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.
We’re watching the renewable bubble pop around us. Tritium was the wonder-child Australian technology business that built fast chargers for electric vehicles. It took 20 years to create, and only two years to unravel into receivership. At its peak in 2021, it launched on the NASDAQ and was worth $2 billion, now it is insolvent.
It’s just another signpost on the way to the Great Green Economy Downunder
We’re watching the renewable bubble pop around us. Tritium was the wonder-child Australian technology business that built fast chargers for electric vehicles. It took 20 years to create, and only two years to unravel into receivership. At its peak in 2021, it launched on the NASDAQ and was worth $2 billion, now it is insolvent.
The company says it has sold more than 13,000 DC fast chargers in more than 40 countries. At its peak it claimed to be the biggest maker of fast chargers in the US with a 30 per cent market share (unclear if this included the Tesla network), and a 75 per cent share in Australia, and one of the top three in Europe.
When it launched in 2021, shares were selling for $2,500 each. The current price is $1.35.
Tritium is the perfect emblem for the Technocratic Planned Economy
During his visit, the Prime Minister said, “This is my third visit to Tritium. Every time I come back, I hear about more revenue, more jobs being created, and more countries where Australia is exporting to. This is a great success story here and I congratulate everyone at Tritium for their achievements.”
Nick Bonyhady and Tom Rabe at The Australian Financial Review point at energy prices:
A Nasdaq-listed electric vehicle fast-charger company hailed first as a Queensland success story and then as a justification for government subsidies is the second major Australian manufacturer to collapse this week.
” Gas industry leaders have labelled “bizarre” and unbelievable the likelihood that Australia could soon start importing gas.”
Daniel Mercer, ABC
Peter Tinley [MP] said it made no sense for states to ban the practice of fracking to develop onshore gas reserves while also allowing the import of offshore supplies that were exploited using the same method.
Victoria has banned fracking through legislation since 2017.
“I find it ironic that some jurisdictions ban fracking, for example, but will eventually be importing fracked gas,” Mr Tinley told the Australian Domestic Gas Outlook conference in Sydney. “How do you correlate that?
Scuba tank on my back, I rolled backwards off the Keppel Dive boat at Bald Rock reef yesterday into the ocean. I was hoping that as with previous claims of mass bleaching, this was exaggerated.
Scuba tank on my back, I rolled backwards off the Keppel Dive boat at Bald Rock reef yesterday into the ocean. I was hoping that as with previous claims of mass bleaching, this was exaggerated.
Bald rock, and the Keppel Dive shop boat.
The New York Times had featured corals from Great Keppel Island in a single photograph as badly bleached. The image showed pale corals not white corals, and from one photograph it is difficult to know the extent.
Visibility was not great, but as I descended down into the blue, I could start to see white: by 8 metres I could see a large field of properly bleached Acropora, and that was all I could see, and the fishes. I could not see any healthy corals.
Fields of badly bleached Acropora, Bald rock Reef, April 19, 2024.
I spent 45 minutes under-the-water at this dive site to the east of Great Keppel Island and I have never seen so much stark white, badly bleached coral.
The reports of bleach here have not been exaggerated. This is a really badly bleached coral reef.
My buddies on scuba had dived here through summer and said it was whiter back eight weeks ago; the bleaching had apparently come on suddenly mid-February. And, they said, to their eye, some of the corals were starting to get their colour back as the water had cooled down by several degrees.
It was possible to find corals at this site with some zooxanthellae, as we swam to the east along the wall.
I could also see sections of this reef already beginning to die, that the algae have already set in.
According to Alison Jones’s book about the Keppel Island reefs:
In the shallow waters of Keppel Bay, coral bleaching on a mass scale has been infrequent and reef recovery has usually been fast.
Mass bleaching was recorded in Keppel Bay in 1998, 2002, 2006, 2020, with minor bleaching in between. There are also earlier unofficial reports by local fishermen of bleaching in 1983 and 1987.”
She also writes that:
Keppel Bay’s reefs can recover rapidly from bleaching because of the excellent growth rates of this branching species. After the catastrophic 2002 bleaching episode, coral cover increased rapidly, reaching 81 percent in 2004, the highest coral cover ever documented.”
Of course, bleaching has occurred over the millennia. It is just that scuba, and more specifically underwater photography, is a recent technology and the politicisation of corals even more recent.
Despite all the white, there was an abundance of little fishes, and so many other creatures including sting rays, nudibranchs, turtles and from the dive boat as we approached this reef from the north, I saw a dolphin.
A nudibranch climbing between healthy and algae, at Bald rock reef, April 19, 2024The red arrow shows the same nudibranch, with more reef, for context.The red arrow shows the same nudibranch, and this wider shot includes some of the very stark, very white branching corals. All the photographs in this post were taken by me/Jennifer Marohasy at Bald rock reef yesterday, April 19, 2024.So much thanks to Jenn and the rest of the crew at Keppel Dive for making these reefs that will recover, so accessible to those of us who are curious, https://greatkeppelwatersports.com.au
An article from the Wall Street Journal, “Cocoa and Coffee Prices Have Surged. Climate Change Will Only Take Them Higher,” claims that climate change is driving recent spikes in the price of cocoa and coffee, and that things will likely get worse as warming continues. This is false. Cocoa and coffee have both set production records multiple times during the recent period of slight warming.
