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.
This new paper in Nature Scientific Reports claims to identify a trend in hurricane intensification so significant that it’s utterly absurd that hurricane forecasters and modelers wouldn’t have noticed and identified it previously. This triggers an intense bright red bullshit detector.
As others to dig into this study we’ll likely see the flawed reasoning that was applied to tease out its conclusion. It’s outside my wheelhouse to do so. When the smoke clears it will be just one more example of how Nature mag has flushed what little credibility it had down the toilet.
[Update since I scheduled this article. Ryan Maue has weighed in on X (formerly Twitter).]
Quite the media rollout for new research paper claiming to link climate change with Atlantic hurricane intensification rates.
Unfortunately, the paper does not prove the climate change causation link. Comparing Atlantic storms from two 20-year periods: 1971-1990 vs. 2001-2020… pic.twitter.com/omfTRtlZ9c
How did they exclude all the new tropical storms being found by the scatterometer, aircraft with onboard radar, etc. They exclude all the 12h storms from the 12h stats, etc. So that removes the 6h storms like Arlene but including them shows a drop in % of TS with 30 kt RI: pic.twitter.com/aeXVlP7IpD
Quickly intensifying tropical cyclones (TCs) are exceptionally hazardous for Atlantic coastlines. An analysis of observed maximum changes in wind speed for Atlantic TCs from 1971 to 2020 indicates that TC intensification rates have already changed as anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have warmed the planet and oceans. Mean maximum TC intensification rates are up to 28.7% greater in a modern era (2001–2020) compared to a historical era (1971–1990). In the modern era, it is about as likely for TCs to intensify by at least 50 kts in 24 h, and more likely for TCs to intensify by at least 20 kts within 24 h than it was for TCs to intensify by these amounts in 36 h in the historical era. Finally, the number of TCs that intensify from a Category 1 hurricane (or weaker) into a major hurricane within 36 h has more than doubled in the modern era relative to the historical era. Significance tests suggest that it would have been statistically impossible to observe the number of TCs that intensified in this way during the modern era if rates of intensification had not changed from the historical era.
Introduction
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are the most damaging natural hazard to regularly impact the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts1,2,3,4. From 2012 to 2022, over 160 “billion-dollar” weather and climate disasters impacted the U.S; 24 of these events were TCs, including the six costliest disasters on record during this time5. Many of the most damaging TCs to impact the U.S. in recent years have been notable for the speed at which they have intensified. For instance, Hurricane Maria (2017), the climate disaster with the highest death toll since 1980, and the 4th highest economic cost in the last four decades, strengthened from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson scale in just over 48 hours5,6,7. Hurricanes Harvey (2017), Ian (2022), Sandy (2012), Ida (2021), and Irma (2017), the five other costliest U.S. weather and climate disasters in the last decade, all similarly strengthened rapidly, with most evolving from tropical storms to major hurricanes (Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson scale or greater) in under three days5,8,9,10,11,12.
The fastest TC intensification rates often occur in areas of unusually warm upper ocean and sea surface temperatures (SSTs)13,14,15,16. These warm waters serve as a critical energy source for the strengthening storms which act as heat engines, transporting excess warmth from the oceans and atmosphere in the tropics to higher latitudes17. As anthropogenic emissions have warmed the planet, the world’s oceans have warmed at the surface, where average temperatures have increased ~ 0.88 °C from 1850–1900 to 2011–202018. The rate at which ocean surfaces have warmed has also accelerated, with 0.60 °C of this warming occurring since 198018. Considering the role of warm upper ocean water and SSTs in the fastest TC intensification rates13,14,15,16, it is reasonable to expect that we may observe an increase in TC intensification rates that coincides with warming ocean temperatures in recent decades19,20,21,22,23,24. Given the highly-damaging nature of many TCs that intensify rapidly, and the operational and forecasting challenges posed by TCs that intensify most quickly25,26, there is an urgent need to better understand how intensification rates of TCs may already have changed in a warming climate.
