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.
Bleaching may occur, but history shows such events do not equal coral death, and the evidence suggests that the cause for any bleaching that occurs this year is a short-term spike in ocean temperatures due to natural El Niño patterns, not climate change.
Reuters and CNN each posted stories in the past week warning that a major coral bleaching event may soon appear affecting coral communities in the Southern Hemisphere, in particular the Great Barrier Reef (GBR)—and climate change is the cause, by the way. Bleaching may occur, but history shows such events do not equal coral death, and the evidence suggests that the cause for any bleaching that occurs this year is a short-term spike in ocean temperatures due to natural El Niño patterns, not climate change.
In its story, “Exclusive: World on brink of fourth mass coral reef bleaching event, NOAA says,” Reuters writes, “[t]he world is on the verge of a fourth mass coral bleaching event which could see wide swathes of tropical reefs die, including parts of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.
“Marine biologists are on high alert following months of record-breaking ocean heat fueled by climate change and the El Niño climate pattern,” Reuters’ continued.
Based on the two stories, one must first ask, which is it, the seventh mass bleaching event or the fourth? It seems the mainstream media can’t even get their numbers straight, although they certainly agree on three things: a mass bleaching is either in process or immanent; it means death for the corals affected, and it is caused by human induced climate change.
Reuters and CNN may be right that a large amount of coral in the southern hemisphere may bleach in the coming year, but they are wrong about the cause and the consequences for coral.
Reuters and CNN both acknowledge that El Niño is a significant factor in present ocean warming.
“Ocean temperatures are also becoming even hotter under the current El Niño — a natural climate pattern that brings warmer-than-average sea-surface temperatures — which is one of the strongest on record,” writes CNN.
Data does not support the claim that ocean temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere have warmed dramatically over the past 30 years. Rather, each and every mass bleaching event that Reuters and CNN cite as evidence of climate change coincided with and was a response to either a strong or a weak El Niño. When an El Niño strikes, Southern Hemisphere corals are impacted, no El Niño, minimal or no bleaching.
As discussed in Climate at a Glance: Coral Reefs, coral thrive in warm water, not cold water, As a result, the recent modest warming has allowed coral to expand their range poleward, while still thriving near the equator and the tropics.
The evidence also clearly shows that coral bleaching is not tantamount to coral death, which has been proven repeatedly at the GBR, which Reuters and CNN express such concern for. Indeed, subsequent to previous strong El Niño induced recent bleaching events at the GBR, the coral reef repeatedly set new records for coral extent. That’s right, the coral not only recovered, but the coral colonies also seemingly adapted and expanded. This fact has been discussed in a number of previous Climate Realism posts, here, here, and here, for example.
Whether an El Niño induced spike in Southern Ocean temperatures causes coral reefs to bleach en masse this year or not, the evidence suggests that most if not all of the coral will recover, evolving and become hardier in the face of future temperature increases. Coral have existed continuously for the past 60 million years, surviving temperatures and carbon dioxide levels significantly higher than what is occurring today, and the evidence suggests until the next ice age, they will continue to thrive and expand their range. Reuters and CNN should honestly acknowledge this rather than trying to generate fear amongst their readers by shoehorning a false coral demise story into the narrative that “climate change causes everything.”
A spot audit of NIWA’s 2023 flagship Annual Climate Summary report and some of its predecessors over the past five years has uncovered multiple major errors that cumulatively exaggerate the impact of climate change and drive public fear.
A spot audit of NIWA’s 2023 flagship Annual Climate Summary report and some of its predecessors over the past five years has uncovered multiple major errors that cumulatively exaggerate the impact of climate change and drive public fear.
Based on a detailed analysis of historic newspaper reports containing temperature, rainfall and other weather data and comparing them to NIWA’s published climate summaries, the audit has found
Claimed temperature records that were never real records
Claimed rainfall records that were never real records
NIWA published false information on New Zealand’s biggest historic cyclone, creating a false narrative that Cyclone Gabrielle was bigger and driven by climate change
Cherrypicked data is being used to exaggerate the apparent frequency of climate records being broken
The practice of reporting records by month is giving NIWA twelve times more opportunities to claim records in any given location, creating media and public confusion and a sense of relentless overwhelming climate change
NIWA is unaware of New Zealand’s highest temperatures
NIWA’s claim that only three days in our history have experienced temperatures higher than 40C is wrong: the real figure is nearly triple that
That there’s little evidence of climate change increasing extreme maximum temperatures in New Zealand, absolute records from a century ago are still intact
A year ago, the original Climate of Fear study on New Zealand historic storms found huge gaps in NIWA’s knowledge of our pre-industrial climate.
Now, nearly 11 months later, a new study finds NIWA continuing to ignore the past at a time when the rest of the world are rapidly expanding their climate change research to include weather data from digitised old newspapers.
NIWA’s continued reliance on its own limited climate records is a systemic research failure, resulting in false or misleading information being provided to government, clients, climate researchers and the public.
The NIWA reports in the spotlight are its annual climate summaries, published every year to provide a comprehensive breakdown of trends in New Zealand’s climate. The documents themselves use varying shades of orange and reddish brown to create the graphic impression of heat and climate urgency, but the data inside has huge holes.
The most obvious example of manipulation is the “records began” column. NIWA would have you believe that Rotorua has no temperature records earlier than 1972, or that Wellington, founded in 1839, has no records before 1931. Although Queenstown records began in 1871, the 1860s goldmining towns Alexandra and Clyde have no temperature records earlier than 1992 and 1978 respectively. Whangarei has no temperatures before 1967, but its rainfall records date back to 1943. Why the difference? Who knows. Town after town, most of their records since settlement are not in the database.
Confused? You should be. NIWA’s climate records are like swiss cheese, continually compromised by decades – even a century – of missing data. With a budget of more than $160 million a year, you’d expect to be seeing more bang for the taxpayer buck.
Against that background, this audit shows NIWA has made almost zero effort in its 32 years of existence to backfill the missing data from other historical documents. That systemic failure has allowed this report to wipe the floor with NIWA, just as the storm report did last year.
NIWA doesn’t know what it doesn’t know. But you are about to find out just how bad their climate research database is.
TOO HOT TO HANDLE: MAIN ARTICLE
“The year was remarkable for the frequency of floods in the Auckland and, especially, the Hawke’s Bay provinces. In the latter they were very severe, and the damage was of disastrous proportions.”
That quote might describe our weather in 2023, but you may be surprised to learn that it came from the 1938 Met Service report to parliament.
Eighty-five years later, lessons from history loom large as major new errors and omissions have emerged in NIWA’s 2023 Climate Summary report, just days after its release, making it the second flawed report in as many years.
The government’s self-proclaimed leading climate research agency, which burns through about $160 million in revenue and funding each year, continues to produce research summaries that – because the errors are systemic, not accidental – its clients like local council planners can’t trust as they’re little better than fiction.
The systemic problem at the heart of NIWA research failings is that the agency has made little to no effort, in three decades of existence, to fill massive gaps in its databases. This leaves NIWA flying blind, not knowing what it doesn’t know.
What it doesn’t know is serious.
CYCLONES: FALSE INFORMATION PUBLISHED BY NIWA
Take Ex-Cyclone Gabrielle. The Niwa Summary says:
“On 12 February, Gabrielle began impacting Northland and Auckland. In central Auckland, the air pressure fell to 971.5 hPa, surpassing that which was observed during the Cyclone of 1936 (973.5 hPa). On 14 February, Gabrielle’s centre of circulation drifted eastward toward East Cape, passing just kilometres offshore during the evening. A MetService analysis indicated a central pressure of 965 hPa. Gabrielle then moved away from the mainland.”
As identified in the original Climate of Fear report last year, NIWA research is incredibly weak on historical storms. The reference to the 1936 Cyclone by NIWA is simply wrong – they don’t have the data.
“The recovery of meteorological data from old documentary sources is of great significance for meteorological and weather research”– Royal Met. Society UK
Thankfully, old newspaper records do, and climate scientists in Australia, the USA and Europe are furiously cross-checking their traditional databases against what they now regard as “the treasure trove” of newly digitised old newspapers.
“Historical records from the 18th and 19th centuries provide a detailed picture of Australia’s pre-industrial climate before instrumental observations become influenced by global warming. This provides a unique opportunity to examine weather extremes produced purely by natural variability for comparison with recently observed variability and extremes,” writes Aussie climate scientist Joelle Gergis.
Gergis and her team are using crowdsourced volunteers on “citizen science platform Zooniverse” to scan through thousands of old reports recovering historic weather data.
“Once complete, these records will be continuous sub-daily datasets, providing a treasure trove for the study of Southern Hemisphere climate variability and extremes. Importantly, they will fill crucial data gaps in global datasets, improving the reliability of historical climate analysis.”
In Britain, the Royal Meteorological Society is crowing about recovering vital climate data from 5000 Spanish newspaper articles.
“The recovery of meteorological data from old documentary sources is of great significance for meteorological and weather research. We describe our recovery of a meteorological series from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century from the pioneering A Guarda Observatory in Galicia (Spain). Data series were obtained from meteorological notes appearing in the newspaper La Integridad as published at the time. In total, we recovered data from over 5000 newspapers using more than 60 000 individual measurements.”
A group of UK scientists have even been using New Zealand’s old newspapers to research historic floods.
Even NIWA has been known to crow when it has discovered information, not in its database, from old newspapers – such as finding out New Zealand’s coldest temperature was -25.6C at Ranfurly in 1903:
“I was quite excited to find the record. It’s like detective work,” NIWA climate scientist Georgina Griffiths remarked in 2017.
Quite.
Interestingly, the agency verified the newspaper record by comparing it to other historic news reports and data to check for consistency. The NIWA article doesn’t mention it but they almost certainly stumbled on this report from the Central Otago town of Gladbrook, which reached a low of -25C on the same day. That’s how corroboration works.
Thus, NIWA, set up in 1992, only discovered in 2017 New Zealand’s coldest recorded temperature, from an old newspaper not their master database.
So, now that you know why trawling through old newspapers is valid climate science, let’s find out how NIWA’s 2023 report claiming Gabrielle was bigger than the 1936 Cyclone is wrong, and how these systematic errors are wasting taxpayer money, possibly endangering lives and property through their flawed analysis, and making NIWA a laughing stock.
