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.
FoMoCo lost $47,585 for each EV sold in Q2, GE Vernova calls offshore turbine blade failure a “manufacturing deviation”
Photo by author.
The losses keep coming. As I reported here in February, Ford Motor Co. lost $4.7 billion on its EV business in 2023, or about $64,731 for each EV it sold. Today, the company reported that over the first two quarters, it has lost nearly $2.5 billion on its Model e segment, meaning Ford’s EV losses are on track to total $5 billion in 2024. While the company’s per-vehicle losses declined somewhat during the second quarter, they are still stunning. Let’s take a quick drive through the results.
On July 3, the company published its second-quarter sales numbers. Its EV sales totaled 23,957 units, up 61% from the same period in 2023.
But the money numbers were published today, and they are sobering. Yes, the company sold 23,957 EVs during the quarter, but it lost $1.14 billion while doing so. Thus, Ford lost $47,585 for each EV it sold. In a press release, the company said it incurred the loss “amid ongoing industrywide pricing pressure on first-generation electric vehicles and lower wholesales. Those factors more than offset about $400 million in year-over-year cost reductions in the segment.”
A bit more background on the company’s sales helps illustrate the scale of Ford’s faltering EV business. During the second quarter, Ford sold 199,463 F-Series trucks. Further, it sold more than half a million internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs). Thus, as seen above, the Dearborn-based auto giant sold 21 times more ICEVs than EVs.
The ongoing disaster in EVs has (finally) awakened Ford’s leaders from their money-losing stupor. Last Thursday, the company announced it would spend $3 billion to expand production capacity for its super-profitable F-Series line. In a July 18 press release, it said to meet “customer demand for one of its most popular and profitable vehicles,” it will add “initial capacity for 100,000 F-Series Super Duty trucks, including future multi-energy technology, at Oakville Assembly Complex in Ontario, Canada.” The press release also contains some telling words from the company’s COO, Kumar Galhotra:
This investment will benefit Ford, our employees in Canada and the U.S., and especially our customers who want and need Super Duty for their lives and livelihoods… It is fully consistent with our Ford+ plan for profitable growth, as we take steps to maximize our global manufacturing footprint, and our investments will have a fast payback. (Emphasis added.)
In other words, Ford has decided profitability matters. Rather than continue pouring money into its money-burning EV business, it will expand the production of the vehicles that keep the lights on, which means producing more F-150s and other vehicles that burn dino juice.
One final note that gives more proof that the EV craze is running out of steam: On Tuesday, General Motors CEO Mary Barra told Wall Street analysts that her company is deferring investments in EVs to ensure, as the Wall Street Journal put it, “the company doesn’t get ahead of demand.”
A broken turbine blade on a GE Vernova turbine at the Vineyard Wind project.
GE Vernova’s Wind Turbine Orders Plummet, CEO Calls Blade Failure “Manufacturing Deviation”
In the annals of corporate gobbledygook, Scott Strazik, the CEO of GE Vernova (GEV), surely deserves a prize for using the phrase “manufacturing deviation” to explain the July 13 disintegration of a turbine blade at the Vineyard Wind project in Massachusetts waters offshore Nantucket.
Yesterday, during an investor call to discuss the company’s second-quarter financials, Strazik addressed the disintegration of the turbine blade. As you may recall, that blade failure sent tons of debris into the ocean, forcing the temporary closure of beaches on Nantucket Island during the height of the summer tourist season. The turbine blade disaster also led to a suspension of construction on the 800-megawatt offshore project, which is owned by two foreign companies, Avangrid, and Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, while investigators try to figure out what happened.
During the call, Strazik explained the blade was made in a factory in Canada and that “our investigation to date indicates that the affected blade experienced a manufacturing deviation.”
What, exactly, does that mean? The MV Times reported that “GE Vernova later issued an email statement that the manufacturing issue was due to ‘insufficient bonding,’ although they didn’t offer further explanation. Vernova — whose offices are in Cambridge — has not returned multiple calls to offer an explanation.”
GE Vernova’s second-quarter results revealed the slow-rolling train wreck now underway in the wind industry. While the company announced an increase in revenue and profits, it also revealed that its wind-related order book decreased “primarily due to a large Offshore Wind equipment order in the second quarter of last year that was canceled in the fourth quarter.”
The press release continued, noting that orders for new wind turbines plummeted 44%, and wind segment revenues fell 21% during the quarter. The company’s wind segment was the only one to lose money during the quarter. While the power segment made $613 million in EBITDA and the electrification segment made $129 million, the wind segment lost $117 million.
As I noted earlier this week in “Breaking Wind,” the wind industry faces lots of pain. More proof came last Friday when Level Ten Energy reported that power purchase agreement prices for new wind projects jumped by 13.5% year-on-year. Solar prices increased by about 3%. Thus, Big Wind is not only seeing lots of turbine failures onshore and offshore and a growing backlash across America — where local governments and landowners are rejecting the encroachment of their monstrous landscape-destroying-wildlife-killing-whale-endangering-and-property-value-shredding machines — it is also losing price competitiveness in the market.
The 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) concluded “It is very likely that well-mixed GHGs [greenhouse gases] were the main driver of tropospheric warming since 1979” (IPCC, 2021; p.5).
The 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6) concluded “It is very likely that well-mixed GHGs [greenhouse gases] were the main driver of tropospheric warming since 1979” (IPCC, 2021; p.5). This statement implies that all known climate forcings have properly been evaluated using the available data, and GHGs have been found to exert a disproportionally large radiative effect on the Global Surface Air Temperature (GSAT) over the past 45 years. However, a close examination of Chapter 7 of the Working Group I (WG1) Contribution to the IPCC AR6 (Forster et al. 2021), which discusses the Earth’s energy budget, climate feedbacks and climate sensitivity, reveals that the observed decrease of Earth’s albedo and the corresponding increase of absorbed shortwave radiation by the Planet for the past 20 years have not been taken into account as contributors to the recent warming. Section 7.2.2 of Chapter 7 entitled “Changes in Earth’s Energy Budget” acknowledges that there have been multidecadal periods of significant decreasing and increasing trends in surface solar radiation (SSR) called “global dimming” (i.e. from 1950s to 1980s) and “global brightening” (after 1980s), respectively. The report states: “There is high confidence that these [SSR] trends are widespread, and not localized phenomena or measurement artefacts.” Indeed, the existence of such dimming and brightening multi-decadal periods has been acknowledged by science for more than 10 years (Stanhill et al. 2014; Yuan et al. 2021), but the IPCC AR6 provides no global estimate of the observed positive trend in SSR since 1980s and its impact on GSAT. Instead, the Report simply states “The origin of these trends is not fully understood”.
With respect to the top-of-the-atmosphere (TOA) solar fluxes, Section 7.2.2 of the IPCC AR WG1 offers no analysis of the substantial decrease in Earth’s shortwave reflectance since 2000 observed by the NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project (Loeb et al. 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021) and also reported by other research teams (e.g. Dübal & Vahrenholt 2021; Stephens et al. 2022). The Report does not discuss the observed 2.0 W m-2 increase in solar-energy uptake by the Planet from 2000 to 2020 nor its contribution to the recent warming. What is even more puzzling, Subsection 7.2.2.1 of the IPCC AR6 WG1 Contribution features graphs in their Fig. 7.3 (on p. 936) showing an increasing reflected solar flux and decreasing outgoing thermal flux since 2000 that are supposedly based on CERES data. However, these trends are opposite of what CERES has actually measured and directly contradict results reported by prior studies. This article presents findings from our investigation of Fig. 7.3 in the IPCC AR6.