An article from the Wall Street Journal, “Cocoa and Coffee Prices Have Surged. Climate Change Will Only Take Them Higher,” claims that climate change is driving recent spikes in the price of cocoa and coffee, and that things will likely get worse as warming continues. This is false. Cocoa and coffee have both set production records multiple times during the recent period of slight warming. A single bad season, or even a few bad seasons, for certain crops in certain regions of the world is not indicative of long-term change, significant shift, or trend.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reports that prices for coffee and cocoa are “surging as severe weather events hamper production in key regions, raising questions from farm to table over the long-term damage climate change could have on soft commodities.”
The WSJ adds that “more frequent heat waves, heavy rainfalls and droughts are damaging harvests and crippling supplies amid ever growing demand from customers worldwide.”
As discussed in multiple Climate Realism posts, data refutes claims that heat waves, droughts, or heavy rainfall are becoming more severe or more frequent. Also both coffee and cocoa bean production has enjoyed a steady climb over the decades, even amid modest warming.
Heat waves, heavy rain, and drought are all weather events that certainly can, and often do, impact crop production for a wide range of produce, not just cocoa and coffee, but evidence that these events are becoming a bigger threat to production is lacking.
The WSJ themselves point to a natural cause of the most recent heat waves and rainfall in West Africa, home of 70% of cocoa production: “powerhouses Ivory Coast and Ghana are facing catastrophic harvests this season as El Niño—the pattern of above-average sea surface temperatures—led to unseasonal heavy rainfalls followed by strong heat waves.”
This year’s heat and rain in both Africa and other parts of the world have been driven largely by El Niño, as discussed by Climate Realismhere, for example, but that phenomenon is temporary, natural, and likely has already ended.
If it were true that climate change was leading to an increase in these kinds of events, that trend should be reflected in production data of coffee and cocoa over time, but the opposite appears in the data. Instead of a long-term trend of struggle and collapse, production has never been better for either coffee or cocoa.
According to data from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization covering the last three decades of climate change:
Cocoa bean production just set its latest record high as recently as 2022;
World cocoa bean production has increased 132 percent;
West African cocoa bean production has increased 167 percent;
World coffee production set its latest record high in 2020;
World coffee production has increased 77 percent. (See figures below)
Climate Realism has previously discussed region-specific coffee and cocoa trends in posts here, here, and here, among others.
Neither coffee nor chocolate, which both thrive in warmer climates, are threatened by climate change. The data show as much. The WSJ and the analysts quoted in the story cage their claims in language like “climate change is set to play a major role” and “could” impact future crops. All of these projections are for a future that does not appear to be approaching any time soon, based on the data and trends. They should stick to reporting the facts.
Throughout history agriculture has suffered during bad weather years; there is nothing new about that. There is no justification for blaming climate change for short-term weather events or their impact on crops.
I got to thinking about sea ice and the climate models. Here’s what we know about polar sea ice extent, showing data that starts with the satellite era when we began to have accurate observations of the poles.
I got to thinking about sea ice and the climate models. Here’s what we know about polar sea ice extent, showing data that starts with the satellite era when we began to have accurate observations of the poles.
Figure 1. Arctic, Antarctic, and global sea ice extent. Colored lines are CEEMD smooths of the underlying datasets.
Now, there are some rather large curiosities regarding the sea ice extent records.
The North Pole is a liquid ocean covered with sea ice, with most of the ice polewards of 70°N. The South Pole is a giant chunk of frozen rock surrounded by sea ice, with almost no ice polewards of 70°S. So why do both poles have about the same extent of sea ice?
From the start of the satellite era up until ~2015, Arctic sea ice extent was decreasing and Antarctic sea ice extent was increasing … and as a result, total global sea ice extent was relatively constant, with 2014 having about the same global sea ice extent as 1978. Why?
Around 2015, Antarctic sea ice extent started dropping rapidly … but Arctic sea ice stopped dropping and leveled off up to the present. Why?
After dropping precipitously for a couple of years, Antarctic sea ice extent leveled off again … and as a result, global ice extent also leveled off. Why?
Here’s the interesting part. Nobody knows the answers to any of those questions. And I suppose predictably, since they’re based on our (mis)understandings of the climate, none of the climate models either forecasts or hindcasts sea ice extent doing anything even remotely similar to the actual observations.
So I’ll leave this here as a testament to just how little we understand the magnificent global heat engine that we call the climate …
Last month, everybody’s favourite intergovernmental agency, the World Health Organisation (WHO), published a “new toolkit empowering health professionals to tackle climate change”. The toolkit is the latest attempt to enlist one of the most trusted professions into the climate war.
Last month, everybody’s favourite intergovernmental agency, the World Health Organisation (WHO), published a “new toolkit empowering health professionals to tackle climate change”. The toolkit is the latest attempt to enlist one of the most trusted professions into the climate war. But not only is this transparently ideological and condescending ‘toolkit’ lacking in fact, it requires ‘healthcare professionals’ to use their authority to eschew science and lie to their patients and politicians. The climate war is, after all, political.
The problem for climate warriors of all kinds since the climate scare story emerged in the 1980s and became orthodoxy in the 1990s and 2000s has been the rapid improvement of all human welfare metrics the world over. On the one hand, all life on Earth and the collapse of civilisation hangs in the balance – that is supposedly the implication of data that shows the atmosphere has got warmer. But on the other hand, people living in economies at all levels of development are today living longer, healthier, wealthier and safer lives than any preceding generation. The era of ‘global boiling’, as UN Secretary General António Guterres put it, also happens to be the era in which unprecedented social development has occurred.