Various past studies have sought to understand how rapid intensification of TCs may evolve in a warmer climate, including work focused on understanding how intensification events that occur within certain regions or fall above a certain threshold may change over time22,27,28,29,30,31,32,33,34. For example, Ref.33 examined intensification trends in landfalling TCs in East and Southeast Asia, and found that a 12–15% increase in the intensity of such storms at landfall was primarily due to an increase in the rate at which they intensified. In the Atlantic basin, multiple studies have sought to understand how TC intensification rates have changed near major coastlines. For instance, Ref.22 found that there was an increased likelihood for TCs to intensify quickly near the U.S. coast during times when basin-wide conditions were generally less favorable for such intensification events. Also focusing on intensification near U.S. coastlines, Ref.28 found that although the mean 24-h intensification rate of TCs increased by 1.2 kts/6 h near the U.S. Atlantic coast from 1979 to 2018, no similar increase was observed along the U.S. Gulf coast. Using a similar focus region, Ref.32 found that, when considering U.S. landfalling TCs, there was a tendency for TCs that intensified rapidly in the 24 h prior to landfall to decay more slowly after landfall.
Elsewhere in the Atlantic, Ref.27 notes that in the central and eastern tropical Atlantic, the 95th percentile of 24-h TC intensity changes increased at 3.8 kts per decade from 1986 to 2015. Using the same threshold of the 95th percentile of 24-h intensity changes to define rapid intensification, Ref.30 suggest that it is possible to detect an anthropogenic-related increase in Atlantic TC rapid intensification rates. Adopting a slightly different threshold of 30 kts/24 h to define rapid intensification, Ref.29 identify no trend in TC rapid intensification tied to warming from 1950 to 2014, but do note key spatial and temporal patterns in rapid intensification events in the Atlantic.
This study adds to the considerable previous research efforts described above by developing a broader assessment of overall basin-wide changes in the magnitude of peak Atlantic TC intensification rates. This work focuses on the Atlantic basin as a whole, rather than a subset of storms that occur in a specific portion of the basin. Furthermore, no arbitrary thresholds of intensification are used in this study to classify a TC rapid intensification event—instead, the work fills a key knowledge gap by assessing overall changes to the peak intensification rates achieved by all TCs across 12-, 24- and 36-h windows during the 5 decades spanning from 1971 to 2020. Results indicate broad increases to observed TC intensification rates over the past 50 years. These findings illustrate a vital need to not only work towards climate mitigation to limit future warming and thus additional changes in TC intensification rates, but also for emergency preparedness plans and resilience measures that will allow our coastlines to adapt to TCs that have already begun to exhibit increased rates of strengthening.Source:
“The bilateral and multilateral inflows are a more accurate indication of contributor country budgetary effort, whereas the outflows are a more accurate indication of actual progress towards the $100bn goal.”
One of the biggest and most contentious issues in climate politics is the provision of money to help poorer countries cut emissions and protect themselves from climate impacts. In 2009, wealthy nations pledged to “mobilise” $100bn in “climate finance” annually by 2020 to help vulnerable nations deal with climate change. As the title notes, even now the target has not been met.
Politicians and observers have warned that this failure could undermine trust between nations as they head into negotiations in Dubai. What is more, there are widespread concerns about the quality of finance being offered, with questions surrounding the use of loans instead of grants, different definitions of “climate finance” and insufficient funding for adaptation efforts.
In this article, which updates and builds on a previous analysis published in 2018, Carbon Brief assesses the state of international climate finance as nations prepare for the next COP. It uses the latest numbers collated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), a club of mostly wealthy nations, many of which are responsible for contributing climate finance.
The OECD, a Paris-based intergovernmental economic organisation, asks its 36 member countries to report on their foreign aid, including climate finance. The data captures climate finance that is both bilateral (country to country) and multilateral (via international institutions) It also gives detailed information about funded projects. (The OECD calls this database “climate-related development finance” rather than strictly climate finance).
Key takeaways from 2015-2016 Report
Donor governments gave climate finance totalling $34bn in 2015 and $37bn in 2016, according to OECD estimates (note that this is not a full estimate of money counting towards the $100bn pledge – see below for more).
Japan was the largest donor, giving $10.3bn per year (bn/yr) on average over the two years. It was followed, in order, by Germany, France, the UK and the US.
India was the largest recipient on average, receiving $2.6bn/yr. It was followed, in order, by Bangladesh, Vietnam, the Philippines and Thailand
The single largest “country-to-country” flow was an average yearly $1.6bn from Japan to India.