2.Figure 7.3 in the IPCC AR6 WG1 Contribution
Page 936 of the IPCC Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis (IPCC, 2021) contains the following figure:
Panel (a) of Fig. 7.3 shows anomalies of the reflected solar flux, panel (b) depicts anomalies of the emitted (outgoing) thermal (longwave) flux, and panel (c) displays net-flux anomalies calculated as a difference between absorbed solar shortwave (SW) and outgoing longwave (LW) anomalies. Since reflection is opposite of absorption, the absorbed SW anomalies are obtained by simply multiplying the reflected solar anomalies by -1. Figure 7.3 also portrays simulation results from 7 climate models that were forced by observed sea-surface temperatures (SST) and sea-ice boundary conditions. Note that the CERES data are depicted as thick black lines while the multi-model means are shown as thick red lines.
The problem with IPCC’s Fig. 7.3 is that the plots of reflected solar and outgoing thermal radiation show opposite temporal trends compared to those found in the actual CERES observations. Figures 1 and 2 below illustrate this fact. At the same time, the net flux (a.k.a. the Earth’s Energy Imbalance or EEI) in the IPCC Figure has a correct trend (Fig. 3).
Figure 1. Trends of Earth’s reflected solar radiation in the CERES dataset (upper panel) and the IPCC AR6 WG1 Fig. 7.3(a) (lower panel). Note that the 13- vs. 12-month running means do not affect the flux trends.
Figure 2. Trends of Earth’s outgoing thermal radiation in the CERES dataset (upper panel) and the IPCC AR6 WG1 Fig. 7.3(b) (lower panel). Note that the 13- vs. 12-month running means do not affect the flux trends.
Figure 3. Trends of Earth’s net radiative flux (energy imbalance) in the CERES dataset (upper panel) and the IPCC AR6 WG1 Fig. 7.3(c) (lower panel). Note that the net-flux trend has not been altered in the IPCC’s Fig. 7.3.
We discovered this data-trend issue while working on a paper evaluating the contribution of Earth’s albedo decrease since 2000 to recent warming using the CERES dataset.
Upon a close examination, it became clear to us that the trend inversion of reflected solar and emitted thermal flux anomalies appeared to have been achieved by multiplying the original data series by -1. The text of the IPCC AR6 referring to Fig. 7.3 does not mention anything about altering the trends of key global energy-budget parameters, nor does it provide a clear explanation of the reason behind it. However, the caption of IPCC’s Fig. 7.3 contains the following peculiar sentence “All flux anomalies are defined as positive downwards, consistent with the sign convention used throughout this chapter.” This statement is perplexing, because flux anomalies are independent of the flux direction. Anomalies are simply departures of timeseries data from an arbitrary chosen reference value. In the case of the CERES dataset, flux anomalies are calculated with respect to the mean value of the deseasonalized timeseries over the entire period of observation. Hence, it is the choice of a reference value that solely determines, whether an anomaly is positive or negative irrespective of the flux direction. In other words, the sign of an anomaly is not subject to the definition of a positive flux direction as suggested by the caption of Fig. 7.3. Furthermore, calculating the anomalies of an environmental parameter (such as global temperature, ocean heat content, planetary radiative flux etc.) does not change the temporal trend of the original data set. This is basic knowledge in the field of climate science. In this regard, the statement in the caption of Fig. 7.3 that relates anomalies to a flux direction is physically meaningless and confusing.
Another problem with the IPCC’s Fig. 7.3 is that the net-flux anomalies shown in panel (c), whose trend has not been altered, cannot be calculated from the timeseries shown in panels (a) and (b) as expected. Since the net-flux anomaly is a difference between anomalies of the absorbed solar and emitted thermal fluxes, the graphs in panel (c) are physically and numerically incompatible with the those plotted in panels (a) and (b).
3.Correspondence with IPCC Authors about Fig. 7.3.
In an effort to clarify the above situation, we reached out to the Coordinating Lead Authors of Chapter 7 in the IPCC AR6 WG1 Contribution, Prof. Piers Forster at the University of Leeds (UK) and Prof. Trude Storelvmo at the University of Oslo (Norway). We asked them, who the authors of Section 7.2.2 in Chapter 7 were, where Fig. 7.3 appears. Prof. Forster promptly replied informing us that Section 7.2.2 was written and edited by Dr. Matthew Parmer at the University of Bristoll and UK’s Met Office (UK) and Dr. Chris Smith at the University of Leeds (UK). Dr. Palmer was the lead author of that Section. Prof. Forster also provided us with a link to the IPCC AR6 WG1 repository at GitHub.com, where all data files and Python processing scripts reside used to generate the figures appearing in the WG1 Report.
We searched the GitHub repository and found three text files containing the source data for Fig. 7.3 as well as a Python plotting script used to generate the actual figure panels. There was a TXT file for every panel of Fig. 7.3 providing both CERES observations and climate-model projections covering the period July 2000 – June 2017. Upon inspecting the data files and the Python script, we discovered that, indeed, the deseasonalized monthly anomalies of reflected solar and emitted thermal fluxes have been multiplied by -1 resulting in inversion of the original trends, and that this data manipulation occurred in the Python script generating the panels of Fig. 7.3. The text files contained unaltered data that exhibited correct trends. Figure 4 depicts the anomalies of reflected solar and outgoing thermal fluxes from CERES observations and climate-model simulations as found in the text data files on GitHub. Figure 5 shows a portion of the Python script, where the signs of shortwave (SW) and longwave (LW) anomalies (code parameters SW_dict and LW_dict) are inverted during the plotting process by placing a minus sign in front of the corresponding data arrays. The Python script inverted the trends of both the CERES data and climate-model projections.
Figure 4. Plots of TOA reflected solar and outgoing thermal flux anomalies found in text data files at the IPCC GitHub repository used to generate Fig. 7.3 in the IPCC AR6 WG1. These data show correct trends.
Figure 5. Portion of the Python script used by the IPCC authors of Section 7.2.2 to plot the TOA anomalies of reflected shortwave (SW), emitted longwave (LW) and net fluxes from both CERES observations and climate model projections. Note the minus sign in front of the arrays containing SW and LW flux data.
It is worth noting that, although the climate models correctly reproduced the overall pattern of observed changes in planetary SW and LW fluxes, the measured trends of these variables are much steeper compared to the modeled ones. Most importantly, the climate models significantly underestimated the rate of decrease of Earth’s albedo and the associated increase of absorbed solar radiation by the Planet since 2000. The rate of planetary cooling (i.e. emitted thermal flux) was also significantly lower in the model simulations compared to observations. An important detail in this comparison is that all models have been forced with observed sea-surface temperatures (SST) and sea-ice boundary conditions. Had the models been only guided by their internal physical processes without periodic nudging to observations, the above model-data comparison would likely have been much worse.
On July 8, 2024, we sent an email message to Dr. Palmer and Dr. Smith informing them about the findings from our search of the GitHub data repository and asking them to explain the reason for the trend inversion of the SW and LW flux anomalies in Fig. 7.3. We also sought their advice about whether we should use the timeseries shown in Fig. 7.3 or the data found in the source text files, if we decide to create customized graphs of TOA fluxes for a review paper we’ve been working on.
We received a reply from Dr. Palmer on July 10, 2024, where he acknowledged that the reflected solar and outgoing thermal flux anomalies had intentionally been multiplied by -1. However, his explanation for this data manipulation was simply an expansion of the justification stated in the caption of Fig. 7.3 that invokes flux direction. Specifically, Dr. Palmer wrote:
“… reflected SW and outgoing LW are both defined as positive in the upward/outward direction. Therefore, for those timeseries we multiply by -1 so that they are expressed in a way that is consistent with the rest of the chapter. This means, for example, that a decrease in reflected SW means a relative GAIN of energy in the Earth system. Similarly, an increase in outgoing LW means a relative LOSS of energy in the Earth system. Note that in the figure we label these as “global solar flux anomaly” and “global thermal flux anomaly” rather than “reflected SW flux” and “outgoing LW flux”.”