That is a paradox if you accept the green premise that economic development comes at the expense of the climate. The UN, which has staked its authority on being able to address ‘global’ issues such as environmental degradation, is committed to defending the ‘global boiling’ narrative. But, at the same time, actively trying to retard the development of low-income countries risks undermining its authority in the developing world.
The statement made by the WHO’s introduction to its new toolkit epitomises the feeble efforts to square this circle, which try to spin interference in the development of low-income countries as being for their benefit:
Our world is witnessing a concerning trend of warming temperatures, extreme weather events, water and food security challenges and deteriorating air quality. The frequency and intensity of these events are surpassing the capacity of both natural and human systems to respond effectively, resulting in far-reaching consequences for health.
Surprisingly, for a ‘toolkit’ aimed at people such as doctors, who have a proven capacity to understand scientific literature, the toolkit offers little evidence in support of these claims. It says that “changing weather patterns and extreme weather events can reduce crop yields, potentially leading to food insecurity and malnutrition” and that the “breeding window for mosquito-borne disease is broadening due to changing weather patterns”. The reference for both of these claims is given in a footnote, which provides a link to the 2023 IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report, which says in relation to the first claim:
The occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases has increased (very high confidence). The incidence of vector-borne diseases has increased from range expansion and/or increased reproduction of disease vectors (high confidence).
But dig a little deeper into the IPCC’s discussion on vector-borne diseases and you find the following figure depicting mortality risk of various climate-related factors for six regions of the world.
As the data clearly show, since 1990 there have been radical reductions in mortality caused by malaria, malnutrition, diarrhoeal disease, natural disasters and exposure to temperature extremes. The only departure from those trends is dengue, which in any case is of far less significance than the other factors, claiming approximately just 1.75 lives per 100,000 per year, compared with malaria, which claims more than 50.
How do these data compare with the WHO’s claim that “the frequency and intensity of these events are surpassing the capacity of both natural and human systems to respond effectively, resulting in far-reaching consequences for health”, and the “occurrence of climate-related food-borne and water-borne diseases” and the “incidence of vector-borne diseases” have increased? They do not compare. In Africa, deaths from malnutrition have fallen by three quarters between 1990 and 2017. Diarrhoeal disease mortality has fallen by two thirds in the same period. Malaria deaths have halved. Consequently, more than 10,000 fewer infants die in the world each day than died each day in 1990.
This is, or ought to be, all the more remarkable to anyone who tracks developmental data, because of the WHO’s longstanding attempt to link these diseases of poverty to climate change. In the 2002 World Health Report, the WHO claimed that 154,000 deaths were attributable to climate change, almost exclusively in High Mortality Developing Countries (HMDCs) – a figure obtained by estimating climate change’s impact on each of these diseases of poverty. Yet despite the radical progress that has been shown since 2000, the WHO has shown no interest either in revising its understanding of climate change or in developing an understanding of what has driven these improvements in global health, in spite of its name. Instead, it has doubled down on the climate-health narrative.
A similar ‘paradox’ can be shown by comparing the WHO’s statements on food security with other UN agencies’ data. There is no evidence of climate change adversely affecting agricultural production in vulnerable economies.
Yet the WHO’s toolkit urges “health professionals” to “communicate” the urgent climate crisis to ordinary people and to use their authority to influence politics:
Things you could say to a policymaker: Climate change is here now, and I am already seeing the impacts on my patients’ health. The health of some people is affected more severely, including children and elderly people, disadvantaged communities, remote communities, and people with disabilities or chronic illness.
People are living longer and healthier lives. Infant mortality is way down. Far fewer people are living in poverty. But the WHO wants doctors and nurses to claim that the opposite is true. And worse than that, the toolkit advises those doctors and nurses not to debate:
Don’t debate the science Don’t get caught up in conversations that question climate science. It’s not up for debate. If conversation veers into this territory, redirect it back to your professional expertise and the links between climate change and health.
But there are no “links between climate change and health”. And if there appear to be, these local or regional health trends run counter to the global trends. Therefore, there must be a better explanation than ‘climate change’. It may well be that extreme weather afflicts a place, or even that unusual weather causes the population of that place a number of problems, as it always has. But ‘extreme weather’ is both rare and as yet not attributable to climate change, on the IPCC’s own analysis. And so, if small changes in weather are coincident with negative economic change or health metrics, the cause is less likely to be meteorological than political in nature. For example, incompetence, especially that of undemocratic regimes’ bureaucracies, is very often the cause of hunger, thirst and the lack of basic services. And in their haste to find politically expedient correlations between weather and welfare metrics, researchers fail to consider alternative causes, despite the knowledge that humans are far more sensitive to economic forces than to nature’s whims.
Don’t believe me? Well, the evidence is extremely stark. Whereas the WHO wants to persuade doctors to ignore science to claim there are “links between climate change and health”, by far the strongest predictor of health is in fact wealth. Accordingly, the WHO 2002 report found practically no climate-related deaths in ‘Low Mortality Developing Countries’ and ‘Developing Countries’. There are no deaths “from climate change” where malaria, malnutrition and diarrhoea are eliminated by rising income levels.
