronian, Cryogenian, Permo-Carboniferous) hence, atmospheric carbon dioxide could not drive global warming.
(b) Increases in atmospheric temperature are followed by an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, which is the opposite of the climate activist mantra that suggests an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide drives global warming.
(c) For decades, I have asked climate activists to give me half a dozen scientific papers that show unequivocally that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. This has not been done.
It appears that fact-checking resorted to lies and omissions of pertinent information. Ideologically-blessed activist fact checkers with no scientific training give little confidence.
Bowing to the unwelcome reality of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Sackett v. EPA ruling, Biden administration officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers on Aug. 29 issued a final rule on their joint jurisdiction over “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act.
Bowing to the unwelcome reality of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Sackett v. EPA ruling, Biden administration officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Army Corps of Engineers on Aug. 29 issued a final rule on their joint jurisdiction over “Waters of the United States” (WOTUS) under the Clean Water Act.
Handed down in May, the high court’s decision significantly narrowed the scope of EPA’s power to regulate bodies of water, such as wetlands and adjacent streams.
“While I am disappointed in the Supreme Court’s decision in the Sackett case, EPA and the Army have the obligation to apply this decision alongside our state coordinators, Tribes, and partners,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a news release.
As a result of the Sackett decision, several types of waters will no longer be under federal jurisdiction, including an estimated 1.2 million to 4.9 million miles of ephemeral streams. Up to 63 percent of wetlands by acreage in the United States could be affected, EPA officials said.
The case revolved around an Idaho couple, the Sacketts, whose dreams of building a home on less than an acre of land near Priest Lake in the northern part of the state were thwarted by EPA. Agency officials claimed their property had a subsurface connection to the lake, which is a “navigable water” under the Clean Water Act. That, EPA said, gave them jurisdiction over the otherwise bone-dry property, and the agency ordered the couple to cease construction on their new home. That was in 2007. The case wound its way through the court system until it was finally resolved in the Sacketts’ favor by the Supreme Court.
The End of “Significant Nexus”
The centerpiece of the court’s ruling was its jettisoning of a nearly two-decade-old standard for determining federal jurisdiction over non-navigable bodies of water. It was then-Justice Anthony Kennedy who, in a decision handed down in 2006, ruled that if a wetland or similar body of water had a “significant nexus” to a navigable (or regulated) waterway, it was subject to federal jurisdiction. But what a “significant nexus” was remained a mystery. The confusion from Kennedy’s bizarre terminology helped make cases like the Sacketts possible.
Writing for five justices of the court, Justice Samual A. Alito ruled that the Clean Water Act extends only to “those wetlands with a continuous surface connection to bodies that are ‘waters of the United States’ in their own right, so that they are ‘indistinguishable’ from those waters.”
Such clarity is a long way from “significant nexus.”
Earlier in the year, EPA released a proposed WOTUS rule that made expansive use of “significant nexus,” thereby awarding itself Godzilla-like power over tens of millions of acres of land throughout the U.S. So far-reaching was the Biden WOTUS rule that Republican-led efforts to roll it back under the Congressional Review Act passed both the House and the Senate in the spring with bipartisan support, only to be vetoed by Biden. And then came Sackett.
In the post-Sackett text of its final rule, EPA now writes:
“The exclusive purpose of the 2023 Rule was to define ‘waters of the United States’ and this rule simply conforms that definition to Sackett.”
Commenters Need Not Apply
Breaking with regulatory custom, EPA released its final rule without giving the public an opportunity to submit comments on the agency’s action. That move, together with EPA’s narrow interpretation of the Supreme Court’s decision, prompted West Virginia Sen. Shelly Moore Capito, ranking Republican on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, to predict EPA’s changes will “likely be rejected once again in the courts.” House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Sam Graves, Missouri Republican, said EPA’s revised rule “barely pays lip service to the Sackett decision,” the Washington Times reported (Aug. 30).
Bonner R. Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with CFACT, where he focuses on natural resources, energy, property rights, and geopolitical developments.
Articles by Dr. Cohen have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Investor’s Busines Daily, The New York Post, The Washington Examiner, The Washington Times, The Hill, The Epoch Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Miami Herald, and dozens of other newspapers around the country.
He has been interviewed on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, NBC News, NPR, BBC, BBC Worldwide Television, N24 (German-language news network), and scores of radio stations in the U.S. and Canada.
He has testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, the U.S. Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee. Dr. Cohen has addressed conferences in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Bangladesh. He has a B.A. from the University of Georgia and a Ph. D. – summa cum laude – from the University of Munich.
Given that Idalia turned out to be a bit of a damp squib, the Independent is rather shooting itself in the foot. It rather proves that the cost of US “climate disasters”, (I assume they mean weather disasters), have actually been pretty low this year!