As discussed above, this explanation makes no physical sense, because anomalies are always defined with respect to a chosen reference value and, therefore, have nothing to do with flux direction. Also, expressing a timeseries in terms of anomalies is not supposed to change the temporal trend of the original data. Dr. Palmer correctly pointed out that multiplying anomalies of the reflected solar flux by -1 produces a timeseries of a relative energy gain by the system. This new timeseries is called absorbed solar flux, because reflection is opposite of (and complementary to) absorption. Hence, panel (a) of the IPCC Fig. 7.3 essentially shows anomalies of the absorbed solar flux by Earth. The problem is that the caption of Fig. 7.3 labels this panel as “reflected solar”, which is misleading. By mislabeling the solar flux in the figure caption while recognizing that Fig. 7.3 (a) depicts a relative gain of solar energy by the Earth system, Dr. Palmer effectively obscured a key natural driver of climate related to the Sun.
On the other hand, multiplying the outgoing thermal flux anomalies by -1 produces nothing meaningful, because (unlike the solar flux) Earth’s LW radiation is always directed outward and does not have a complementary flux directed inward. By showing a decreasing thermal emission from Earth over time as done in Fig. 7.3 (b), the authors of Section 7.2.2 (Dr. Palmer and Dr. Smith) de facto suggest the presence of “heat trapping” in the climate system by increasing concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. However, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics makes it impossible for an open system with a rising surface temperature such as Earth to have a decreasing outgoing thermal emission. In other words, by inverting the trend of the TOA outgoing LW flux, the IPCC authors misrepresented the physical reality!
Interestingly, Dr. Palmer advised us to use the data in the text files found in the GitHub repository in case we wanted to create customized plots of CERES and modeled radiative fluxes. We interpreted this as an acknowledgement that the correct data were contained in the text files rather than Fig. 7.3.
In our reply to Dr. Palmer, we listed a series of specific concerns that the trend inversion of reflected solar and outgoing thermal fluxes made in Fig. 7.3 was methodologically inappropriate, because it fundamentally changes the observed behavior of the climate system over the past 20 years and creates a false impression about climate drivers in the minds of researchers and politicians reading the IPCC Report. Dr. Palmer did not address our concerns and instead directed us toward an official IPCC webpage, where we could raise our issues. Since Dr. Palmer did not recognize the misrepresentation of satellite data in Fig. 7.3, it is possible that he was genuinely confused about flux anomalies and how they are calculated judging by the following odd statement he made in one of his replies: “I don’t think there is any fundamental issue here – just different choices about the sign convention used”.
The truth is that the flux-trend inversions in Fig. 7.3 have enormous implications for both IPCC’s main conclusions and the climate theory; hence, they must be exposed and explained to the Public.
4. Implications of the Data Manipulation in the IPCC Fig. 7.3
Figure 7.3 in the IPCC AR6 WG1 essentially shows an increasing planetary albedo (panel a) and a decreasing infrared cooling to Space (panel b) for the past 2 decades, which is diametrically opposite of satellite observations. While the text of the IPCC WG1 Chapter 7 does not discuss any long-term trends of the TOA reflected solar and emitted thermal fluxes in the 21st-Century, Fig. 7.3 subconsciously suggests that the solar forcing played no role in recent warming and the rising concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases due to human industrial activity had increased the retention of heat in the climate system by impeding the outgoing LW radiation. These implications of Fig. 7.3 resulting from the data manipulation align perfectly well with the radiative greenhouse theory of climate change, but contradict directly the physical reality as measured by the CERES Project.
By inverting the trend of the reflected solar flux, the IPCC authors effectively eliminated the need to analyze the cloud-controlled solar forcing and its contribution to recent tropospheric warming while reaffirming at the same time the a-priori assumed pivotal role of greenhouse gases in driving the global surface temperature since 2000. The trend inversion of the outgoing thermal flux further solidifies the false impression that the Earth had warmed in response to “heat trapping” by increasing atmospheric trace gases.
Had the IPCC AR6 WG1 acknowledged the ~2.0 W m-2 increase of solar radiation absorption by the Planet between 2000 and 2020 as measured along the 13-month running mean curve of CERES anomalies (Fig. 6), the following conclusions/claims found in the Report’s “Summary for Policy Makers” would have been impossible to defend “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land” and “It is very likely that well-mixed GHGs were the main driver of tropospheric warming since 1979” (IPCC, 2021; p.4-5). This is because a solar forcing of 2.0 W m-2 is more than sufficient to explain the entire observed warming for the past 2 decades, thus eliminating the need to invoke any model-generated (i.e. theoretical) radiative forcing by greenhouse gases.
Figure 6. Monthly radiative anomalies of the Earth’s absorbed solar flux estimated from the CERES EBAF 4.2 dataset by multiplying the reported reflected all-sky shortwave anomalies by -1 (in accordance with the fact that absorption is diametrically opposite of reflection).
For example, using the lowest value of IPCC’s transient climate sensitivity estimated from data on total anthropogenic forcing and temperature increase presented in Sections 7.3.5.2 and 7.3.5.3 of the IPCC AR6 WG1 Chapter 7 (Forster et al. 2021), i.e. 0.47 K/(W m-2), the warming caused by solar forcing alone for the period 2000 – 2020 should have been 2.0*0.47 = 0.94 K. The observed global surface warming over this time interval (calculated as an average temperature rise from 6 datasets) is 0.62 K along the curve of 13-month running means (Fig. 7). Similar results are obtained, if one uses the linear trends depicted in Figures 6 and 7 instead. Assuming the above IPCC climate sensitivity, the mean decadal increase of Earth’s sunlight absorption measured by CERES, i.e. 0.797 (W m-2)/decade (Fig. 6), corresponds to a global surface warming of 0.797*0.47 = 0.37 K/decade, while the actual observed warming is only 0.23 K/decade (Fig. 7). Thus, the observed solar forcing, which is mostly induced by natural cloud-albedo variations (Loeb et al. 2019), leaves no room for any action by greenhouse-gas radiative forcing or amplifying (positive) feedbacks claimed by the IPCC AR6. In addition, according to our analysis, the IPCC’s lowest climate-sensitivity estimate of 0.47 K/(W m-2) is still an overestimation of the Earth’s actual climate sensitivity, 0.29 K/(W m-2) inferred from observed data and a new physical model discussed elsewhere (Nikolov & Zeller, manuscript under review).
Figure 7. Monthly anomalies of the global surface air temperature calculated by averaging data from 6 datasets (HadCRUT5, GISTEMP4, NOAA GlobalTemp, BEST, RSS and NOAA STAR) and a 13-month running mean used to smooth the interannual variability.
In other words, if the measured increase of Earth’s sunlight absorption by CERES in the 21st Century was acknowledged in the IPCC AR6, it would have invalidated the Report’s central assertion that human carbon emissions were the main driver of climate in recent decades. It is conceivable then that radiative flux anomalies in Fig. 7.3 were manipulated and discussions about long-term CERES trends in Section 7.2.2 were intentionally omitted, precisely because the actual CERES data present a significant empirical challenge (obstacle) to the UN’s political Agenda (established by Resolution A/RES/43/53 of the UN General Assembly in 1988) to promote Anthropogenic Climate Change.
5.Conclusion
Considering the above facts and the enormous global socioeconomic impact of the IPCC’s conclusions and recommendations, we believe that it will be in the World’s best interest to launch an independent, critical reevaluation of fundamental premises in the climate theory from the standpoint of modern observations, and establish a new, objective peer-review system that ensures a complete and unbiased representation of all available data in the IPCC Reports. These efforts should be accompanied by a decisive depoliticization of climate science through the passing of appropriate legislation in the form of International Law that restores the financial independence of academic research, criminalizes political interference in scientific inquiry, and incentivizes the adoption of novel approaches to solving climate physics problems.