Seen from this perspective, the WHO’s mobilisation of health professionals looks very much like a political campaign against wealth. Only such an ideological – and anti-science – aversion to wealth could put such emphasis on the link between health and weather, because whereas doctors can and should say that income and health are linked, the WHO presses them not to: the best thing that can be given to poorer people is ‘stable weather’, apparently, not higher incomes. The toolkit even anticipates this criticism, advising people how to answer the argument that “climate action is perceived as detrimental to the economy”. According to the WHO, this is “an untrue and unhelpful perception held by some people… which was repeated by some businesses and governments to delay the implementation of climate solutions”. A conspiracy theory, no less, which is supported only by the highly dubious claim that “for every dollar spent on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, approximately $2 are saved in health costs”.
Any doctor who took such an extraordinary and unevidenced claim about a new drug at face value and promptly started prescribing it to their patients would have his or her licence taken away. Britain, for instance, spends around £10 billion per year on subsidising its green electricity transition alone, yet there is no evidence of the NHS budget benefiting by £20bn. An analysis of Germany’s Energiewende estimates the annual cost at €45 billion, yet per capita expenditure on healthcare rose from €3,500 in 2009 to €5,700 in 2021 – an increase of 62%. Moreover, Germany’s green deindustrialisation has come at a heavy price, signalling to the world that not even a first-tier industrialised and wealthy nation can survive such environmentalism, with far reaching consequences looming for similar policies in the rest of Europe. The country’s status as Europe’s deep-green policy champion has passed and now half of Germans believe that lower prices should be put before emissions-reduction policies. German tractors, and for that matter French and Dutch ones as well, aren’t heading to the capital’s streets to protest against green economic and health miracles. The WHO’s claim is simply mad.
The reason the WHO’s toolkit is so bereft of evidence and logic is because it’s just political propaganda. The document credits authors who are not medical doctors and climate scientists, but psychologists at the Centre for Climate Change Communication located at George Mason University, led by Dr. Ed Maibach. As I have pointed out previously in the Daily Sceptic, climate shrinks’ unwelcome intrusion into climate politics does nothing to improve debate and only serves to antagonise increasingly intense conflicts. And their involvement in producing the WHO’s toolkit is no exception. This remote, conflicted intergovernmental agency claims the authority of ‘experts’, but its guidance instructs doctors to eschew science, evidence and debate – it literally advises them not to engage in debate – and instead to promulgate green ideology: the mythical claim that there are ‘links’ between climate and health, that the green ‘transition’ will improve health and that complying with emissions targets is cheap as chips.
The toolkit may give ‘healthcare professionals’ the justification to lie to the public and politicians, but that’s not ‘empowerment’, it’s just fibs. And its recruitment of psychologists to mobilise doctors and nurses as the instruments of a political agenda is yet more evidence of the urgent need to dismantle the WHO, for the sake of billions of people’s health and wealth.
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This report is produced by re.Climate, who are disappointed in Canadians weakening support for Net Zero alarm and expensive emissions initiatives. More on the findings, but first some facts about the source.
This report is produced by re.Climate, who are disappointed in Canadians weakening support for Net Zero alarm and expensive emissions initiatives. More on the findings, but first some facts about the source.
About Re.Climate
Re.Climate is Canada’s go-to centre for training, research and strategy on Climate Change communications and public engagement. We provide strategic services to help practitioners reach new audiences, overcome polarization, communicate urgency, and motivate change.
Re.Climate works closely with experts conducting research in misinformation and climate change communications.
Re.Climate Major Funders with mission slogans
Environment Funders Canada: A national network of philanthropic foundations and other organizations supporting efforts to transition toward a more sustainable world.
Ivey Foundation: A private charitable foundation dedicated to supporting Canada’s transition to a net-zero future while ensuring the country’s long-term economic competitiveness.
McConnell Foundation: We are dedicated to tackling the climate crisis and supporting communities coast to coast to coast in transitioning to net-zero carbon.
Donner Canada Foundation: Supporting Canada’s Transition to a Net-zero Carbon Future While Fostering Economic Prosperity
Clean Economy Fund: Supporting giant leaps toward net zero.
European Climate Foundation: Help tackle the climate crisis by fostering the development of a net zero emissions society at the national, European and global level.
The report is a meta-analysis by people dedicated to reduce hydrocarbon energy use in Canada. So while they claim to be non-partisan, their advocacy is aligned with the Trudeau government. Public opinion organizations conducted surveys in the last year, and Re.Climate consolidated and interpreted the findings.
Executive Summary
Canadians report high levels of concern about climate change and are connecting the dots between wildfires, extreme weather and global warming. But the affordability crisis has displaced climate action on the list of priorities while concerted opposition has dampened support for key policies.
The world is experiencing record temperatures and we are skirting 1.5 C above pre-industrial levels over a full year for the first time. But climate policies and actions are hindered by narratives framing them as costly, unfair and ineffective.
The competing concerns and undermining narratives are impacting public attitudes. Many Canadians say they do not believe we can meet our energy and climate objectives, even when they agree that climate change is a serious threat that requires concerted effort. There is a worrying gap between general concern about climate change and the erosion of support for specific climate actions.
Theme: Mind the Gaps
The report contains communications advice to activists concerning declines in support and shifts away from desired initiatives. Examples of some of the gaps are excerpted below.