Storm research 101: the lower the hPa number, the lower the atmospheric pressure in the eye of the storm and therefore the stronger and faster the winds will be (racing in to fill the vacuum) and the higher the storm surge – king tides caused because of the lower air pressure allowing the sea level to rapidly rise. In plain English, high pressure systems essentially weigh more heavily on the ocean, forcing the sea level down, while low pressure storms are lighter, and the sea rises accordingly.
It’s the storm surge that causes the ocean to rise high enough to flood roads and wash away buildings and cars.
NIWA says Gabrielle was 965 hPa. A century ago they measured barometric pressure in inches of mercury, and 965 hPa is equivalent to 28.5 inches of mercury.
NIWA also says the 1936 Cyclone was only 973.5 hPa (28.75 inches), not as low and therefore not as powerful as Gabrielle.
They are wrong. Three barometers near the tip of the North Island recorded what appears to be the deepest cyclonic low measured in NZ. One, at Cape Maria van Diemen, dropped to 28.5 inches of mercury (965 hPa), identical to Gabrielle’s deepest low. The second unit, a calibrated device at Kaitaia, went even lower to 28.00 inches of mercury (948.2 hPa) as the cyclone passed overhead.
The third device, at Doubtless Bay and just six metres above sea level, plunged to 27.91 inches of mercury (945 hPa), the deepest low known in NZ.
The 1936 storm, like Gabrielle, devastated the North Island and had our modern infrastructure been in the firing line back then the damage may well have been more extensive than Gabrielle. But that’s not the point of this story – the take home message is that NIWA doesn’t know that 1936 was far more powerful than Gabrielle. It simply doesn’t have the data and its failure to factcheck against publicly available records is embarrassing.
The 1936 news reports even join the dots to show how lazy NIWA’s research was, noting that the 973 hPa low that Cyclone 36 reached in Auckland probably wasn’t the full story:
“The pressure at Auckland yesterday morning was 28.76 inches (973.9 hPa), and at the centre it must have been lower.”
As you’ve now seen, it was much lower, 945 hPa. If it was obvious to news reporters in the 1930s that there was a deeper low to be found, it should have been far more obvious to 21st century climate scientists. If NIWA scientists had bothered to read the historical reports they would have found that caveat and discovered the far north readings. But they didn’t.
Instead, their flagship report, the 2023 Annual Climate Summary, contains major errors that could have been avoided.
Adding insult to injury, NIWA in 2023 had weather satellites and a vast network of automated sensors, so it had the advantage of being able to track and measure Gabrielle every second. Last century, that technology didn’t exist. It’s possible a satellite or remote electronic weather station back in 1936 would have found an even deeper low. It’s just blind luck that three barometers in far north homes were able to measure and corroborate.
RAINFALL RECORDS THAT DON’T REALLY EXIST
Then there’s rainfall extremes. In February 1936, Whangarei was swamped.
“The rainfall at Whangarei for the 24 hours ending at 9 o’clock this morning was 11.41 inches (290mm),” reported the Press Association, the morning after Cyclone 36 had swept through.
“Whangarei recorded 11.41 in (29.0 cm) of rain in 24 hours (Return Period over 150 years).”
So, knowing that, why on earth did NIWA sign off on its 2023 Annual Climate Summary Report containing the false statement: “Whāngarei recorded 216 mm between 9:00 am 12 February – 9:00 a.m. 13 February, its wettest February day on record.”
Really? Is 216mm in 2023 a bigger deluge than 290mm in February 1936? Does NIWA have no Year 3 maths graduates on staff?
“Claimed record after claimed record, there’s evidence that NIWA’s cherrypicked data is being used (and coloured in dark red for the most extreme bits) to bolster the narrative that extreme climate records are being broken more frequently now”-Ian Wishart
The reason for this incredible own goal from New Zealand’s premiere climate research agency can be sheeted home to hubris. Despite admitting the HWE data is verified before uploading, NIWA says it doesn’t use it, preferring to rely on its other database, CliFlo:
“The website Ian Wishart has based his opinions on is not New Zealand’s national climate database,” the agency said, sniffily, in a statement published after the Climate of Fear report.
“Wishart has conflated the Historic Weather Events website with the New Zealand National Climate Database [CliFlo] that is used by NIWA and climate scientists nationally and internationally to analyse weather events and trends in the climate. NIWA’s New Zealand National Climate Database includes official observations back to the 1850s, including some descriptions of significant weather events of the time.
“The Historic Weather Events website that Wishart has based his study on is a catalogue that was created to collate descriptive details on impacts and hazards from weather events. It is not an official type of meteorological record. It has gaps because it contains information gathered from newspaper articles, journals, books and reports that periodically come to light. Gathering these sources and validating them takes significant time and is an ongoing process.”
The take-home from the arrogant news release is, ‘trust us, we know what we’re doing, our real database has all the official data covered’.
Yet clearly it doesn’t. If CliFlo was fit for purpose Cyclone 36 would correctly be listed as a 945 hPa record-breaking storm, not 973 hPa, and NIWA would not have published the claim – contradicted by its own secondary database – that Whangarei suffered its wettest day ever during Cyclone Gabrielle with a 216mm rainfall, when the real record was 290mm in 1936.
But that’s not the worst of it by a longshot. Claimed record after claimed record, there’s evidence that NIWA’s cherrypicked data is being used (and coloured in dark red for the most extreme bits) to bolster the narrative that extreme climate records are being broken more frequently now.
Akaroa, on Banks Peninsula, is listed in 2023 as having its highest 24 hour rainfall – 199mm or 7.8 inches – since records began in 1977. That may be true, but there are records of a 212mm (8.36 inches) downpour in 1941. NIWA’s records are incomplete.
If you didn’t know the real historic record, you’d come away from reading the NIWA Summary convinced that we are getting record rainfall because climate change has turbocharged it beyond anything that happened before. Instead, the truth is that Akaroa didn’t break the 1941 record.
Waipawa, in the North Island, is claimed to have suffered its most extreme 24 hour rainfall since records began in 1945, with a 117mm (4.6 inch) sluicing during Cyclone Gabrielle. Again, the implication from these lists is that the modern climate is more extreme. Yet, earlier records, evidently lost to NIWA, show downpours of 148mm (5.83 inches).
The 2023 Summary says Gabrielle also delivered record rainfall to the Chateau station on Mt Ruapehu, with 154mm (6.06 inches) in 24 hours. However historical records that NIWA clearly doesn’t have, show a 7.5 inch (191mm) washout over just five hours in March 1933. The storm washed out bridges, derailed an overnight passenger train in an eerie foreshadowing of Tangiwai two decades later, caused a plane crash and widespread flooding.
NIWA says the Anniversary Day floods last year delivered Auckland’s biggest ever rainfall since “records began” as early as 1853, with a peak of 265mm (10.4 inches) in 24 hours at Mangere. In April 1924, though, a storm lashed the Auckland region delivering a peak intensity of 356mm (14 inches) over the north of the city in only five hours!
Although the event is listed in the NIWA Historical database, the agency does not mention the massive rainfall tallies recorded in two locations, the second being an unofficial reading of 15 inches near Silverdale, but clearly corroborating the first gauge. The distance between both gauges was 30 km, meaning the catchment was larger than most of urban Auckland (Mangere is 17km south of the CBD, Albany is 22km north). If all of Auckland had been hit with that much water on Anniversary Day it would have been devastating.
MYSTERIOUS SUDDEN DISCOVERY OF RECORD GABRIELLE RAINFALL
The number one rainfall record in the latest Climate Summary naturally goes to Cyclone Gabrielle, but the circumstances are mysterious.
NIWA reported in a major analysis of Gabrielle last year, after checking all its data, including a 565mm fall at the Glengarry station near the Esk River which turned out to be over two days, that: “The highest 1-day rainfall was 316 mm, recorded at Tūtira (Hawke’s Bay) on 13 February.”
This was NIWA’s official position in every public report in 2023 including the February Monthly Climate Summary and the Summer Seasonal Summary. It was still the official position in a Hawke’s Bay Regional Council Report at the end of October.
Yet, when the nation’s highly trained climate change reporters opened their advance copies of NIWA’s 2023 Climate Summary in early January 2024, they were greeted with a hitherto unseen claim:
“The top three daily rainfall totals from regularly reporting gauges in 2023 excluding high elevation stations were: 561 mm at Tareha (near the Esk River in Hawke’s Bay) on 13 February, 336 mm at Whakamārama (near Tauranga) on 17 June, and 316 mm at Tūtira (Hurford Rd) on 13 February.”
Yes, you picked it where dozens of highly trained climate journo’s didn’t even bat an eyelid: how did the one-day record of 316mm at Tūtira suddenly morph into 561mm at Tareha?
There’s a big difference between those two figures with no explanation how NIWA has magicked up the extra rain data, but you can bet 561mm/24hrs will now be the money quote future climate research on Gabrielle is anchored to.
“NIWA have some explaining to do. As indicated, no mainstream media climate reporters have picked up the discrepancy, it’s just been blindly accepted like a daily dose of Mogadon, and repeated. We are literally seeing history being rewritten.”-Ian Wishart
The 2023 Climate Summary, incidentally, released 11 January 2024, is the first time NIWA has ever mentioned Tareha in connection with Cyclone Gabrielle. Make of that what you will. It didn’t appear in the updated cyclone data from late-reporting field stations released in March last year. Curiously, although it tops the list of 2023 extreme rainfalls of the year, Tareha’s 561mm is nowhere to be found in the top ten rainfalls of the month, February. Instead, top spot goes to Tutira with its 316mm.
A cynic would say NIWA threw in Tareha at the last minute based on questionable data (eg, did they erroneously code total Gabrielle rainfall over two days, as just a one day fall?), so NIWA have some explaining to do. As indicated, no mainstream media climate reporters have picked up the discrepancy, it’s just been blindly accepted like a daily dose of Mogadon, and repeated. We are literally seeing history being rewritten.
Regardless, even in the unlikely event that the mystery Tareha reading is real, a century ago in March 1924, another storm drowned Hawkes Bay with 512mm (20.14 inches) of rain – not in 24 hours, but within only ten hours! That’s almost the same deluge as Gabrielle, but in less than half the time.
Embarrassingly for NIWA, just like the old Whangarei rain record that turned out to be hiding in plain sight on HWE, the ‘bridesmaid’ database NIWA boasts it doesn’t use, the 1924 genuine rain record is there as well.