A recent article in Bloomberg titled The Market’s Next Black Swan Is Climate Change, by Mark Gongloff, says “Failing to do more to slow the planetary heating caused by greenhouse-gas emissions will gouge 40% from global stock valuations.”
The article rife with multiple false claims and unverifiable predictions.
A recent article in Bloomberg titled The Market’s Next Black Swan Is Climate Change, by Mark Gongloff, says “Failing to do more to slow the planetary heating caused by greenhouse-gas emissions will gouge 40% from global stock valuations.”
The article rife with multiple false claims and unverifiable predictions. Here is what the article claims:
Climate change will be really, really bad for stock prices.
Failing to do more to slow the planetary heating caused by greenhouse-gas emissions will gouge 40% from global equity valuations, estimates a new study by the EDHEC-Risk Climate Impact Institute. Accounting for climate-change-accelerating “tipping points” such as Amazon-rainforest dieback or a Big Burp of gas from melting permafrost, the market losses rise to 50%. On the other hand, if the world gets its act together and limits warming to 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial averages, then the hit to stock prices will be just 5% to 10%.
A black swan event is an unexpected, rare, and consequential event that has a major impact and is difficult to prepare for. The term is based on a Latin expression that assumed black swans didn’t exist. The term was popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, an economist, professor, and writer.
The article assumes that climate change is such an event.
The ”really, really bad” portion of the article is more of an emotional reaction from a stock trader than a real quantification. Of course, it has been shown that stock trading is mostly emotional to begin with, according to Investopedia:
Trading psychology is the emotional component of an investor’s decision-making process, which may help explain why some decisions appear more rational than others.
Trading psychology is characterized primarily by the influence of both greed and fear.
Given that, it is easy to understand how the article and the study it references can easily be attributed to the fear component of stock trading.
And in the article, fear is used as the impetus:
And like objects in your rearview mirror, climate-change damage is already closer than it appears. Weather disasters cost the global economy $1.5 trillion in the 2010s, according to the World Meteorological Organization, up nearly tenfold from the 1970s after adjusting for inflation. The reinsurer Swiss Re has suggested insured losses from natural catastrophes will double in the next decade.
But the fear is based on climate model projections, not actual data. If actual data was used to look ahead, using several metrics, the trend would be for less weather (not climate) damage in the future. For example, hurricanes. The data shows no trend:
Or tornadoes, not only is there no increasing trend, the trend is actually negative:
Likewise, heatwaves. They were much worse in the past:
In fact, the metric combining many severe weather events, the data showing deaths from extreme weather, is sharply down over the last century.
While Bloomberg likes to blame climate, for extreme weather events, extreme weather events are just that, weather events. Such events are often conflated with climate change but this is a mistake. Weather and climate operate on vastly different timescales
From an investor’s perspective, it’s all about money. The biggest thing about extreme weather events is that they destroy property, but even the trend in property losses has declined as the Earth has modestly warmed:
“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future,” the baseball player Yogi Berra is reported to have said. The truth of this is evident every day in the world of the stock market.
In the end, since climate change is not causing increasingly extreme weather, it cannot be causing increasing business losses – which the data shows it is not. My advice to investors? Follow the data, not the money, and suggest Mark Gongloff of Bloomberg take a “chill pill.”
Giant plumes of Sahara Desert dust that gust across the Atlantic can suppress hurricane formation over the ocean and affect weather in North America.
But thick dust plumes can also lead to heavier rainfall – and potentially more destruction – from landfalling storms, according to a July 24 study in Science Advances. The research shows a previously unknown relationship between hurricane rainfall and Saharan dust plumes.
“Surprisingly, the leading factor controlling hurricane precipitation is not, as traditionally thought, sea surface temperature or humidity in the atmosphere. Instead, it’s Sahara dust,”
However, uncertainty remains around the questions of how climate change will affect outflows of dust from the Sahara and how much more rainfall we should expect from future hurricanes. Additional questions surround the complex relationships among Saharan dust, ocean temperatures, and hurricane formation, intensity, and precipitation. Filling in the gaps will be critical to anticipating and mitigating the impacts of climate change.
“Hurricanes are among the most destructive weather phenomena on Earth,” said Wang. Even relatively weak hurricanes can produce heavy rains and flooding hundreds of miles inland. “For conventional weather predictions, especially hurricane predictions, I don’t think dust has received sufficient attention to this point.”
Competing effects
Dust can have competing effects on tropical cyclones, which are classified as hurricanes in the North Atlantic, central North Pacific, and eastern North Pacific when maximum sustained wind speeds reach 74 miles per hour or higher.
“A dust particle can make ice clouds form more efficiently in the core of the hurricane, which can produce more precipitation,” Wang explained, referring to this effect as microphysical enhancement. Dust can also block solar radiation and cool sea surface temperatures around a storm’s core, which weakens the tropical cyclone.
Wang and colleagues set out to first develop a machine learning model capable of predicting hurricane rainfall, and then identify the underlying mathematical and physical relationships.
The researchers used 19 years of meteorological data and hourly satellite precipitation observations to predict rainfall from individual hurricanes.
The results show a key predictor of rainfall is dust optical depth, a measure of how much light filters through a dusty plume. They revealed a boomerang-shaped relationship in which rainfall increases with dust optical depths between 0.03 and 0.06, and sharply decreases thereafter. In other words, at high concentrations, dust shifts from boosting to suppressing rainfall.
“Normally, when dust loading is low, the microphysical enhancement effect is more pronounced. If dust loading is high, it can more efficiently shield [the ocean] surface from sunlight, and what we call the ‘radiative suppression effect’ will be dominant,” Wang said.
Additional authors are affiliated with Western Michigan University, Purdue University, University of Utah, and California Institute of Technology
Tropical cyclone rainfall (TCR) extensively affects coastal communities, primarily through inland flooding. The impact of global climate changes on TCR is complex and debatable. This study uses an XGBoost machine learning model with 19-year meteorological data and hourly satellite precipitation observations to predict TCR for individual storms. The model identifies dust optical depth (DOD) as a key predictor that enhances performance evidently. The model also uncovers a nonlinear and boomerang-shape relationship between Saharan dust and TCR, with a TCR peak at 0.06 DOD and a sharp decrease thereafter. This indicates a shift from microphysical enhancement to radiative suppression at high dust concentrations. The model also highlights meaningful correlations between TCR and meteorological factors like sea surface temperature and equivalent potential temperature near storm cores. These findings illustrate the effectiveness of machine learning in predicting TCR and understanding its driving factors and physical mechanisms.
INTRODUCTION
Tropical cyclones (TCs) are extreme weather events that have caused catastrophic damages globally (1, 2). According to global and regional climate models, TC rainfall (TCR) is expected to increase with global warming, following the increased water vapor holding capacity in the atmosphere with rising temperature (3–5). A recent study (6) compared the sea surface temperature (SST)–TCR relationships and discovered that the climate scaling (changing ratio between rainfall and rising temperature) under future warmer climate (5% per K) is smaller than the Clausius-Clapeyron scaling (7% per K) and apparent scaling under current climate. In addition, recent satellite observations revealed a decreasing trend of rain rate in the core part of TCs but increasing trend in outer bands (7, 8). Besides ocean surface temperature and water vapor in the atmosphere, other environmental factors regulate the regional variations of TCR, including vertical wind shear (9–11), surface roughness change (12–14), and atmospheric aerosols (15, 16). How the environment and climate influence the TCR remains unresolved, especially over multiyear to decadal time scales.