My Comment:
All opinion surveys are testing the effectiveness of media messaging upon public awareness. This one seems to show that Canadians have been frightened by what they are told, but are not convinced that current and proposed actions will be practical and effective solutions to the claimed problem.
Electric car sales plummeted across Europe last month as demand dried up despite the EU’s push to ban petrol and diesel vehicles by the middle of the next decade.
Electric car sales plummeted across Europe last month as demand dried up despite the EU’s push to ban petrol and diesel vehicles by the middle of the next decade.
Sales of battery-powered cars dropped by 11.3pc as demand in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, plunged by 28.9pc, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA).
Only 13pc of new registrations were electric, down from 13.9pc in March last year and down from 14.6pc for all of 2023.
Sales of electric cars have stalled despite Europe’s plans to ban the sale of new internal combustion engine cars by 2035.
An article by the website ProPublica titled The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What” linked to Hurricane Katrina, storm refugees, and climate change, claiming that the storm was evidence of the beginning of a “climate migration” in America. The connection is false. Data refutes a climate connection to any particular hurricane or trend in migration.
An article by the website ProPublica titled The Flooding Will Come “No Matter What” linked to Hurricane Katrina, storm refugees, and climate change, claiming that the storm was evidence of the beginning of a “climate migration” in America. The connection is false. Data refutes a climate connection to any particular hurricane or trend in migration.
The article does a lot of rambling coverage of a family that was displaced by Hurricane Katrina back in 2005, saying:
Another great American migration is now underway, this time forced by the warming that is altering how and where people can live. For now, it’s just a trickle. But in the corners of the country’s most vulnerable landscapes — on the shores of its sinking bayous and on the eroding bluffs of its coastal defenses — populations are already in disarray.
The article goes on to follow the trials and tribulations of a single family who had their home destroyed during Hurricane Katrina. Pro Publica believes this case is evidence of climate change causing a “migration,” because the family have not moved back to the same location.
The article itself cites no data and or study to support its claim about hurricane Katrina. Rather, it simply state’s the author’s opinions as if it were an established fact. Later article similarly describes families displaced by the 2018 campfire in Paradise CA, as climate refugees writing:
As the number of displaced people continues to grow, an ever-larger portion of those affected will make their moves permanent, migrating to safer ground or supportive communities. They will do so either because a singular disaster like the 2018 wildfire in Paradise, California — or Hurricane Harvey, which struck the Texas and Louisiana coasts — is so destructive it forces them to, or because the subtler “slow onset” change in their surroundings gradually grows so intolerable, uncomfortable or inconvenient that they make the decision to leave, proactively, by choice.
First, it should be noted that weather events such as a hurricane are not proof of climate change, and ProPublica is falsely conflating short term weather events with long-term climate change. Further, as discussed in Climate at a Glance: Hurricanes, even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits to finding no increase in the long-term frequency or severity of hurricanes. Also, after Katrina, the United States went through its longest period in recorded history without a major hurricane strike, and recently experienced its fewest total hurricanes in any eight-year period. There has been no increase in the number or intensity of tropical cyclones since 1972 as the planet has modestly warmed. Indeed, for some basins the data suggests tropical cyclone frequency has actually declined over the past century.
Data presented in more than 100 previous Climate Realism posts, here, here, here, and here, for example, clearly show that hurricane trends are relatively flat over the past 50 years of modest warming, and the trend in powerful Atlantic hurricanes is downward (see the figures below)
Figure 1: Global Hurricane Frequency (all & major) — 12-month running sums. The top time series is the number of global tropical cyclones that reached at least hurricane-force (maximum lifetime wind speed exceeds 64-knots). The bottom time series is the number of global tropical cyclones that reached major hurricane strength (96-knots+). Adapted from Maue (2011) GRL. https://climatlas.com/tropical/Figure 2: Figure: Last 50-years+ of Global and Northern Hemisphere Accumulated Cyclone Energy: 24 month running sums. Note that the year indicated represents the value of ACE through the previous 24-months for the Northern Hemisphere (bottom line/gray boxes) and the entire global (top line/blue boxes). The area in between represents the Southern Hemisphere total ACE. https://climatlas.com/tropical/
Simply put, contrary to the claims made by ProPublica, there is no upward trend in hurricane frequency or intensity, and thus claims that climate driven migration, leaving “populations in disarray,” is completely false.
The claim made about wildfire in Paradise, CA causing “climate driven migration,” is equally false. Paradise burned to the ground during the 2018 Camp Fire, which was due to lack of maintenance on Pacific Gas and Electric power lines. That was combined with a weather event causing high winds on a single day and low fuel moisture to create the perfect storm of flammability. California’s drought at the time was certainly a contributing factor, though drought has been historically common across the region, due by periodic weather patterns in the Pacific Ocean.
These patterns have occurred for millennia and are not a feature of man-made climate change. In fact, tree ring studies of the western United States show past mega-droughts lasted as long as 200 years at times.
A report from California State University notes active forest management is a key practice in preventing wildfire.
“One of the reasons we’re observing more fires is because of 100 years of poor Forest Service policy where we didn’t allow prescribed fire or wildfires to burn,” says Dr. Craig Clements, a San Jose State University meteorology and climate science professor and director of the school’s Fire Weather Research Laboratory.