The simple reality, that even the simpletons who read the Independent must know, is that by definition hurricanes tend to be much more costly than most other weather events. That is the nature of the beast.
Poland objects to being bounced into net-zero style policies against its will, so the EU’s climate dogma will get tested in court. Of course arguing with the EU is usually a waste of time, as the UK found out, but there is an obvious alternative (hint).
Poland objects to being bounced into net-zero style policies against its will, so the EU’s climate dogma will get tested in court. Of course arguing with the EU is usually a waste of time, as the UK found out, but there is an obvious alternative (hint). – – – The EU’s recently adopted climate legislation was not properly assessed, exceeded Brussels’ authority and now threatens Poland’s economy as well as energy security, legal arguments published by Warsaw on Monday (28 August) contend, reports Euractiv.
The EU has approved a raft of climate laws over the past months, aiming to reduce its net greenhouse gas emissions to 55% below 1990 levels by 2030 and help the bloc of 27 countries comply with the Paris Agreement on climate change.
But Warsaw is contesting those laws, now aiming to overthrow some of them in court – including the hard-won agreement on banning the sale of new combustion engine cars by 2035.
“We don’t agree with this and other documents from the ‘Fit for 55’ package and we’re bringing this to the European Court of Justice. I hope other countries will join,” Polish climate and environment minister Anna Moskwa said back in June.
Poland is the most sceptical EU country when it comes to climate policy. It is still heavily reliant on coal and has less financial firepower to put behind the green transition than richer western EU countries.
In addition to the new car emission rules, Warsaw wants to overturn a recently agreed law on land use and forestry (LULUCF), scrap legislation updating 2030 emission reduction targets for EU countries and another one changing the number of pollution allowances in the EU’s carbon market stability reserve.
Poland is also seeking to challenge the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism, which introduced the world’s first-ever tariff on carbon-intensive goods entering the European Union.
“Does the EU want to make authoritarian decisions about what kind of vehicles Poles will drive and to increase energy prices in Poland? The Polish government will not allow Brussels to dictate,” Moskwa wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Unanimity
A key pillar of Poland’s argument is that EU climate policies should have been agreed by unanimity because they impact countries’ sovereign decisions about their choice of energy mix and land use, according to a document listing Poland’s legal pleas.
The adoption of the law infringes on the EU’s legal building blocks “by failing to adopt the contested decision on the basis of that Treaty provision, which requires unanimity in the Council, despite the fact that the contested decision significantly affects a Member State’s choice between different energy sources and the general structure of its energy supply,” Warsaw argues.
Poland also warns that certain laws, including changes to the carbon market reserve and country-specific emission reduction targets, threaten its energy security because they do not take into account the individual situation of EU member states.
Meanwhile, the ban on sales of new combustion engine cars risks having serious consequences on Europe’s automotive industry, the related economic sectors and wider society, Warsaw argues.
“The contested regulation imposes excessive burdens connected with the transition towards zero-emission mobility on European citizens, especially those who are less well off, as well as on the European automotive companies sector,” the argument reads.
This “risks giving rise to serious negative consequences for the European automotive industry, social exclusion, transport exclusion of poorer persons, and increased disparity between citizens as regards the standard of living,” it adds.
Moreover, the wider socio-economic impacts of these laws have not been thoroughly assessed, particularly the legislation changing the permits available in the carbon market’s stability reserve, Warsaw contends.
This was adopted “on the basis of an incomplete, out-of-date and incorrectly carried out impact assessment which was prepared using data which did not take account of Russia’s armed attack on Ukraine and the energy crisis resulting therefrom,” Poland argues.
Brussels rebuffs Poland’s arguments
A Commission spokesperson said the EU executive has taken note of Poland’s legal challenge, adding it is up for the EU Court of Justice to rule on the case.
Poland is challenging several newly agreed climate laws, including a 2035 ban on combustion engine cars, in the Court of Justice of the European Union. [Nitpicker / Shutterstock]
Free speech today is under assault from the Left everywhere and all the time. You already know about the federal government’s pervasive Censorship Industrial Complex, pressuring all the big social media companies to suppress what they deem “misinformation” about any subject important to the current dominant political narrative (Covid-19, climate change, etc.). And you already know about ex-President Trump getting indicted by both federal and Georgia prosecutors for saying the same things about the 2020 election that Al Gore said about the 2000 election and Hillary Clinton said about the 2016 election and Stacey Abrams said about the 2018 election.