Saharan dust, transported across the Atlantic Ocean by trade winds, is the predominant aerosol type during summer and early fall over the tropical Atlantic (17). It can efficiently alter atmospheric radiative fluxes in both shortwave and longwave bands and participate in cloud formation by serving as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and/or ice nuclei (IN) (18). It has been reported that Saharan dust tends to suppress the formation of tropical cyclones via a cooling effect on SST that consequently cuts the energy supply for TCs (19, 20). This phenomenon was evident during the peak of European air pollution in the 1970s and 1980s, which is believed to have amplified the Sahel dust emissions due to the prevalent drought conditions. This intensified dust transport coincided with a noticeable downturn in Atlantic hurricane activity (8). Another study (21) has highlighted a close association between the North Atlantic’s dust and considerable spatial shifts in factors such as zonal wind shear, midlevel moisture, and SST. However, they found a minimal correlation between dust optical depth (DOD) and the Atlantic’s accumulated cyclone energy. As Saharan dust-laden air masses move westward, they can introduce dry and stable air into the tropical environment. This dry air inhibits the moisture and convection required for tropical cyclone formation. Moreover, by blocking solar radiation from reaching the surface, dust can reduce SST. The dust effects on TCR can be more complicated and multifaceted. Similar to the anthropogenic aerosols (e.g., sulfate or hygroscopic organics) that provide more CCN to TC systems (22), dust can foster the hydrometeor formation in the cloud tower, enhance the vertical motion of rain bands via elevated latent heat release, and result in more surface precipitation (23). In a nutshell, there is no consensus on the sign of the dust effect on TCR, and it remains uncertain what is the relative importance of dust effect compared to the other meteorological factors.
Current climate models still do not have sufficient spatial resolution to resolve the complex microphysical processes of cloud and precipitation, particularly how aerosol microphysics affects deep convective clouds. While cloud-resolving numerical models were adopted to capture the complex air-sea and aerosol-TC interactions (14, 24), it remains challenging to run these models over multiyear to decadal climate time scales, given their computational expense. Therefore, a combination of big data and machine learning (ML) offers a promising alternative method for untangling those complex relationships between environment forcings and TC activities. Previous studies have demonstrated that ML has robust predictive capabilities in TC genesis, intensity, precipitation, and rapid intensification (14, 25–27). While current ML research on TCs primarily centers on enhancing forecasting and prediction capabilities, ML models also have the potential to unveil intricate and nonlinear relationships between features and response variables. Recent advancements in interpretable ML further bolster the interpretability of these models. Therefore, in this research, we first derive a long-term record of TCR, which is defined as the average tropical cyclone rain rate within 600 km of each TC position (see Materials and Methods), and then aim to: (i) develop an ML model capable of predicting TCR variabilities across the Atlantic Ocean using environmental forcing variables; (ii) pinpoint the most influential environmental forcing variables within the ML model and explore their interactions; and (iii) specifically, elucidate the role of Saharan dust in TCR. This will be achieved by contrasting various ML models with and without the dust variable and interpreting their physical significance through the lens of ML interpretability techniques.
RESULTS
Model performance and overall effect of dust
A correlation analysis first shows very low correlations (coefficient generally smaller than 0.06) between individual environmental factors and TCR (fig. S1). It indicates that conventional statistical methods such as linear regression may not work well to model TCR, likely due to the nonlinear relationships between environmental features and TCR. Therefore, we use a more sophisticated ML approach, the Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) based on an ensemble of decision trees, to build our TCR models. Two distinct models were developed, one only including the traditional meteorological factors and geoinformation and the other adding DOD as another predictor. Results from fivefold cross-validation demonstrate that both DOD and non-DOD models offer decent out-of-sample prediction capabilities (with ~0.6 R2, as in Fig. 1, A and B), without overfitting the training data. Notably, the DOD model surpasses its counterpart, as evidenced by a higher R2 and a reduced root mean squared error (RMSE). The differences in conditional median values further highlight the DOD model’s superiority across most TCR spectrums, with pronounced error reduction observed for both light and heavy TCR extremes (as illustrated in Fig. 1C). Both models tend to have a larger magnitude of underestimates for heavy TCR than the overestimates for light TCR. With respect to the spatial distribution, we can also observe systematic improvement from the non-DOD to DOD models (Fig. 1D). On average, the absolute error (AE) of the non-DOD model is approximately fourfold that of the DOD model. This is underscored by the more frequent appearance of an AE ratio exceeding 1, indicating that the non-DOD model’s AE is consistently larger than that of the DOD model.
So, yes, we are seeing more hot weather and we are seeing more rainfall overall. But no, we are not being battered by biblical downpours or extreme weather of all kinds.
The UK climate is getting ever more extreme. We know this because the BBC keeps telling us so, most recently in today’s reporting of the annual Met Office/Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) State of the Climate Report for 2023. ‘Climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the UK,’ writes climate editor Justin Rowlatt on the BBC website. As well as experiencing more really hot days, ‘its observations suggest there has been an increase in the number of really wet days too, such as the prolonged and heavy rain Storm Babet brought to wide areas of the country in October last year.’ He comments: ‘The UK’s shifting climate represents a dangerous upheaval for our ecosystems as well as our infrastructure’. And in case we still haven’t got it, he adds: ‘Climate change has already made more extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall, storms, and drought, more frequent and stronger in many parts of the world.’
But how much of this is really true, and how much of it – were BBC Verify minded to undertake a fair analysis of this output – is hyperbole? The State of the UK Climate Report 2023 is published today in the International Journal of Climatology, and you can read it for yourself here. But for those without the time to do this, this is what it says on the specific matters raised by Rowlatt and the BBC. Firstly, those ‘extremely high temperatures’. As far as 2023 was concerned, it turns out that actually they were rather thin on the ground. The highest temperature measured anywhere in the UK in 2023 was 33ºC in Faversham, Kent, which the report notes is rather modest by the standards of recent years. Nevertheless, it is true to say that there is an increasing trend in the frequency of hot weather in Britain. In the decade from 2014 to 23 there were 2.5 times as many days per year with temperatures exceeding 28ºC somewhere in Britain as there were during the years 1961 to 1990. There were 3.6 times as many days per year with temperatures over 32ºC.
This is consistent with the long-term trend in mean temperatures, which have also resulted in fewer very cold days. In the decade from 2014 to 2023, there were on average 17 fewer days of air frost per year than during 1961 to 1990. It is not very satisfactory comparing a ten-year period with a 30-year one, given the natural variability in the weather, but year-on-year graphs appear to confirm that Britain is experiencing more hot weather and less cold weather. That is something that needs to be borne in mind when the BBC and others claim climate change is causing more ‘extreme’ weather. The rise in extreme hot weather is balanced out by a fall in extreme cold weather.
What about the claimed rise in ‘really wet days’? The State of the Climate Report does state that overall Britain is becoming wetter, with overall rainfall ten per cent higher from 2014 to 2023 than between 1961 and 1990. But then rainfall fluctuated quite a lot decade on decade prior to the 1960s. The year 2023 was the seventh wettest year in England and Wales in a series going back to 1766. The wettest, by the way, was 1767. But ‘really wet days’? The report states that there has been a ‘slight increase in heavy rainfall across the UK in recent decades’. There are a number of metrics used to measure heavy rainfall, such as the average number of days a year with rain exceeding 10mm, the number of days when rainfall exceeds the 99th percentile, etc. All seem to tell a similar story: there was a strong upward trend in the frequency of heavy rain in Britain between the 1960s and the beginning of this century, but with little or no trend since then (figure 49 shows this).