So, poor forest management and poorly maintained power lines affected by weather led to the wildfire devastation in Paradise, not climate change.
ProPublica simply failed to do basic research, relying on opinion and storytelling instead of factual reporting to weave yet another misleading story where climate change is blamed as part of the ongoing narrative told by the media blaming climate change for everything bad, even when the facts clearly say otherwise.
Despite its commitment to “no more gas, oil, or coal,” Friends of the Earth has launched a campaign against one of the nation’s “greenest” governors, California’s Gavin Newsom. Their goal? To stop the U.S. Department of Energy from doling out $1 billion to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (no gas, oil, or coal there) open past its planned 2025 closure date.
Despite its commitment to “no more gas, oil, or coal,” Friends of the Earth has launched a campaign against one of the nation’s “greenest” governors, California’s Gavin Newsom. Their goal? To stop the U.S. Department of Energy from doling out $1 billion to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant (no gas, oil, or coal there) open past its planned 2025 closure date.
Newsom, whose policies are among the world’s most aggressive against gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles and tools, last year stated that “the Diablo Canyon power plant is important to support energy reliability as we accelerate progress towards achieving our clean energy and climate goals.” Diablo Canyon today supplies nearly a tenth of California’s electricity.
The aptly named FOE claims that “the environmental impacts from extending the lifespan of this aging power plant at this point in time have not been adequately addressed or disclosed to the public.” Other groups, too, spread fear about nuclear energy. But by far the most powerful obstacle for nuclear energy enthusiasts to overcome lies within the federal government.
While nuclear energy has accounted for about 20% of the electricity generated in the U.S. and 2023, supplied nearly half the nation’s carbon-free electricity, a new report from the Government Accountability Office says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission must more fully consider possible impacts of climate change on the nation’s mostly aging nuclear power plants.
The message? The GAO report says that climate-related threats to nuclear power plants range from worsened droughts that dry up water supplies needed for cooling reactors to sea level rise and storm surge flooding. Despite its regulatory obtuseness, the report said the NRC should include “data” from future climate projections [scary scenarios?] in safety risk assessments along with the historical data the NRC relies upon. All this adds costs.
Douglas McIntyre, the former editor-in-chief of 24/Wall St., last month said that, despite the obvious need for nuclear power, “many Americans, perhaps remembering Three Mile Island, do not want nuclear energy to be part of the solution.” And a recent Pew Research poll found that “Critics highlight the high cost of nuclear power plant projects and the complexities of handling radioactive waste.”
By contrast, the U.S. Department of Energy has argued that the U.S. will need an additional 550 to 770 gigawatts of clean, firm capacity to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions and that nuclear power is one of the few proven options that can fill this need. Moreover, nuclear power plants create high-paying jobs with concentrated economic benefits for the communities most impacted by the energy transition.
These dichotomous messages from the DOE and NRC are highlighted in a recent article by ThorCon International co-founder Robert Hargraves, who bluntly stated that the U.S. is not building commercial nuclear power plants – while 16 other nations are – “because NRC and EPA regulators are so misinformed about radiation.”
Regulatory overkill is a likely culprit in the failed six-reactor, 462-megawatt project NuScale had planned in cooperation with Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, part of the DOE’s Carbon Free Power initiative for small modular reactors. Several towns pulled out and sank the project as the estimated price for power rose from $58 per megawatt-hour (MWh) to $89/MWh.
Misguided safety assumptions created a regulatory jungle so complex that startup Atomic Canyon is offering AI to help applicants navigate the NRC’s database of 52 million documents. U.S. nuclear energy regulators, Hargraves charged, do not analyze data about human health effects of radiation from nuclear power; instead, they rely on groupthink consensus evolved in NGOs originally misled in the 1950s by grant-seeking geneticists.
For decades these geneticists claimed radiation damage to chromosomes was increasing. But when children of the survivors of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima atomic bomb attacks exhibited no such effects, the anti-nuclear scientists switched to alleged cancer impacts. And a major flaw in their analysis is what caused the cost of nuclear energy to skyrocket.
While studies of those survivors found no excess cancers in people receiving less than 0.1 Gray (joules of energy absorbed by kilogram of tissue), regulators set public radiation limits 100 times lower, mistakenly limiting accumulated dose rather than dose rate. In the real world, setting a maximum daily dose of 0.02 Gray (rather than the current maximum cumulative annual dose of 0.001 Gray) would provide a large safety margin.
Salisbury University Professor of Finance Danny Ervin pooh-poohs the fears of nuclear foes, saying, “The next wave of nuclear can’t come soon enough.” That “next wave” includes scalable nuclear reactors, notably the TerraPower initiative sparked by Bill Gates. This advanced facility, coupled with a molten salt energy storage system, will be capable of increasing output for nearly six hours during peak demand periods at a projected cost of about $4 billion.
The plant will be powered by an advanced Natrium reactor cooled with liquid sodium instead of water [eliminating one concern of skeptics]. With a capacity to generate up to 500 megawatts, it will provide ample energy to power approximately 400,000 homes.
Of equal importance is that its location at a former coal-fired power plant in Wyoming enables easy integration into the existing electric grid while stimulating the local economy. This contrasts with wind turbines and solar arrays, which often are located far from existing transmission lines, require massive footprints, and operate intermittently, thus requiring backup power generation.