The US was the top contributor to the multilateral Green Climate Fund (GCF) in 2016. (However, the US has now ended its support for the GCF).
Around $16bn/yr went to mitigation-only projects, compared to $9bn for adaptation-only projects. Around 42% of the finance consisted of “debt instruments”, such as loans.
Key takeaways from 2018-2019 Report
In 2019, the OECD found that climate finance had reached $79.6bn, up just 2% from 2018, and while official figures for 2020 are not yet available, Bloomberg reported that rich countries reckon they had raised $88-90bn, as of October 2021.
The shares attributed to countries are based on analysis by the World Resources Institute (WRI) of bilateral and multilateral development funds that can be traced to Annex II nations. These roughly align with the OECD’s figures, which are not broken down by country but, like the WRI’s, are partly derived from Annex II nations’ reports to the UNFCCC.
The remaining finance, indicated by the grey bars in the chart above, is made up of export credits, additional outflows from multilateral institutions and, most of all, private contributions by businesses and philanthropic groups (this is an approximation based on the OECD’s total values with the WRI estimates removed).
Private funds count towards the $100bn target, but the WRI did not include them in its analysis as the data is less complete and difficult to attribute to individual nations. The OECD estimates that annual private finance has been stable at around $14bn since 2017.
The top five finance providers – Japan, Germany, France, the UK and the US – have remained the same since Carbon Brief’s last analysis for 2015/16. These five nations contributed more than 60% of the 2018/19 finance. While Japan, Germany and France appear to be by far the biggest contributors, the WRI warns that the lack of clarity around climate finance reporting means the numbers should be approached with caution.
As in Carbon Brief’s previous analysis, India was by far the biggest recipient of climate finance, with more than double the funds received by the next largest, Bangladesh.Japan and Germany provided about 94% of the funds to India, almost all in the form of loans.
Implications
Climate finance figures are widely contested, with many global-south nations questioning how much funding is new and not simply diverted from other development funds. Criticism has also been levelled at the overreliance on loans and the inclusion of support for “high-efficiency” coal plants by Japan and Australia.
A recent assessment prepared by the UNFCCC’s Standing Committee on Finance concluded that developing countries require $5.8-5.9tn up to 2030 in order to fund less than half of the actions outlined in their official climate plans – although some of this would be funded domestically.
This year’s negotiations are likely to spark calls for a significant scaling up of finance, although the slow pace of proceedings means that, for the time being, the focus of new goal discussions will primarily be on agreeing a framework for future talks.
Nevertheless, there are various issues that could be on the table during this next phase, including ensuring that more money is spent on adaptation.
The Paris Agreement specifies that climate finance should aim for an even split between these two categories, but funding has long been skewed towards mitigation. According to Jan Kowalzig, a senior policy adviser at Oxfam, governments often tend to view such projects as more attractive investments:
“Since [mitigation projects] often have to do with energy, they seem to be more directly linked to a country‘s development, even though, of course, this is a huge misconception given the central (but, for politicians, often less visible) role of adaptation.”
Of the roughly $40bn average for the 2018/19 period, 39% of money went on mitigation, while just 25% went on adaptation – a slightly more even split than was recorded in Carbon Brief’s previous analysis for 2015/16.
However, other estimates, including the OECD’s own climate finance report, suggest a more pronounced split, with around three times as much finance going to mitigation than adaptation in 2018 and 2019.
This imbalance is a major concern amid rapidly escalating climate costs. The UN Environment Programme places current annual adaptation costs for “developing countries” at $70bn, but says they will reach $140-300bn by 2030.
Ensuring adequate adaptation finance in the coming years is, therefore, seen by many vulnerable nations as a key priority for post-2025 climate finance plans as they are developed.
We must also bear in mind that global warming is not the planet’s only challenge. We often hear that it is the defining issue of our time, but it is no such thing. By the 2070s, the IPCC — the U.N. climate change panel — estimates that warming will cost between 0.2 and 2 percent of global GDP. This is certainly a problem, but not the end of world.
Speaking of climate change in catastrophic terms easily makes us ignore bigger problems, including malnutrition, tuberculosis, malaria and corruption. The World Health Organization estimates that climate change since the 1970s causes about 140,000 additional deaths each year, and toward the middle of the century will kill 250,000 people annually, mostly in poor countries. This pales in comparison with much deadlier environmental problems such as indoor air pollution, claiming 4.3 million lives annually, outdoor air pollution killing 3.7 million and lack of water and sanitation killing 760,000. Outside of environment, the problems are even bigger: Poverty arguably kills 18 million each year.