As for the claim that the world is seeing more frequent and stronger storms – made by Rowlatt in the global rather than specifically UK context – what does the UK State of the Climate Report say about that? By recent standards, last year was a relatively stormy year. However, the frequently-made claim that Britain saw a ‘record’ number of storms last winter is based on a meaningless metric: the number of named storms. There is no consistent definition of a named storm other than that someone in the UK or Ireland Met Office’s has decided it warrants a name. Moreover, the naming of storms only began in 2015 – so not even the 1987 hurricane had a name. But the State of the Climate Report does present data on extreme wind speeds measured in the UK – namely the number of days per year on which gusts of over 40, 50, and 60 knots have been recorded somewhere in the UK. This data shows a very clear downward trend since 1990 [fig 60]. There is also data showing that mean wind speeds have been falling in Britain since 1970 – a trend that echoes that in many parts of the world. That is not very good for Ed Miliband’s wind turbines, but it is not consistent with a claim that Britain is becoming more stormy.
So, yes, we are seeing more hot weather and we are seeing more rainfall overall. But no, we are not being battered by biblical downpours or extreme weather of all kinds.
Remember in the end, we are not buying EV’s because they go further, cost less, or are more convenient, we’re buying them because we want to stop storms in 100 years.
The government has this hope that homeowners can be tricked into paying for the batteries (in the form of EVs) that the wind and solar industry need to make their useless random energy into something reliable. Now comes the news that not only are batteries hazardous fire risks and expensive themselves, but to connect to our grid in a two way arrangement we need to spend $3,000 dollars per household (or maybe $10,000) to buy the bit of equipment that makes this work. Not to mention adding another million gigawatts of generation so the cars can be charged in the first place.
Remember in the end, we are not buying EV’s because they go further, cost less, or are more convenient, we’re buying them because we want to stop storms in 100 years.
How many nice weather days will I get in 2100AD for that $3,000 inverter?
Interim Director of Monash Energy Institute, Roger Dargaville, said powering EVs in just one million households could cost as much as $10bn in power inverters.
Professor Dargaville said such inverters, unlike home batteries such as Tesla’s Powerwall, would allow EV drivers to recontribute power into the grid.
“That piece of infrastructure costs about $10,000 at the moment, and if you have a million vehicles sometime in the future trying to do this that’s $10bn,” he said.
Prof Dargaville hopes that mass production might reduce the cost to $3,000 each if we are lucky. (Mass money printing and inflation will probably prevent that.)
Historians will look back on this era and describe it as a case study in corruption and mass delusion. The great capitalist free market of Adam Smith exists only in limited pockets that masquerade as “free choice”.
Within a day of ex-President Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out.
An article I wrote for Forbes about J.D. Vance published on July 18th began as follows:
Within a day of ex-President Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out.
Little did I know that within a day of publishing that article, the knives would come out for me.
The editors of Forbes deleted my article, stating that “we had to take down your latest Forbes article about J.D. Vance because it did not meet our editorial guidelines which we take seriously”. This was followed by a short note stating that I was sacked as a contributor. Similar complaints of not abiding by the magazine’s guidelines were made by an editor on a couple of previous published articles.
What editorial guidelines? “Avoid advocacy, opinion, polemic and rumour-mongering.”
I have yet to read any Forbes piece that avoided opinion, given that Forbes contributors are opinion columnists and not journalists who are hired to merely report the news. The contributor’s role, one would have thought, is to offer opinions and advocate certain lines of argument about current affairs or topics of interest based on a reasonable reading of verifiable data. Otherwise, what is the contributor’s purpose?
But here is the catch. It depends on whether you are “on message”. Are you with or against the accepted narratives? If against, you are cancelled. That is how the establishment operates – within Forbes and in the mainstream media – as I found out.
“Avoid Advocacy”
Here is the lead paragraph of a recent article in Forbes entitled “GOP Platform: Back To The Carbon Age” in the weekly column “Current Climate” by two “Forbes Senior Editors”:
Ahead of the Republican Party’s National Convention that kicks off today in Milwaukee, the GOP released its official platform of key priorities for a second potential Trump Administration. As with any such political document, it’s long on platitudes and slogans, but very short on detail. But there’s at least one clear takeaway in the document: it prioritises increasing energy from fossil fuels while ignoring the carbon-fuelled climate crisis that’s triggered record-setting heatwaves and earlier and more intense hurricanes.
The authors assert that the GOP official platform “prioritises increasing energy from fossil fuels while ignoring the carbon-fuelled climate crisis”. They further claim that the “carbon-fuelled climate crisis” has “triggered record-setting heatwaves and earlier and more intense hurricanes”. By these leading statements, the reader is led to believe that both constitute “settled science”.
Here is another example of writing from another recently published Forbesarticle that allegedly does not constitute advocacy or opinion:
Imagine not being able to get the warning about the approaching hurricane or tornado. How would you know when to evacuate to stay safe or board up your home or business? Or make sure your staff is protected? It’s not a bad dream, it could be the reality if Donald Trump takes office again.
My suggestion that the policy positions of J.D. Vance in support of fossil fuels and sceptical of climate alarmist claims are consistent with the verities of physics and economics got me cancelled. But arguing that if Donald Trump takes over, it would be “a bad dream” is perfectly fine in a Forbes world allegedly devoid of advocacy or opinion.
Settled Science
To suggest that fossil fuels have “fuelled the climate crisis” is, we are led to believe, neither an opinion nor advocacy. Forbes’s readers are told to accept “the carbon-fuelled climate crisis” as established science, though it is nothing of the sort. There is no “settled science” – an oxymoron to begin with – regarding climate change. It is apparent that Forbes would have cancelled John Clauser, a Nobel Laureate, for Physics in 2022 – like the IMF did – since he does not give obeisance at the altar of climate change as Forbes staff evidently do along with their preferred contributors and senior editors.
Indeed, if Dr. Clauser were to write, as he did, that the climate emergency narrative is “a dangerous corruption of science that threatens the world’s economy and the well-being of billions of people”, he would have received a termination letter pronto from the senior editors of Forbes. And if he had said, as he did, that “climate science has metastasised into massive shock-journalistic pseudoscience”, that would certainly have sealed his fate.
The Forbes editors seem oblivious to the fact that the latest IPCC assessment report, by finding little support for the much-proclaimed link between climate change and extreme weather events, “is badly out of step with today’s apocalyptic zeitgeist” as Roger Pielke Jr. puts it.
What is even more remarkable is that Forbes’s senior editors seem out of step with their own Editor-in-Chief and grandson of the magazine’s founder, Steve Forbes. Mr. Forbes said in his column last month that some $6 trillion had been spent on “so-called renewables” such as solar and wind over the past two decades which “barely made a dent” in the use of fossil fuels in the global economy. Yet in the linked Forbesarticle above, the authors criticise the GOP platform for not making specific references to solar and wind (along with geothermal and hydropower). Perhaps they should have checked with their own Editor-in-Chief before indulging in “climate groupthink”, which Mr. Forbes warns his readers against.
Au RevoirForbes
My first Forbes article was published more than five years ago in April 2019 entitled ‘The World Bank’s Misguided Green Energy Policies To Persist’. Since then, I have published a range of pieces on climate, energy and public policy. Readers often remarked in personal comments to me that they found it surprising that a mainstream business magazine such as Forbes allowed such contrarian and sceptical writing to be published. My response was to say that Forbes was exceptional in providing a broad range of informed opinion to their readers.
Alas, that is no longer true, and climate groupthink has captured yet another media outlet. Newer hires at the Forbes editorial office from a younger more “woke” generation of journalists may well have tipped the balance in support of the climate alarmist narrative. Gone are the days when informed analysts such as Roger Pielke Jr., Michael Schellenberger, Diana Furchtgott-Roth graced the pages of Forbes.
Dr. Tilak K. Doshi is an energy consultant, member of the CO2 Coalition and an ex-Forbes contributor.