Over in England, X-Energy, in partnership with Babcock International subsidiary Cavendish, has proposed to develop a 12-reactor plant using the company’s Xe-100 high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design. The Teesside array, which should be operational by the early 2030s, is the first of what the companies hope will be a fleet of up to 40 of the 80 MWe power plants in locations across the United Kingdom.
Cavendish Nuclear managing director Mick Gornall boasts that “a fleet of Xe-100s can complement renewables by providing constant or flexible power, producing steam to decarbonize industry, and manufacturing hydrogen and synthetic transport fuels. Deployment will also, he said, create thousands of high-quality, long-term jobs nationwide.
Uranium-rich Nigeria thinks it has a solution to the radioactive waste management issue that has been a big bugaboo for the nuclear energy industry worldwide. The solution relies on the NST SuperLAT, which NuclearSAFE Technology co-founder Dr. Jimmy Etti-Williams calls “a breakthrough in nuclear waste management”.
SuperLAT will, says Etti-Williams, process, package, load, store, and transport nuclear waste in casket containers to several thousand feet underground, yet able to be retrieved as needed for fuel in reactors to generate low-carbon-footprint energy. This geological nuclear waste disposal technology is designed to isolate and dilute nuclear waste in line with universal regulations.
The SuperLAT technology should, says Etti-Williams, satisfy the International Atomic Energy Agency and other stakeholder concerns about nuclear waste storage accidents, leakages, or terror risks. He boasts that Nigeria can have its own uranium plants to boost its own and pan-African development efforts.
There’s an old saying, which first appeared in 1902 in Puck’s Magazine, with the message, “People who say it cannot be done should not interrupt those who are doing it.” It is high time, many now believe, for the nay-saying over-regulators to stop interrupting nuclear progress.
And on that front, too, there is good news. Nuclear Matters has announced an online gathering entitled “The Path to Progress: Modernizing the NRC,” scheduled for May 2.
At the event, a four-person panel moderated by the Nuclear Energy Institute’s John Kotek will discuss the urgency of NRC modernization in order to unlock the benefits of nuclear technology innovation to revitalize the U.S. nuclear energy industry.
The anti-nuke FOEs (sic) will have little left to argue once these and other innovative nuclear projects prove successful and safe when brought to the fore in other nations – places like England and Nigeria. But those who seek reliable, safe, and clean technologies to generate the electricity in quantities needed tomorrow will only be satisfied if the archaic rules can be recrafted to accommodate them.
The recent autumn and winter months have seen Britain beset by more than the usual number of storms, and more than average amount of rainfall. For most of us, this has been merely unpleasant weather, but it has seemingly caused rivers to breach their banks and put much farmland under water. This is a real problem in its own right. Predictably, now the waters are receding, adherents of green ideology are turning the farming drama into the climate crisis, with talk of “failed harvests” and predictions of our imminent hunger. But where is the evidence?
The recent autumn and winter months have seen Britain beset by more than the usual number of storms, and more than average amount of rainfall. For most of us, this has been merely unpleasant weather, but it has seemingly caused rivers to breach their banks and put much farmland under water. This is a real problem in its own right. Predictably, now the waters are receding, adherents of green ideology are turning the farming drama into the climate crisis, with talk of “failed harvests” and predictions of our imminent hunger. But where is the evidence?
The Guardian, as we would expect, has been leading the alarmist chorus. “The U.K. faces food shortages and price rises as extreme weather linked to climate breakdown causes low yields on farms locally and abroad,” it proclaimed, adding that “scientists have said this is just the beginning of shocks to the food supply chain caused by climate breakdown”. “I wish people understood the urgent climate threat to our near-term food security,” mourned Associate Professor of Environmental Change at Leiden University in the Netherlands to the newspaper.
Citing his experiences as a carrot farmer, Extinction Rebellion (XR) co-founder Roger Hallam declared on X that, “I know what is going to happen – not because of these particularly bad years, but because of the speed at which things are getting worse now.” Only “urgent revolution” can save us. And this in a nutshell is what the entire green movement has long been warning us of – extreme weather that will force us into hunger, which will drive us into political extremism and social breakdown and the end of civilisation. So are these floods a warning from Gaia that she made no covenant with us, unlike that other God, and that clouds stand ready to unleash her revenge on us for our SUV sins? Are these greens latter-day Noahs, or just a ship of fools?
The problem for Hallam is that carrot production in the U.K. shows very little sign of sensitivity to climate change. Since the 1950s, carrot and turnip production has quadrupled. More significantly, yield per hectare – the indicator which is more sensitive to climate and weather – has more than tripled. If Britain was experiencing a climate-related carrot crisis, we would see this indicator plunge, rather than rise. Consequently, and contrary to fears about price rises, supermarkets are selling a kilo of British-grown carrots for 65p. ‘Wonky’ or ‘imperfect’ carrots are being sold at 45p/Kg. The struggle for carrot farmers may therefore be less high water than low prices for their products.
And the same story is revealed in UN data for nearly all British-grown vegetables. Inspection of the data reveals nothing resembling a pattern of climate change for the yield of wheat, oats, and cereals in general, onions, apples and pears, dry peas and other pulses, plums, potatoes and other roots and tubers, rapeseed, raspberries and strawberries, sugar beet and tomatoes. The only reductions in yield relate to the production of cauliflower and broccoli, and green peas. However, given that these data are significant outliers, we can for the moment assume that other reasons, perhaps economic or regulatory, better account for apparent declines in yield. Meanwhile, there is plenty of evidence in the U.K. and beyond that the era of global warming – or climate crisis – has been an era of bumper harvests.