Every dollar spent on climate change could instead help save many more people from these more tractable problems. The current approach to subsidize solar and wind arguably saves one life across the century for every $4 million spent — the same expenditure on vaccinations could save 4,000 lives. Each person — and the next president — needs to decide his or her legacy.
Postscript: Financing for Climate Aid is a Fraction of the Full Cost of Climate Crisis Inc.
A fuller accounting of the climate crisis industry more likely exceeds 2,000,000,000,000 US$ per year (2 Trillion)
Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, enshrined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But around the world, there are governments and those wielding power who find many ways to obstruct it.
We write as journalists, artists, authors, activists, technologists, and academics to warn of increasing international censorship that threatens to erode centuries-old democratic norms.
Coming from the left, right, and centre, we are united by our commitment to universal human rights and freedom of speech, and we are all deeply concerned about attempts to label protected speech as ‘misinformation,’ ‘disinformation,’ and other ill-defined terms.
This abuse of these terms has resulted in the censorship of ordinary people, journalists, and dissidents in countries all over the world.
Such interference with the right to free speech suppresses valid discussion about matters of urgent public interest and undermines the foundational principles of representative democracy.
Across the globe, government actors, social media companies, universities, and NGOs are increasingly working to monitor citizens and rob them of their voices. These large-scale coordinated efforts are sometimes referred to as the ‘Censorship-Industrial Complex.’
This complex often operates through direct government policies. Authorities in India[1] and Turkey[2] have seized the power to remove political content from social media. The legislature in Germany[3] and the Supreme Court in Brazil[4] are criminalising political speech. In other countries, measures such as Ireland’s ‘Hate Speech’ Bill[5], Scotland’s Hate Crime Act[6], the UK’s Online Safety Bill[7], and Australia’s ‘Misinformation’ Bill[8] threaten to severely restrict expression and create a chilling effect.
But the Censorship Industrial Complex operates through more subtle methods. These include visibility filtering, labelling, and manipulation of search engine results. Through deplatforming and flagging, social media censors have already silenced lawful opinions on topics of national and geopolitical importance. They have done so with the full support of ‘disinformation experts’ and ‘fact-checkers’ in the mainstream media, who have abandoned the journalistic values of debate and intellectual inquiry.
As the Twitter Files revealed, tech companies often perform censorial ‘content moderation’ in coordination with government agencies and civil society. Soon, the European Union’s Digital Services Act will formalise this relationship by giving platform data to ‘vetted researchers’ from NGOs and academia, relegating our speech rights to the discretion of these unelected and unaccountable entities.
Some politicians and NGOs[9] are even aiming to target end-to-end encrypted messaging apps like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram.[10] If end-to-end encryption is broken, we will have no remaining avenues for authentic private conversations in the digital sphere.
Although foreign disinformation between states is a real issue, agencies designed to combat these threats, such as the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the United States, are increasingly being turned inward against the public. Under the guise of preventing harm and protecting truth, speech is being treated as a permitted activity rather than an inalienable right.
We recognize that words can sometimes cause offence, but we reject the idea that hurt feelings and discomfort, even if acute, are grounds for censorship. Open discourse is the central pillar of a free society, and is essential for holding governments accountable, empowering vulnerable groups, and reducing the risk of tyranny.
Speech protections are not just for views we agree with; we must strenuously protect speech for the views that we most strongly oppose. Only in the public square can these views be heard and properly challenged.
What’s more, time and time again, unpopular opinions and ideas have eventually become conventional wisdom. By labelling certain political or scientific positions as ‘misinformation’ or ‘malinformation,’ our societies risk getting stuck in false paradigms that will rob humanity of hard-earned knowledge and obliterate the possibility of gaining new knowledge. Free speech is our best defense against disinformation.
The attack on speech is not just about distorted rules and regulations – it is a crisis of humanity itself. Every equality and justice campaign in history has relied on an open forum to voice dissent. In countless examples, including the abolition of slavery and the civil rights movement, social progress has depended on freedom of expression.