Below is the article that Forbes memory-holed.
Trump’s VP Pick Is A Climate Sceptic And the Knives Are Out
By Tilak Doshi
Within a day of ex-President Trump’s announcement of “climate denier” Mr. J. D. Vance as the Republican Vice Presidential nominee, the climate industrial complex and supportive mainstream media had the knives out. A few headlines of the past 24 hours are an indication:
New York Times – “J.D. Vance Is an Oil Booster and Doubter of Human-Caused Climate Change”
Independent – J.D. Vance: “Climate Activists Alarmed by Trump’s ‘Dangerous’ Pick for Vice President”
Guardian – “Climate Advocates Fear Picking J.D. Vance for VP Is ‘A Dangerous Step Backward’”
The umbrage taken by media commentators is familiar. CNBC laments that “the former venture capitalist though is a known critic of climate change and renewable energy [italics added].” U.K.’s the Independent newspaper reports that “[c]ampaigners are responding with alarm to the selection of climate denier and Ohio senator J.D. Vance as Donald Trump’s Vice Presidential nominee, with activists warning he represents a “dangerous” voice for the U.S.” Mr. Vance’s “eagerness to please Donald Trump” adds to the image of the Vice-Presidential nominee as an unprincipled politician seeking office.
Climate advocacy group Fossil Free Media spokesperson Cassidy DiPaola asserted that “This [VP] choice signals that a potential Trump-Vance administration would likely double down on fossil fuel expansion at a time when we desperately need to transition to clean energy.” Communications Director Stevie O’Hanlon of Sunrise Movement, a climate activist organisation, said that “Like Donald Trump, J.D. Vance has proven that he will make it a top priority to roll back climate protections while answering to the demands of oil and gas CEOs.”
Does Mr. Vance have a principled stand and is his stance on climate and energy policy worthy of consideration?
Climate Denialism
As the highly polarised debate over climate change over the past few decades has amply demonstrated, the discourse often descends into ad hominem attacks and name calling. “Climate denier” is a charge that is often used by proponents of climate alarm to shut down critical debate and to deplatform climate sceptics. Lena Moffitt, Executive Director of the environmental advocacy group Evergreen Action, said this of Mr. Vance: “Donald Trump has chosen an avowed climate denier as his running mate who has used his time in Congress to vote against the environment and shill for fossil fuel corporations at every opportunity.”
The “denier” accusation is among the more pernicious if popular epithets used to denigrate sceptics of the so-called “consensus science”. It invokes a comparison to those who engage in Holocaust denial. To be sure, most observers would consider it ludicrous to suggest that questioning the accuracy and predictive power of scientific models is like questioning the historical fact of the genocide of Jews in Europe.
What Is Mr. Vance’s Position on Climate?
Putting aside epithets and journalistic hit-pieces, it seems a fair question to ask just what do politicians sceptical of the climate alarmist narrative believe? And what are their policy positions regarding the Paris Agreement’s “Net Zero by 2050” target? This policy target is an imperative, at least nominally, for most current governments in North America and Western Europe.
Mr. Vance – lawyer, businessman, former Marine and writer of the bestselling memoir Hillbilly Elegy, arisen from the humblest working-class background – places himself firmly in the populist Right movement. It now looks very likely that Mr. Trump will be the next U.S. President. The assassination attempt on Saturday, his miraculous split-second turn of the head which saved him and the iconic picture of his raised fist with the U.S. flag in the background seconds after being injured make him almost irresistible. Thus Mr. Vance will likely join the Donald Trump next year as his VP in an administration that will seek to rapidly unwind the myriad policy and regulatory constraints that the Biden administration has imposed to shackle the U.S. oil and gas industry at every turn.
Vance has also criticised the “green energy fantasy” of the Biden administration, pointing out that “solar panels can’t power a modern manufacturing economy” and “that’s why the Chinese are building coal power plants”. He has similarly called out wind power turbines. At the Turning Point Action conference last year, he said “they’re hideously ugly. They kill all the birds. And they’re mostly made in China.” The Biden administration’s all-out support for EVs comes in for the same critique. In a July 2022 radio interview, he said: “The whole EV thing is a scam. If you plug it into your wall, do these people think there are Keebler elves back there making electricity in the wall? It comes, of course, from fossil fuels.”
Mr. Vance’s climate scepticism goes beyond encouraging U.S. oil and gas dominance in global markets once again – a strong theme of Trump’s first term in office – if the Republicans get elected to office. He has come out fiercely against the ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) movement. In an interview with Breitbart in 2022, he said: “ESG is basically a massive racket to enrich Wall Street and enrich the financial sector of the country, at the expense of the industries that actually employ a lot of Ohio’s workers for middle-class jobs.” The push against ESG occurring through the red states in the U.S. and the increasingly evident lack of success of ESG-focused firms and investment advisors suggests that Mr. Vance has probably got a better finger on the pulse than his critics would care to admit.
Who’s More Credible?
As a climate change sceptic, Mr. Vance stands in good company. For instance, the 2022 Nobel Laureate in Physics John Clauser exposed in a recent lecture how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) models and analyses do not meet basic standards of scientific enquiry. IPCC models have been used as “proof” of scientific consensus by politicians and activists to support claims of a “climate crisis”. Another example would be Richard Lindzen, an American atmospheric physicist and Emeritus Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who published an assessment of the global warming narrative in 2022. Prof. Lindzen finds climate alarmism “a quasi-religious movement predicated on an absurd ‘scientific’ narrative. The policies invoked on behalf of this movement have led to the U.S. hobbling its energy system.” Whatever one’s views on climate science, it is apparent that Mr. Vance is not a wild-eyed outlier in his scepticism of the claims of climate policy advocates, as asserted by his many critics.
J.D. Vance’s criticisms of subsidy-supported renewable energy and EV sectors accord with the empirical evidence emerging in the current context of higher inflation, higher interest rates and a deep slump in renewable energy stocks. For instance, an Associated Press report last November described the travails of the Biden administration’s ambitious plans for offshore wind: “The cancellation of two large offshore wind projects in New Jersey is the latest in a series of setbacks for the nascent U.S. offshore wind industry, jeopardising the Biden administration’s goals of powering 10 million homes from towering ocean-based turbines by 2030 and establishing a carbon-free electric grid five years later.” This news was preceded by earlier reports of developers cancelling three offshore wind power projects in New England. They said their projects were “no longer financially feasible” despite the ample subsidies on offer.
The news on the EV front, called out as a “scam” by Mr. Vance, is just as dire for green technology enthusiasts. As David Blackmon, a keen observer of the renewable energy space, notes: surveys show that the vast majority of U.S. car buyers will not purchase an EV even at “bargain basement” prices (and despite Government subsidies); the overall growth in private EV sales in the U.S. has slowed “to a trickle”, just as is happening in the U.K. and EU; and the market for used EVs is practically non-existent. “Pure play” EV maker Fisker recently declared bankruptcy while Rivian approaches the same fate. Giant U.S. automakers GM and Ford have turned to gasoline-powered vehicles to sustain their profits as the global EV sales slowdown force them to delay investments and cut costs in their EV production lines.
Partisans may criticise the man all they want, but the realities of thermodynamics and economics support J.D. Vance. He may prove to be the best Vice President in a Republican administration geared towards supporting the country’s oil and gas industries and ‘Making America Great Again’.
“… But it is not clear how much of this remarkable regional increase in severe rains is due to climate change, or how widespread it is …”
Landmark new research shows how global warming is messing with our rainfall
Published: July 26, 2024 6.20am AEST Steven Sherwood Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, Climate Change Research Centre, UNSW Sydney Anna Ukkola ARC DECRA Fellow, UNSW Sydney
The past century of human-induced warming has increased rainfall variability over 75% of the Earth’s land area – particularly over Australia, Europe and eastern North America, new research shows.