NIWA, of course, should know all this. The fact that they don’t is a scandal in my view, and can be directly blamed on their failure to crosscheck raw data points in their CliFlo database against actual historical reports or, in fact, their own website.
MISLEADING
The 2023 Summary, relied on by the news media and climate researchers, is arguably misleading in other ways, such as the omission of key facts necessary for context.
Example? It implies the Auckland Anniversary floods delivered the most extreme rainfall ever recorded at Whenuapai.
I say “implies” because there’s a list of extreme rainfall records by month, and Whenuapai, which NIWA boasts has official records dating back to 1943, suffered a 190mm drowning (7.5 inches of rain) on 27 January 2023, the “highest” one-day event.
Ordinary readers will assume that is an overall record-breaker that happened in January, because there’s no context. The impression of how important that 190mm record is, would have been different if NIWA had also published the actual all-time record alongside, the details come from this newspaper report from 1966:
“At Whenuapai, 10.23 inches of rain (260mm) was recorded for the 24 hours up to 9 am yesterday. The previous record in the area was 3.75 inches. Between 9pm and 11:00 p.m. on Wednesday 5 inches fell at Whenuapai.
“The weather office at Whenuapai was not equipped to handle the deluge as its gauge stops measuring at 9 inches. To measure rainfall up to this morning staff dug up the protecting canister for the gauge, tested it for leakage, found there was none and poured the 1.23 inches overflow into the measuring cylinder.”
The report is gobsmacking, and clearly puts the Anniversary Day downpour in the context of scale. When compared to the rest of the 2023 Auckland Anniversary rain records, this 260mm 1966 event eclipses all but one of the gauges (Mangere on 265mm) which proves that Auckland does get tropical downpours naturally.
NIWA’s failure to include relevant facts is glaring, especially as their own disused Historical database confirms the event:
“Whenuapai recorded 260 mm (26.0 cm) of rain in 24 hours (Return Period over 150 years). Whenuapai recorded 107 mm (10.7 cm) of rain in one hour (Return Period well over 150 years). The one-hour downpour broke a 35-year record.”
If you’ve got visions of Star Trek: Next Generation Captain Jean-Luc Picard facepalming right now, you’re not alone.
Essentially, NIWA appears to be grooming the media with meaningless out-of-context ‘geek stats’, like the hottest temperature on a given date, in the hope that something sticks.
Even worse, the exercise of breaking down your extremes by month, week or day is even more meaningless when you aren’t including historic extremes to show the true long term trend.
Weather is chaotic, big storms even more so. There’s enough variance in each storm for us to know that it’s mostly blind chance whether the biggest deluge is over Silverdale, Whenuapai, Auckland CBD or somewhere out to sea. The same exercise can be applied to any other region. Sure, weather systems follow rough trajectories, but knowing precisely where they are going to hit hardest – that’s beyond our power to control, making NIWA’s excitement about rain or temperature records at individual sites within a defined region largely artificial. Last year Mangere scored the highest rainfall in Auckland. A century ago it was Helensville through to Silverdale. Unless there are major topographical features creating distinct microclimates capable of holding their own against a cyclone, there’s usually nothing in the difference, it’s random luck for the most part not a predictable pattern.
What matters is not the difference between Mangere and Whenuapai, for the purposes of proclaiming a record. What we should be looking at is the size of the storm system in the region and how much rain it was able to dump within the region.
TEMPERATURE RECORDS THAT WERE NEVER REAL
More dodgy claims emerge in the section on record temperatures. Greymouth, for example, is singled out for special mention in the new report:
“A particularly notable event occurred during early January, when Greymouth registered a temperature of over 30°C, the first time this has happened since records began in 1947.”
Let’s look at that “records began” phrase. The overarching impression is that we’ve never seen Greymouth this hot – it must be proof of climate change.
Believe it or not, those ornery old timers who actually invented thermometers, barometers and navigation equipment and figured out how to travel 18,000km to get here in leaky sailboats, actually knew how to use the equipment.
Even more inconveniently, in 1967, 20 years after NIWA says records began, a government thermometer in a Stevenson screen outside the government radio station in Greymouth notched up 30.6C (87F) on January 15.
Now, before anyone squawks about different sites possibly being involved, NIWA itself has been happy to claim hottest days from different sites (more on this later) when it suits.
Meteorologists had been aware since the 1860s of the need to screen thermometers from direct sunlight or reflected heat. Rainfall, barometer, wind and temperature data was collected by port authorities for fairly obvious reasons. The lives of mariners depended on accurate data. By 1911 Greymouth had an official meteorologist.
Unfortunately many west coast old weather records were washed away in floods so they don’t “officially” exist anymore. Unless of course you add them back in from the daily newspaper weather columns, which NIWA have never done.
Give a couple of interns endless coffee and donuts for a month and the gaps could easily be filled and a more realistic picture of climate trends would emerge.
But it’s not just Greymouth.
NIWA lists Westport Airport reaching a record high of 29.1C (84.4F) for the first time since “records began” in 1937.
Which is all well and good, except that in 1967 Westport reported a 30.6C (87F) temperature.
Only four towns had record maximum temperatures in NIWA’s 2023 Annual Climate Summary, and of those four you’ve just seen two of the record temperatures debunked – half of them are wrong.
But let’s take an even deeper dive into the integrity of NIWA’s CliFlo temperature records.
SEVEN STATION SERIES
The donkey work of NIWA’s temperature record trend is done by a network of seven locations with continuous data records dating back more than 110 years. If there are discrepancies in the Seven Station Series, that has implications for the integrity of NZ climate research, as it feeds into peer-reviewed studies published around the world.
One of the core seven stations is Masterton.
On its website, NIWA confirms “these locations were chosen because they provide broad geographical coverage and long records (with measurements started at all sites by 1908).”
Yet on 2 February 2013, the Herald reported on Masterton setting a new record:
“The official high recorded in Masterton on Thursday of 33.3C [91.9F] was the highest recorded by NIWA in the past 20 years – as long as records exist.
“A NIWA spokeswoman said yesterday that Masterton’s temperature was the highest recorded since records started being collated in 1992.”
You may be thinking, “1992? What happened to all the records since 1908?”. Great question. Let’s look at some of the inconvenient facts that would have torpedoed the Masterton heat record good story, if NIWA’s database had thrown them up. It may be a material fact that NIWA just happened to also have been established in 1992.
Was 33.3C in 2013 a record for Masterton? Not even close.
There may be higher temperatures listed in old newspapers, but only the Christchurch Press has digitised issues after 1950 and they don’t cover Masterton so for now the temperature data after 1950 is scarce.
In January 2009, the Herald reported a new NIWA record at Masterton of 34.6C (94.3F). Note the date: it is four years before the supposed record of 33.3C, but it’s higher!
How can the media run a story about a record temperature in 2013 that is 1.3C lower than the “new record” set in 2009 and reported by exactly the same newspaper?
It turns out NIWA is releasing random city temperature readings from different sites, all called Masterton.
If different sites are all fair game to hang a climate change record story on, it raises questions about whether the Masterton temps are cherrypicked depending on whichever site is highest on a given day. It’s not like the media are ringing NIWA asking for the different temps at each site, they’re simply asking how hot was it in Masterton today? It appears NIWA is not restraining itself to one site but picking whichever suburb is hottest to answer the question.
The city reached its current record of 35.4C in January 2018, during what NIWA was calling NZ’s “hottest summer”. As you can see, it’s a ‘massive’ 0.3C higher than the 1930 record. But here’s the kicker: when NIWA was telling the Herald in 2013 about the new 33.3C “record” being the highest since records began in 1992, it knew it was lying to the paper. Buried in a NIWA file dated 13 years earlier in 2000 is a reference to Masterton’s all time high of 35.2C, presumably either an adjusted 1930 reference or a similar warm day at some time over the following 70 years.
The media, it seems, are being played like a Stradivarius. It wouldn’t surprise me if CCTV footage eventually surfaces of NIWA climate scientists jumping on desks and high-fiving each other – Wolf of Wall Street-style – every time a media outlet falls for a fake climate record!
NIWA’s 2018 report claims Lumsden set a new record of 32.3C (90.1F). History shows Lumsden with the same temperature in 1934. Net climate gain = 0.
In the same document, Cromwell is listed reaching an all time record of 36.6C. However the real record is 37.8C (100F) set in 1937.
All-time records don’t fall every year so we have to go back to NIWA’s 2019 Climate Summary to expose another Seven Station city, Wellington. In 2019, NIWA trumpeted a Wellington temperature of 30.3C (86.5F) as the highest since records began at Kelburn in 1927. Proof of global warming. What the article didn’t say is that Wellington’s all time highest temperature was 31.1C (88F) in 1896. And NIWA knows it, as you can see from the Masterton image above.
In that same 2019 Summary, NIWA trumpeted an all-time record high for Rotorua of 32.2C (90F). The only problem with that? Rotorua’s all-time record is actually 98F (36.7C). Yet another example of NIWA not doing its homework.
A temperature of 35.5C at Akaroa is listed as “equal highest”. This is wrong, records show a 36.7C temperature there in 1938.
In its 2019 Summary, NIWA claims that Hamilton had set a new record of 32C, when the actual all time record is 35C, set in 1935, creating the false impression that climate change is creating maximum temperature records. Again, the same NIWA document from 2000 that lists Masterton also notes a record of 34.7C at Hamilton – lower than the 35C we found but still ahead of the “record” they were trying to claim 19 years later.
In 2021, NIWA’s Annual Report said Ashburton had reached a record high of 39.4C, but the town hit 41.3C during the 1973 heatwave.
As an example of the kind of confusion these false record claims are causing in the media, and therefore the public, consider Invercargill.
In 2018, RNZ reported “Invercargill has hottest day on record at 32.3C”. Newshub earnestly told its viewers “Invercargill’s previous hottest recorded temperature was taken in 1921, when the city reached a high of 32.2degC.”
Is that accurate? No.
In 1894, historic news reports show Invercargill set a record with two consecutive days above 33.3C (92F).
That inconvenient truth was obviously unknown to NZ’s premiere climate research agency, as NIWA told the world in 2018 that Invercargill had never gone above 30C for “consecutive days”:
“From 14-16 January [2018], Invercargill recorded three consecutive days above 30°C, which is unprecedented in records going back to 1905. The city had never previously recorded consecutive days above 30°C. On 14 January, the city observed a maximum temperature of 32.3°C; its second-highest temperature on record for any month (the highest temperature recorded was 33.8°C on 2 January 1948).”