Caution is required here. The point that sceptics rightly make to alarmists is that weather is not climate. It would be foolish to say that just because there exists no climate signal in agricultural production statistics, there is no evidence of weather affecting farming. There is.
In the 60 years of data about the production of potatoes in the U.K. there have been two unquestionable impacts of weather. The first occurred in the drought and heat years of 1975 and ’76. The second occurred in the washout year of 2012, though not, curiously, in the non-summer of 2008 and the ‘barbecue summer’ of 2009, which left the U.K. Met Office with egg on its face. However, the consequences of these disappointing years for society more broadly is very far from famine. Whereas potato famers produced 100kg of their crop per person in the U.K. in 2011, in 2012 this fell to 72Kg, the difference being made up by imports, mostly the following year. Chips and crisps may have cost slightly more, but nobody went hungry. And imports are perhaps the explanation for the gradual decline of overall production of the crop, too. Despite the ‘crisis’, potatoes are retailing for as little as 75p/kg in supermarkets.
It remains to be seen whether or not, and to what extent, recent weather events have affected agricultural production statistics. Nonetheless, farmers across the U.K. are reporting real problems. A mostly sober article in January’s Farmer’s Guide features the experiences of farmers from Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Essex and Lincolnshire following the deluge delivered by Storm Henk, leaving in some places the “highest flood level in more than 70 years”. Again, these are reports of serious problems that can ruin a farm. But the climate change narrative distracts from this necessary discussion. The article concludes with the words of Dr. Jonathan Clarke from the Institute for Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick, who claims that “there is an urgent need to consider how our society can become more resilient to the worst effects of a changing climate”. But weather conditions the same as we experienced 70 years ago are not evidence of an “urgent need” as much as they are a reminder of weather being a constant problem, and therefore of academics’ and scientists’ recent departure from both reality and historical fact.
So what has been the signal from weather? The Met Office’s data show that, for the country as a whole, March, February, December, October and September of last year brought significantly more than average rainfall. In a series of monthly data spanning 188 years, those months respectively were the 19th, 4th, 11th, 8th, and 63rd wettest of those months for England, and the 31st, 11th, 9th, 7th, and 32nd for the U.K. as a whole. Nasty for all of us, and especially difficult for famers. But does it even stand as evidence of “extreme weather”, as the Guardian claims, let alone man-made climate change-induced “extreme weather”, requiring “urgent” interventions to prevent it getting worse? Isn’t it just… you know… weather?
The worst of those months for the U.K. – the ninth wettest December – can be seen in its historical context. The Met Office provides a running average, which would seem to stand as an approximation of ‘climate change’. But despite that moving trendline, there were plenty of comparable Decembers in the mid to late 19th Century, and in the early and late 20th Century.
Moreover, the inter-annual variation of December rainfall spans nearly an entire order of magnitude, from 25mm to just under 225mm. The averaging of such noisy data does not and cannot reveal any underlying changing reality because it does not and cannot tell us anything useful – the trend is a phantom. Even if we were to follow on the Guardian’s and scientists’ injunction to eliminate emissions from fossil fuels, farmers would be no better protected from either drought or deluge. Moreover, if those trends were to be interpreted as probabilistic forecasts on which decisions are based, farmers would go bust in short order, because gambling on either more or less rain is guaranteed to produce a busted flush.
Farmers are not automata whose cyclic programming requires the same conditions each year. Farming is not a process with narrow operating thresholds that have been exceeded. Farming is an art, which requires careful judgement based on experience acquired by generations of farmers developing expertise in coping with hostile circumstances, including both different weather and market conditions.
The evidence clearly shows that continuous and increasing supplies of food are produced despite radical interannual monthly, seasonal and yearly shifts in weather, regardless of any semblance of trends in those variations. It has no doubt been a wet winter and spring. And this wetness may well have an effect on this year’s harvests. But the notion that this has anything to do with climate change, as per the framing of the Guardian‘s radical activists and equally ideologically-driven scientists, puts ideology before reality.
Many farmers have taken to social media to show videos of their submerged farms. And this speaks to the absurdity of framing first-order problems like flooding as extremely abstract climate-related phenomena, for which there exist little if any evidence. The extant raw data, which span 188 years, tell us all that we need to know: some months there is very little rain, and these months may coincide; some months there is a great deal more rain, and likewise this can add up to create a backlog that needs to be drained. That is the full extent of the data that policymakers require to develop drought and flood mitigation strategies, and those parameters are completely unchanged by climate change, if any climate metrics can be squeezed out of the data at all.
In other words, we already know how dry it can be, and we already know how wet it can be. Therefore, we know what we need to do to ensure that there is sufficient water in drought and sufficient drainage in times of excess rainfall. We know, therefore, how badly politicians are already failing at their job. Their preferences for saving us with policies that ban cars and domestic gas boilers, tax flights and cover agricultural land with turbines and solar panels will not change these parameters. And by pushing up the prices of energy and feedstocks, it will likely create an agricultural crisis where none needs to exist. Climate change is a massive distraction from our real and present problems.
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