The findings, by Chinese researchers and the UK Met Office, were published overnight in the journal Science. They provide the first systematic observational evidence that climate change is making global rainfall patterns more volatile.
Climate models had predicted this variability would worsen under climate change. But these new findings show rainfall variability has already worsened over the past 100 years – especially in Australia.
…
Analysis of daily extreme rainfall totals across Australia in present and future simulations revealed future increases were likely to exceed expectations from many past studies. Rainfall is likely to increase more sharply in the most extreme events, and appears to do this nearly everywhere on the continent.
In 2022, we looked at rainfall hour-by-hour in Sydney using radar data. We found the maximum hourly rainfall increased by 40% in Sydney over the past two decades.
Our findings have major implications for Sydney’s preparedness for flash flooding. More intense downpours are likely to overwhelm stormwater systems designed for past conditions. But it is not clear how much of this remarkable regional increase in severe rains is due to climate change, or how widespread it is.
Increasing variability also means a greater risk of drought. Climate models suggest rainfall variability in many parts of Australia will keep increasing, unless greenhouse gas emissions are rapidly reduced.
A change in only a handful of heavy rainfall days can make or break a drought in Australia. This means even small changes in variability can bring more devastating droughts in the future as dry periods become drier.
As climate change continues, warming of the atmosphere allows it to hold more water and thus produce more precipitation. A corollary to more rain is the amplification of precipitation variability, a behavior easier to predict than to observe. Zhang et al. used global records of daily precipitation to show that this expected increase in precipitation variability is in fact detectable in the data over the past century. This trend, which is most prominent over Europe, Australia, and eastern North America, will make adaptation more difficult for societies and ecosystems. —Jesse Smith
Abstract
As the climate warms, the consequent moistening of the atmosphere increases extreme precipitation. Precipitation variability should also increase, producing larger wet-dry swings, but that is yet to be confirmed observationally. Here we show that precipitation variability has already grown globally (over 75% of land area) over the past century, as a result of accumulated anthropogenic warming. The increased variability is seen across daily to intraseasonal timescales, with daily variability increased by 1.2% per 10 years globally, and is particularly prominent over Europe, Australia, and eastern North America. Increased precipitation variability is driven mainly by thermodynamics linked to atmospheric moistening, modulated at decadal timescales by circulation changes. Amplified precipitation variability poses new challenges for weather and climate predictions, as well as for resilience and adaptation by societies and ecosystems.Read more:
Quantifying how climate change drives drought is a priority to inform policy and adaptation planning. We show that the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP6) simulations project coherent regional patterns in meteorological drought for two emissions scenarios to 2100. We find robust projected changes in seasonal drought duration and frequency (robust over >45% of the global land area), despite a lack of agreement across models in projected changes in mean precipitation (24% of the land area). Future drought changes are larger and more consistent in CMIP6 compared to CMIP5. We find regionalized increases and decreases in drought duration and frequency that are driven by changes in both precipitation mean and variability. Conversely, drought intensity increases over most regions but is not simulated well historically by the climate models. The more robust projections of meteorological drought compared to mean precipitation in CMIP6 provides significant new opportunities for water resource planning.Read more:
The models don’t agree but they think some of their model predictions are reliable.
This seems a very short timeframe to call global warming as the culprit. Not only are there other confounding factors, such as massive land use changes, including vastly expanded irrigation and emission of dust and exhaust particulates, and some major volcanic eruptions such as Hunga Tonga, there is plenty of evidence of huge century scale shifts in rainfall which occurred well before anthropogenic warming became a potential issue.
Meanwhile local city administrations should be spending more money on drains anyway, even without this prediction of worsening floods. That day in 2023 while I was driving through the Sydney floods I saw a sight I’ll never forget – a council worker in flood water up to his waistline bashing at a large blocked drain under his feet with a huge pry bar, to try to save an entire street of houses from the flood. I don’t see how that kind of risky emergency action would ever be necessary if the city had done a proper job of maintaining the drains BEFORE the floods hit. I sure hope he wasn’t injured that day.
On Episode #120 of The Climate Realism Show, we will this troubling record, examine the claim that Europe just recorded its hottest day ever, worry about our future arrest as “climate criminals,” revisit the ongoing environmental disaster off Nantucket due to a single broken wind turbine, and more “Crazy Climate News of the Week.
With Joe Biden handing off the presidency to “a new generation” in Kamala Harris, her record and public statements shows she is even more radical on environment and energy policies than her old boss. For instance, Harris thoroughly endorsed every bit of the radical “Green New Deal,” she pledged to ban all fracking in the United States, she has fully embraced the “Net Zero by 2030” agenda, and has called for changing the American diet by restricting (or even banning) the production of beef.
On Episode #120 of The Climate Realism Show, we will this troubling record, examine the claim that Europe just recorded its hottest day ever, worry about our future arrest as “climate criminals,” revisit the ongoing environmental disaster off Nantucket due to a single broken wind turbine, and more “Crazy Climate News of the Week.
Join us LIVE at 1 p.m. ET with The Heartland Institute’s Jim Lakely, Sterling Burnett, Anthony Watts, and Linnea Lueken. Join the chat and we’ll try to answer your questions on the air.
El Paso, the southern gateway to America, has long served as a critical juncture between the U.S. and Mexico, evolving from the “six-shooter capital” of lore into a pivotal hub for international trade and economic development. Today, the El Paso-Juarez metroplex boasts a bustling economy with a strong binational character yet finds itself hindered by national border policies and the overwhelming media attention they attract.
El Paso, the southern gateway to America, has long served as a critical juncture between the U.S. and Mexico, evolving from the “six-shooter capital” of lore into a pivotal hub for international trade and economic development. Today, the El Paso-Juarez metroplex boasts a bustling economy with a strong binational character yet finds itself hindered by national border policies and the overwhelming media attention they attract.
As the CEO and President of the El Paso Chamber of Commerce, Andrea Adkins-Hutchins, contends, El Paso is unfairly portrayed and penalized in the national dialogue on immigration. “It’s costing us money, time, and especially economic growth; it hurts our city far more than America’s media will ever tell you,” she expressed in a Fortune article. This misrepresentation detracts from our true narrative: a city ripe with opportunity and resilience in the face of adversity.
In December last year, the economic impact of these policies was starkly highlighted when the Customs and Border Patrol suspended international railway operations to redirect resources to migrant processing. This decision alone has strained our local economy, costing millions in delayed trades essential not only to Texas but to the entire U.S. economy.
El Paso’s economic contribution is not minor; trade between Mexico and Texas rose to $285 billion in 2023, underscoring the region’s role as a top manufacturing powerhouse in the Western Hemisphere. Yet, these contributions are overshadowed by the challenges of managing sudden surges in migration—challenges compounded by federal decisions without adequate support or foresight.
Mayor Oscar Leeser’s repeated declarations and pleas for aid reflect a city stretched to its limits, forced to redirect scant resources to manage migrant surges—an unsustainable situation that diverts focus and funds from long-term economic planning and development.
This September, the Chamber will host the State of the Borderland event, spotlighting the economic dynamism of the Borderplex region. It’s a call to the national media and policymakers to observe firsthand not just the challenges we face but, more importantly, the opportunities and progress defining our community.
El Paso’s story is one of strength, resilience, and potential. It’s time for the narrative to shift from one of crisis to one of opportunity. We urge the national media and policymakers to recognize the strategic importance of El Paso in America’s economic landscape and to support, not hinder, our progress.
The future of El Paso, a city integral to America’s economic framework, should be shaped by informed, constructive dialogues that highlight our capabilities and needs—not by sensationalist coverage that distorts our reality and stymies our growth.
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