NIWA was wrong on the consecutive days, and because it didn’t know about that nor did it know the 1894 temps of 33.3C were actually “the second highest…on record”.
But just when you think you’ve sorted out the confusing media reports, along comes the Otago Daily Times on February 6 last year:
“Invercargill came agonisingly close to breaking a 24-year-old record when it reached 32.0 degC at 4pm on Saturday.”
Wait, what?! I thought we’d established that it hit 32.3C in 2018 and that the real record is 33.8C set in 1948?
“The February record stands at 32.1degC, set in 1999.”
Ah, the ODT was being fed monthly “records” by, in this case, MetService.
This constant bombardment of the public, via a compliant news media, with an endless confusing stream of monthly “geek records” is a sophisticated psy-op that again creates the false impression that real records are being broken when they’re not.
NIWA VS JOURNALIST: WHO’S RIGHT ON 40C DAYS?
In late December 2023, NIWA’s Ben Noll gave an interview to Stuff, where the news company say he told them:
Only three days have hit at least 40C in New Zealand, said Noll and two of those were recorded in the South Canterbury town of Timaru. “Timaru is home to two of the three hottest days overall on record, so definitely a claim to fame.”
This is where the rubber hits the melting bitumen for NIWA. Noll has all the power and resource of a $160 million government agency. He can put agents in suits, sunglasses and black electric SUVs with tinted windows anywhere in the country. I’ve just got a laptop and time to burn.
So is NIWA’s vast computer database correct? Has NZ really only experienced 40C temperatures on three days? Or is the journalist right? Let’s find out.
Eight days at 40C or higher. Not three. The power of comprehensive historical records over a badly designed NIWA database with decades of data holes, brutally demonstrated.
MANIPULATED CLIMATE RECORDS
Let’s examine those data holes a little more carefully. Whenever they come under fire, NIWA hides behind its “records began” caveat, the column alongside every data record that shows when the site data dates back to. “See that?” they say, “we’re not misleading anyone. It clearly says those records began in 1992.”
Yeah, but. The town in question was founded in 1860, what happened to all the previous records?
“A goat ate them”.
That last line is not a real answer of course, but it’s a good representation.
When towns first began springing up, collecting weather data fell to the local harbourmaster if it was coastal, or the local scientist/headmaster/reverend/old sea captain if there was no significant local authority. In rural areas, big sheep and cattle stations operated weather stations because they needed to run their stock logistics ahead of storms/heatwaves and so on.
Reports from this network of independent weather stations were initially supplied to local newspapers and then, after the country’s first Director of Meteorological Stations was appointed in 1861 they gradually ended up being coordinated.
Bureaucracies being what they are some of the records were lost or damaged over time. Many have now been digitised and form the backbone of NIWA’s CliFlo database, but even a cursory look at some of the Annual Climate Summaries will quickly show that there are gaps where you wouldn’t expect them.
There appear to be two possible explanations. 1) They have the data but it’s from no longer used sites so it’s been jettisoned from the records. This would enable NIWA to pass off more recent warming from the current site as a cascade of new records, without needing to bother the peasantry by revealing that the real record for Ohakune, for example, was five degrees higher than the current “record”. 2) The records are missing.
I suspect it’s a combination of both factors. Laziness and goats. NIWA admits “stations are missing (e.g. Masteron (sic) prior to 1906)”, so it’s clear backfill from newspapers is necessary in some cases.
When there’s a break in continuity at a weather station – say it’s moved to a different site – temperatures may need an adjustment factored in. The best example is Wellington where the site in Thorndon closed at the end of 1927 and reopened in Kelburn, higher up the mountain in a cooler spot. The old and new sites ran in parallel for a month and scientists discovered a 0.8C adjustment needed to be subtracted from old temperatures when comparing them to the colder new ones. The modern Wellington temperatures have that adjustment already built in, so they can be directly compared to older temperatures.
The hassle of working out offsets across the whole country is too much for NIWA so it found a core group of seven stations, adjusted those and now relies almost exclusively on that to measure long term temperature change.
But NIWA wants to both have its cake and eat it. The public want to know about weather trends in their own towns. The agency wants to issue as many press releases as possible on “new records”, and there are far more than seven towns in NZ. So the solution appears to have been use the most recent site data from every town outside the seven series and pretend the old records never happened.
This has the effect of creating a fireworks pattern of false random records announcements that can only be untangled the way we are doing it here (and which the mainstream media will never do as they are part of the problem) – by zooming out to get a big picture overview of the records timeline. That’s when the propaganda tricks become obvious.
CAUGHT IN THE ACT: NIWA DECEPTIVE CONDUCT
It’s not until you scrutinise some of these NIWA reports in depth that discrepancies become obvious. Consumers of NIWA’s data, like ordinary members of the public, would expect a consistency of measuring sites when records are being claimed. “Whangārei”, for example, should mean choosing and using “the” official site, not “any” official site.
After all, that’s what NIWA warns the media:
“Journalists are advised, however, to take extreme care when interpreting trends from raw data to ensure they have not been compromised by changes in site location, urbanisation, exposure, or instrumentation over time. If in any doubt, please call us.”
The irony, that when media call NIWA they are being fed information “compromised by changes in site location”, is stark.
Take Whangarei. One NIWA record says rainfall records only began in 1937, while another says 1943. Which is it?
Or take Wellington. Did temperature records begin in 1931 or 1928?
If NIWA were selling this data to ordinary consumers they’d be hauled before the Commerce Commission for making misleading statements in trade, in my opinion.
THE WRAP-UP:
So what does all this really mean? In my view NIWA is stacking its Annual Climate Summaries with misleading “records” to drive a climate change narrative and essentially justify its existence. While there’s a need for climate research, there’s no public interest in a government agency manipulating and exaggerating data.
In my view NIWA has:
Published false data on the size and power of Cyclone Gabrielle relative to the 1936 Cyclone it compared it to – specifically that NIWA seriously undercalculated the 1936 storm, creating a false impression that modern storms are bigger because of climate change
Published false information claiming that Gabrielle delivered Whangarei’s “wettest” February day with a “record” 216mm deluge, when it knew Whangarei’s February record was 290mm during, ironically, Cyclone 36, creating a false impression that modern storms are bigger because of climate change
Published misleading statements about Auckland Anniversary Day rainfall breaking records, with up to 265mm downfall in 24 hours in one part of the city, without disclosing that 356mm drowned the north of the city over just five hours in a 1924 storm, creating a false impression that modern storms are bigger because of climate change
Published misleading statements about “record” 199mm rainfall at Akaroa when the actual record from 1941 is 212mm, creating a false impression that modern storms are bigger because of climate change
Published misleading statements about record 117mm rainfall at Waipawa when the actual record from 1911 is 148mm, creating a false impression that modern storms are bigger because of climate change
Published misleading statements about “record” 154mm rainfall at The Chateau, Mt Ruapehu when the actual record from 1933 is 191mm that derailed a passenger express train, creating a false impression that modern storms are bigger because of climate change
Mysteriously increased the maximum extreme 24 hour rainfall in Hawke’s Bay from Cyclone Gabrielle to 561mm, from the 316mm total used by NIWA in all previous official reports on Gabrielle, without explanation, while also failing to mention the existing record of 512mm in ten hours from 1924, which NIWA knew
Published misleading statements that Greymouth topped 30C for the first time in 2023, when in fact it reached 31.7C in 1918 and was measured at 30.6C in 1967 on a state-approved thermometer at the government’s Broadcasting House
Published misleading statements that Westport reached 29.1C for the first time since 1937 when Westport reported 30.6C in 1967 as well
Published, in its 2019 Annual Climate Summary, misleading statements that Rotorua had reached 32.2C for the first time, when the actual temperature record of 36.7C was set in 1935, creating the false impression that climate change is creating maximum temperature records
Published, in its 2019 Summary, misleading statements that Hamilton had set a new record of 32C, when the actual all time record is 35C, set in 1935, creating the false impression that climate change is creating maximum temperature records
Published, in its 2019 Summary, misleading statements that Ohakune had set a new record of 31.1C when the actual record from 1924 is 36.7C, creating the false impression that climate change is causing new maximum temperature records
Published, in its 2019 Summary, misleading statements that Wellington had set a new record of 30.3C, when it knew Wellington’s all-time record is 31.7C dating back to 1896
In a 2024 interview with Stuff, NIWA falsely claimed only three days in New Zealand have ever seen temperatures of 40C or higher. In fact historical records disclose nearly triple that figure, with at least eight days reaching those heights
Falsely claimed New Zealand’s highest ever temperature was 42.4C at Rangiora in 1973, when two major South Island sheep stations recorded higher temperatures of 42.8 and 44.4C separately, on the same day in 1949
The public need to be able to trust NIWA. In my view publishing claimed records that imply a historical trend when, for whatever reason, relevant datapoints that might challenge that impression are being left out, is dishonest science. It is simply not good enough for a research agency to hide behind a technical literal truth – “it’s the highest since records began in 1978” – when in many cases the agency knows of verified higher records in the past. It is lying by omission in my view.
The government should compel NIWA to add columns to its record graphs for All-time Verified Record, and Unofficial Claimed Record, with the dates included as well, to provide meaningful context to the media, clients and the public.
NIWA should also be compelled to specify when it is using different sites within a region to report records, so that debacles like Masterton reporting no longer happen.
As for the news media, their predecessors a century ago had no computers to keep track of temperature records, so they could be forgiven for wrongly claiming something was a new record. Modern media have no such excuse. It’s one thing to be played by climate scientists, but it’s a total credibility fail if your internal systems can’t instantly pull up all previous stories on temperature records to factcheck.
The last government began a review of NIWA and MetService. On the strength of this report and last year’s Climate of Fear, it seems pretty clear the new government needs to deepen the investigation.
Ian Wishart is a bestselling author and journalist, currently a consultant to the Centrist in its establishment of a new investigative unit to help us bring more in-depth coverage of issues that matter to our readers. He is slowly (but carefully) writing a new climate book.
Huge data gaps, crude models, system complexity and endless unknowns frustrate climate scientists
The science of climate change is very complex and there are many different points of view. This post summarizes some of the strongest arguments of climate skeptics.
The earth’s system is chaotic and unpredictable. Today’s climate models are still crude given the earth’s huge complexity. (Symbol image: NASA)
1. Natural climate variability
The Earth’s climate has always changed in the past, often dramatically, even without human influence. The current warming is therefore likely just part of a natural cycle, and one that is totally capable of reversing on its own.