We do not want our children to grow up in a world where they live in fear of speaking their minds. We want them to grow up in a world where their ideas can be expressed, explored, and debated openly – a world that the founders of our democracies envisioned when they enshrined free speech into our laws and constitutions.
The US First Amendment is a strong example of how the right to freedom of speech, of the press, and of conscience can be firmly protected under the law. One need not agree with the U.S. on every issue to acknowledge that this is a vital ‘first liberty’ from which all other liberties follow. It is only through free speech that we can denounce violations of our rights and fight for new freedoms.
There also exists a clear and robust international protection for free speech. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)[11] was drafted in 1948 in response to atrocities committed during World War II. Article 19 of the UDHR states, ‘Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.’ While there may be a need for governments to regulate some aspects of social media, such as age limits, these regulations should never infringe on the human right to freedom of expression.
As is made clear by Article 19, the corollary of the right to free speech is the right to information. In a democracy, no one has a monopoly over what is considered to be true. Rather, truth must be discovered through dialogue and debate – and we cannot discover truth without allowing for the possibility of error.
Censorship in the name of ‘preserving democracy’ inverts what should be a bottom-up system of representation into a top-down system of ideological control. This censorship is ultimately counter-productive: it sows mistrust, encourages radicalization, and de-legitimizes the democratic process.
In the course of human history, attacks on free speech have been a precursor to attacks on all other liberties. Regimes that eroded free speech have always inevitably weakened and damaged other core democratic structures. In the same fashion, the elites that push for censorship today are also undermining democracy. What has changed, though, is the broad scale and technological tools through which censorship can be enacted.
We believe that free speech is essential for ensuring our safety from state abuses of power – abuses that have historically posed a far greater threat than the words of lone individuals or even organised groups. For the sake of human welfare and flourishing, we make the following 3 calls to action.
We call on governments and international organisations to fulfill their responsibilities to the people and to uphold Article 19 of the UDHR.
We call on tech corporations to undertake to protect the digital public square as defined in Article 19 of the UDHR and refrain from politically motivated censorship, the censorship of dissenting voices, and the censorship of political opinion.
And finally, we call on the general public to join us in the fight to preserve the people’s democratic rights. Legislative changes are not enough. We must also build an atmosphere of free speech from the ground up by rejecting the climate of intolerance that encourages self-censorship, and that creates unnecessary personal strife for many. Instead of fear and dogmatism, we must embrace inquiry and debate.
We stand for your right to ask questions. Heated arguments, even those that may cause distress, are far better than no arguments at all.
Censorship robs us of the richness of life itself. Free speech is the foundation for creating a life of meaning and a thriving humanity – through art, poetry, drama, story, philosophy, song, and more.
This declaration was the result of an initial meeting of free speech champions from around the world who met in Westminster, London, at the end of June 2023. As signatories of this statement, we have fundamental political and ideological disagreements. However, it is only by coming together that we will defeat the encroaching forces of censorship so that we can maintain our ability to openly debate and challenge one another. It is in the spirit of difference and debate that we sign the Westminster Declaration.
The Melbourne meteor, if it was a meteor, wasn’t as big as the Chelyabinsk blast of 2013, but it was powerful enough to make people wonder what just happened, over a large area.
What can I say? It’s only a matter of time until one of these space objects seriously damages a city or worse.
And of course, we have the Tunguska blast of 1908 itself, estimated yield of 12 megatons, as proof dangerous space objects are still out there.
There are other mysterious devastations through history, some of which might have been meteoric. Some researchers claim the Manuika crater in New Zealand is evidence of a 15th century comet strike and regional mega-tsunami, though this claim is controversial.
There is a risk an unexpected meteor might be mistaken for a nuclear attack. The East Mediterranean Event of 2002 could have started a nuclear war, had it exploded further East over India or Pakistan. 2002 was a time of heightened tension in the region.
Space defence is an issue we could actually try to address. A better space watch would reduce the risk of unpleasant surprises. Even a little more warning could save lives, and there are technologies we could explore, such as Project Orion (if detected late), or NASA’s hypervelocity interceptor (if detected early), which might allow us to prevent substantial collisions with Earth.
But our politicians are too busy frittering uncounted trillions of dollars on climate unicorn projects to bother with real problems.