But how about the Left using its widespread control of social institutions to silence dissent. Today, this is literally everywhere. Here are a couple of notable examples for today — both, as it happens, from outside the U.S.:
Alimonte, et al., paper in European Physical Journal Plus
If you wonder why the climate alarm narrative seems so completely to dominate public discussion (even though it is utter nonsense), then you need to understand that there is an orthodoxy enforcement police operating behind the scenes. Most of the time the operation of this orthodoxy enforcement mechanism is invisible to the general public. Climate skeptics can’t get jobs in academia, and go into other careers; when skeptics write papers, they get rejected, and are never heard from again. But every once in a while something happens to bring aspects of the orthodoxy enforcement mechanism momentarily into the open. That has recently occurred with respect to a paper published in a European scientific journal in early 2022.
In January 2022 the European science journal called European Physical Journal Plus (part of the Springer Nature collection of journals) published a paper by Gianluca Alimonte and colleagues with the title “A critical assessment of extreme events trends in times of global warming.” The paper is essentially a review of trends in various sorts of extreme weather events since the early 20th century, including hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, droughts, and so forth. The bottom line from the article is that there are no noticeable trends in the frequency or severity of these extreme weather events during recent years. For example, the summary as to hurricanes is “To date, global observations do not show any significant trends in both the number and the energy accumulated by hurricanes.”Here is the graph as to numbers of hurricanes and tropical storms and accumulated energy of same:
Surely no trends are visible there. And here are the key concluding sentences from the abstract:
None of these response indicators show a clear positive trend of extreme events. In conclusion on the basis of observational data, the climate crisis that, according to many sources, we are experiencing today, is not evident yet.
That last observation seems to be the one that just could not be allowed. It appears that a group of orthodoxy enforcers from academia and journalism ganged up to go to Springer Nature to demand retraction of the Alimonte, et al. paper. There followed a lengthy back and forth, which ended with the paper being retracted on August 23, 2023. A whistleblower at Springer Nature leaked the back and forth to Roger Pielke, Jr., who has published two pieces about it on his Substack, the first on July 17, and the second on August 26. You can read those two lengthy pieces for all the details.
From the Pielke July 17 piece, the pile-on began about a year ago:
[E]ight months [after publication of Alimonte, et al.], following some discussion of the paper in the Australian media, The Guardian wrote an article severely criticizing the paper. The Guardian quoted four scientists critical of the paper: Greg Holland, Lisa Alexander, Steve Sherwood, and Michael Mann.
As an example of the nature of the criticisms, Pielke quotes the execrable Michael Mann, whose comments Pielke describes as “scathing and personal.” They are also notably non-substantive, appealing to consensus without disputing the accuracy of any of the data:
[This is] another example of scientists from totally unrelated fields coming in and naively applying inappropriate methods to data they don’t understand. Either the consensus of the world’s climate experts that climate change is causing a very clear increase in many types of weather extremes is wrong, or a couple of nuclear physics dudes in Italy are wrong.
As Pielke documents, there was no allegation of scientific fraud or misconduct of any sort. This was purely a case of Mann and his henchmen demanding a retraction over a matter of disagreement with the conclusion. Alimonte, et al. stood behind their work and declined to retract. And Springer then bowed to Mann’s bullying and retracted the article on August 23.
Meanwhile, go to the (now-retracted) Alimonte, et al., paper, and look at the graphs. It is obvious that there is no trend in extreme weather events. There is no getting around this. But it is not allowed to be said in “prestigious” publications like the Springer science journals.
Or, by the way, you can go to Joe D’Aleo’s excellent website, icecap.us, where there is a frequently updated section headed “Climate Alarmist Claim Fact Checks” with the latest data on trends in all extreme weather events.
Pielke mildly criticizes Alimonte, et al., for their “editorializing” about the lack of any climate crisis discernible in the data. Meanwhile, he notes that he did a Google search that turned up some 300,000 papers asserting the existence of a climate crisis. A few hundred billion dollars of government money can buy a lot of fake climate alarmism.
Jordan Peterson license to practice psychology in Ontario
On August 23 judges of something called the Ontario Divisional Court upheld a ruling of the College of Psychologists of Ontario, which had ordered Jordan Peterson to undergo what Peterson calls “social media retraining” to punish him for various tweets and a Joe Rogan podcast interview that the College found unacceptable. In a podcast on August 25, watchable at the Neo Neocon website here, Peterson goes through the tweets and statements that the College of Psychologists finds so unacceptable. Here are a couple discussed on the podcast:
In a tweet on February 19, 2022, Peterson called Ottawa City Councillor Catherine McKenney, who uses “they/them” pronouns, an “appalling, self-righteous moralizing thing.”