2. Climate models are still in their infancy
Climate models are complex computer programs that attempt to simulate the climate system. These models provide different results and are not able to accurately reproduce past climate changes. All are filled with assumptions and guesses.
The climate is a highly complex, chaotic system and so much of it is still poorly understood. Much remains a complete mystery, which means it is impossible to accurately model. Model outputs are thus unreliable.
Remember that with chaotic systems like weather and climate, even very small changes in the initial inputs, which are many, can be amplified over time, thus making long-term predictions impossible. That’s a hard fact of life that climate scientists have to accept.
3. The influence of the sun
The sun is the earth’s main energy supplier and its activity certainly greatly influences the climate. There are hundreds of publications that show this. Many of these impacts are poorly understood, and so climate scientists like to pretend they don’t exist.
4. Limited effects of trace gas CO2
Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a trace, “greenhouse” gas that human activities release into the atmosphere. Many scientific publications show CO2’s impact on global warming is overestimated.
5. Oceanic cycles hugely impact climate change
The ocean acts like the earth’s giant heat re-distributor. There are many cycles that impact climate. Ocean currents move warm water from the equator towards the poles, and from higher depths to lower depths, thus redistributing energy. Ocean cycles play a crucial role in regulating Earth’s temperature and weather patterns. Changes to these cycles can have significant consequences for global climate.
The heat content of the oceans is about 100 times that of the atmosphere, so even small heat redistribution changes can significantly impact the atmosphere above.
Predictions are difficult because there is little historical data available from the ocean depths and scientists can only speculate what the oceans will do next.
6. Economic consequences of climate change
Measures to combat climate change entail extremely high costs and are especially socially unbearable for the poor. Study after study suggest these costs far outweigh the negative consequences of climate change, which we are unable to steer in the first place.
No. This more a statement of fact than a claim and we don´t have to ignore inconvenient truths.
The government insists the plan adheres to the country’s transition to net zero, but climate campaigners warn against the reliance on fossil fuels.
No. This more a statement of fact than a claim and we don´t have to ignore inconvenient truths.
The government insists the plan adheres to the country’s transition to net zero, but climate campaigners warn against the reliance on fossil fuels.
The UK will face “blackouts” without building new gas power stations, ministers have claimed. Sky News has the story.
The government has said that while it will continue to move forward with its net zero targets and a focus on renewables, gas was needed as a “back-up” – with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak saying climate goals must be reached “in a sustainable way that doesn’t leave people without energy on a cloudy, windless day”.
Energy Secretary Claire Coutinho will outline the plans for new stations in a speech later today, which include a full review of the electricity market and changes to the law to make the plants ready convert to low-carbon alternatives.
But Greenpeace said the plan would make the country “more dependent on the very fossil fuel that sent our bills rocketing and the planet’s temperature soaring”.
Electricity demand is increasing as the UK electrifies things like heating and cars, and the population grows.
Officials have been reviewing how to make sure supply keeps up with demand, is reliable, and reaches the right areas of the country.
Today the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said it was clear the UK would need new backup gas capacity to provide power that can be fired up on demand, on days when it isn’t windy or sunny enough to get electricity from renewables.
That’s also because some gas plants are due to retire in the coming years.
Advertisement
The commitment to renewed unabated gas was long expected, and the energy industry welcomed the reassurance on how to direct its investment.
But some analysts warned extra gas is the wrong solution to the question of how to meet increasing demand and provide flexibility, and said it was a reflection of failure in other areas of energy security policy.
‘We must be realistic’
In a speech today at Chatham House, Ms Coutinho is expected to say: “There are no easy solutions in energy, only trade-offs.
“And so, as we continue to move towards clean energy, we must be realistic.”
In a statement overnight, Mr Sunak said: “I will not gamble with our energy security. I will make the tough decisions so that no matter what scenario we face, we can always power Britain from Britain.”
Labour’s shadow energy secretary, Ed Miliband, said the plans were only necessary because of “fourteen years of failed Conservative energy policy”, including an effective ban on onshore wind, slow progress on energy efficiency and last year’s failed offshore wind auction.
However, he added that if old capacity needs replacing, Labour would be open to some new gas power generation, too.
Mr Miliband said: “Of course we need to replace retiring gas-fired stations as part of a decarbonised power system, which will include carbon capture and hydrogen playing a limited backup role in the system.”
The government argues the move is in line with its climate commitments to cut emissions from fossil fuels because although gas capacity will increase, overall running hours will reduce, as the gas power would not be not firing all the time, but could be scaled up and down as a backup.
Residential and commercial buildings throughout the United States are in the bull’s eye of a White House plan “intended to help move the building sector to net-zero emissions.”
Residential and commercial buildings throughout the United States are in the bull’s eye of a White House plan “intended to help move the building sector to net-zero emissions.”
A “pre-decisional” draft released with little fanfare in January outlines the vast scope of an initiative aimed at nothing less than the decarbonization of one of the nation’s largest economic sectors.
Couched in the turgid bureaucratic prose common to regulatory schemes, the White House draft seeks a “broadly accepted minimum definition of a zero-emissions building.” “The intent of the National Definition of a Zero Emissions Building,” it says, “is to create a standardized, consistent, measurable basis for zero emissions buildings.”
“This clear market signal and consistent target, backed by measurable data,” are intended “to influence the design and operation of buildings to substantially reduce building sector emissions.” In other words, the same people intent on forcing the driving public to buy EVs, and to mandate “all-electric” appliances in the nation’s kitchens, now see themselves as architects of resilient green structures that can withstand anything the climate throws at them. (RELATED: DAVID BLACKMON: The Terrible News For Electric Vehicles Keeps Rolling In)
And which buildings are to be included in this scheme? “This definition can be applied to existing buildings and to new construction of non-federally owned buildings,” the White House explains. “The definition applies to whole building operational emissions, including those from tenants.”
To meet the administration’s net-zero emissions criteria, a building must be highly energy efficient, free of on-site emissions from energy use, and powered solely from “clean energy,” defined as “carbon-free sources.” Fossil fuels need not apply.
Verification of each building’s compliance with the net-zero-emissions regime is a key element of the Biden program. “EPA’s ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager will generate standardized documentation that can be independently verified through licensed professionals and/or third-party certification bodies or others as determined by organizations using the zero-emissions building definition.”
A Roadmap To Control
Anyone wishing to know how the administrative state seizes power need look no further than the White House’s net-zero building emissions plan. It starts with a “broadly accepted minimum definition of a zero-emissions building … to transition the building sector to zero greenhouse gas emissions.” The White fails to say by whom the definition is “broadly accepted” but quickly moves on to a scheme that will put the federal government in every building – existing and not yet constructed – in every community in the country.
Several well-trodden pathways are at its disposal, including regulation of fossil-fuel sources of energy that might otherwise make their way into buildings. Another is EPA’s ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, who is accountable to absolutely no one, but nevertheless has the power to generate standardized documentation that can be “independently verified” by third parties with a financial stake in the net-zero program.
The White House draft places no restrictions on the size of the buildings subject to the program, meaning even smaller structures could fall under its purview.
Building Codes
The administration’s move comes amid a nationwide fight — playing out in such places as North Carolina, Michigan, and Idaho — over efforts to adopt “climate friendly” building codes at the state and local level. Climate advocates, often under the banner of energy efficiency, demand that building codes for homes be updated to include thicker insulation, super airtight windows, and upgraded wiring to accommodate all-electric appliances and in-home chargers for EVs.
With home prices already at record-high levels, the 140,000 members of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) are mobilizing against state and local efforts to enact what are said to be more energy-efficient building codes for residences.
Last year, NFIB’s North Carolina affiliate successfully lobbied against a Tarheel State plan to tighten energy efficiency standards designed to lower the carbon footprint of residential buildings. Ron Jackson, a home builder in predominantly rural Moore County, worried that the code would put the affordable housing he specializes in out of reach for nurses, police officers, and teachers.
What the White House says is merely a “definition” of a zero-emission building, won’t stay a definition for long. It will be a launching pad for regulations — ideally at the federal, state and local levels — that mandate which materials throughout the supply chain can go into a green building.
Politically connected purveyors of those materials stand to profit handsomely from this arrangement.
By contrast, perspective home buyers, particularly those on a tight budget, will ultimately pay the price exacted by the administrative regulatory state and its partners the climate cartel.
Note that the Biden White House refers to its definition of a zero-emissions building as a “clear market signal.” But that signal did not come from the market.
It originated with an administration in Washington whose “whole-of-government” approach to what it says is a “climate crisis” extends to every nook and cranny in American society.
Bonner Russell Cohen, Ph. D., is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org.
The previous parts of this series investigated model bias in the CMIP6 models and in their interpretation in AR6 WGI. This part looks at model bias in AR6 WGII, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.
The previous parts of this series investigated model bias in the CMIP6 models and in their interpretation in AR6 WGI. This part looks at model bias in AR6 WGII, Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability.[1] The IPCC WGII report uses the possible future climate projections from the WGI report to project the future impact of climate change on society. It uses socio-economic models to accomplish this. As we saw in the previous parts of this series, the WGI report is biased and ignores possible natural contributions to recent observed global warming from changes in the Sun, cloud cover, and the meridional transport of energy.
The WGI/CMIP6 models, rather arbitrarily, assign all warming since 1750 to human influences, particularly CO2 emissions.[2] WGII accepts this controversial conclusion. It uses projected CO2 emissions combined with the WGI/CMIP6 models to predict future temperature and projected knock-on effects to other climate components, like precipitation, to model the future impact on human civilization.
WGII states that:
“Human-induced climate change, including more frequent and intense extreme events, has caused widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damages to nature and people, beyond natural climate variability.”[3]AR6 WGII, page 9
This is only true if we accept their assumption about the range of natural climate variability, but as we saw in the previous parts of this series, their assumptions about natural warming, especially the impact of solar variability, are very controversial. Further, whether climate change is natural or human-caused, someone, somewhere, is nearly always going to be adversely affected by a change in climate, while others will benefit from the same change. How widespread is “widespread?”