Meteors are a classic low probability high impact event. the odds of serious damage on any given year might be very low, but if we don’t do something to address the threat, it is inevitable that sooner or later something really bad will happen.
This week, we’re covering the go-to media hottest ever narrative parroted after every summer. And, we’ll have special guest Marc Morano on to discuss Mann’s court appearance in the decade old Mann vs Steyn case this week.
On Climate Change Roundtable, we take a stand against selective information portrayal, examining the contexts often omitted in mainstream climate discussions. This week, we’re covering the go-to media hottest ever narrative parroted after every summer. And, we’ll have special guest Marc Morano on to discuss Mann’s court appearance in the decade old Mann vs Steyn case this week.
The media has been quick to dub this the ‘hottest summer on record’, but what does that truly mean in the vast timeline of Earth’s climatic history? The referenced record composes the last 150 years, a misleading statement outright. And during this time, Earth is recovering from the Little Ice Age, further skewing the data. When you look at the Earth’s entire history, temperatures are well within norms. We discuss issues with the temperature record, misleading language, and highlight objective data.
An Unexpected Ally in Michael Mann When figures like Michael Mann, known for the hockey stick chart, begin to voice concerns about the media’s alarmist take on climate change, it’s an indicator that the discourse might be veering off course. We’ll discuss his recent tweet that underscores the exaggerated stance of corporate media on climate-related issues.
So check out episode 84 of “Climate Change Roundtable,” with host Anthony Watts, panelists H. Sterling Burnett and Jim Lakely, and special guest Marc Morano, founder of ClimateDepot.com. Tune in LIVE at Noon CT/1 PM ET this Friday for an insightful discussion. And be sure to leave your questions during the show for the weekly question and answer segment. There’s always more questions than time, so leave us a Super Like and we guarantee yours is addressed.
Carbon dioxide is only about 0.04% of the atmosphere (400 parts per million). This means that, overall, it’s much less important than water vapor in terms of its ability to warm the atmosphere and wetlands and termites are the real methane producers.
“Climate change” is in the news daily, with each featured story getting an attention-grabbing sensationalist headline. The frenzy is at its peak now because it’s the time of year for tropical storms and wildfires.
However, to appreciate that these stories are pure narratives, it’s a good time to consider the facts behind the so-called “greenhouse gases.”
Several atmospheric gases, including carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapor, absorb light in the infrared region. These are collectively known as the “greenhouse gases” because absorbing infrared energy warms up the air—hence the name greenhouse effect.
Carbon dioxide, on a per-molecule basis, is six times as effective an absorber as water is. However, that’s offset by the fact that carbon dioxide is only about 0.04% of the atmosphere (400 parts per million). This means that, overall, it’s much less important than water vapor in terms of its ability to warm the atmosphere.
And then there’s methane. Pound-for-pound methane can trap 25 times more heat than carbon dioxide. However, there are two reasons why scientists say it will never significantly contribute to global warming. Primarily, it is by far the rarest of the green house gases. [Note that weight is the wrong metric for radiation properties of gases, volume is what matters. The 25 times CO2 is exaggerated because CH4 molecular weight is only 16 compared to 44 for CO2.]
But there is another reason why we will probably never have to worry about methane being a major contributor to global warming: Methane’s narrow absorption bands, at 3.3 microns and 7.5 microns , perfectly match…water’s! Did you catch that? It’s worth emphasizing: “The ratio of the percentages of water to methane is such that the effects of methane are completely masked by water.”
Nor is methane a cow problem that humans can remediate by going meatless. Instead, wetlands and termites are the real methane producers: “When it comes to methane, another greenhouse gas, termites are responsible for 11 percent of the world’s production from natural sources. Seventy-six percent comes from wetlands…”
Image: Termites in a wetland by AI.
Many studies have attributed a methane spike to soaring emissions from tropical wetlands, predominantly in Africa. “A ‘significant change’ in tropical weather ascribed to human-caused climate change has led wetlands to get bigger and more plants to grow there, thus leading to more decomposition — a process that produces methane.”
You noted, of course, how the quoted language blames methane on human-caused climate change. Yet this same “human-caused” climate change isalso blamed for transforming lush Hawaii into an arid ticking time bomb that, in the summer of 2023, erupted into a devastating inferno. Moreover, it seems like it wasn’t that long ago when environmentalists were ardent supporters of wetlands.