Speaking on a Joe Rogan podcast about air pollution and child deaths, Peterson said: “It’s just poor children, and the world has too many people on it anyways.”And here are few more from a piece in the Daily Mail:
2016: Slammed proposed Canadian legislation that would ban discrimination based on ‘gender identity or gender expression’, claiming it would threaten free speech
2017: Claimed that ‘the idea of white privilege is absolutely reprehensible’ because ‘most people have all sorts of privilege’
2018: Told British TV network Channel 4 that men need to ‘grow the hell up’ and ‘adopt responsibility’ while discussing the crisis of masculinity. Also claimed that the gender pay gap was not ‘only due to sex’
You can see how very nefarious this guy is. Clearly he must be silenced.
The punishment for Peterson is that he must undergo re-education until his re-educators are satisfied that he is sufficiently compliant.
The good news is that Peterson has the resources to continue the fight. Perhaps he will take it to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Andrew Forrest speaks of the deaths of millions coming soon…
The cult doomer prophesy upgrades to Billionaire Class. Put this man out of his misery.
Andrew Forrest, Executive Chairman of a $60 billion company made a bizarre speech a few days ago. This is a business presentation with the words like “vomit”, “stampede” and “seizures”, and pictures of skeletons in the desert. The big secret threat, he said, that scientists are not saying “is lethal humidity”. He really believes it. Here’s a man in command of the tenth largest company in Australia with a $33 billion dollar bank account, but not the judgment to get an advisor who can explain the difference between specific and relative humidity. He doesn’t realize that trends are rising in one, but falling in the other, and the modelers were wrong (again). He just had to pick up the phone and call the Met Office, or the CSIRO. They would have loved to talk to him. Even the IPCC experts could have saved him from this embarrassment.
“Lethal Humidity will be the next global pandemic” he prophecies.
“It is business that will kill your children,” he says blaming and demonizing the corporate world that made him rich. “It is the beginning of the end”.
The message for Fortescue shareholders, is run, don’t walk. He is setting up your company to “lead the way” on a sacred mission to save humanity. He hasn’t done his homework, and worse, must have surrounded himself with people telling him what he wants to hear.
“At just 35C with high humidity you can die in six hours”
“We do not have the human evolution to survive it”
There’s no cure.
Forrest runs away with stories of acute emergency care for hyperthermia, labeled with “Harvard Medical School” because, science, yeah…
We may have to drain the blood…
But he’s panicking about relative humidity and it’s not rising, it’s falling…
The fatalistic 35 degree death rate that Forrest is so afraid of, happens only “with 100 percent humidity” — it refers to relative humidity, not specific humidity which is measured in grams per kilogram, not percentages, and relative humidity is falling. So “climate change” such as it is, might reduce the rate of lethal humidity.
The Humidity Paradox
Forrest claims that for every degree the world gets warmer we will get a 7% rise in humidity. This is standard bucket chemistry — like a SciFi novel written by a precocious 12 year old. It comes from the Clausius-Clapeyron equation, which works well in the lab but is cruelly being thwarted by slowing wind speeds or ocean currents leaving modelers scratching their heads. Even the IPCC agrees. Surface relative humidity is falling. Perplexed modelers call this “the humidity paradox” which sounds so much better than “we were wrong”, but that’s what it means. Temperature is important for evaporation, but as anyone who has hung washing on the line knows — wind speed will make or break your day and ultimately the models can’t predict future wind speeds. The dreaded “Global Stilling” was a thing right up until “Global windiness” suddenly became a great opportunity for wind farms. At one point, modelers split their bets saying the northern hemisphere winds would slow while the southern hemisphere would speed up. Confused? Join the IPCC.
In theory, if there are no limiting factors, then this [7% per degree] is the rate of increase we would expect to see. However, … this new dataset shows that relative humidity has actually decreased over many regions of the oceans. … This decrease is difficult to explain given our current physical understanding of humidity and evaporation. For example, the expectation from climate models is that ocean relative humidity should remain fairly constant or increase slightly.
The decrease in relative humidity over land is really interesting. We do not see the same decrease in historical reconstructions from climate models…
Specific humidity is rising as the world warms (compared to 1981). A warmer world is a “wetter world.”
But relative humidity is falling, which the models didn’t expect. Warmer air can hold more water vapor, and apparently the air is warming faster than the extra water vapor is leaping into the sky. With lower relative humidity the air has a little more capacity to cool mammals than it did 40 years ago.
Andrew Forrest must have surrounded himself with people who only agree with him. There would be scores of people at Fortescue Metals who could explain the flaws to him, save him from wasting billions of dollars, and from great public embarrassment, but presumably they are all too afraid to say anything. He does keep sacking top executives, after all.
His beliefs are launched on a list of something like 60 peer reviewed papers. He quotes these papers like a kid with a chemistry set. The key words are there, but he doesn’t understand what they mean.
Most other chairmen talk about the climate but they don’t believe it.
Fortescue Metals Group is worth $60 Billion AUD. This ought to scare any investor.
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