WGII liberally discusses the potential negative impact of climate change,[4] and they discuss the potential benefits of their recommended adaptation and mitigation policies, but the report rarely mentions the well documented potential benefits of global warming and additional atmospheric CO2. [5] The fact that WGII only considers the problems of climate change and not the benefits, reveals their bias and invalidates their analysis. Even when mentioning a benefit, they find something negative in it. For example, they mention that elevated CO2 benefits woody plants, but that woody plants can cause an increase in atmospheric carbon.[6]
As Brian O’Neill writes, while many studies anticipate problems in the future, they also predict a future where humanity is better educated, better fed, longer lived, healthier, with less poverty, and less conflict. This is simply continuing a trend that has been underway for many decades.[7] O’Neill reports that currently there are 700-800 million people at risk of hunger globally. By 2050, even including the possible effects of 2°C of warming, that number will fall to 250 million.[8]
Currently the world’s economy is growing between 2 and 3% per year[9] and this is not expected to change much in the future. Looking ahead at a possible 2.5°C of warming in the next century or so, economists anticipate between a positive net climate change impact of about 2% and negative net impact of about 2.5% on global GDP. It is significant that the sign of the net economic impact due to climate change is not known. The average impact for 2.5°C of warming is a negative 1.3% for the average person.[10] In the next 80 years global GDP would be expected to grow between 487% and 1,000%, so a negative 1.3% due to climate change is unlikely to be noticed. Richard Tol writes that the uncertainty in the estimates of the impact of climate change on total economic welfare is very large and if we take this uncertainty into account, the impact of climate change does not significantly deviate from zero until 3.5°C of warming.[11]
Emissions and impact scenarios
The future cannot be predicted. So, the concept of “scenarios” was developed in the 1960s by Herman Kahn, a military strategist with the RAND Corporation.[12] The idea is to develop a “business as usual” forecast that assumes no unusual events occur over the planning period. Then you vary something and compute an alternative forecast that shows the difference between the baseline, business-as-usual, forecast and your model. It is just a learning tool and like all models, used to investigate the possible impact of policy changes, regulations, or tactical decisions in wars or battles. We are not supposed to believe any of the forecasts, it is just the relative values between various assumptions that are important. Scenario analysis is widely used to do cost-benefit analysis. However, since WGII only incorporates the costs and leaves out the benefits, their cost-benefit analysis is invalid.
It is very important to remember that the projections used in WGII assume that there will be no natural warming or cooling between now and 2100. If there are natural forces acting on climate, then the greenhouse gas-based projections they rely upon will be wrong and their projected impacts on human civilization must be wrong as well. The AR6 scenarios of temperature change relative to 1850 to 1900 are shown in figure 1.
Figure 1. The temperature projected to 2100. Source: (IPCC, 2022, p. 16).
Hausfather and Peters[13] have called the higher scenarios, SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5 (as well as their AR5 equivalent RCP8.5) unlikely, but since this view is contested,[14] AR6 WGII takes no position on which of the scenarios in figure 1 is most likely.[15] This is unfortunate since the difference in the scenarios in 2100, only 76 years from today, is over three degrees. The combination of the uncertainty in the projected warming and in the potential impact of the warming is extremely large.
Roger Pielke Jr. and Justin Ritchie tell us that the ancestor of the SSP5-8.5 scenario in figure 1 originated in the first IPCC report in 1990. In 1990, with what was known then, it was a reasonable “business-as-usual” scenario. It predicted a large increase in coal consumption and a CO2 concentration of 1,200 PPM in 2100. Today that emissions scenario is reached in SSP5-8.5, but with what we know today it is not “business-as-usual,” in fact it is an implausible future, that is becoming more impossible with each passing year.[16] To be fair, the IPCC does not call SSP5-8.5 business-as-usual, that label is used by others, presumably because that is what it is called in the first report in 1990.[17]
Marcel Crok reports in the book that he and I edited, The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, that the unlikely, and now implausible, SSP5-8.5 and its predecessor RCP8.5 are mentioned in AR6 41.5% of the time according to Roger Pielke Jr., much more than the more likely SSP2-4.5 or RCP4.5 scenarios (mentioned 17% of the time). The latter two scenarios more closely match recent observations.[18] Thus, WGII often uses the biased and too hot WGI models as input to maximal and implausible emissions scenarios to do their modeled climate impact projections.
Ignoring the Good News
While using implausible scenarios and biased climate model results in assessing the impacts of climate change is unwise, ignoring the positive impacts of climate change and focusing only on the bad may well be worse. The whole idea of using scenarios is to investigate the full range of possible outcomes, not cherry-pick the model input to manufacture a desired outcome, a problem often called reporting bias. It is this part of the WGII procedure that cost them credibility.
Marcel Crok shows us that U.S. major and all landfalling hurricanes have been declining since 1900.[19] Globally, there is no trend in cyclones and hurricanes.[20] There is also no trend in accumulated global cyclone energy.[21] AR6 WGI finds that since 1950 there has been an increase in the number of hot days and heatwaves,[22] but as figure 1 in part 2 shows the world was cooling in 1950. At least in the United States, records show that peak hot days and heatwaves were in the 1930s.[23] AR6 WGI also finds that there is “low confidence in general statements to attribute changes in flood events to anthropogenic climate change.”[24] The idea that extreme weather is increasing globally is very controversial.
It is worth noting that AR6 WGII states that they have high confidence that some extreme weather is increasing as a result of climate change, including extreme rainfall events, more frequent and stronger cyclones/hurricanes, and that recent devastating floods were made more likely due to climate change.[25] This appears to be directly contradicted by what is stated in AR6 WGI, but WGII cleverly sidesteps the contradiction by specifying “Some extreme weather…” and “devastating floods in western Europe…” Thus, to make their point, they cherry pick locations and events and avoid discussing global impacts that have not changed or are decreasing.[26] In any given year, extreme weather events are increasing somewhere, that is the nature of weather. Their assertion is contradicted by the work of Zhongwei Yan, Philip Jones, and Anders Moberg already mentioned in part 5.[27]
Finally, both WGI and WGII completely ignore evidence that global warming and additional CO2 have many benefits. Bjorn Lomborg reports that human welfare will likely increase 450% in the 21st century and damages due to climate change might reduce this to 434%,[28] which will be hard for most people to detect. Lomborg also finds that non-climate-related deaths, due to earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, etc. have fallen only slightly in the past 100 years, but climate-related deaths have fallen a staggering 99%. Part of this is that cold-related deaths are much more common than heat-related deaths, and as the world warms, cold-related deaths fall more than heat-related deaths increase.[29]
Cherry picking
The authors of AR6 WGII were particularly guilty of selecting papers to discuss that supported their assumptions and ignoring papers that refuted or disagreed with them. In a classic case they discussed Grinsted, et al.,[30] which claims to be able to attribute some U.S. hurricane losses to human-caused global warming. Grinsted is the only paper, out of many[31] that was able to attribute hurricane losses to human-caused or human-enhanced hurricane activity. However, Roger Pielke Jr. has found that the paper is flawed and has requested that it be retracted.[32]
Even though the paper is likely flawed and is contradicted by many other studies, it is used to support the idea that some U.S. hurricane losses can be “partly attributed to anthropogenic climate change” in AR6 WGII.[33] To be fair, they do mention one of the many studies that disagree with Grinsted. However, they also mention one other paper, Estrada et al.,[34] that they imply supports attribution to human-caused climate change, but the paper does not say that. Estrada, et al. say that their results are ambiguous, and that in 2005 2-12% of normalized losses “could be attributable to climate change.” So, they chose one year, and only considered the United States, and maybe 2-12% of the damage was due to climate change. In Estrada’s conclusions they note:
“Increases in wealth and population alone cannot account for the observed trend in hurricane losses. The remaining trend in itself does not prove the existence of a climate change signal, as it could be due to causes not considered here.”Estrada, Botzen, and Tol, Nature Geoscience, 2015
In other words, they detect a trend in normalized hurricane damage that cannot be fully explained by increasing wealth and population and it is possible that this excess is due to climate change. Estrada, et al. explain that prominent ocean oscillations, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) can account for some of the excess hurricane damage observed. Also, data problems prior to 1940 could produce a spurious upward trend in damage. So, Estrada, et al.’s analysis uncovered a small excess trend in damage that might be explainable by climate change but could also be caused by other factors. Not very convincing.
AR6 WGII leaves the reader with the idea it is two against one, when actually one of the pro-attribution studies is inconclusive and they ignored a large number of studies that found no connection between hurricane damage and climate change. WGII does make the following statement, which partially absolves them:
“Climate change explains a portion of long-term increases in economic damages of hurricanes (limited evidence, low agreement).”[35]IPCC AR6 WGII, page 1978
They are saved by the “limited evidence, low agreement” bit, but somehow that part is always left out of the press releases and news media.
WGII Model Bias, Summary
Just as WGI ignored the potential impact of solar variability and changes in meridional transport, WGII ignored the potential benefits of warming and additional atmospheric CO2. This invalidates the report. By ignoring the well-documented benefits of global warming and additional CO2, they clearly cannot assess the impact of climate change or our vulnerability to climate changes. It makes their report useless for policy making or cost-benefit analysis.
It is hard to decide exactly how to characterize this problem in AR6 WGII, it could be described as reporting bias, since they ignored so many studies that report warming and CO2 benefits. It could also be described as confirmation bias given their stated assumption that warming and additional CO2 is a bad thing. But, either way, they failed to honestly report the current state of the existing literature on the subject.
(May, Are fossil-fuel CO2 emissions good or bad?, 2022g), (Idso, 2013), (Zhu, Piao, & Myneni, 2016), (Tol R. S., 2018) , (Tol R. , Correction and Update: The Economic Effects of Climate Change, 2014b), and (O’Neill, 2023) ↑
(Lomborg, Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies,, 2020), (Lomborg, We’re Safer From Climate Disasters Than Ever Before, 2021), and (Pielke Jr., 2021) ↑
(Lomborg, Welfare in the 21st century: Increasing development, reducing inequality, the impact of climate change, and the cost of climate policies,, 2020) ↑
John Kerry, with his parting shot as Climate Czar, said that the world might feel better about Russia’s actions in the Ukrainian war if they lowered their climate footprint. In Germany, destroying an ancient forest to put up wind turbines is beyond any rational thought.
We have had a week that has exposed the no-limits extremes of the climate campaign.
John Kerry, with his parting shot as Climate Czar, said that the world might feel better about Russia’s actions in the Ukrainian war if they lowered their climate footprint.
The depths of lunacy this reaches know no bounds. It is because of the actions of Kerry and his ilk in the administration Putin has the funds to fight the war in the first place.