Meanwhile, ignoring the predominance of naturally occurring methane, a band of climate fanatics wants toeliminate traditional farming and ranching because they are sources of methane, primarily from ruminant livestock and paddy rice. Rice growing produces methane gas by feeding microbes that live under the rice paddies. Cattle produce methane during their digestive process.
Greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland’s agriculture industry must be reduced by 25 per cent by 2030. This is part of the country’s latest Climate Action Plan, which pledges to halve overall carbon emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.
Current initiatives to cut methane gas emissions from domestic livestock like cows and pigs by culling them, a potentially famine-inducing policy, fail to take into account the sheer volume of feral animals.For example, in Australia, “there is 10 times the number of feral pigs … than domestic.”
By some estimates, Australia contains “ 400,000 wild horses, five million donkeys, 150,000 water buffalo, one million camels, and 24 million feral pigs—in comparison, the United States contains just six million feral pigs.”
To put things in perspective, let’s go back to the lowly termites. Consider that, in 1992, “it was estimated that the digestive tracts of termites produce about 50 billion tons of CO2 and methane annually. That was more than the world’s production from burning fossil fuel.”
In 1982, the journal Science published an article titled “Termites: A Potentially Large Source of Atmospheric Methane, Carbon Dioxide, and Molecular Hydrogen.” Here is the key sentence: “The estimate gross amount of carbon dioxide produced is more than twice the net global input from fossil fuel production.”
That same year, the New York Times ran an article titled: “Termite gas exceeds smokestack pollution.”
None of this information stops the Biden administration.In November 2021, it “proposed regulations on methane emissions by the U.S. oil and gas industry, at a direct cost of more than $1 billion annually, to deal with a nonexistent problem.”
Wouldn’t it be nice if a little science got through to the policy-makers behind so-called “climate science”?
First, China finally dropped its “net zero” pose. The world’s largest emitter had promised to reach net zero by 2060. China’s primary goal is to become the lone global superpower by 2049.
Steve Milloy, in his article for The Hill, presents a critical analysis of President Biden’s climate plan, questioning its practicality and potential impact on the US economy. Milloy begins by discussing the revelations from this year’s United Nations Climate Week, particularly focusing on China’s stance on fossil fuels and emissions.
First, China finally dropped its “net zero” pose. The world’s largest emitter had promised to reach net zero by 2060. But its climate envoy now says that “completely phasing out fossil fuel is unrealistic” because “fossil fuels are essential to maintain grid stability and energy security given the sometimes unreliable nature of renewables.
Milloy contrasts China’s practical approach with the Biden administration’s ambitious climate policies, suggesting that the US is on a path to economic self-sabotage. He points out the administration’s efforts to phase out coal and gas plants and promote the adoption of electric vehicles without ensuring grid stability.
The Biden administration, on the other hand, is determined to cripple the U.S. It is engaged in simultaneous EPA rulemakings to zero out coal and gas plants, and to mandate the adoption of electric vehicles, even if the grid will not be able to sustain so many of them.
The author also highlights the US’s dependency on China for critical minerals necessary for electric vehicles and solar panels, questioning the wisdom of this economic reliance on a geopolitical rival.
We also learned from the UN event that the Biden administration has given up hope of trying to be independent of China with respect to electric vehicles and solar panels. A top Biden administration official told Bloomberg News that we “won’t be able to cut China out of the critical minerals supply chain”, even as Washington seeks to diversify its sources of the ingredients that go into everything from electric vehicle” for electric vehicle batteries and solar panels.
In conclusion, Milloy’s article raises significant questions about the feasibility and strategic soundness of the Biden administration’s climate policies. He encourages a critical evaluation of these policies, considering their economic implications and the realistic assessment of global emission reduction efforts.
The radiation balance of the Earth system is an accounting of the incoming and outgoing components of radiation. These components are balanced over long time periods and over the Earth as whole. If they weren’t the Earth would be continually cooling or warming.
There are many scientifically invalid assumptions in the “greenhouse gas hypothesis” that the editors of a journal, Earth System Dynamics (ESD), now insist they will never again allow to be subjected to critical analysis in future publications, as the editors of this journal are committed to only publishing studies agreeing with the “consensus.”