In Germany, destroying an ancient forest to put up wind turbines is beyond any rational thought. First of all, you can wreck plenty of open spaces with the turbines. But the removal of 120k ancient trees, each taking away 50 lbs of CO2 for 6 million pounds a year, and the environmental cost of building these monstrosities should have every environmentalist up in arms.
Do they realize the effect on the local climate?
Forests are a great way to remove CO2 as I mentioned above, and are naturally cooler areas. So if you are afraid of CO2 (I am not, but understand you might be) this shows in no uncertain terms the depths of delusion these people are forcing on others.
How this is even considered, is beyond me. And if you are an environmentalist how are you not up in arms at this?
You have a forest that has survived wars and turmoil. Germany’s forests are supposedly dying because of climate change so they destroy more forests to prevent more climate change. How is this even considered or tolerated? This is just another matter that Dostoevsky was right about.
Then, there is this illustration from this Twitter handle.
True Science PEng, DFP, ADFS, MA, MBA.
The covering of fields with solar panels could actually ADD TO WARMING. The illustration means microclimates will indeed change. We see this all the time with cities.
Not only is there an urban heat island with downstream implications. (For example, the Philadelphia UHI is a great place to start thunderstorms that then follow the 3 major highways, US 30, US 322, and the Atlantic City expressway ESE toward the shore.
There are major differences in thunderstorm frequency at the NJ shore for instance north of Atlantic City vs south, more to the north enhanced by the effect noted above). But now imagine fields that were covered with cooling vegetation replaced with solar panels that can elevate temperatures to 70C.
Imagine the change to the environment in those areas. The vegetation and animal life be dammed.
But this is because the people pushing this HAVE NO LOVE OF WEATHER OR CLIMATE. I have written about this several times. They simply use weather and climate to advance their mission. There is no rational thinking about this.
It is getting so bad that the Dostoevsky quote above, not only is evident in the irrational policies we are seeing enacted in non-climate issues but is leading to some kind of disorder that is causing societal disruptions we are seeing with climate protesters that are blocking roads or trying to destroy priceless art. Circle back to the destruction of the ancient forest. How is that so different from throwing orange paint on a priceless piece of art as far as an irrational action based on a phony mission?
In the face of all this lunacy, these facts seem to be completely ignored, nicely compiled by man-made climate change skeptic, Graham Keagan:
Since 1900… – Life expectancy +130% – Literacy percentage up 4 fold – Population up 5 fold – GDP per capita up 7 fold – Poverty down 7 fold – Death from natural disasters down 50 fold (with 5x the number of people on the planet) Civilization is flourishing!
There is no rational reason for what is being forced down the throat of the planet. The destruction of an ancient forest should raise alarm bells.
Kerry’s parting comments that would imply a carbon footprint reduction would somehow offset aggression that we are indirectly funding by phony climate war policies Kerry advocates should raise alarm bells. The effect of these actions on the environment, the destruction of large areas of nature by the establishment of these fields, and the cost of the materials should be obvious. This has nothing to do with climate or weather. It is being pushed by people who have no love of climate, weather, nature, or mankind in general.
Dostoevsky was (is) right. It’s time for rational people to stop this irrationality. I have never thought climate should be a big issue, but what is driving all this is. The motivation for all this is the reduction, if not destruction, of man’s upward mobility — and climate is the tool. This must be stopped peacefully at the ballot box. Because, in the end, this irrationality is the nail in the coffin of our freedom and is designed for top-down elitist control.
Do you believe in UFOs? If so, be careful, you might be a dangerous Right-wing radical without even knowing the fact! A new Pentagon report released last week made the dismissive claim that historical spikes in sightings of such things back in the 1950s and 1960s were largely just the result of paranoid members of the general public innocently mistaking top-secret U.S. military craft of the era for those of extraterrestrial beings.
Do you believe in UFOs? If so, be careful, you might be a dangerous Right-wing radical without even knowing the fact! A new Pentagon report released last week made the dismissive claim that historical spikes in sightings of such things back in the 1950s and 1960s were largely just the result of paranoid members of the general public innocently mistaking top-secret U.S. military craft of the era for those of extraterrestrial beings.
The report was issued on behalf of the Pentagon’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), headed up until last December by a physicist and former CIA man named Sean Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was the man habitually known by the media as ‘the Pentagon’s UFO chief’, in the limited sense that, whenever a journalist wanted to ask the U.S. Government whether there was any definite proof aliens had landed on Planet Earth yet, it was his job to say “No, please stop asking us”.
Nonetheless, the term UFO means just that – Unidentified Flying Object, and there have certainly been plenty of those buzzing American airspace of late, although whether they are actually extraterrestrial in nature, or simply invasive drone-like tech from an enemy nation like China or wherever is a moot point, as Kirkpatrick himself has explained.
Alien Worldviews
Yet, besides making such perfectly reasonable apolitical points, Kitkpatrick also appears to possess a certain fondness for making a few rather less reasonable overtly politicised ones too. In early February, Kirkpatrick gave an interview to politics website Politico, expressing his grave expert opinion that the authorities should be much more forthcoming in revealing details about such mysterious phenomena to the general public: hence the release of the Pentagon’s new debunking report, I suppose.
His reasons for advising this course of future action were rather interesting. Noting it was AARO’s job to investigate potential military or terrorist threats to U.S. airspace, not “to go and find extraterrestrials”, Kirkpatrick argued that “If there is a void in the information space, it will be filled with the imagination of the public Right and [their] conspiracies”.
Yes, that’s right: only conservatives ever subscribe to mad conspiracy theories of any kind. A rash of media stories in recent years have tried to link (in fact wholly unrepresentative) Right-wing American movements like QAnon and January 6th rioters to belief in UFO-related conspiracies, often with the self-evident aim of smearing anyone non-Lefty as a David Icke-style, lizard-loving loon (which rather ignores the fact Mr. Icke was once in the U.K Green Party).
As someone who has written twobooks exposing the fake contemporary online legend of Nazi UFOs, I would fully admit that the subject can indeed occasionally be used as a front for fascism or a handy far-Right recruitment tool. But, on the other hand, as someone who has also written another book substantially dealing with how the subject can equally sometimes be used as a front for far-Left Marxist recruitment purposes too, I can see how an honest accusation of this nature could actually go both ways. Honest accusations, however, are no longer terribly in fashion.
Obviously, with their God-given contemporary right to define precisely what counts as ‘misinformation’ in the public sphere, today’s all-wise and all-knowing Leftists hold a total and complete monopoly upon objective truth, and would never stoop so low as to begin making bizarre politically motivated claims about what are popularly dismissed as disreputable fringe topics like UFOs and alien beings. Or would they…?
The Dry Canals on Mars
Speaking to the media back in 2011, Venezuela’s former quasi-Marxist Dictator, Hugo Chávez, was very firmly of the opinion that, many years ago, there used to be life on Mars, now an utterly barren and dead globe, but that native Martian forms of capitalism had killed it off wholesale.
“I have always heard that it would not be strange that there had been civilisation on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived, and finished off the planet,” Chávez said in a speech to mark World Water Day in March 2011, whilst himself ostentatiously sipping from a glass of H2O as if to mock the tragically dehydrated Martian dead.
“Careful!” Hugo added. “Here on planet Earth where hundreds of years ago or less there were great forests, now there are deserts. Where there were rivers, there are deserts.” And why? All because of climate change, caused by rapacious Western capitalism, El Presidente cautioned. (Awkward note: Venezuela is a principal member of OPEC, has the world’s largest proven oil reserves and fossil fuels provide the backbone of its entire economy – or at least they did until Chávistas began wrecking it all like Mars with their blessed planet-loving socialism.)
That sounds uncannily like a Left-wing ET-related conspiracy to me. But then, Chávez always was a noted nut. Maybe he was just an unfortunate, unrepresentative progressive one-off? Sadly not. I have written before in the Daily Sceptic about Left-wing astronomers trying to contact PC ETs (see here and here), and in my regular Takimag column this week have detailed some barely believable current attempts of queer activists to contact races of homosexual ‘gayliens’. But the rival Left-wing trope of trying to spuriously relate extraterrestrial life and flying saucers to climate change is even more surprisingly widespread in today’s wokery-ridden academic and media worlds.
Guardian Readers of the Universe
In 2019, the New York Times (America’s rough equivalent of the Guardian, but even worse) ran a thought-experiment by op-ed columnist Farhad Manjoo entitled ‘Pretend It’s Aliens’. Here, Manjoo spoke of how, as Westerners today lived in a world of absurd Right-wing illusions conjured by wicked populist politicians – specifically, “full-grown adults who maintain, against all evidence, that immigration poses an existential threat to the United States”, no less – why shouldn’t Leftists like him just “perform the same sleight of hand” with causes close to their own bleeding hearts?
Some sceptics may argue they have done so already, with their hyperbolically exaggerated talk about ‘global boiling’ etc., but Mr. Manjoo proposed extending such lies even further by proposing the idea that evil extraterrestrials were actually behind our planet’s imminent eco-doom, by spreading ludicrous tweets like this:
Manjoo’s logic, such as it is, ran as follows:
This [combatting climate change] will be a long-term existential battle that will require remaking every part of society… that may involve costly and politically unpopular changes to our way of life for years to come, and will necessarily make some people [but not Manjoo himself, probably] worse off than if we did nothing. But that will be justified, because we understand the stakes: we are fighting murderous aliens… If the aliens attacked, we’d do better. I’m sure of it. We would understand the stakes in the battle ahead. We would apprehend the necessity of sacrifice and perseverance. We would be able to perceive what is happening to our planet and our species as what it plainly is: a war for survival.
Manjoo meant the public should be brainwashed to adopt this millenarian mindset as a dramatic internal motivational tool, rather than as a literal belief, much as an Olympic runner might be able to sprint faster by imagining he is being chased by an endangered Bengal Tiger. Yet there are other people out there who apparently believe such things rather more literally. And some of them, unlike humble NYT columnists, are actual scientists.
The Goonhilly Goon Show
I don’t know if you happen somehow to have missed it – and really, how could you? – but October 2022 saw the advent of something annual called ‘World Space Week’, the theme of which for that particular year was ‘Space and Sustainability’ (this year’s is ‘Space and Climate Change’; I can see a pattern developing here). Considering that, as far back as 1852, Lord Kelvin had already theorised the ultimate heat-death of the universe, it could be argued that, in the long-run, even outer space itself is not actually fully sustainable at all, but never mind.
As part of the whole pointless shindig, astronomers from METI International (METI = Messaging Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) based at Cornwall’s Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station, planned to beam out a message towards the far-distant star-system of Trappist-1, which is deemed a likely spot for potentially inhabited Earth-like planets to be located. And what would this radio-signal say? Naturally, it would tell the ETs all about our planet’s currently ongoing climate crisis.
“The great challenge of interstellar communication is to establish a common ground for understanding” between humans and aliens, the men from METI explained. Traditionally, this may have meant sending them signals based upon mathematics, reasonably guessed to be a universal language all across the cosmos, as two plus two equals four even on Alpha Centauri (although certain lettuce-headed Left-wing U.S. academics like Rochelle Gutierrez might disagree). METI preferred to send the aliens transcripts of the Periodic Table, however, hoping this may prove the initial basis for interstellar symposia about how industrialised capitalism would cause severe and damaging chemical changes in any planet’s atmosphere and environment, not just Earth’s own.
The hope was that the ETs would be a much older civilisation than ours; if so, they would surely have long passed through their foolish planet-polluting phase aeons ago, and thus have worked out how to solve the catastrophe of global warming entirely. Otherwise, how would they still be here to talk to mankind? Wouldn’t they all just have been burned to a crisp? Once the Trappist-1 aliens realised we comparatively primitive humans were facing a climate crisis too, they would surely be able to help, METI hoped, beaming us back down advice on what to do next in return.
But what if the ETs replied to say: “Ignore the whole thing – it’s a total mad alarmist cult movement, just put gags on George Monbiot and Swampy and you’ll all be quite, quite fine”? I would guess, in that alarming eventuality, METI might conveniently ‘forget’ to pass the unwanted message in question on to mankind at large, or else ‘accidentally’ wipe it from their recording systems. Appropriately enough, the cult-busting ETs from Trappist-1 would be forced to remain every bit as silent as their monkish human counterparts traditionally are down here on terra firma. Either that, or Michael Mann would just sue them, like he did with Mark Steyn.
Little Green Men
And what happens if the aliens turn out not to be quite as benign as METI might hope? Anyone who has read Chinese sci-fi author Cixin Liu’s Three-Body Trilogy series of books will know it makes perfect military sense for any alien civilisation to immediately wipe out any other currently less-advanced intelligent societies elsewhere in the galaxy as soon as they become aware of them, lest their far-off interplanetary rivals one day grow strong enough to do the same to them, a bit like if the US had nuked Moscow back in 1945 to prevent the entire Cold War ever taking place at all.
A 2011 report from a group of NASA-affiliated scientists from Pennsylvania State University, ‘Would Contact with Extraterrestrials Benefit or Harm Humanity? A Scenario Analysis’, argued that just such a situation really could occur, should any alien intellects “vast and cool and unsympathetic”, as H.G. Wells once put it, detect that Earth was currently undergoing climate change due to rapid post-WWII-era industrialisation.
As the ever-onwards expansion of borderless international capitalism uncaringly pushes other disposable species like rhinos, polar bears and white people to looming extinction here on Earth, so wary ET military scouts might fear the same fate being imposed upon the flora and fauna of other innocent planets, should the evil imperialist Earthlings ever advance far enough to begin colonising them too. In this case, the aliens could just blow our entire planet up with death-rays, to nip the danger in the bud, like a time-traveller killing Hitler at birth to avert his future invasion of Poland. Alternatively, they may be a race of exoplanetary Chris Packhams from the Planet PETA and decide to land on Earth and just destroy all the nasty naked ape humans, thereby to save the trees, whales and great crested newts, whose lives they may deem to be innately more significant.
According to the report’s distinctly doom-mongering authors:
Humanity may just now be entering the period in which its rapid civilisational expansion could be detected by an ET because our expansion is changing the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, via greenhouse gas emissions… These scenarios give us reason to limit our growth and reduce our impact on global ecosystems. It would be particularly important for us to limit our emissions of greenhouse gases, since atmospheric composition can be observed from other planets.
To be fair, the full written assessment as a whole did consider a range of possible other scenarios, and did specifically deem the above detailed outcomes to be rather unlikely – but guess which specific possibility the Guardian picked out when reporting on the paper? That’s right: its chosen headline was ‘Rising greenhouse gas emissions could tip off aliens that we are a rapidly expanding threat, warns a report’. The Guardian’s story was bylined as being by someone named Ian Sample, but given its basic methodology and outlook, it may as well have been written by Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times.
All this is daft enough, but it gets much worse. In part two of this short series, we shall see how clever scientists have now also managed to model the basic path of climate catastrophes endured by other planets – other planets that do not even exist. Why was the entire world in Dune nothing more than one gigantic, globe-spanning desert? Hugo Chávez knew. And so, it would seem, do his contemporary academic counterparts: the answer is capitalism!
It is all beginning to look a bit like the Volkswagen scandal: you remember, when regulators caught out the German car company for installing software which detected when diesel engines were in test mode and adjusted performance so that it flattered emissions figures.
Another electric car disaster:
It is all beginning to look a bit like the Volkswagen scandal: you remember, when regulators caught out the German car company for installing software which detected when diesel engines were in test mode and adjusted performance so that it flattered emissions figures.
A test by What Car magazine has revealed that the official figures for the range of electric cars over-estimates their real-life range by around a third. Vehicles were driven around a test track in Bedfordshire until they ran out of juice.
The result? A Lexus UX 300e (official range 273 miles) managed just 170 miles before slowing to a halt – 37.9 per cent less than advertised. A Volkswagen ID7 Pro (official range 383 miles) managed 254 and a Volvo XC40 Recharge (official range 331 miles) managed 252. Moreover, these are all supposedly long-range vehicles which retail at over £50,000 new.
I am no petrol-head. I would much rather have a clean electric vehicle, but sorry, I am still not buying one. Last week I drove up and down to the Scottish Highlands, with a door-to-door distance of 480 miles. With generous stops, it took me 11 hours. It was no problem in my diesel Volvo estate. I didn’t even have to fill up on the way up: the car averaged 59 miles to the gallon, giving it a range of around 700 miles. I simply don’t know how I am supposed to complete such a journey in an electric car, even if I was minded to pay £55,000 for one.
Say I was in that Volvo XC40 Recharge. Theoretically I could do the journey – just about – on a single charge. But that would require an overnight stop exactly half way because a rapid charger, assuming I could find one that was vacant and working, would only take the car from a 20 percent to 80 percent charge in a reasonable timeframe. In practice I would need to stop at least twice, and probably three times, spending around hour a time at some miserable service station.
And that is in a premium model. I once sat down and worked out how I could get to Scotland in a Nissan Leaf, fully-loaded and in cold weather, when even the advertised range for the car dropped to 99 miles. It was going to take at least seven hour-long stops – and even that relied on sites which in many cases offered only a single charger. Too bad if someone else was using it.
Even worse would be when I eventually reached Scotland. Last week I took a trip down the 22 mile single track road which leads to the back end of the Knoydart peninsula. I didn’t see any electric vehicles there, and no wonder. There is no hope whatsoever of charging a vehicle anywhere along that road – to attempt the journey I would end up feeling like Captain Scott fretting whether his rations were going to last to the South Pole and back.
Electric cars are practical as local runabouts, for motorists who have access to off-street parking within reach of an electric socket. But they are still not a practical solution for most of us. Nor are they likely to become so in the near future. If we plastered the country with rapid chargers it would blow out the grid. As the chief of Toyota recently pointed out, Western governments have been trying to push for a complete transition to electric vehicles in ignorance of the fact that many parts of the world do not have effective electricity grids.
Trying to jump straight to electric cars has condemned the whole effort to decarbonise road transport to failure. What I really wanted to buy, by the way, was not a diesel car but a hybrid petrol one, with a 50 mile electric-only range and a small petrol engine to provide back up for longer journeys. But no such vehicle seemed to exist when I was looking, and further innovation on hybrids has been undermined by the government’s pre-announced ban from 2035 onwards. As a result, manufacturers are being condemned to make vehicles which few of us will ever want to buy.
Baby, it’s hot outside: A fearmonger’s guide to dressing for the apocalypse
By Sandy Powell Updated March 11 2024 – 12:13PM, first published 11:30AM
…
It is the year 2074 and we are at the end of another glorious half-century of climate extremes that have kept us on our toes; nimble and spry and ready for the next challenge. Those of us who have survived at least.
As I was digging the weekend’s accumulated ash and filth from around the front door of my burrow this morning I thought about a time, 50 years ago, when we didn’t live underground and were mildly surprised by the warming weather.
It was a beautiful time when we still used that antiquated term “drought” as though the rain would at some point return to a stable and reliable pattern in the coming years.
We were aware of climate change, of course, and had been for half a century, but that was a thing that far off future generations would have to prepare for, not us. We were simply too comfortable to make any substantial changes to our lives.
Granted this is an attempt at political parody, but the logical inconsistency of this future climate fantasy is just irritating.
If “we still used that antiquated term “drought” as though the rain would at some point return to a stable and reliable pattern”, how can there be any vegetation left to burn? Surely it all burned away and never re-grew ages ago, because there was no water to irrigate the new seedlings, or they all got washed away in the infrequent but brutal mega floods. Dust I can believe – Australia is a very dusty place, even super floods wouldn’t be able to remove all the dust. But dust and ash, not so much.
If somehow the ash and dust got there anyway, despite the lack of rain and vegetation, and everything is covered in dust and ash, all that investment in solar panels was a big waste of money.
Ah but sometimes it rains – so who in their right mind would live underground, and risk getting drowned in a flood? Better hope those fossil fuel driven water pumps work properly. Maybe you live underground until it floods, then climb a tree? Ah I forgot, all the trees burned down long ago.
Describing Covid as a “once in a lifetime pandemic”? Well Covid is still here – but where are the lockdowns? Does anyone still believe the lockdowns were anything but a massive government overreaction?
And if the world of 2074 is an apocalyptic dystopia, who would care who got tax cuts way back when?
Reading this ill considered attempt at political parody was just painful, like trying to watch a badly scripted Hollywood movie which gets all the science wrong. But I guess you have to have an engineering mind, to feel irritated by such obvious inconsistencies, or to understand the absurdity of bumbling Western “solutions” to climate change.
You must be logged in to post a comment.