In a editorial comment published in the MDPI journal Entropy responding to an editorial written by the editors of ESD, two Portuguese scientists (Khmelinskii and Woodcock, 2023) identify at least 8 assumptions in the “greenhouse gas hypothesis” that lack scientific validation. Despite the lack of observational evidence supporting their viewpoints, proponents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis prefer to dismiss and ignore challenges to what they believe is the “consensus” – the opposite of what the scientific method requires.
For brevity’s sake, only a few of the challenges are summarized below.
• CO2 can only absorb 10% of all radiation in the specific IR bands CO2 affects. CO2 “absorbs absolutely nothing at all other IR wavelengths.” Thus, CO2 has no effect on IR in 90% of absorption bands.
• CO2 can only absorb IR in the top 300 m, or 0.3 km, of the surface-troposphere, which is 10 km thick. Thus, CO2 can only affect 10% of the IR in 3% of the surface-troposphere, where climate change occurs.
• Because of its vanishingly small effects, doubling CO2 concentrations could only lead to a 0.015°C surface temperature change, at most. Understatedly, “this effect would not even be measurable.”
• Uncertainty in the Earth’s radiation balance is ±17 W/m². The estimated radiation imbalance is 0.6 W/m², which is “orders of magnitude” smaller than the uncertainty in its derivation. Thus, the “global balance of energy fluxes…cannot be derived from measured fluxes“… and this “profoundly affects our ability to understand how Earth’s climate responds to increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases.”
The editors at ESD do not view observational uncertainty – or questions regarding the magnitude of CO2’s effects – as worthy of critical analysis.
Urban heat islands concern both the temperature of various surfaces (streets, roofs, etc.) and the atmosphere. The absorbed heat during the day by the urban infrastructure is given away slowly – therefore also at night.
After years of dabbling in this issue, John Christy and I have finally submitted a paper to Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology entitled, “Urban Heat Island Effects in U.S. Summer Surface Temperature Data, 1880-2015“.
I feel pretty good about what we’ve done using the GHCN data. We demonstrate that, not only do the homogenized (“adjusted”) dataset not correct for the effect of the urban heat island (UHI) on temperature trends, the adjusted data appear to have even stronger UHI signatures than in the raw (unadjusted) data. This is true of both trends at stations (where there are nearby rural and non-rural stations… you can’t blindly average all of the stations in the U.S.), and it’s true of the spatial differences between closely-space stations in the same months and years.
The bottom line is that an estimated 22% of the U.S. warming trend, 1895 to 2023, is due to localized UHI effects.
And the effect is much larger in urban locations. Out of 4 categories of urbanization based upon population density (0.1 to 10, 10-100, 100-1,000, and >1,000 persons per sq. km), the top 2 categories show the UHI temperature trend to be 57% of the reported homogenized GHCN temperature trend. So, as one might expect, a large part of urban (and even suburban) warming since 1895 is due to UHI effects. This impacts how we should be discussing recent “record hot” temperatures at cities. Some of those would likely not be records if UHI effects were taken into account.
Yet, those are the temperatures a majority of the population experiences. My point is, such increasing warmth cannot be wholly blamed on climate change.
One of the things I struggled with was how to deal with stations having sporadic records. I’ve always wondered if one could use year-over-year changes instead of the usual annual-cycle-an-anomaly calculations, and it turns out you can, and with extremely high accuracy. (John Christy says he did it many years ago for a sparse African temperature dataset). This greatly simplifies data processing, and you can use all stations that have at least 2 years of data.
Now to see if the peer review process deep-sixes the paper. I’m optimistic.
ESG standards are designed to create a “great reset of capitalism” and to “revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions.”
The Heartland Institute’s Donald Kendal, Jim Lakely, Justin Haskins, and Chris Talgo present episode 420 of the In The Tank Podcast.
ESG is the backbone of The Great Reset.
And while we have made significant progress in the fight against ESG, it still remains an existential threat to liberty and free markets.
With the presidential primaries approaching, The Socialism Research Center team produced a report card grading the candidates on their positions against ESG.
The ITT crew discusses this report and talks about which candidate is best equipped to fight the Great Reset.
PRIMARY TOPIC – WHO IS BEST EQUIPPED TO FIGHT THE GREAT RESET?
The Heartland Institute
Stopping Socialism TV with Justin and Donald
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